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ejected me from her tremendous vagina, leaving me alone on the floor like a dispossessed king, drenched from head to toe, unable to utter a single word. When she saw me squatting on the floor too long with a vacant look, Madame C. ordered me to go wash myself by giving me a big slap on the butt. "Come on, off you go, my little fellow, into the shower!" I didn't dare tell her that she herself had a crying need for a shower, because this time I'd been truly afraid of asphyxiating in our mad embrace. If you can call the repulsive act that joined us together an embrace. Dirty locks of my black hair hung over my forehead. I felt slimy, sticky, like a bawling newborn just chased out of his mother's stomach, dreadfully uneasy, angry at everything around him. There were some days I couldn't help but think that, all the same, Madame C. had a very strange way of making love. She never waited until I was ready, no, she wanted me completely inside her. I was condemned to thrust away without grumbling into the reddening gloom. I understood the terror the residents of Pompeii must have felt when the lava of Vesuvius streamed over them. But I could never quite hold it against Madame C. In the first place, the passivity to which she condemned me was not to my disliking. I'd always been incredibly lazy in love, incapable of ever taking the initiative. And then, wasn't she the first woman to have ever shown me a bit of tenderness? People generally called me a creep, or compared me to a bug, which sort of flattered me since I've always adored little insects. When I looked at myself in the mirror in the morning, I couldn't completely blame my disparagers. That sullen little runt's face, almost always sleepy, that sallow complexion, as if I'd spent the night in a chamber pot, that ridiculously diminutive stature that obliged me to wear shoes with very high heels so I wouldn't look like one of Snow White's dwarves, I sometimes felt so ugly, so miserable, that I'd have to look away when I saw my reflection in a store window. Madame C. was still too good for me. I didn't deserve her. I'd often tell myself: "So who are you, you midget, that makes you worthy of such a woman? What are your merits?" I had to admit that I had none of these said merits. Of course, there was the difference in age, but ceremoniously, her monstrous breasts unfurling upon me with the muted rumbling of an avalanche, little by little they covered me, however much I tried to struggle, I was submerged, I couldn't even see Luis Mariano's beaming smile anymore, or the green plants, or the hideous vegetable-patterned wallpaper, a nightmarish vegetable garden, with Jerusalem artichokes, rapeseed, cabbages, carrots, greens, purple asparagus, I was in the dark, I could still hear Madame C. saying, weakly, that everyone in the building had their own individual toilet except her, can you imagine, a gleaming white bowl, you could see yourself in it with all the modern products, a seat lined with velvet or fur, a solid gold handle, more beautiful than the Shah of Iran and the Shahbanou put together, porcelain bidets you could wash yourself with champagne in, these heavenly visions seemed to excite her terribly as she engulfed me, she was already getting all marshy, she moved me about roughly inside her while holding my feet to keep me from wriggling about, and then, once she had come thoroughly, after letting out a lowing that shook the walls, she ejected me from her tremendous vagina, leaving me alone on the floor like a dispossessed king, drenched from head to toe, unable to utter a single word. When she saw me squatting on the floor too long with a vacant look, Madame C. ordered me to go wash myself by giving me a big slap on the butt. "Come on, off you go, my little fellow, into the shower!" I didn't dare tell her that she herself had a crying need for a shower, because this time I'd been truly afraid of asphyxiating in our mad embrace. If you can call the repulsive act that joined us