The Elementary Particles (18 page)

“As the months went by, David and some of the others plunged deeper into cruelty and horror. Sometimes they wore masks and filmed these scenes of carnage—one of them was a producer for a video company and could get the tapes duplicated. A good snuff movie was worth a lot—about twenty thousand dollars a copy. One night, at an orgy held by a lawyer friend, he saw one of his films being shown in a bedroom. It had been filmed about a month before, and in this one he’d cut off a man’s penis with a chain saw. He was very aroused and dragged a young girl of about twelve—a friend of the lawyer’s daughter—and forced her to her knees in front of him. The girl struggled a bit, but in the end she started to suck him off. On the screen, he watched himself slide the chain saw gently along the thighs of a forty-year-old man. The guy was tied up, his arms spread-eagled, screaming in terror. David ejaculated into the girl’s mouth just as the blade cut through the man’s penis. He grabbed the girl by the hair and jerked her head around brutally, forcing her to watch the long close-up of the stump as it pissed blood.”

“That was the end of the evidence against David. The police got hold of a master copy of one of the torture videos, but David had probably been warned in advance; in any case, he managed to get away in time. At this point, David Macmillan puts forward his theory. What he had proved in his book was that these self-professed Satanists didn’t believe in God or Satan or any supernatural power. Blasphemy was simply something they used to spice up their rituals, and most of them quickly lost the taste for it. In fact, like their master the Marquis de Sade, they were pure materialists—libertines forever in search of new and more violent sensations. According to Macmillan, the progressive destruction of moral values in the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties was a logical, inevitable process. Having exhausted the possibilities of sexual pleasure, it was reasonable that individuals, liberated from the constraints of ordinary morality, should turn their attentions to the wider pleasures of cruelty. Two hundred years earlier, de Sade had done precisely the same thing. In a sense, the serial killers of the 1990s were the spiritual children of the hippies of the sixties, and their common ancestors would be the Viennese Actionists of the fifties. In the guise of performance art, Actionists like Nitsch, Muehl and Schwarzkögler had conducted animal sacrifices in public. They would rip out and tear apart an animal’s organs and viscera in front of an audience of cretins, plunge their arms into the flesh and blood—drawing out the innocent animal’s suffering to the limit—while someone photographed or filmed the carnage so it could be exhibited in an art gallery. This Dionysian pleasure in the release of bestiality and evil, begun by the Viennese Actionists, can be traced through every succeeding decade. According to Macmillan, this shift in Western civilization since 1945 was simply a return to the brutal cult of power, a rejection of the secular rules slowly built up in the name of right and morality. Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who affirmed the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippie movement, but its logical conclusion; and what David di Meola had done was nothing more than to extend and to put into practice the principles of individual freedom advocated by his father. Macmillan was a member of the Republican party, and some of his diatribes against individual liberty caused much gnashing of teeth within the party, but his book had a tremendous impact. With his royalties, he went into politics full-time and, the following year, was elected to Congress.”

Bruno fell silent. He had long since finished his coffee; it was four a.m. and there wasn’t a single Viennese Actionist in the house. In fact, Otto Muehl was currently languishing in an Austrian prison for raping a child. He was in his sixties now, and hopefully would die soon, thereby eliminating one source of evil from the world. There was no reason to get so worked up. Everything was calm now; a single waiter moved between the tables. They were the only customers left, but the brasserie was open twenty-four hours a day—it said so above the door and again on the menu—in what was practically a contractual obligation. “They better not try to hassle us, the bastards,” Bruno remarked distractedly. In contemporary society, a human life inevitably goes through one or two crises of self-doubt. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, to find at least one establishment in any major European city which is open all night. He ordered a raspberry
bavarois
and two glasses of kirsch. Christiane had listened closely to his story; her silence was pained. It was time to return to simple pleasures.

16

TOWARD AN AESTHETIC OF GOODWILL

With the dawn, young girls go picking roses. A whisper of wisdom breathes over the valleys and the capitals, stirring the intellect of the most ardent poets, strewing safekeeping to cradles, crowns to youth and to old men an intimation of immortality.

—L
AUTRÉAMONT,

Poésies II

Most of the people Bruno had encountered in his life had been motivated solely by the pursuit of pleasure—if one includes in the definition those narcissistic pleasures so central to the esteem or admiration of others. And thus different strategies are adopted, and these are called human lives.

To this rule, however, he had to make an exception for his half brother; it seemed impossible to associate the notion of pleasure with him; but what, if anything, did motivate Michel? A uniform rectilinear motion will continue indefinitely in the absence of friction or any other external force. Orderly, rational, sociologically situated at the median of the higher social stratum, Michel’s life did not so far seem to have encountered any friction. It was possible that there were dark and terrible power struggles among molecular biologists, but Bruno doubted it.

. . .

“You have a very pessimistic view of the world . . .” said Christiane, ending the oppressive silence between them. “Nietzschean,” corrected Bruno. “Pretty second-rate Nietzsche at that,” he felt he should add. “I’ll read you a poem.” He took a notebook out of his pocket and recited the following verse:

It’s always the same old shit of course,

The eternal return, et cetera,

And here I am eating raspberry mousse

In a café called Zarathustra.

“I know what we should do,” she said after a long silence. “We should go and have an orgy on the nudist beach at the Cap d’Agde. You get a lot of Dutch nurses and German businessmen there, all very proper, very middle-class—the Northern European or Benelux types. Why don’t we go fuck around with some Luxembourgeois policemen.”

“I haven’t got any vacation left.”

“Neither have I, school starts again on Tuesday, but I
need
a holiday. I’m tired of teaching, the kids are all little fuckers. You need a holiday too, and you need to get off with a lot of different women. It’s possible—I know you don’t believe me, but it is. I’ve got a friend who’s a doctor; he can give us sick leave.”

They arrived at the station at Agde on Monday morning and took a taxi to the nudist colony. Christiane hadn’t had time to go back to Noyon and had very little luggage with her. “I have to send my son some cash,” she said. “He can’t stand me, but I still have to support him for another couple of years. I just hope he doesn’t turn violent. He hangs out with a lot of shady people—neo-Nazis and Muslims . . . You know, if he had an accident on his motorbike and was killed, I’d be sad, but I think I’d probably feel relieved.”

It was September, so they found a rental easily. The nudist colony at Cap d’Agde was divided into five separate condominiums built in the late seventies and early eighties with a capacity of ten thousand beds—the largest in the world. Their apartment was twenty-two square meters: a living room with a sofa bed, a kitchenette, two bunk beds, a bathroom, separate toilet and a balcony. It had a maximum occupancy of four people—usually a family with two children. Bruno and Christiane felt at home immediately. The balcony was west-facing, with a view over the harbor, so they could drink their aperitifs while watching the sun set.

Though it boasted three shopping centers, a mini-golf course and bicycle rental, the primary attractions for vacationers at the colony were sex and sunbathing. It was an archetype of a particular sociological concept, which was all the more surprising in that it was the result not of some preestablished plan but the convergence of individual desires.

That, at least, was how Bruno portrayed it in his article “The Dunes of Marseillan Beach: Toward an Aesthetic of Goodwill,” a distillation of his two-week vacation. The article was narrowly rejected by
Esprit
.

“What first strikes the visitor to Cap d’Agde,” he wrote, “is the juxtaposition of the consumer outlets typical of any European seaside resort with shops openly selling erotica and sex. It is surprising to see a bakery or a supermarket next to a shop selling transparent miniskirts, latex underwear and dresses cut away to reveal breasts and buttocks. It is equally surprising to see women and couples, some with their children, moving casually from shop to shop, aisle to aisle. At the resort, the newsstands offer the usual array of papers and magazines alongside a particularly extensive assortment of porn and wife-swapping magazines as well as sex toys without raising so much as an eyebrow.

“Vacation clubs usually run the gamut from ‘family’ concerns (Mini Clubs, Kids’ Clubs—bottle warmers and changing tables) to more trendy alternatives (boogie boarding, nightclubs for ravers, ‘not recommended for under 12s’). The nudist colony at Cap d’Agde—with its high proportion of families and the focus on sexual activity divorced from traditional pickup rituals—escaped this standard dichotomy. What is most surprising is how different it is from traditional nudist colonies, which tend to stress the ‘healthy’ aspects of naturism, avoiding any direct allusion to sexuality. They are big on macrobiotic food and smoking is practically forbidden. Their outlook is very environmentalist: vacationers study yoga, painting on silk and oriental exercise and are satisfied with rough-and-ready accommodation in a wilderness environment. The apartments on the Cap d’Agde, on the other hand, correspond to the standards of comfort prevalent at other resorts. The only allusion to nature is the manicured lawns and lavish flower beds. The food is standard fare, pizzerias jostling with seafood restaurants, French fry stands and ice cream parlors. Even nudity, dare one say it, wears a coat of a different color. In traditional colonies, nudity is obligatory whenever the weather permits; this is strictly monitored, and any behavior deemed to be voyeuristic is severely reprimanded. At Cap d’Agde, however, there is no dress code, and from the supermarkets to the bars, attire ranges from traditional dress to full nudity by way of overtly fetishistic outfits (fishnet miniskirts, lingerie, thigh-high boots). Voyeurism is tacitly condoned: it is commonplace to see men on the beach stop to admire the female genitalia on show; women make even this contemplation more intimate by shaving to make it easier to see the vulva and sometimes the clitoris. Even if one does not partake in the activities of the center, all this makes for a singular atmosphere, as far removed from the erotic, narcissistic ambience of an Italian disco as from the sleazy ambience of the red-light districts of major cities. What we have here is a traditional, rather genial seaside resort with the single distinction that sexual pleasure is recognized as an important commodity. It is tempting to suggest that this is a sexual ‘social democracy,’ especially as foreign visitors to the resort are principally German, Dutch and Scandinavian.”

On the second day, Bruno and Christiane met a couple on the beach. Rudi and Hannelore gave them an insight into the sociology of the resort. Rudi was an engineer in a satellite tracking station responsible for the geostationary position of satellite Astra; Hannelore worked in a big bookshop in Hamburg. They had been coming to the Cap d’ Agde for ten years or so. They had two small children but had decided to leave them with Hannelore’s parents and treat themselves to a nice vacation this year. The four of them had dinner together that evening in a seafood restaurant famous for its bouillabaisse. Afterward they went back to the German couple’s apartment. Bruno and Rudi took turns penetrating Hannelore while she licked Christiane’s vagina, before getting the women to swap positions. Then Hannelore fellated Bruno. She had a beautiful body, buxom but firm and visibly toned through regular exercise. She sucked very sensitively; turned on by the whole situation, Bruno came a little too quickly. Rudi, more experienced, managed to delay his orgasm for twenty minutes while Christiane and Hannelore sucked him off together, their tongues sliding over each other around the glans of his penis. Hannelore offered them a glass of kirsch to round out the evening.

The Germans spent little time in the nightclubs at the colony. The Cleopatra and the Absolute could not compete with the Extasia, which was outside the nudist area, on the Marseillan resort, spectacularly equipped with a “black room,” peep shows, heated swimming pool, Jacuzzi and, recently, the most magnificent mirror room in Languedoc-Roussillon. Far from resting on the laurels it had earned in the early seventies, and helped by the enchanting surroundings, the Extasia had managed to preserve its reputation as a nightclub legend. Nonetheless, Hannelore and Rudi suggested they meet up the following evening in the Cleopatra. Though smaller, it was situated in the heart of the complex and had a warm, convivial atmosphere ideally suited to the novice couple. It was the perfect place to have a no-frills after-dinner drink with friends and for women to try out their daring new clothing in a supportive environment.

Rudi passed the bottle of kirsch around once more. None of them had dressed. Bruno was excited to discover that he was hard again, less than an hour after coming in Hannelore’s mouth; he mentioned this, his voice naively enthusiastic. Touched, Christiane began to masturbate him under the tender gaze of their new friends. As he neared climax, Hannelore knelt between his thighs and started fellating him gently as Christiane continued to stroke him. Somewhat absently, Rudi murmured, “
Gut . . . gut . . .
” They left, a little drunk but in good spirits. Bruno said that together they reminded him of the Famous Five. He told Christiane she was exactly as he had always imagined George; all they needed now was Timmy the dog.

The following afternoon they went to the beach together. The weather was beautiful and, for September, very hot. Bruno thought how pleasant it was, the four of them walking naked along the shoreline. It was nice to know there would be no problems, that all the sexual issues had been resolved; it was good to know that each of them would do their best to bring pleasure to the others.

. . .

The nudist beach at Cap d’Agde is about three kilometers long, on a gentle slope that makes for very safe swimming even for young children. Most of its length is reserved for family bathing and beach activities (windsurfing, badminton, kite-flying). It is tacitly accepted that couples looking for adventure meet on the eastern part of the beach, just past the refreshment stand. The dunes are shored up at the sides by a fence, creating a slight hill. From the top of the hill, to one side you see the beach sloping gently to the sea; to the other, which is more hilly, the dunes enclose flat expanses of sand dotted with clumps of holly oak. They settled themselves on the beach side, just below the rise. About two hundred couples were there, concentrated in the limited space. Some single men had sat down among the couples; others paced up and down the line of dunes, looking from side to side.

“During our two-week vacation, we went to the beach every afternoon,” Bruno’s article continued. “Of course death, or the thought that one might die, could make one judgmental about such human pleasures. I intend to show that if we ignore such an extremist notion, the dunes of Marseillan beach are a defining example of the humanist proposition: striving to maximize individual pleasure without causing unbearable moral suffering to anyone. Sexual pleasure—the most intense feeling of which human beings are capable—is principally dependent on the sense of touch, in particular, on the deliberate stimulation of specific areas of the epidermis rich in Krause’s corpuscles. These activate neurons capable of triggering an abundant flow of endorphins in the hypothalamus. This simple neocortical system has evolved over generations of cultural change and a richer construct has been superimposed, one based on
fantasies
and (particularly in women) on
love.
My hypothesis is that the dunes of Marseillan beach, far from wildly exacerbating fantasies, even out the sexual odds, and serve as the geographic medium for a return to a norm in which sex is based on the notion of
goodwill
. To be specific, in this space between the dunes and the shoreline, any couple can take the initiative and begin public fondling; often the woman begins to stroke or lick her partner’s sexual organs and the man returns the favor. Neighboring couples watch with interest, move closer to better observe their caresses and slowly begin to follow their example. From the original couple, a wave of affection and sexual excitement will quickly ripple across the beach. Sexual passion begins to grow, and couples come together to indulge in group sex—though it must be stressed that each waits for acknowledgment or explicit consent. If a woman wishes to decline an unwanted caress, she indicates this with a simple shake of the head, and the man makes a formal—almost comic—apology.

“The extreme decorum among the men is even more striking farther inland, above the dunes. This area is dedicated to fans of the
gang bang,
usually involving multiple male partners. Here, too, the germ is a couple who begin an intimate caress—commonly fellatio. Rapidly, the couple find themselves surrounded by ten or twenty single men. Sitting, standing or crouched on their haunches, they masturbate as they watch. Often things go no further; the couple return to their embrace and the crowd slowly disperses. Sometimes the woman will gesture to indicate that she would like to masturbate, fellate or be penetrated by other men. In this case, the men take turns—in no apparent hurry. When she wishes to stop, another simple gesture is sufficient. No words are exchanged; one can hear the wind whistling through the dunes, bowing the great tufts of coarse grass. Now and then the wind dies away and the silence is almost total, broken only by cries of pleasure.

“It is not my intention to depict the naturist resort at Cap d’Agde as some sort of idyllic phalanstery out of Fourier. In Cap d’Agde, as anywhere, beautiful, firm young women and seductive, virile men will find themselves inundated by flattering propositions. In Cap d’Agde, as anywhere, the obese, the old and the ugly are condemned to solitary masturbation—the sole difference being that whereas masturbation is generally prohibited in public, here it is looked upon with kindly compassion. What is most surprising is that so many diverse sexual practices—many far more arousing than one might witness in a pornographic film—can take place with such exemplary courtesy and not so much as an undertone of violence. In my opinion, this ‘sexual social democracy’ is an uncommon example of the qualities of discipline and respect for the social contract which allowed Germany to conduct two appallingly murderous wars a generation apart before building a powerful international economy from the ruins of their country. Indeed, it would be interesting to see what countries which traditionally honor the values of discipline and respect (Japan and Korea, for example) might make of the application of such principles in the Cap d’Agde. This respectful and legalistic attitude, which pleasurably rewards those who fulfill the contract, is a powerful incentive, in that it can, even without a written code, easily be enforced on the multifarious minorities at the resort (National Front yahoos, Arab delinquents, Italians from Rimini).”