The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [17]
My soul then was a thing of darkness, naked and devoid of form.
I remember this so vaguely that I’m not even sure whether I’m remembering it or making it up. But there it is, Gwen, you may have it.
But as for the earliest warning signs of my sexual perversion? Let’s talk about love. I felt love for my mother. I felt love for Céleste. But was there anything at all erotic in these loves? Did I feel anything remotely Oedipal in my biological mother’s warm, soft, stupid lap? Was there even the slightest tingle of preadolescent sexuality in my close bond with Céleste? No. No, no, no, absolutely not. Now, I do not assert this because I’m an anti-Freudian; I only assert this because my childhood was not innocent of sexual longings. In fact, I was obsessed with the sexual side of things, the coital, the carnal, the warm creamy slippery fucking fuckal. From an abnormally, maybe even unhealthfully precocious age I was inwardly consumed with a fierce, insane, insatiable lust that was always rushing and crackling its way through my soul like a match held to a pile of dry straw.
I never felt—even very early on—I never felt like I quite belonged to the same species as my mother or Céleste. I loved Céleste, but I did not lust after her. I did not lust after her because she was a chimp. My erotic desires lay elsewhere, yes, even then. For years in the course of my early development I kept my burgeoning desires secret. Or at least I thought I did. In retrospect, surely my mother knew. She could see something in the way I watched the human women just beyond the glass wall or above the ledge of the greater wall—the Wall—some bright animus thrashing like an electric snake in the pits of my eyes that was more than just the chaste fascination of the amateur anthropologist. For fascinated indeed was I by their forms—but it was a fascination mingled in with the surging juices of young lust. And why should I have been, why should I ever have been sexually attracted to other chimps? By the time I was six years old I had seen thousands and thousands and maybe I don’t know millions of human beings, I had practically become an aficionado, a connoisseur of the human form, I noticed all their interesting differences in size, shape, texture, tone, style—upon seeing a human for the first time I immediately remarked to myself upon that particular human’s differentiating characteristics, height, heft, age, color, and sex, and if the sex was female then boy oh boy did I notice so much more!
When did my love of Céleste become tainted with physical revulsion? I’d seen Céleste scrounge parasites out of her fur and eat them! Am I expected to be attracted to a girl of such grotesque manners? Hell, she eats my parasites! But wait!—I do that, too! They’re good! No! No! Go ahead and eat your own delicious goddamn parasites, Céleste, but Bruno’s moving up in the world!—even if it means leaving you—even if I do, in a very primitive and uncomplicated way, love you. Female chimps—when they’re in estrus their ugly plump vulvae inflate and swell out behind them, and they drag around these bloated pink balloons of flesh between their legs as they walk, their sphincters oftentimes plugged with repugnant globs of partially excreted shit. And those flat gray mealy breasts and protruding bellies and rangy hairy bodies and bald heads and scrunched-up noses? No, I’m sorry. It’s true, I am a deviant and depraved pervert: I have no desire to have sex with