LAST NIGHT bouba dragged in a couple of half-dead females. Both of them were dogs. He’d picked them up on St. Catherine. Everyone knows no one’s ever seduced a girl with an offer of a place to sleep. They had to be dogs.
When he came in Bouba whispered to me that the big one was mine and I could do whatever I wanted with her: fuck her, sell her, throw her out the window. I didn’t want any part of it. It wasn’t in my job description. A month ago I would have considered her manna from heaven. (“On the day when they behold the scourge with which they are threatened, their life on earth will seem to them no longer than an hour. That is a warning. Shall any perish except the evil-doers?” Sura XLVI, 35.) But these days I’m on a diet. I’ve lost my taste for gimps, drunks, poetesses, what-the-cat-dragged-ins, sick of all those girls that nobody will take except bums and blacks. I want a normal girl with a conservative father and a bourgeois mother (both racist to the core), a real live normal girl, not a blow-up doll smashed on beer. Shit, I’ve got a thirst for a decent life. I am thirsty. The Gods are thirsty. Women are thirsty. Why not Negroes? The Negroes are thirsty.
The Big One was worse than a crushed cockroach on a Sunday night. She didn’t even see me; she flung open the fridge door and helped herself to a beer. Big, ugly and vulgar. (“Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it.” Sura II, 216.) Up above, Beelzebub is lying low. Very low!
Bouba started undressing the Little One and feeling up her breasts. The Big One had had time to put away three beers and still not notice me. I scrunched down in the bed. Bouba signalled me to take care of the Big One and went on feeling up the Little One. I was laying in wait for the Big One behind the eleventh beer. Then the ceiling came tumbling down with a tremendous crash. It had to happen sooner or later. Columns of pink smoke. But we were spared the worst. Escaping death by inches. Beelzebub wasn’t lying low up there after all.
The Big One went and stood in the shower with all her clothes on and and started screaming at the top of her lungs. She was hungry. She went and cooked up some spaghetti. Soaking wet. I don’t know when I finally snapped. I didn’t stop screaming for over an hour. The police came. I fell asleep right afterwards. The next morning the girls were gone.
A GRIMY noon. Bouba went out. I’m typing the last chapter at top speed. The end of my ordeal is in sight. The Remington (my partner in crime) hasn’t lost its touch. I’ve just got to finish this prologue. When you add it up, I wrote this novel in thirty-six days and eighteen nights, using three ribbons, four jars of liquid paper, five hundred sheets of bond paper, thirty bottles of wine and a dozen cases of beer. I totalled it up in a little black notebook, a gift from Miz Literature. I’m typing like crazy. The Remington is having a ball. Words are squirting out everywhere. I type. I can’t take it any more. I type. I’m at the end of my ribbon. I finish. I crash out on the table next to the typewriter with my head on my arms.