Emmanuelle (16 page)

Yet she did not want to make things too easy for him. “I don’t see how you can reconcile your ‘love on the installment plan’ with the esthetics you were professing last night,” she remarked ironically. “If it’s important to lavish and unmake oneself, why are you now exhorting me to be stingy with myself, to give myself in bits and pieces?”

“Then give yourself all at once! And when it’s over?”

“Over?”

“When the woman who posed for the ‘oval portrait’ had given away her last color and emptied herself of her last breath, what art remained possible?
Finita la commédia
. When the last cry of pleasure has come from your lips, the work of art will be abolished. It will vanish like a dream, it will never have existed. Isn’t the most imperious duty in this mortal world, the only duty, taking everything into account, to
make things last
? Unmake oneself? Certainly! But endlessly!”

“You and your disciple Marie-Anne should harmonize your teaching. She urges me to squander myself, you urge me to economize myself. And you both give the shortness of life as your reason!”

“I see you’ve totally misunderstood me, my dear! Little girls like Marie-Anne seem to have a talent for exposition that we elderly men lose with age.”

“No, it’s not that! You advocate continence . . .”

“That’s the most unjust reproach I’ve ever heard!” Mario interrupted gaily. “But isn’t your indignation liable to condemn us to abstinence?”

“How?”

“This soufflé is getting cold . . .”

Emmanuelle laughed a little sheepishly. It was too easy for Mario to elude embarrassing questions that way.

For a time they spoke of nothing but the food and wine. Quentin took only a modest part in the conversation, even though Mario flitted back and forth from one language to the other. Emmanuelle praised the refinement of the meal. She said that she usually attached little importance to what she ate, but that this evening she found that even she was sensitive to the quality of a roast.

“If gastronomy doesn’t seem to you the most important thing in life, what does?” asked Mario.

She realized that the conversation was now allowed to rise to the heights it had failed to reach during the hors d’oeuvres. She reflected. What answer could she give, to remain within the tone of the house, yet without conceding too much to her host’s despotism? After all, she told herself, the goal of that evening was clear—she had come there to be debauched, not to philosophize.

“Frequent orgasms,” she said in a natural voice.

Mario seemed unappreciative, even impatient. “Yes, yes, of course,” he said, “but should one simply have them? Is it the orgasm that matters most, or how one reaches it?”

“The orgasm—there’s no doubt of it!” She did not really mean it; she was trying to provoke Mario. She seemed to have succeeded only in appalling him.

“Poor god,” he sighed.

“Have you gotten religious?” she asked in surprise.

“It’s an esthetic god I’m invoking. A god—Eros—whose laws you would do well to learn.”

“Do you think I don’t know how to serve him?” she bristled. “He’s the god of love.”

“No. He’s the god of eroticism.”

“Oh, that’s what he’s been made into!”

“Is a god ever anything else? You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of eroticism.”

“You’re mistaken—I’m all for it.”

“You are? And how do you understand it, exactly?”

“Well, eroticism is . . . how shall I say it? . . . It’s the cult of the pleasure of the senses, freed of all morality.”

“By no means. It’s precisely the opposite.”

“It’s the cult of chastity?”

“It’s not a cult, but the victory of reason over myth. It’s not a movement of the senses, it’s an exercise of the mind. It’s not an excess of pleasure, but the pleasure of excess. It’s not a license, but a rule. And it’s a morality.”

“Very pretty!” Emmanuelle applauded.

“I’m talking seriously. Eroticism is not a handbook of recipes for amusing yourself in society. It’s a concept of human destiny, a gauge, a canon, a code, a ceremony, an art, a school. It’s also a science—or rather the choice fruit, the last fruit, of science. Its laws are based on reason, not on credulity . . . on confidence, instead of fear . . . and on a taste for life, rather than on the mystique of death. Eroticism is not a product of decadence, but a progress. Because it helps to desanctify sex, it’s an instrument of mental and social health. And I maintain that it’s an element of spiritual elevation, because it presupposes character training and a renunciation of the passions of illusion in favor of the passions of lucidity.”

“That sounds gay!” Emmanuelle said sarcastically. “Does it seem like a tempting picture to you? Isn’t it more pleasant to have illusions?”

“The fury of possessing someone for oneself alone, or belonging to a single person; the will for power or servitude; the pleasure of making others suffer and die; fascination with, desire for, and love of suffering and death; an appetite for eternity—those are what I call passions of illusion. Do they tempt you?”

“Not really. But tell me what ought to tempt me.”

“I’d like the supreme virtue to be the passion for beauty. It contains everything. What’s beautiful is true, what’s beautiful is justified, what’s beautiful thwarts death. It’s because of love of beauty that the world will ultimately refuse to sit in the theater of illusion where the masqueraders of politics and revelations act out their shadow play with regal slowness. The universe in motion will laugh at their immoble pretensions.

“But remember this: It’s not in the finished work that beauty awaits you. It’s not a success. Not the paradise promised to the loyal workman, or the serenity of twilight after the piety of toil. It’s a creative blasphemy that’s never silent, a question that nothing satisfies, a forward march that never wearies. It’s what challenges us in the black suicidal gifts of our accidental matter. It identifies itself with the heroism of our destiny.

“Beauty was not given to Man by a god. Man invented it. Beauty is Man’s seditious hope against the given order, the virtue born of his feeling of pride and strangeness in a universe from which he has banished angels and devils. It’s the promised victory over grass and rain, the sirens’ flight above the hideousness of the ocean. For beauty is the wing of the world; without it, the mind would be grounded. That’s why I say that eroticism, that triumph of the dream over nature, is the lofty refuge of the spirit of poetry, because it denies the impossible. It is Man who can do
anything
.”

“I don’t have a very clear idea of that power,” objected Emmanuelle.

“The sex act between women is a biological absurdity, it’s impossible. Eroticism immediately makes a reality of that invention of the dream. Sodomy is a defiance of nature; eroticism commits sodomy. Intercourse by five people at once is not
natural
; eroticism imagines it, orders it, and carries it out. And each of its victories is
beautiful
. It’s true that eroticism doesn’t need these exceptional arrangements in order to flourish; it demands only youth and freedom of the mind, love of truth, and a purity that owes nothing to custom and convention. Eroticism is a passion of courage.”

“Your eroticism sounds like a kind of asceticism! Is it really worth going to all that trouble?”

“It’s worth a thousand times more! If only for the pleasure of flouting our monsters. To begin with, the most hideous of all—stupidity and cowardice, those two Hydras so dear to men! To men who have never confessed themselves so well as in Hobbes’ cry, truer each morning after three centuries: ‘The single passion of my life will have been fear!’ Fear of being different. Fear of thinking. Fear of being happy. All those fears that are antipoetry and have become the values of the world—conformity, respect for taboos and rites, hatred of imagination, refusal of novelty, masochism, malevolence, envy, pettiness, hypocrisy, lying, cruelty, shame. In a word, evil! The true enemy of eroticism is the spirit of evil.”

“And to think that I believed some people called eroticism what others simply called vice!” Emmanuelle mused ironically.

“Vice, you say? What do you mean by that word? ‘Vice’ means ‘defect.’ Eroticism, like all the other works of Man, is not free of defects, errors, and relapses. If that’s the case, then let’s say that vice is the price of eroticism, its shadow, its waste matter. But there’s one thing that cannot exist—shameful eroticism. The qualities required for the birth of the erotic act—logic and firmness of mind above all, imagination, humor, and daring, to say nothing of power of conviction, organizational ability, good taste, esthetic intuition, and a sense of grandeur, without which all its attempts fail—must necessarily make it something proud, generous, and triumphant.”

“Is that why you present it as a morality?”

“No, it’s because of much more than that. Eroticism demands above all a systematic mind. Its partisans can only be men of principle, makers of theories—no joyous carousers or circus strongmen announcing the number of shots they’ve fired, after drinking, with little chambermaids who like to dance.”

“In short, eroticism is the opposite of making love?”

“That’s going too far. But it’s true that making love is not necessarily an act of eroticism. There’s no eroticism where there’s sexual pleasure that springs from impulse, habit, or duty; where there’s a pure and simple response to a biological instinct, a physical purpose rather than an esthetic one, a pursuit of the pleasure of the senses rather than the pleasure of the mind, love of oneself or another rather than love of beauty. In other words, there’s no eroticism where there’s
nature
. Eroticism, like all morality, is an effort by Man to oppose nature, surmount it, surpass it. You know very well that Man is Man only to the extent that he has made himself a
denatured
animal, and that he becomes more human only insofar as he separates himself more from nature. Eroticism, the most human talent of men, is not the opposite of love, it’s the opposite of nature.”

“Like art?”

“Bravo! Morality and art are one. I commend you for speaking of art as antinatural. Haven’t I already told you that beauty was found only in the defeat of nature? In every age, the makers of shadows on the wall of our lives have tried to convince men, usually by kicking them, that they can be cured of the fatigue of machines and architecture only by a ‘return to nature.’ What a disgusting panic, what an abominable degradation of intelligence! A return to the vermin of humus—is that the whole future deserved by the inventors of mathematics and ballerina tights? If this species is eager to end, then let it go out in a blaze of glory, in a spray of atoms. It would be better to have an empty spot among the heavenly bodies and the memory of a final song of pride than a planet populated by one more race of monkeys. I hate nature!” He abruptly put his hand down on hers and squeezed it almost hard enough to make her cry out.

His voice became strangely beautiful: “I was flying over the Gulf of Corinth, on my way to the country whose night we’re now sharing. To my right, the peaks of the Peloponnesus were covered with snow. To my left, the golden beaches of Attica were warming the sea. A newspaper that was brought to me turned me away from that spectacle for a moment, but not to betray it, because it proclaimed the most beautiful poem that man has ever written—a poem whose ancient roots plunged into the very land that was offering me its adorable lips, half-opened above the lustrous waves and blistered by sunlight, the same dawn as the morning of the Odyssey and, after so many miraculous years, swollen with the same desire of the sirens, still as headstrong and mad for knowledge, wary and wise . . . Here is that poem: ‘On January 3, at 3:57
A
.
M
., a white star will appear at the center of the triangle formed by the stars Alpha of Boötes, Alpha of Libra, and Alpha of Virgo.’

“That star has now appeared, a minute steel pebble thrown by Man, as though from a sling, at the face of the universe. And the new age that has begun is ours forever. From now on, our earth and the flesh of our race may perish, but one more star, a star made by our hand, stamped with our mark and speaking words of our language, will be eternally turning, ruining by its song the cold majesty of infinite space. O you, you Alpha stars, whose vigil has crossed out our remorseless conquest, our taste for life stretches its bare legs on your beaches of fire!”

Mario closed his eyes and did not begin speaking again until several minutes had gone by. His voice had regained its disdainful slowness.

“Art, you said? The most perfect artistic creation is that which moves farthest from the image of God. Ah, how unimportant is what God has created, compared with the work of men! How beautiful our planet is, now that we’ve filled in its hollows, now that we’ve erected our glass palaces on it, and made its ether vibrate at the frequency of our cantatas! How beautiful it is, drawn from God’s night by Man’s light! How beautiful it is, liberated from God’s underbrush and snakes by the growth of Man’s cities! How beautiful it is, trimmed of its landscapes and adorned with the iron creatures of its Calders, the squares of gold, blood, and sky, and the lines of its Mondrians! The kingdom of Man on earth and in the skies is too beautiful for us to concern ourselves any longer with the kingdom of God!” He looked at Emmanuelle as though he saw in her face those forms and fires of the earth he loved.