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).”
At the end of his first week, Bruno stopped writing. What remained to be said was more tender, fragile and uncertain. After spending the afternoon at the beach, they were in the habit of going back to their apartment for an aperitif at about seven o’clock. He usually had a Campari, Christiane a vodka martini. He watched the sunlight play on the stucco—white inside, pinkish outside—and enjoyed seeing Christiane wander naked through the apartment, fetching ice or olives. What he felt was strange, very strange: his breathing was easier, and sometimes he found he could spend minutes at a time without thinking, without being so afraid. One afternoon, about a week after they arrived, he said to Christiane, “I think I’m happy.” She stopped dead, her hand on the ice bucket tensing visibly, and breathed out slowly.
“I want to live with you,” he went on. “I think we’ve both had enough, that we’ve both been too miserable for too long. Later we’ll have to deal with sickness and infirmity and death, but I think we could be happy together right to the end. I’d like to try, anyway. I think I love you.”
Christiane started to cry. Later, over seafood at the Neptune, they tried to work out the practical side. She could come and stay on weekends, that would be easy, but it would be difficult for her to g
et a transfer to Paris. Allowing for alimony, Bruno’s salary was not enough for them to live on. In any case, there was Christiane’s son to think of; they would have to wait. All the same, it was feasible. For the first time in many years, something seemed feasible.
The following morning Bruno wrote a short, emotional letter to Michel. He declared himself happy, and regretted that they had never truly understood each other. He hoped that Michel, too, might find a measure of happiness. He signed the letter: Your brother, Bruno.
17
When Michel received the letter he was in despair over a theoretical crisis. According to Margenau’s theory, human consciousness could be compared to a field of probabilities in a Fock space, defined as a direct sum of Hilbert spaces. Such a space could be created by elementary electrical activity at a microscopic, synaptic level. Normal behavior could therefore be seen as the elastic warping of the field and free will as a rupture within it; but in what topology? There was nothing in the natural topography of Hilbert spaces that might give rise to free will. Michel was not entirely convinced that the problem could even be posed except in the most metaphorical sense. Of one thing he was certain: that a new conceptual framework was needed. Every night, before switching off his PC, he sent a request over the Internet for the daily experimental results. The following morning, he would digest them. As he did so, he remarked that around the world, research centers were groping their way along in a senseless empiricism. Nothing in their results brought them closer to a conclusion, nor did they provide support for any particular hypothesis. Individual consciousness seemed to emerge among animals for no apparent reason, and clearly predated the capacity for language. Darwinians, with their unconscious teleology, as usual put forward hypotheses about the possible selective advantages of the emergence of consciousness, but, as usual, these didn’t explain anything; they were just-so stories, no more. Then again, the anthropogenic model was hardly more convincing: life had thrown up something which could contemplate it, a mind capable of understanding it, but so what? That in itself did not make understanding human consciousness any easier. Self-consciousness, which is absent in nematodes, was clearly observable in inferior lizards like Lacerta agilis, implying the presence of both a central nervous system and something more. What that something was remained completely mysterious. Consciousness did not seem to depend on any single factor, whether anatomical, biochemical or cellular. It was all rather dsicouraging.
What would Heisenberg have done? What would Niels Bohr have done? Step back from the problem, take time to think, take a walk in the country, listen to music. The new was never simply a reworking of the old; information was added like handfuls of sand, predefined in their nature by the conceptual framework of the experiments. Now, more than ever, a new paradigm was essential.
The short, hot days went by sadly. On the night of 15 September Michel had an unusually happy dream. He was with a little girl as she gamboled through the forest, surrounded by flowers and butterflies. (An image, he realized later, that had floated to the surface from a thirty-year-old memory of the credits of Prince Sapphire, a television series he used to watch at his grandmother’s every Sunday afternoon, and which so accurately found an echo in his own heart.) A moment later, he was walking alone across an immense, undulating meadow through tall grasses. He could not see the horizon; the grassy hills seemed to stretch out to infinity under the brilliant gray sky. He walked on, however, purposeful and unhurried; he knew that some way beneath his feet ran an underground river, and that his feet instinctively would follow its path. All around him the breeze ruffled the long grass.
Upon waking he felt joyful and alive, something he hadn’t felt in the two months since he left work. He went out and walked under the linden trees down the avenue Émile-Zola. He was alone, but not lonely. He stopped at the corner of the rue des Entrepreneurs. It was about nine o’clock. Zolacolor was opening up; Asian girls sat behind the cash registers. Between the Beaugrenelle towers, the sky seemed strangely luminous; there seemed no solution. Perhaps he should have talked to his neighbor across the street, the girl who worked at Vingt Ans. Working for a lifestyle magazine, informed about cultural trends, she would surely know how to fit in. She would know about psychology, too. There was probably much that she could teach him. He walked back quickly, almost breaking into a run, and bounded up the stairs to the door of his neighbor’s apartment. He rang the doorbell three times. No one answered. Flustered, he retreated to his own building; as he waited for the elevator, he questioned himself. Was he depressed, and did such a question have any meaning? For years he had seen posters appear in the area, asking people to be vigilant and warning them about the National Front. The fact that he had no opinion on such a subject one way or the other was already a worrying sign. Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable.
Back in his kitchen, he realized that belief in the free and rational determination of human actions—which was the natural foundation of democracy—and, in particular, the belief in the free and rational determination of individual political choices, probably resulted from a confusion between the concepts of freedom and unpredictability. The turbulence of a river flowing around the supporting pillars of a bridge is structurally unpredictable, but no one would think to describe it as being free. He poured himself a glass of white wine, opened the curtains and lay down to think. The equations of chaos theory made no reference to the physical space in which their effects took place; their ubiquity meant that they applied as effectively to hydrodynamics as to meteorology, group sociology or the genetics of a population. As a tool for devising morphological models they were excellent, but their predictive capacities were nonexistent. On the other hand, the equations of quantum mechanics made it possible to predict the behavior of microphysical systems with exceptional, even perfect precision if one was prepared to give up any hope of a return to a materialist ontology. Certainly it was premature to establish a mathematical link between the two; it might even prove impossible. But Michel was convinced that the formation of attractors in the evolving network of neurons and synapses held the key to understanding human actions and opinions.
Looking for a list of recent publications on the subject, he noticed he hadn’t opened his mail for more than a week. Naturally, most of it was junk mail. With the launch of the Costa Romantica, a company called TMR hoped to completely redefine the luxury-cruise concept; the ship was described as an “authentic floating paradise.” The first moments of his cruise—“the decision is yours!”—might be described thus: “You step into the great hall. Sunlight streams through the great glass cupola. You take one of the panoramic elevators to the upper deck. Here, from the immense atrium situated on the prow, you can stare out to sea as though you were watching it on a gigantic screen.” He put the brochure to one side, thinking to study it in detail later. “Walk along the deck, contemplate the ocean through a transparent bulkhead, sail for weeks under a changeless sky . . .” Why not? While they sailed, Western Europe might well be atomized under a hail of bombs. They would disembark, tanned and sleek, onto a new continent.
In the meantime he had to live, and that was something he could do intelligently, responsibly, joyously. The most recent issue of Dernières Nouvelles de Monoprix stressed more than ever the image of a socially responsible company. Once again the editor took issue with the notion that gastronomy and watching your weight were incompatible. Their scrupulous choice of recommended dishes, their range of produce, their store-label products—everything, in fact, that Monoprix had stood for since the beginning—was based on exactly the opposite conviction. “It is possible to have gourmet food, a balanced diet and to have it now,” the editor boldly affirmed. After this first contentious, even combative article, the rest of the magazine was fill
ed with “handy hints,” educational games and “useful information.” Michel was therefore able to calculate his average daily caloric intake. In the past weeks he hadn’t once swept or ironed, gone swimming, played tennis or made love; the only three activities he could actually tick off were sitting, lying down and sleeping. All told, he needed only 1,750 calories a day. From Bruno’s letter, it was clear that he’d been doing rather more swimming and lovemaking. He recalculated, using these new parameters, and discovered he would require 2,700 calories a day.
There was a second letter, this one from the town council at Crécy-en-Brie. In the light of development plans for a new parking lot, it was necessary to move the local cemetery; a number of graves, among them his grandmother’s, would have to be moved. According to regulations, a family member had to be present for the relocation of the remains. He could arrange a meeting with the funeral directors between the hours of ten-thirty and noon.