It Is the Love of Loving
That Makes You
the World’s Betrothed
We who must, perhaps, die one day, shall declare
man immortal on the very threshold of that instant.
—Saint-John Perse, Amers
“Anna Maria Serguine.”
In sounding the i in the young woman’s first name, Mario had held it, for the longest time, on a high, isolate note, thus giving the remainder of the syllables an air of abrupt and tender confidentiality.
She remained seated behind the steering wheel of her car. Mario took her hand and presented the long, ringless fingers to Emmanuelle, holding them on his own palm.
“Anna Maria,” says the echo within Emmanuelle, as she tries to recapture the caressing thrill of the sound that had followed upon the Florentine roll of the r. Fragments of plainchant come to her mind, and with them, the scents of incense and melting wax. Panis angelicus. Young girls’ knees under the decent cover of skirts. Delicious daydreams. O res mirabilis! And throats, prolonging the i-sounds, tongues, moistening them with their saliva, lips, opening, offering up their teeth. . . . O salutaris hostia. . . . With the light shining through a stained-glass window, from the other end of the world, Emmanuelle gilds this unfamiliar face, reproaching herself for her inability to transcend a schoolgirl’s vocabulary in her response to its beauty:
“She’s marvelous!” Emmanuelle whispers to herself. “And of a purity so sure of herself, so jubilant, so happy.” It is almost breaking her heart. Such grace can only be a dream!
“It’s up to you to make it real,” says Mario, and she asks herself whether she hasn’t, after all, been thinking out loud.
Anna Maria laughed, a peal of amusement so unembarrassed that Emmanuelle regained her composure. She decided to take the visitor’s hand into her own.
“But not right now,” Anna Maria said with a smile. “I mustn’t be late for this ladies’ tea party I’m going to.”
Then she turned toward Mario, looking him over as if he had grown since she had last seen him. Her car was a very low-slung affair.
“I’m sure you’ll find some good soul to take you back?”
“Via, cara, via!”
The wheels spun in the gravel, skidded off. No windshield, no mudguards, no top! Emmanuelle thought, anxiously looking up at the dark sky. Instantly unhappy, she watched the dream fading into the distance.
“And I had thought I knew the most beautiful creatures on this earth! Where did you ever find that archangel?”
“Oh, she’s related to my family,” Mario said. “Sometimes I have her drive me around.”
Then, sounding curious:
“You find her interesting?”
Emmanuelle looked inscrutable.
“She’ll be back tomorrow,” he said.
After a moment’s silence, he went on:
“I have to tell you this: you would have to get her more than just a little excited. But I’m sure that you’ll be able to make her listen to reason.”
“Me?” protested Emmanuelle. “But how do you think I could do such a thing? I’m just a beginner.”
A twinge of spite entered her feelings. Was it perhaps that he, as far as he was concerned, regarded their affair as finished, after one single lesson?
They had walked across Emmanuelle’s garden and terrace, and were now standing in the living room, in front of the large mobile sculpture constructed out of black metal. Mario breathed on its leaves and made them turn.
Emmanuelle said:
“But I’m sure you must have taken care of her education, yourself. What would I be able to add to that?”
“It isn’t Anna Maria we’re talking about. It’s you.”
He stopped to wait for a reply from her, but she only rearranged her features in an expression meant to look skeptical. So he went on, explaining:
“You see, the act that makes you new, is the one that you have to accomplish. There is no form that is yours to such a degree as the one that turns you into another being. But perhaps you are satisfied with what you are?”
Emmanuelle shook her great black mane.
“No, I’m not,” she said, resolutely.
“Well, then. Do it.” Mario sounded weary.
Nevertheless, he went on:
“As a woman, your love for yourself quite certainly is a fitting preoccupation. But you are a goddess, as well: therefore the well-being of others has to be an equal concern of yours.”
She smiled, remembering the boardwalk, the temple, the night. He looked at her, with a questioning mien:
“And have you started enlightening your husband?”
She shook her head, looking half defiant, half ashamed.
“But wasn’t he surprised by how long you were gone?”
“He was.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that you had taken me to an opium den.”
“And he didn’t give you a lecture?”
“He made love to me.”
She read the question in her father confessor’s eyes.
“Yes,” she said, “I was thinking about it, all the time.”
“And you liked it that way?”
Emmanuelle’s face was eloquent: in her mind, she was reliving the tremendous new thrill she had experienced when her husband’s semen had spurted forth to mingle with the sam-lo’s.
“You’d like to do it again, right now,” Mario observed.
“But I told you, I believe in your law.”
And it was true. At this moment, she found herself unable even to remember what could have raised any doubts in her mind. In order to convince Mario, she repeated the maxim that he had caused her to formulate, the day before:
“All time spent in other pursuits but that of making love, embraced by an ever-increasing number of arms, is time lost.”
Then she wanted to know:
“And what does Anna Maria believe she ought to spend her time on?”
“On the preparation for other times; on self-mortification in this world, in order to achieve endless ecstasy in the other.”
Emmanuelle’s voice sounded impartial:
“Well, that means that there are other values in her life, besides those of eroticism. She, too, has her gods and her laws.”
Mario looked at her quizzically:
‘What I’m waiting to see,” he said, “is whether the dream of heaven is going to lead a daughter of man to damnation, or if the love of the real is going to win a soul, here on earth.”
Emmanuelle puts her hand on his arm.
“But I’m such a miserable hostess. I haven’t even offered you a drink, not even a cigarette.”
She wants to guide him over to the bar, but he holds her back.
“I hope, to say the very least, that you’re not wearing anything under those shorts?” he asks, looking roguish.
“Look again.”
The shorts are so minimal that they’re hardly visible beneath the coral-red sweater. Emmanuelle’s black, curly pubic hair is peeking out both sides of the crotch.
Mario looks, but has still further comment to make:
“I don’t like this kind of clothing. A skirt may be raised: it is a gate permitting entry. Those shorts are like a wall. I’ll get bored with your legs, as long as I see them emerging from that little bag.”
“I’ll take them off,” Emmanuelle says, good-humoredly. “But first you have to tell me what you would like to drink?”
He has another bee in his bonnet:
“Why stay in here? I like the trees in your garden.”
“But it’s going to rain!”
“It isn’t raining yet.”
He takes Emmanuelle where he wants to go: out to the wide ledge of flat rocks bordering the terrace. A lightning-bolt turns the spaces between the motionless, flamboyant flowers a vivid hue of green.
“Oh, Mario, look at that beautiful boy walking by in the street!”
“Yes, he’s handsome all right.”
“Why don’t you call him over here and make love to him?”
“There is a time for everything under heaven, saith the Preacher: a time to run after the boys, and a time to let them run.”
“I’m positive he never said anything like it. Listen, Mario, I’m thirsty!”
He crosses his arms, in a display of patience. She knows what he is waiting for. She shrugs, looking obstinate, and examines her naked thighs: naked up to the groin, where the edge of her shorts draws a red line across the skin. To expose oneself beyond that line is incompatible with dignity.
“Well, then?”
“Please, Mario, not out here! They can see us from the house across the street. Look!”
She points at a pair of curtains moving in one of the windows.
“You know these Siamese. There’s always someone skulking around.”
“But that’s perfect!” Mario exclaims. “Didn’t you tell me that you like people admiring your body?”
Emmanuelle’s shamefaced look makes him smile. Then he gets going, once again.
“Remember: nothing that’s discreet can be erotic. The erotic heroine is not unlike the chosen of God: she is the one who brings about strife and scandal. A masterpiece always scandalizes the world. What nakedness is it that hides itself in order to be naked? Your lechery makes little sense, if you draw the curtains of your bedroom on it: it won’t liberate your neighbor from his ignorance, his shame, his fear. The important thing is not that you get naked, but that you are seen naked; not that you cry out with pleasure, but that you can be heard; not that you count your lovers, but that he can count them; not that your own eyes have been opened to the truth of loving love, but that that other one, who is still groping about amongst his own chimeras, and in his own night, may discover, by seeing you, that there is no other light, and see your gestures testify to the fact that there is no other beauty.”
His voice assumes a more urgent tone:
“Every relapse into false shame will demoralize a multitude. Each time you start worrying about causing a scandal, think of those who secretly yearn for you to show them the way. Do not betray them. Don’t make light of the hope they put in you, whether they know it or not! If out of timidity or doubt you should ever—yes, even just once—prevent the accomplishment of an erotic act, no future audacity or merit would ever make up for such backsliding.”
He pauses to draw breath, and then, with an almost imperceptible note of disdain in his voice:
“Or is it propriety you’re thinking about? Is it that you only want to do as others do—or that you want all others to act like you? Is it Emmanuelle you want to be . . . or just anybody?”
“But surely I can respect the beliefs of my neighbors,” she defends herself. “That doesn’t mean that I share them, does it? And if they do not like my kinds of pleasure, why should I enjoy shocking them, or creating a scandal? It’s no skin off my back to let them conduct their lives according to their own lights. Is it possible to live at all, without a little discretion, tolerance, politeness? What is wrong with letting those people persuade themselves that I really do think and act like them—society is made out of such conventions, compromises.”
“If one behaves like the people across the street, one is the people across the street. Instead of changing the world, one merely becomes the reflection of what one would like to destroy.”
Emmanuelle looks impressed. Mario hastens to add:
“Well, that’s not by me, that’s Jean Genet.”
He continues in a gentler vein:
“As another playwright puts it: in the matter of love, too much isn’t even enough. If you already have done well, it is necessary to do even better. You must constantly surpass yourself, as well as all others. You can not afford to have anyone match your achievement, much less allow him to transcend it. It is not enough to be exemplary, you have to be exemplary before anyone else.”
Emmanuelle stares into the distance. She has nothing to say. She sits down on the low wall, folding her arms round her crossed legs and resting her chin on the double pommel of her knees. After a while, she asks, sounding tense, almost hostile:
“And why is it that I have to do all that? Why me?”
“Why you? Because you’re capable of doing it. As others are able to solve equations, to write symphonies, your genius lies in physical love and beauty. Or let’s put it this way: you become what you can do. Surely you don’t want to live out your life without making some mark on the world?”
“But I’m only nineteen years old! I’m not about to end my life. . . .”
“Do you have to wait any longer to even begin to live? Are you just a little kid? It’s true, I’m telling you to be heroic. But the world needs that. Your species demands it from you.”
“My species?”
“Yes, indeed: that ancient amino acid, that ancient amoeba, that ancient tarsier, that unbelievable that has to be believed—always destined to turn into something else. Animal? Vertebrate? Mammal? Primate? Hominid? Homo? Homo sapiens? Outdated labels, all of them! The forerunner of those to come: man of space-time, man of boundless thought-power, man of multiple bodies and a single spirit, man, the creator and modifier of men, always threatened by his own creatures, and bleeding, stigmatized, by his errors and his mysteries. Don’t you want to help him?”
“So if I take my shorts off, that’s helping him?”
“What use is it to perpetuate illusion, swindles, phobias? To perpetuate modesty?”
“Listen, do you really believe that it’s important, for past and future mankind, whether one bares one’s pubis or keeps it covered?”
“The future depends on your powers of imagination, on your courage. Not on your fidelity to old customs. What once was the wisdom of the caves may have become our idiocy. Let’s take modesty: is that an innate virtue, a positive or negative value for all time? As a matter of fact, it is nothing of the sort. Originally, a sound notion, a smart idea, fitting and salutary: but today, a mere pretense, a sophism, senseless, a false jewel of absurdity, a refuge of iniquity, a vessel of perversion. . . .”
“You know very well that I’m no prude. And I find your litanies quite ravishing. But is it necessary to take all that so seriously?”
“Man came down into the underbrush, still holding on to the saving lianas hanging from the branches. He was scared of the claws and teeth of the competition, and spent more time in climbing, jumping, hopping about on the ground among the thorns and flints than in caressing his females in the saline humidity of his caves. And the first one who got the idea to protect those organs on which the creation and number of his progeny depended, true, he rendered the species a service. If he hadn’t managed to turn this simple precaution into an ethical law, a ritual, a matter of elegance, a charm, who knows if he would have been able to impose his supremacy on the rest of creation? What was to become bigotry initially was a kind of biological clairvoyance: it was an initiative in the direction of evolution, a good thing, in the most moral sense.”
Mario sits down, facing Emmanuelle:
“Then, later, the invention of clothing saved the species from perishing in the great freeze.”
With an irritated gesture, he pinches the material of his shirt, now lightly stained with perspiration:
“But now, look! The reindeer have retreated, the great glaciers have melted away. Nevertheless we go on disguising ourselves, just because it would be bad to go naked!”
A dramatic sigh. Then:
“Our resting places are covered with velvet, our gardens are lovely lawns. Our domestic animals have no armor, no fangs. But we are still afraid something might hurt our genitals. Its function accomplished, its true meaning forgotten, the pair of panties has become sacred. And you’re asking me why it is necessary to rid oneself of it, as urgently as if it were Deianira’s tunic? Clinging to a myth that has outlived its purpose is bound to stultify mankind. The energy wasted in the service of a mere superstition saps our creative powers.”
Mario’s face brightens, as he shifts gears:
“In fact, the task the ancient Greeks felt to be the most urgent one, once they’d gotten it into their heads to civilize us, was: to take their clothes off! In the beginning, still harking back to the Stone Age, they went on concealing their phalloi—but once the age of reason and high culture began, their statuary became nude. If those great warriors and philosophers hadn’t realized, in time, how ridiculous their jockstraps were, we might still be barbarians, to this day.”
There is a sly gleam in the Italian’s eyes.
“And don’t you believe that the Dorian ephebes chose to compete in their pentathlons with nothing on only because it granted them maximal freedom of movement! Surely their prime intention was to show off their beauty to their admirers, who then went on to immortalize them. In the gymnasium, the statue of Eros stood next to that of Pallas Athena, and it was at his feet that man achieved his first insights into philosophy.”
For a moment, Mario seems lost in reverie about an epoch which Emmanuelle knows he would have liked to live in. Then he goes on, emphasizing his words with sweeping gestures:
“What I’ve just said about the history of modesty goes just as well for the other sexual taboos. Your peers would heap such immense opprobrium on you if you were to admit, openly, that you just love to feel a male member entering your mouth and taking its pleasure there, right to the very end! That you delight in the caresses your own fingers provide you, every day! And that you take pleasure in sharing your bed with other bodies besides your husband’s! Once upon a time, all those taboos made sense. When it was man’s task to populate the planet, wasting sperm didn’t make much sense, and it seemed an excellent idea to proclaim masturbation a sin. Now that the proliferation of human beings has become a menace, men should be forbidden the practice of coming inside the female vagina: it ought to be regarded a virtue to spill one’s semen only in those places where there is no risk of fertilizing an ovum. Once that is recognized, the husband’s archaic fear that his wife might bear another man’s child loses its raison d’être—even more so since we can now rely on our arts of contraception, in addition to those of our lips and tongues and fingers. It’s surely ridiculous, in this century, and offensive to the intelligence, to regard the search for sensual pleasure outside of the reproductory mechanism as in any sense blameworthy—and it’s time, too, for us men to recognize our wives’ taste for new penises as both inoffensive and legitimate.”
Mario seems to expect a reply from Emmanuelle, but she does not say anything, and so he continues:
“If we wish our children to have greater mental capabilities than our own, we must bequeath to them an earth delivered, by our courage, from absurd prohibitions and useless anguish. A prudish, a devout scholar is a shackled one: what might Pascal or Pasteur not have discovered, more, and greater things, had they not been such trapped spirits? And what is there to say about the artist if he allows himself to be blinkered and tethered? None are worthy of the name of man, that glory of tomorrow, if they believe or pretend to believe that the body showing itself must be damned! These stamens, these pistils, the gift to our eyes of these naked graces, for which we praise nature who adorns its flowers with them—surely some perverse god did not give them to his best-loved creature merely to constrain him and to cause his downfall? But, of course, you have nothing to worry about! That strange little pretense that your shorts are will amply suffice to guarantee the favors of Eternity. . . . Oh! please forgive me my anger, my dearest, but does it bear thinking about? That the entire, great nation of human beings, capable of so much intelligence and skepticism, tempered by so many millennia of bravery and risk, so strong in its laughter, so beautiful in its poetry—that it should now be such a frightened Achilles, looking for his salvation in the frippery, the false modesty, the simpering of virgins? The task of eroticism is this: to rid the living from the hair shirts that constrain them, and from the virtue-mongers who make them look ridiculous.”
Emmanuelle is serenely contemplating her thin sweater, her nipples pointing out through it. Mario, however, pays no attention, but continues to remind her of her duty:
“I don’t even care for eroticism as an end in itself. All I know is that it gives one a distaste for stupidity and hypocrisy, a desire to be free, and the strength to achieve this. When the world turns into a prison, eroticism is the file that can cut through the bars, it is the ladder, it is the password! I don’t know of any secret that could, better than this lucidity, free man from his most sterile terrors, give him the chance to tear himself away from the Paleozoic burden and to penetrate outer space, without any assistance from the stars. And, as it is repugnant to me that in our age, the age of great wings, such prehistoric self-immolations, pruderies, and artifices continue to determine your actions, I do beseech you to parade your naked beauty and your senses openly, so that they may cause your beholders to found a new lineage—one that will be less ugly, more potent, less credulous and servile, and not so obsessed by simulacra as they themselves have been.”
Mario stretches himself out on his back, his head at Emmanuelle’s feet.
“For humans who are running the risk of becoming dehumanized by the laws of nature, which are too young, and by the laws of the city, which are too old, the challenge of your bare cunt, on this slab of stone, may provide an upsurge of their spirits, of the love of danger.”
He gets up again.
“If it is the task of intelligence to know the truth, our moral sense provides us with the means of recognizing it—by a very simple method, that of opening one’s eyes, and one equally simple rule, that of telling no lies. An easy task altogether, or so it would seem. And yet, and yet!”
A dramatic shrug.
“But, patience. You know the saying of one of your countrymen, a mathematician: Truth never triumphs, but its adversaries end up dying.”
Some sudden vision seems to cheer him up:
“Who knows,” he says, with a smile, “perhaps it wouldn’t be all that wise to await its arrival too long? In an era that likes to admire robots more than human beings, we ought to hurry to put our bodies to the test, to glorify their powers, if we want to remain in charge. We already know that our clearest distinction from the other fauna of this world lies in our ability to drink even when we aren’t thirsty—and to make love at any time. I wouldn’t be surprised if—not too long from now—the only way to distinguish a human being from a machine would be based on the former’s insistence on defying the sexual order through the disorder of eroticism. No doubt about it, the transistorized androids who will pilot our rocket ships will also, one day, acquire the knack of reproduction through sexual intercourse—and have a whale of a good time doing it, too! But as long as they won’t question the laws of nature and common sense by preferring to masturbate, as long as their females have not acquired a taste for the juices of orgasm on their lovers’ cocks, we’ll still be ahead in the game.”
Emmanuelle appears quite enchanted. Mario relaxes for a moment, looking at her, but not for long. His subject has a most urgent grasp on him.
“Humanity doesn’t need only transfinite numbers, synchrotrons, cortisone, and heart transplants. Of course, it is wonderful that it is now able to disarm the attackers of metabolism, to turn mesons and molecules into its servants. But in a world where man knows his rhesus factor, and is capable of measuring, with the aid of some solenoid of his own invention, the wavelengths of his desires, he does run the danger of remaining forever ignorant of the true value of his own life.”
Mario’s voice grows more impassioned:
“As long as that form of barbarism that prides itself on eating meat tenderized under the saddle can coexist, no matter how indecent the spectacle, with the embryo whose chromosomes have been changed, with the atom whose structure has been altered, we have to watch out not to let that precious Ariadne’s thread slip from between our fingers which alone saves us from beating our heads against the wall and losing heart, in the midst of such confusion, such madness: our passion for beauty. Our love of loving, as well: because love is not only our means of entering the workings of the entire universe while still in our bodies, it is also the most beautiful of all works of beauty: it is an art, created by man, the art of creating man, and it is man become art! Let art be exactly that, the love of our own flesh, a prodigious eternalizer! Thus we shall become perennial as the stones, or as those alluvial deposits of the infinite the great quanta-rivers are forever hurling across the great plains of space. . . . I’m telling you, there is no greater future for the perishable and solitary spirits we are, stricken with the angelic plague of our pulsating cells, in all their fragility, than this one chance we have to bequeath to the indestructible void of matter those figures with outstretched arms and eyes like stars, which we shall have sculpted for our pleasure, finding them to be our greatest glory. Ah, yes, the only true survival of man, his acknowledged progeny, his defiant victory over death, his oeuvre! You have reason to fear death, if you are not going to leave anything that is not greater than yourself. But to what heights won’t you rise, above all secular pieties and agonies, when the chisel of your life immortalizes this body, constantly threatened by hair shirts and winding sheets, carving the lineaments of gratified desire into the marble of beauty.”
Mario spreads out his arms, raises his face toward the sky. His voice sounds choked with emotion.
“Before the Sun goes dark,
And there is an end to its light, to the Moon, the Stars. . . .”
Emmanuelle relinquishes her grip on her imprisoned knees. She looks at Mario as she had been looking at him when he was holding forth earlier by the khlong. And he continues:
“Yes, it’s true—it all works, in its given moment. Even Christianity. One day there came a man to those mortals, haggard with their sacrifices and superstitions, tribes beaten down by their own disdain and ignorance, a man who said to them: ‘Love one another: You are a unique and fraternal species. There are no chosen people; there are no slaves; there are no damned. I call upon you to rise from your fantasies, your carnage. I deliver you from your false gods, from the chimerical burden of your original sins. Your preachers, your temples, and the books in them no longer hold the answers to everything: it is to yourselves that you now have to address your questions, not forgetting that there will never be an answer. It is this quest, aimless and ceaseless, upon which your existence and your freedom rests. Your judgment will depend only upon what you yourselves have accomplished. . . .’ That day the world took a step forward. Later, the meaning of the message was lost, and the doctrine of progress became a great system of constraint, condemning all manifestations of the life force as sinful. The Messiah had served evolution: his church became an obstacle to it. My darling, it is now up to you, this very day, to bear the good tidings. A love that is no offense, a love that frees from shame: sacrilege only to the pharisees who will, once again, refuse to let their eyes feast on it. A love that demystifies, yet is like a proud sail of true magic, swelled by the mystery of great beginnings. A love that will be a victory over all weakness and fear: a victory for life. ‘Rejoice in life with the woman you love,’ crieth the Preacher: ‘All that your hand can do, let it do with all your might, because there shall be no more doing or knowing, no science or wisdom, in the realm of the dead where you must go.’ It is the body that matters when one weeps for love: ‘No, not Heaven!’ cries the dying woman. ‘I do not want Heaven, I want my Lover!’ Only the lunatic proclaims a love of death—reason replies that it desires to believe only in the goodness of life, in the carnal feast of the living: ‘Better a live dog than a dead lion. . . .’ Only a disdain for the body makes the body perishable, and who finds the body’s laws vile, renders them vile. If there is anything sacred in this world, surely it is the body’s incarnation, its sexual organs. Happy the one who when it is time for him to die can say: ‘I placed my bet on this body, and I did not lose my life!’ Emmanuelle, I am not afraid, nor am I ashamed, to wager all the tomorrows of the world on your body!”
Mario pauses, collects his thoughts, calms down:
“No preacher would ever dare advance that far, to the Erosphere, which seems far more distant than the Noösphere. Eroticism, the secret name of evolution, is nothing but the increasing spiritualization of matter. The brain alone does not suffice to let us perceive its nature: we need a booster rocket, the organ able to create visions beyond nature, capable of projecting us beyond the earth—and that is our sex. Without it, we remain nailed to the ground. If the human brain is so superior to that of the angels, and likewise superior to any cybernetic contraption, that is due to the fact that it is activated by rivers of sperm. The phallus is our only chance: without it, we would be mere machines, cold as ice.”
For a moment, Mario’s ruminations take a loftier turn:
“I hope, however, that when you hear me talking about the sexual organs and about the brain, you’ll bear in mind that both factors have to be rendered their dues, and that the art of eroticism must not be confused with a simple appetite of the senses. For the great majority of humans, the powers of the senses are pearls cast before swine: the use they make of them is no better than what a slightly-brighter-than-average monkey might be capable of. Eroticism requires a reorganization of thought that alone can dignify the senses on the human level. Make no mistake: the true face of eroticism is not a lascivious one: it is the face of love.”
There is a sudden note of hurt in Mario’s voice:
“Surely you haven’t been regarding me as a heartless maniac? It is the suffering of mankind that makes me so vociferous! I believe that happiness is our reason for being, and I believe that it can be achieved, provided that your curiosity and your courage do not weaken in its pursuit! I believe that we can learn to live by learning how to change, in a universe that is governed by change. Men must liberate themselves from their obsession with the past; from time to time they must renew their patterns of thought and their laws. Of those, the most backward, the most blinkered, the most unjust are the ones imposed by the arithmetic of present sexual mores—with its units and binomials, ridiculous in an epoch during which the study of isolated entities has given way to the study of groups, as you well know, being something of a mathematician yourself. But, alas! it does need heroism, to rid oneself of habits that are good for nothing but suffering. We call ourselves moral creatures, and yet we haven’t even managed to convince ourselves that it is our duty to lead happy lives! It is not true that ‘there is no such thing as happiness in love.’ The love I am teaching you is one that gives happiness a chance. It does not arise from boredom or decadence, but is a sign of health in those whose youth still lies before them. It is their experience of a world which has not yet been created. So do not weep, Emmanuelle: the joys of tomorrow are greeting your carnal reality with outstretched arms! Solitude can never be humanity’s eternal vocation: it is, no doubt, an elementary stage in man’s consciousness, a measles of the spirit, cured by adulthood. I believe that the future of the species lies in union rather than in isolation: first of all, the union of one with one, then with two, then three, in groups that constitute true units, combinations with complex variables, spirits with a multiplicity of bodies. And perhaps we shall thus surmount, in a billion years, that condition that today allows us to begin our lives only on ‘the other side of despair.’ The prime virtue I attribute to eroticism is simply this: it breaks down the walls of solitude. At long last, it gives humans a taste for other humans. And I am convinced that it can succeed, and succeed far better than any other discipline, better than all modes of asceticism, all sacraments, and all drugs. You have to understand that, to me, the exclusive, the jealous are marks of absolute criminality: attempts to assassinate evolution itself, born from the hypocritic malice of suicidal sects who hate the prodigious innate powers of the species. To make love to more than one other body in no way injures the idea of love, nor does it betray that idea: it is the gateway to an abundant life, in which love multiplies the lover and at the same time prevents him from amputating the beloved. This love that we shall one day be capable of will be the end of our befuddlement and ignorance, the end of childhood, and the time of the truly humane will begin. A time, one hopes, of unfeigned joy. The self-love of our sexual organs and golden breasts, the circle of our dancing arms, our crazy wings, the spreading of our legs and their high jumps, free of shame—these will make the lugubrious tangos of our little side trips look terribly outmoded. . . . It will be possible to be young again, even in the midst of graves. But, hell! I don’t need to convince myself of that. It is my one and only belief!”
The look in Mario’s eyes moves Emmanuelle. She allows him one final spurt:
“The world will become what the genius of invention and the temerity of your body will make it. My mission is merely to make you aware of that possibility. It will be up to those who come after me to see that you won’t be turned into yet another false deity. When eroticism itself has become a religion with its own cults, churches, bishops, and devils, with its own Latin and tabernacles, excommunications, indulgences, curiae, wars of religion—when it, too, finally pretends to have the answer to everything, thus turning the world into a miserable place with its own laws and butchers: then man will know it well enough to be able to go on to further revolutions. But now, this instant, it is up to you to topple the false gods, their desolate temples, their rites devoid of faith. Emmanuelle, deliver us from our evil!”
She looks at him for a while, as if waiting. Her eyelids move, once or twice; then she closes her eyes and sits there, motionless. After a couple of minutes that seem too long to Mario she sits up straight, and, with slow-motion gestures, lifts the hem of her sweater, unzips her shorts and slides them down to her knees, then to her ankles. She shakes them off her feet, letting them fall into the grass below the terrace wall. At the touch of the stone, neither hot nor cold, merely sleek and hard, she feels her buttocks contracting.
She has no objections when Mario asks her to stretch herself out on her back, exposing everything below the navel. To offer herself up even more completely, she lets her legs hang down both sides of the parapet; her thighs open, her pubic mound jutting up in a delightful display of rippling muscles under the flawless skin, amber and shadowy by turns under the ever-changing monsoon sky.