hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me… it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You’d imagine I’d never seen one before. And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a statue — that was by Rodin. You ought to see it some time… she has her legs spread wide apart… I don’t think there was any head on it. Just a cunt you might say. Jesus, it looked ghastly. The thing is this — they all look alike. When you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts of things: you give them an individuality like, which they haven’t got, of course. There’s just a crack there between the legs and you get all steamed up about it — you don’t even look at it half the time. You know it’s there and all you think about is getting your ramrod inside; it’s as though your penis did the thinking for you. It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing… about a crack with hair on it, or without hair. It’s so absolutely meaningless that it fascinated me to look at it. I must have studied it for ten minutes or more. When you look at it that way, sort of detached like, you get funny notions in your head. All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing — just a blank. Wouldn’t it be funny if you found a harmonica inside… or a calendar? But there’s nothing there… nothing at all. It’s disgusting. It almost drove me mad… Listen, do you know what I did afterwards? I gave her a quick lay and then I turned my back on her. Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book… but a cunt, it’s just sheer loss of time…»

It just so happened that as he was concluding his speech a whore gave us the eye. Without the slightest transition he says to me abruptly: «Would you like to give her a tumble? It won’t cost much… she’ll take the two of us on.» And without waiting for a reply he staggers to his feet and goes over to her. In a few minutes he comes back. «It’s all fixed,» he says. «Finish your beer. She’s hungry. There’s nothing doing any more at this hour… she’ll take the both of us for fifteen francs. We’ll go to my room… it’ll be cheaper.»
On the way to the hotel the girl is shivering so that we have to stop and buy her a coffee. She’s a rather gentle sort of creature and not at all bad to look at. She evidently knows Van Norden, knows there’s nothing to expect from him but the fifteen francs. «You haven’t got any dough,» he says, mumbling to me under his breath. As I haven’t a centime in my pocket I don’t quite see the point of this, until he bursts out: «For Christ’s sake, remember that we’re broke. Don’t get tenderhearted when we get upstairs. She’s going to ask you for a little extra — I know this cunt! I could get her for ten francs, if I wanted to. There’s no use spoiling them…»
«Il est méchant, celui-là,» she says to me, gathering the drift of his remarks in her dull way.
«Non, il n’est pas méchant, il est très gentil.»
She shakes her head laughingly. «Je le connais bien, ce type.» And then she commences a hard luck story, about the hospital and the back rent and the baby in the country. But she doesn’t overdo it. She knows that our ears are stopped; but the misery is there inside her, like a stone, and there’s no room for any other thoughts. She isn’t trying to make an appeal to our sympathies — she’s just shifting this big weight inside her from one place to another. I rather like her. I hope to Christ she hasn’t got a disease…
In the room she goes about her preparations mechanically. «There isn’t a crust of bread about by any chance?» she inquires, as she squats over the bidet. Van Norden laughs at this. «Here, take a drink,» he says, shoving a bottle at her. She doesn’t want anything to drink; her stomach’s already on the bum, she complains.
«That’s just a line with her,» says Van Norden. «Don’t let her work on your sympathies. Just the same, I wish she’d talk about something else. How the hell can you get up any passion when you’ve got a starving cunt on your hands?»
Precisely! We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over with. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms, to say, «I’m fed up with it… I’m through.» No, there’s fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about any more and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one’s own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest. Then one has the rest of his life to think about the fifteen francs. One hasn’t any eyes or arms or legs, but he has the consolation of dreaming for the rest of his days about the fifteen francs which everybody has forgotten.
It’s exactly like a state of war — I can’t get it out of my head. The way she works over me, to blow a spark of passion into me, makes me think what a damned poor soldier I’d be if I was ever silly enough to be trapped like this and dragged to the front. I know for my part that I’d surrender everything, honor included, in order to get out of the mess. I haven’t any stomach for it, and that’s all there is to it. But she’s got her mind set on the fifteen francs and if I don’t want to fight about it she’s going to make me fight. But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind. My mind is on the peace treaty all the time. I can’t forget that it was the fifteen francs which started all the trouble. Fifteen francs! What does fifteen francs mean to me, particularly since it’s not my fifteen francs?
Van Norden seems to have a more normal attitude about it. He doesn’t care a rap about the fifteen francs either now; it’s the situation itself which intrigues him. It seems to call for a show of mettle — his manhood is involved. The fifteen francs are lost, whether we succeed or not. There’s something more involved — not just manhood perhaps, but will. It’s like a man in the trenches again: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’d slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why.
As I watch Van Norden tackle her, it seems to me that I’m looking at a machine whose cogs have slipped. Left to themselves, they could go on this way forever, grinding and slipping, without ever anything happening. Until a hand shuts the motor off. The sight of them coupled like a pair of goats without the least spark of passion, grinding and grinding away for no reason except the fifteen francs, washes away every bit of feeling I have except the inhuman one of satisfying my curiosity. The girl is lying on the edge of the bed and Van Norden is bent over her like a satyr with his two feet solidly planted on the floor. I am sitting on a chair behind him, watching their movements with a cool, scientific detachment; it doesn’t matter to me if it should last forever. It’s like watching one of those crazy machines which throw the newspaper out, millions and billions and trillions of them with their meaningless headlines. The machine seems more sensible,