Emmanuelle (18 page)

“Yes, I agree. But it’s an individual progress, it has consequences only for him. Just now you were talking about progress as though it concerned the human race.”

“It does. It’s not by masses, by whole societies, that species evolve. Mutations have always occurred in a small number, one of those unloved minorities, with heads erect and eyes open, with which the great, flabby herds refused to share their pastures. But when one of those mutant branches grows out of the human tree, the whole world is changed. If tomorrow a man appears for whom the words ‘immodesty,’ ‘adultery,’ and ‘incest’ are meaningless, a man who couldn’t understand them even if he tried, then our virtues will be relegated to museum displays, along with the teeth of the pterodactyl and the bony plates of the stegosaurus.”

“But since that man hasn’t appeared yet, the erotic age is only a vision of the future. You and I are unlucky—we were born too soon!”

“Who can say? The laws of evolution are still largely hidden from us. It may not be useless to try to bring ourselves into the world. Perhaps we haven’t yet been born.”

“What can we do to be born?” cried Emmanuelle.

“We can act as if we were the masters of life. Act as if we were alive! What may give us light is the practice of eroticism as the rule of life. And if enough of us adopt the scale of erotic values as the only scale, without reserve, in all clarity, ostentatiously, it’s not we alone who will be enlightened—luck may smile on our species once again. Think of the first quadruped who decided once and for all that he was going to walk on his hind legs, without worrying about whether or not the rest of the animal kingdom would rather go on sniffing dung. Our determination to change for a prouder posture may be the decisive step, the necessary and sufficient condition for passing from the age of fear to the age of reason.” He sighed.

“Ah, of course we’d prefer to be born a million years from now! Let’s at least do our best to bring that age of reason closer to us. Nothing deserves to be done, said, or written today if it doesn’t help us to ‘pass.’ We must watch our words and our simplest acts. We mustn’t say or do anything that might confirm men in the idiotic conviction that they’ve already found what they came to seek. Nothing that might retard their puberty still longer. For my part, I know my duty—to repeat to them ceaselessly that the body is just, that its powers are infinite, that the sweetness of living is also life’s reason for being.”

* * *

The sound of Quentin’s voice made Emmanuelle start—she had forgotten his presence. She listened to him talking to Mario with unexpected warmth and loquacity. Mario seemed greatly interested. Now and then he uttered exclamations of pleasure. Finally, he translated for Emmanuelle, who realized that the Englishman must have followed the main drift of their conversation more easily than she would have thought.

“What Quentin has told me makes all hopes possible. It seems that the ‘mutant branch’—or at least a bud of that branch—exists already and, even better, has existed for a thousand years! For several months, Quentin was the guest of a tribe in India, the Muria. The ‘civilized’ Hindus call them ‘primitive,’ but there’s every reason to believe that they’re actually a vanguard of intelligence. Their society is constructed entirely around a sexual morality that is the exact opposite of ours . . . a morality that’s not prohibitive, but formative. The cornerstone of their system of education is a community dormitory that children of both sexes enter at a very early age, to serve their apprenticeship in the art of love. This institution is called the ‘
Gothul
.’ There, long before puberty, the little girls are initiated into physical love by the big boys, and the little boys by the big girls. And by no means in an instinctive or bestial way—the erotic techniques that are inculcated in them have, it seems, after ten centuries of practice, attained a level of incomparable refinement. This course of instruction, which all children are required to follow for several years, also serves to develop them artistically, because they spend their spare time—when they’re not making love—decorating the walls of their dormitory. Their drawings, paintings, and sculptures are always erotically inspired. Quentin tells me they’re so well done that no one can visit such a gallery without immediately being filled with very strong feelings. And when you’ve seen eleven-year-old boys and girls imitating the most daring figures in that museum of love without hiding or showing embarrassment, with the doors wide open, before their parents’ proud gaze, executing living tableaus that in Europe would take them straight to a reform school, it quickly occurs to you that the Muria are not living a thousand years behind our time, but a thousand years in advance.”

When Mario stopped speaking, Quentin gave him more details, which were in turn translated for Emmanuelle.

“The most remarkable part of it is that this sexual ‘laboratory instruction,’ which all the children of the tribe participate in, is the result of a system, a set of rigorous and elaborate rules, and not of moral laxity, or some sort of congenital moral blindness. It’s not a matter of license, it’s a matter of ethics. The community discipline of the
Gothul
is very strict; the older children are responsible for the younger ones. The ‘law’ rigorously forbids any lasting attachment between boys and girls. No one has the right to say that a certain girl is
his,
and a boy is punished if he spends more than three straight nights with any one girl. Everything is organized to prevent intense attachments that drag on indefinitely, and to eliminate jealousy. ‘Everyone belongs to everyone.’ If a boy shows an instinct of ownership and exclusiveness toward a girl, if his face goes to pieces when he sees her having intercourse with another boy, the community brings him back to the right path by helping him to overcome his nature. He must make active efforts to have the girl he loves possessed by all the other boys, he must guide their members into her with his own hand, until he has learned not only to suffer from it, but to wish it and be glad of it. With the Muria, the great crime is not theft or murder,
which do not exist,
but jealousy. Thus, by the time the girls and boys come to marriage, they’re not only rich with a sexual knowledge and skill that’s unique in the world, they also belong to another age of the earth—the resentments, grievances, and despairs of our civilization are foreign to them. They’re on the side of happiness.”
*

*
See Verrier Elwin’s
The Muria and Their Gothul
(Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1947).

Emmanuelle seemed impressed, yet she protested. “Mario, a morality of that kind can’t be developed within a people by an effort of awareness and reflection. I’m sure the Muria have always had it. It must be an inborn grace. Let me remind you that a little while ago you put the gift of eroticism on the same level as the gift of poetry. That means it can’t be acquired by will or intelligence. If it wasn’t given to you by nature when you were born, you’ll never get it, no matter how hard you try.”

“What a common illusion that is! Must I tell you again that there’s no other poetry in nature than what has been put there by Man? No other harmony, no other beauty. And although Man does everything, nothing comes to him, including poetry and genius, until the age of reason. The example of the Muria simply shows that one can reach that age when one is more or less young. No man is born a poet. No people is born a chosen people. No one is born anything. One must learn. Our way of becoming men, of mutating into men, is to reject our ignorance and our myths, like a hermit crab casting off its old shell, and don truth like a new garment. Thus we can be indefinitely born and reborn. With each ‘abrupt mutation,’ we’ll be more human and we’ll remake our world to suit our pleasure better. ‘Learning’ is learning to enjoy. Ovid already said it, as you’ll recall: ‘
Ignoti nulla cupido!
’”

Emmanuelle did not recall. Without troubling to enlighten her, Mario went on. “And what don’t we have to learn! Art, morality, science—the beautiful, the good, the true; in short, everything, because nothing else exists, the time of the sacred is over. Fortunately, to make our task easier, that everything has produced a child of its own—Eros. Therefore erotic reflection, experience, and insight are all we need in order to attain poetry, morality, and knowledge, since these are actually only diverse reflections of a single lesson: the
man lesson,
in the sense that one speaks of an object lesson.”

“Your demonstration is becoming more and more abstract, Mario! Why don’t you give me some examples of what can be done?”

“Imagining, seeing, and if necessary, provoking those unexpected attitudes, encounters, and associations without which there can be no poetic situation—there, for example, is one of the sources of eroticism.”

“You say ‘unexpected’—does that mean you can’t find pleasure in something you expect? Can’t anything be erotic without being disconcerting?”

“It must at the very least be something that breaks with habit. A pleasure ceases to have an artistic quality if it’s a usual pleasure. Only the nonbanal, the exceptional, the unfamiliar have value. Nothing can be truly erotic that isn’t
unusual
.”

“But then, when erotic morality has become established, won’t eroticism lose its attractiveness? Can it be that, for the Muria, making love is no more amusing than making bread?”

“That’s not the impression I got from what Quentin told me. Instead, it seems that, being experts in the art of love from childhood, they place nothing above sexual games all through their lives. They’re known in India as fervent advocates of physical love. But I grant you that their experience isn’t necessarily valid for us, since our minds are still marked, crippled forever, perhaps, by traditions of sexual hypocrisy that are stronger than the obvious conclusions of reason. We must hope, of course, that nature will make a leap for us. But in any case, let’s not flatter ourselves that we’re capable of guessing and usefully describing in advance what the psychology of our descendants, the mutants, will be. We who haven’t yet ‘taken the step’ must concern ourselves only with our own adventure. And we must recognize that, for the prisoners that we are, the liberating miracle of erotic emotion usually occurs only when there’s a defiance of accepted behavior. So it’s true, and it’s our revenge, that the present survival of false moral rules—or simply of social conventions—gives us, who refuse them, the power to shock. The woman whose husband impregnates her in her bed, before sleep, is not erotic. The erotic woman is the one who, at snack time, calls her son and tells him to prepare a sperm sandwich for his little sister. That’s erotic because that menu hasn’t yet become commonplace. When the bourgeoisie has adopted it, something else will have to be found.”

“So I was right in saying that if eroticism needs the extraordinary, the unfamiliar, its very progress puts it in danger. One fine day it will have used up all its possibilities.”

“You can even say without risk, my dear, that for a long time no one has invented anything. Nevertheless, your fears are vain, because eroticism isn’t a heritage, it’s a personal adventure. Eroticism will keep its value as an individual conquest even when Mankind has been freed of sexual taboos. Has the public nature of the laws of versification ever kept the poet from rediscovering the secret of poetry on his own?”

Emmanuelle nodded in agreement.

“What justifies the artist’s enterprise,” Mario continued, “is not innovating for history, but for himself. Unlike the inventions of science, the inventions of art lose nothing from having been already made! What does it matter if a horse has already been drawn by the Chinese or the cavemen of Lascaux? The first time my fingers extract a horse from the tenderness of my vision, he carries me on his four legs as far as the universe interests me. That is, let me say in passing, as long as he and I can be seen together, as long as I can show him off. We need society to look at us. There can be no happy art without a spectator.”

He scrutinized Emmanuelle, awaiting a reaction. She showed none.

“The children of the Muria,” he went on, “make love in front of their companions, or a passing visitor. If they were alone together in a bedroom, the chances are that they would eventually become bored. You’re afraid that habit dulls pleasure. You’re right. But don’t we have the gaze of others to open up new horizons for us?” His voice took on a certain affectation. “At this point we come to a second law of eroticism: that it needs
asymmetry
.”

“What do you mean? And besides, what was the first law?”

“That of the
unusual
. But both of them, as I’ve told you, are only ‘little laws.’ The great law, the only necessary and sufficient one, you’ll remember, is supremely simple . . .”

“That all time spent doing anything but taking pleasure ‘artfully,’ always in different arms, is wasted. Is that it?”

“More or less, although I don’t like the expression ‘always in different arms.’ It seems to imply that you must reject your old partners as soon as you acquire new ones. That would be the worst mistake! The quality of your pleasure will arise from increasing the number of your partners, rather than making them replace one another. Eros hides his secrets from fickle hearts! What good does it do to give yourself if it’s only to take yourself back? The world will not become greater for you.”