Emmanuelle (17 page)

“Wasn’t it by means of art that the Quaternary hominid separated himself from the wild animal and became Man? He is the only living creature that will leave more in the universe than he found. But already the art of colors, curves, and sounds is no longer sufficient to satisfy his creative passion. He wants to fashion his own flesh and his own thought in the image of his genius, as he once drew Apsaras and Corae from his dream. The art of this age can no longer be an art of cold stone, bronze, or paint. It can only be an art of living bodies, it can only ‘live from life.’ The only art that fits spaceman, the only one capable of taking him farther than the stars—as figures drawn with ocher and soot opened the walls of the cave onto the future—is eroticism.

“Tell me,” he continued, “is there any art more poignant than the art that takes the human body and, from that work of nature, makes its own denatured work? It’s easy for a skilled craftsman to draw from marble or the rhythm of lines an object whose paternity he hasn’t had to wrest from the universe. But to work with Man! To seize him in one’s hands, not like a lump of clay, not in order to feel his texture and his contours, or approve of him, or love him, or enjoy him, but precisely in order to contest his form and content, remove him from the idiotic groping of the cell, alter his very composition, extract his abject nature from him, as one delivers a laboratory animal from the heredity that made it a slug or a rodent. To remake Man! To save him from matter, in order to make him free to give himself his own laws, laws that no longer lump him together with the meteor and the molecule, laws that liberate him from the decline of energy and from gravity. That, truly, is more than art . . . it’s the reason for being of the mind itself.”

He stood up and walked to the opening that overlooked the
khlong
. “Look!” he said. “The gulf is not between animate and inanimate; it’s between what’s conscious and the rest of the world. That lizard and that dog aren’t different from trees and seaweed, which aren’t different from water and stone. But look at those boatmen rowing and dreaming, decked out in their rags, with their persistence, their clenched fingers, their short hair . . . There’s Man! Ah, it takes a frenzied love of men to be able to hate nature well. Men, men, how I love you! You’ll go so far!”

“For you, then,” Emmanuelle asked almost timidly, “the only possible love is unnatural love?” She accompanied her question with an affectionate laugh intended to show him that she was not trying to offend him. But there was no risk of that. As usual, he demolished the idea with words.

“That’s a truism. And a redundancy. Love is always unnatural. It’s the absolute antinature. It’s the crime, the insurrection par excellence against the order of the universe, the false note in the music of the spheres. It’s Man escaping from the Garden of Eden with a burst of laughter. It’s the failure of God’s plans.”

“And you call that moral!” Emmanuelle joked.

“Morality is what makes Man Man! Not what makes him an alienated object, a captive, a slave, a eunuch, a penitent, or a buffoon. Love wasn’t invented to debase him, subjugate him, or make him grimace. It’s not the poor man’s cinema or the restless soul’s tranquilizer; it’s not a diversion, or a game, or a drug, or a toy. Love, the art of carnal love, is Man’s reality, the only firm ground, the only real homeland. ‘Everything that is not love takes place for me in another world, the world of phantoms. Everything that is not love takes place for me in a dream, and in a hideous dream . . . I do not become a man again until arms enfold me!’ That penetrating cry of Don Juan’s has been heard and understood by so many others, no matter how different the forms of their genius. ‘Do you think love is a pastime? Gyrinno, it’s a task, and the hardest of all.’”

“I don’t agree,” said Emmanuelle. “I prefer to think of love as a pleasure rather than as a duty.”

“The morality of eroticism is that pleasure makes morality.”

“I feel that a moral pleasure loses a good part of its appeal.”

“Why?” he asked with surprise. “I don’t understand. Is it because you identify moral principles with deprivation and coercion? But what if a principle deprives you of depriving yourself? What if it obliges you to take advantage of life? The idea of morality repels you because you confuse it with the idea of sexual prohibition. To you, moral conduct means ‘Thou shalt not be impure in body or mind; thou shalt desire the act of the flesh only in marriage.’ Don’t let that hoax discredit the honorable word ‘morality’ in your eyes. Don’t use a ludicrous imposture, long since exposed, as a pretext for condemning both good and evil, or—and this is even more serious—saying that good and evil don’t exist!

“You surely realize that it was through fraud that sexual taboos gained admission into the kingdom of morality and finally subjugated it to their unjust law. They had no place in it by divine right. In fact, their nature and purpose are totally immoral, since they originally sprang from an eminently pragmatic motive—to assure the landholder of the ownership of children, who were instruments of production and outer signs of wealth, like flint pickaxes and pottery.”

He leaped up and walked to a shelf laden with books, in the deep red semidarkness, and returned holding a volume.

“I don’t choose or appeal to my texts improperly,” he said. “I limit myself to the most irrefutable of dogmas: the Commandments brought back from Mount Sinai by Moses. And in the seventeenth verse of the twentieth chapter of Exodus I read, carved in stone, the following: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.’ There, it’s directly and unambiguously stated. Woman, know the place that the Eternal has assigned to you—between the barn and the livestock, with the rest of the laborers. And not in the first rank, either. Wife, you come after brick and thatch. Maidservant, you have less value than a farmhand, and just a little more than a horned animal or a donkey.” He closed his Bible and put his right hand on it, pastorally.

“It is said that the Middle Ages invented love. The fact is that the Middle Ages nearly succeeded in making us disgusted with it! In giving us the poisoned gift of his ‘morality,’ the feudal cleric thought he was cutting off our desire for sexual pleasure forever. Look at what’s left of his plots and contrivances! The chastity belts of good and evil that the lords of the earth fastened onto their wives and their she-asses are now falling in rusty fragments from the battlements and parapets that witnessed their birth. Let’s do them the honor of putting them in a museum. But let’s first note that their end is eminently moral—though their birth was not! And let’s marvel at the fact that real morality is what subsists after the work of time has dealt with false morality as it deserves.”

Emmanuelle was thoughtful. She agreed with Mario’s view of the contingent value of the imperatives of traditional morality, but, precisely because of that, it seemed senseless to waste time building a new morality on the ruins of the old one. Couldn’t she simply make love as she pleased, freely, without racking her brain to draw up a new code and announcing it from the housetops? Was it really necessary to give herself formed laws? There was no morality anywhere, not even an “erotic” one, she thought, that could be better than no morality at all.

“You can’t triumph over bad laws by anarchy,” Mario retorted when she had expressed these doubts to him. “The idea is not to return to the jungle, but to recognize that some of Man’s powers, which society now represses and condemns to atrophy, are just, and that they give our species the means of happiness. The new law, the good one, simply proclaims that it’s beautiful and good to make love well and freely; that virginity is not a virtue, two lovers not the limit, or marriage a prison; that the art of erotic pleasure is what matters and that we must constantly offer ourselves, give ourselves, unite our bodies with more and more bodies, and count all time spent out of their arms as wasted.” He raised his finger. “If you hear me add other laws to this great one, remember that they’re nothing more than secondary regulations whose purpose is to help in observing the principle I’ve just set forth, by rejecting timidity of the soul and weariness of the flesh.”

“But,” said Emmanuelle, “if the taboos of bourgeois morality have an economic origin, there will have to be a real revolution before your erotic morality can be put into effect.”

“It requires something much more important and much more radical than a revolution—a mutation like the mutation by which the fish that was tired of the sea, and was one day to be called Emmanuelle, wanted to find out if its new liking for land would make it grow legs, and began breathing by raising its future breasts.”

She smiled at the image. “So erotic Man will be a new animal?”

“He’ll be more than Man, and yet he’ll still be Man. Simply more adult, further advanced on the scale of evolution. The day is coming when, just as surely as artistic values separated men from beasts, the values of eroticism will separate the proud man from the ashamed man who huddles in the dens of present society, hiding his nakedness and chastising his sex. Poor, human, rough drafts that we are, sketches still coated with the mud of the Pleistocene swamps! In love with our inhibitions and our crude sufferings, struggling with all our blindness and all our evangelical brute strength against the currents of hope that try to draw us out of childhood!”

“But what makes you think that those currents will win out, that your morality will eventually triumph over the morality that’s protected by religious custom and law? What if the opposite were to happen?”

“It won’t! I won’t believe it! Because I can’t believe that Man has come from so far and so low only to stop here and suddenly give up moving forward, being something else. He’ll go on! Groping his way, yes, and shuddering, but without ever turning back, making himself more and more different from the other species. If we’re already less stupid than the coelacanth, it means that some day the gap will be even greater.”

He gave her a few moments to reflect.

“What we’re capable of is trying to add to intelligence, and to do the impossible to be happy. I’ve been given no promise that I’ll ever find the unexplored shore that I can only call happiness, yet Eluard was right to proclaim, ‘It’s not true that it takes everything to make a world. It takes happiness, and nothing else.’ But what courage we need to attain it! The human animal has already shown great courage from childhood, in tearing himself away from the nursery of his gods. And he still shows it today in choosing not to wait in solitary contemplation for the kingdom where the meek and humble in heart will be rewarded, but rather to join the people of the streets in running the risk of life and death without paradise.”

“And the risk of being mistaken,” Emmanuelle pointed out, “of deluding himself about his nature. And the risk of what he thinks are his own ideas about his power and his importance.”

He stared at her with sudden suspicion. “Are you on the side of those for whom Man’s adventure has no meaning? Do you maintain that our species is doomed to failure, a failure in proportion to its naïveté? Do you think that we’re the playthings of our own language, and that our downfall is inscribed on sovereign tablets? Is it your disdainful conviction that we’ve been invented, like the dodo bird, for the sole purpose of becoming extinct, and that that’s all we’re good for? Perhaps you even feel that Man’s extinction will be the best thing that can happen to the world he’s disrupted, and you’re waiting for it, from the heights of your cold, inhuman knowledge, with the masochistic impartiality that’s now in fashion?”

“No, I don’t think that way,” said Emmanuelle. “But you must admit that your own confidence is also a faith. A kind of religion.”

“That’s not true. If I’m sure of Man, it’s because I see him at work. His progress, which is mine, consists in believing less and less and seeing better and better. Gods are born only behind closed eyelids.”

“Maybe you look only at Einsteins, and not enough at criminals. Otherwise, you’d sometimes be afraid.”

“Not being Einstein isn’t a crime, but it’s certainly a defect. And I have no right to complain that men are killing me if I myself have been unable to cure them of death. I may die, but I’ll know that it’s my weakness and not my honor.”

“You know very well that no one will ever find a remedy for death.”

“I know that it’s the mind that dies when our mythologies, like tumors of the flesh, replace the happy cells in it. Disorder reigns where the chance of our reality existed. We die only of ignorance and ugliness. Death is nothing but the stupor of knowledge. The infinite expansion of intelligence is asymptotic to death. Therefore our future is infinite. We’re no longer Doctor Eternal’s patients; our patience is exhausted! We’ll forget our mortal mornings as those who are cured forget their disease. We’ll find our world in some haven of space-time; it will be our love and our reason. And we’ll spend the long vigils of our illusion-less lives listening to the din of the quasars. We’ll be happy . . .” He fell silent.

Emmanuelle let sufficient time go by, then, with a certain caution in her voice, brought him back to the subject. “And eroticism is capable of helping in the discovery of that new world?”

“More than that! It’s identical with it, it’s progress itself.”

“Aren’t you exaggerating?”

“Try to understand! I’ve told you the goal is not to reform society, or even to conceive a new one, to build a republic of lechery! The goal is biological progress, a transformation, a click that will be heard some morning in the future in a man’s brain. A flash, and there it is! He thinks differently, he’s another being. He’s taken a step. The ignorance, terror, and servitude of his former race no longer concern him. He no longer even understands what they mean. It matters little whether or how he makes love. What’s new is that he does it with a free mind. Good is what gives him pleasure, evil is what causes him suffering. It’s as simple as that. There’s his good and his evil. There’s his morality. And his good is what’s beautiful, what tempts him, what gives him an erection. His evil is what’s ugly, what bores, limits, or frustrates him. Mystic trances and the delights and poisons of anxiety will no longer touch him. He’ll no longer need hallucinogenic mushrooms, philosophers, or hermitages to cure himself of despair. His liking for himself and his fellow human beings will be enough for him. Doesn’t that man seem to you a more advanced animal than the haircloth wearer? Hasn’t he made progress?”