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I REMEMBERED THIS

My first erotic feeling

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 26, 1941

Notes on future work: While writing the erotica I remembered this: In Brussels we lived in a two-storied house. I was seven or eight years old then. My father always took us to the attic to be whipped. He did not want my mother to hear us. She would interfere and get angry at him, and the struggle usually ended in a great battle between my father and mother. So the punishments always took place in this low-ceilinged room, cluttered with trunks, rags, broken dolls, old curtains, moth balls, old books and music. As far as I can remember, we all hated this and begged to be forgiven. The walk up the stairs was usually spent trying to persuade our father that we were innocent and did not deserve punishment. I remember I wept violently at the humiliation and hated my father. Now I ask myself if the hand which administered the powerful spankings must have awakened, at the same time as the pain, a region of pleasure. I do not remember feeling the pleasure then, but much later when I remembered the beatings it was as if the warmth of the hand had awakened not only the pain at the blow, but the dormant regions of sensibilities around the backside. It was as if the beating had come too near to the place where pleasure is felt and then entangled and related in the body, both the pain and the pleasure suddenly revealed as close to each other and related. I never became aware of the link between them until I was walking down the boulevards one night and I entered one of those places where they show erotic lantern slides for one penny. I had already seen four or five scenes of embraces, men and women rolling over on the grass, women caught in their bath, whores undressing, and then I saw the following scene: It was in a schoolroom. Many little girls sat on a bench, wearing very short skirts such as I wore as a child. The teacher was growing angry at them. Finally she ordered one of them to walk up to her desk and she scolded her. The little girl answered impudently. The teacher took the little girl, laid her across her knees, lifted her skirt, unbuttoned her pants, and began spanking her sharply. As I watched this scene I felt the most amazing pleasure. I was stirred, I grew wet between the legs, and began to palpitate, almost reaching the orgasm. This was a revelation. I could not remember experiencing this pleasure as a child. It must have come as an aftermath of the pain. The pain created the warmth, and ultimately a feeling of pleasure.

When I discovered this it became a fantasy which I used when I could not feel the orgasm with Gonzalo. I would imagine this scene in the attic from the very beginning. I would close my eyes and imagine the attic, and my father spanking me. In doing this his hand would slip and touch my sex. The warmth of the spanking spread to the sex between my legs. I would say to myself: now my mother is slowly coming up the stairs to stop this, slowly coming up to see what my father is doing. She will catch him spanking me and she will try to stop him. I must enjoy it before she comes up (and how clearly I felt this warm hand on my backside, or was it Gonzalo’s warm hand, and Gonzalo’s Spanish words). He is spanking me, but it is like a violent caress, and it arouses me sexually. I must open and enjoy it more and more before we are stopped by the mother (before Gonzalo satisfies himself and stops moving inside me). My father is spanking me, my backside is warm, feverish, and all around it, it is spreading, the warmth and fever… And seeing this image I would have the orgasm.