“The article in Paris Match was basically just the translation of an interview that the district attorney, David Macmillan, had given in Newsweek. According to him, it was not just a group of young men on trial but society as a whole; he believed that the case was symptomatic of America’s social and moral decay since the late 1950s. On more than one occasion the judge had instructed him to stick to the facts of the case; he thought the parallels Macmillan was drawing with the Manson family were spurious, especially as di Meola was the only one for whom they could establish a vague connection to the beatnik or hippie scene.
“The following year Macmillan published a book called From Lust to Murder: A Generation, translated into French as Génération meurtre. The book shocked me; I was expecting the usual right-wing fundamentalist rant about the return of the Antichrist and how there should be prayer in school. In fact, it was a precise, well-documented book which examined a number of cases. Macmillan was particularly interested in David di Meola and had done a lot of research to put together a full biography.
“Just after the death of his father in September 1976, David had sold the seventy-five-acre estate and bought a lot of property in old buildings in Paris. He lived in a big studio on the rue Visconti, and he had the rest renovated to be rented out. He divided up the old apartments; the chambres de bonne were knocked together and kitchenettes and showers added. When the work was done, he had about twenty studio apartments, which would themselves guarantee him a comfortable income. He hadn’t given up on the idea of being a rock star and thought that maybe in Paris he might get the break he’d been looking for. But he was already twenty-six. He took two years off his age before touring the record studios; all he had to do was tell them he was twenty-four—no one ever checked. Brian Jones had the same idea long before. Once, at a party in Cannes—according to Macmillan’s witnesses—David had run into Mick Jagger and recoiled as though he’d come face to face with a cobra. Jagger was the biggest rock star in the world: rich, adored, cynical—he was everything David longed to be. To be so seductive, he had to personify evil, to be its perfect embodiment—and what the masses adored above everything was the image of evil unpunished. Only once had Jagger’s power been threatened, a clash of egos within the group—with Brian Jones. But the problem had been resolved in Brian Jones’s swimming pool. Though it wasn’t the official version, David knew Jagger had pushed Brian into the pool; he could see it happening. It was this original murder which made him leader of the greatest rock band in the world. David was convinced that man’s greatest achievements were based on murder, and by the end of 1976 he was ready to push as many people as he had to into as many swimming pools as he could find in order to succeed. In the years that followed he only managed to appear as a session bassist on a couple of records—none of which was at all successful. On the other hand, women continued to find him attractive. Sexually, he became more demanding. He got used to sleeping with two women at a time—preferably a blonde and a brunette. Most of them agreed because he was exceptionally handsome, with a strong, virile, almost animal beauty. He was proud of his long, thick phallus and his big, hairy balls. He became less and less interested in penetration, but he still got off on watching a girl get on her knees to suck his cock.
“Early in 1981 he met a California guy visiting Paris and looking for bands to put together a heavy-metal tribute album to Charles Manson. He decided to go for it. He sold the studio apartments—which had quadrupled in price—and moved to Los Angeles. He was thirty-one now; officially he was twenty-nine, but even that was too old. Before meeting the American producers, he decided to lose another three years. Physically, he could easily pass for twenty-six.
“Production was delayed, and from his prison cell Manson demanded huge sums for the rights. David took up jogging and began to hang out with Satanist groups. California had always had more than its fair share of Satanists, from the very first ones—the First Church of Satan was founded by Anton La Vey in Los Angeles in 1966, and the Process Church of the Final Judgment was founded in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in 1967. These sects still existed, and David sought them out. Most of them just indulged in ritualistic orgies with the occasional animal sacrifice thrown in, but through them he was able to get in touch with more secretive and extreme groups. Notably, he got in touch with John di Giorno, a surgeon who organized ‘abortion parties.’ After the procedure, the fetus was ground up and kneaded into bread dough to be shared among the communicants. David quickly realized that the most advanced Satanists didn’t believe in Satan at all. Like him, they were pure materialists who quickly abandoned all the ritualistic kitsch of pentagrams, candles and long black robes, trappings which were mostly there to help initiates overcome their moral inhibitions. In 1983 he took part in his first ritual murder—a Puerto Rican baby. While he castrated the baby using a serrated knife, John di Giorno ripped out and ate the eyeballs.
“By now David had more or less given up on the rock star dream, though he still felt a twinge whenever he saw Mick Jagger on MTV. The Tribute to Charles Manson had gone belly-up, and though he pretended to be twenty-eight, he was actually five years older and beginning to feel too old. In his fantasies of domination and power, he began to identify with Napoleon. He admired this man who had rained fire and blood upon Europe and killed hundreds of thousands of people without even a fig leaf of ideology, faith or political conviction. Unlike Hitler, unlike Stalin, the only thing Napoleon believed in was himself. He had succeeded in establishing a radical separation between himself and the rest of the world, and considered others mere tools in the service of his imperious will. Thinking about his distant Genoese origins, David imagined that he was related to the dictator who, walking through a battlefield at dawn and surveying the thousands of mutilated and eviscerated corpses, said nonchalantly: ‘Bah! One night in Paris will replace these men.’
“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 Vien
nese 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.
—LAUTRÉAMONT,
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.