Cain's Book by Alexander Trocchi

Author:Alexander Trocchi [Trocchi, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Contemporary, New York, Urban Life
ISBN: 9780802133144
Google: wE_C0qsFkBgC
Amazon: 0802133142
Goodreads: 396060
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1973-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

At the age of five I walked with my elder brother to school, along grey streets in a sprawling grey city; on my back a little burden I was to carry through life with me, a cheap leather bag with shoulder straps to carry knowledge in. Cold pink thumbs in the straps of my schoolbag, lifting their cutting weight off my collarbones, against the weight of books and into the driving sleet. A pain in the nose in search of an identity.

AUNT HETTIE DEAD. SHE was the first woman I ever saw naked. She slept in the cavity bed in her kitchen. One afternoon I went in and she was alone, standing naked in the middle of the floor. I surprised her in a pose that she would subsequently have to explain to herself.

I was sixteen, her favourite nephew. She was about fifty at the time, with grey, almost white, hair. But the hair on her mound wasn’t grey. It was the colour of a hazelnut.

She was angry at me for barging in unannounced. She was a little drunk. But she calmed down, put on a dressing gown, and made tea. We sat in front of the fire. She said in her husky chain-smoker’s voice that I would be making women dance “bare-nekit” soon enough.

When I was younger I was afraid to kiss her. The skin of her face was porous and she was old and smelt of port and soiled underwear. But that day my attitude changed. The house was empty, she was naked, and I was nearly seventeen and deadly curious.

“Where’s Hector?” I said.

“He just went round the corner. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

We sat in silence, each conscious of the other in a new and disturbing way.

That night I stayed at my aunt’s, sleeping with my cousin Hector. In bed I contemplated the possibility with vague lust before I went to sleep. Hector was sleeping soundly and I could hear my aunt moving around in the kitchen. But at the last minute, standing outside the kitchen door in the dark hall, listening, breathing softly, I lost my nerve. I’m inclined to think that I knew I would from the beginning, that I knew I should not have the nerve, that the satisfaction I sought was in the danger of the dark passage, naked in the hall. Anyway, I didn’t go in, and afterwards I didn’t say anything to Hector, a boy a year younger than I. It was his mother and I thought he might be angry.

Two factors combined to give the impression that my aunt was fat. Her paunch had spread with middle age. Her cheap, fitted skirt made an inverted pear of her lower torso. Then, she wore no brassiere, and her large, pendulous breasts were slung within the stained woollen jumper like a bag of meat almost at the level of her navel. When she moved about, her broad Slavic countenance sailed under a bell of grey hair. Or she sat, feet

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