Tristessa by Jack Kerouac

can’t get a yes or no out of her eyes for the time I allot to them. Very nervous, I sit, stand, sit, she stands explaining further things. I am amazed by the way her skin wrinkles O so sensitively down the bridge of her nose in even clean lines, and her little laugh of delight that comes so rarely and so’s littlegirlish, child of glee,—It’s all my own sin if I make a play for her.
    I WANT TO take her in both hands by the waist and pull her slowly close with a few choice words of sudden endearment like “Mi gloria angela” or “Mi whichever it is” but I have no language to cover my embarrassment—Worst of all, would it be, to have her push me aside and say “No, no, no” like disappointed mustachio’d heroes in French movies being turned out by the little blonde who is the brakeman’s wife, by a fence, in smoke, midnight, in the French railroad yards, and I turn away big pained loverface and apologize,—going away thence with the sensation that I have a beastly streak in me I didn’t notice, conceptions common to all young lovers and old. I don’t want to disgust Tristessa—It would horrify me to cause her ruinous fleshpetal tender secrets and have her wake up in the morning lodged against the back of some unwelcome man who loves by night and sleeps it off, and wakes up blearing to shave and by his very presence causes consternation where before there was absolute perfect purity of nobody.
    But what I’ve missed when I don’t get that friend lunge of the lover’s body, coming right at me, all mine, but it was a slaughterhouse for meat and all you do is bend to wreak havocs in somethings-gotta-give of girlihood.—When Tristessa was 12 years old suitors twisted her arm in the sun outside the mother’s cooking door—I’ve seen it a million times, in Mexico the young men want the young girls—Their birthrate is terrific—They turn em out wailing and dying by the golden tons in vats of semiwinery messaferies of oy Ole Tokyo birthcrib.—I lost track of my thought there,—
    Yes, the thighs of Tristessa and the golden flesh all mine, what am I a Caveman? Am a Caveman.
    Caveman buried deep under ground.
    It would just be the coronna of her cheeks pulsing to mouth, and my rememberance of her splendid eyes, like sitting in a box the lovely latest in France enters the crashing orchestra and I turn to Monsieur next to me whispering “She is splendide , non?”—With Johnny Walker Scotch in my tuxedo coatpocket.
    I stand up. I must see her.
    POOR TRISTESSA IS swaying there explaining all her troubles, how she hasn’t got enough money, she’s sick, she’ll be sick in the morning and in the look of her eye I caught perhaps the gesture of a shadow of acceptance of the idea of me as a lover—Only time I ever saw Tristessa cry, was when she was junk sick on the edge of Old Bull’s bed, like a woman in the back pew of a church in daily novena she dabs at her eyes—She points to the sky again, “If my friend dont pay me back,” looking at me straight, “my Lord pay me back— more ” and I can feel the spirit enter the room as she stands, waiting with her finger pointed up, on her spread legs, confidently, for her Lord to pay her back—“So I geev every-things I have to my friend, and eef he doan pay me back”—she shrugs—“my Lord pay me back”—standing alert again—“ More ” and as the spirit swims around the room I can tell the effective mournful horror of it (her reward is so thin) now I see radiating from the crown of her head innumerable hands that have come from all ten quarters of the Universe to bless her and pronounce her Bodhisat for saying and knowing that so well.
    Her Enlightenment is perfect,—“And we are nothing, you and me”—she pokes at my chest, “Jew—Jew—” (Mexican saying