That same year Annabelle entered the seconde at the Lycée de Meaux. The three spent their afternoons together after class, before Bruno headed back to the school, Michel and Annabelle to the train station. Then events took a sad, strange turn. At the beginning of 1974 Michel wandered into Hilbert spaces; launched himself into the theory of measurements, discovered the integrals of Riemann, Lebesgue and Stieltjes. At the same time Bruno was reading Kafka and masturbating on the commuter train. One afternoon in May he had the pleasure of letting his towel fall open and flashing his cock at a couple of twelve-year-old girls at the new swimming pool at La Chapelle-sur-Crécy. The pleasure was heightened as he watched them elbow one another, clearly interested in the show. He caught the eye of one of them—a short brunette with glasses—and held it for a long time. Though he was too miserable and frustrated to be especially interested in the psychology of others, Bruno realized nonetheless that his half brother’s situation was worse than his own. They often went to the café together; Michel would wear anoraks and caps that made him look ridiculous, he was hopeless at table soccer, and Bruno did all the talking. Michel barely moved, barely said a word; he simply stared at Annabelle, his gaze attentive but lifeless. Annabelle did not give up; for her, Michel’s face was like a commentary from another world. At about that time she read The Kreutzer Sonata and, for a moment, thought she understood him. Twenty-five years later it was clear to Bruno that everything about their relationship had been lopsided, out-of-kilter, abnormal—there had never been a future in it. But the past always seems, perhaps wrongly, to be predestined.
12
A BALANCED DIET
In revolutionary times, those who accord themselves, with an extraordinary arrogance, the facile credit for having inflamed anarchy in their contemporaries fail to recognize that what appears to be a sad triumph is in fact due to a spontaneous disposition, determined by the social situation as a whole.
—AUGUSTE COMTE,
Cours de philosophie positive, Leçon 48
France in the 1970s was marked by the controversy surrounding Phantom of the Paradise, A Clockwork Orange and Les Valseuses — three very different films whose success firmly established the commercial muscle of a “youth culture,” based principally on sex and violence, which would redefine the market in the decades that followed. Those who had made their fortunes in the 1960s, now in their thirties, found their lives mirrored in Emmanuelle, released in 1974. In the context of a Judeo-Christian culture, Just Jaeckin’s film, with its mixture of fantasy and exotic locations, appeared as a manifesto for the leisure class.
A number of other important events in 1974 further advanced the cause of moral relativism. The first Vitatop club opened in Paris on 20 March; it was to play a pioneering role in the cult of the body beautiful. The age of majority was lowered to eighteen on 5 July, and divorce by mutual consent was officially recognized on the eleventh, thus removing adultery from the penal code. Lastly, on 28 November, after a stormy debate described by commentators as “historic,” the Veil act legalizing abortion was adopted, largely thanks to lobbying by the left. Christian doctrine, which long had been the dominant moral force in Western civilization, accorded unconditional importance to every human life from conception to death. The significance was linked to the belief in the existence within the body of a soul — which was by definition immortal and would ultimately return to God. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, advances in biology gave rise to a more materialist anthropology, radically different in its assumptions and significantly more moderate in its ethical counsel. On the one hand, this change meant that the fetus, a small collection of steadily subdividing cells, was no longer acknowledged as a viable individual except by consensus (absence of genetic defects, parental consent). On the other hand, the new concept of human dignity meant that the elderly person, a collection of steadily failing organs, had the right to life only as long as it continued to function well enough. The ethical problems posed by the extremes of youth and age (abortion and, some decades later, euthanasia) would become the battleground for different and radically antagonistic worldviews.
The agnosticism at the heart of the French republic would facilitate the progressive, hypocritical and slightly sinister triumph of the materialist worldview. Though never overtly discussed, the question of the value of human life would nonetheless continue to preoccupy people’s minds. It would be true to say that in the last years of Western civilization it contributed to a general mood of depression bordering on masochism.
For Bruno, who had just recently turned eighteen, the summer of 1974 was a significant, possibly crucial period in his life. Years later it would recur in sessions with his psychiatrist, who seemed to enjoy the story immensely. Sometimes Bruno altered or refined the details, but this is his standard version:
“It was the end of July. I was staying on the coast with my mother for a week. The house was full of people coming and going. My mother was sleeping with some Canadian guy at the time — young, built like a lumberjack. The day I was supposed to leave, I got up early. It was already pretty hot. I went into her room. They were still asleep. I hesitated for a second or two and then I pulled the sheet off them. My mother moved and for a minute I thought she was going to open her eyes; her thighs parted slightly. I knelt down in front of her vagina. I brought my hand up close—a couple of centimeters away—but I didn’t dare touch her. Then I went outside and jerked off. There’d always been cats hanging around the house, mostly strays. A black cat lay sunning itself on a rock. The land around the house was stony and white, a merciless white. The cat looked over at me from time to time while I was whacking off, but closed its eyes just before I came.
“I bent down and picked up a rock. The cat’s skull shattered and some of its brains spurted out. I covered the body with a pile of stones and went back inside. There was still nobody awake. Later that morning, driving me back to my father’s house about fifty kilometers away, my mother talked to me about di Meola for the first time. Apparently, he’d left California four years earlier and had bought a big place on the hills of Ventoux near Avignon. In the summer he took in young people from all over Europe and America. She thought maybe I could go there one summer; she said it would broaden my horizons. According to her, di Meola’s commune wasn’t a cult, it simply passed on the teachings of the Brahman. Di Meola knew a lot about cybernetics and communication skills and used deprogramming techniques he’d developed at Esalen. It was all about liberating the individual’s innate potential—‘Because we only use ten percent of our brain, you know.’ ”
“Anyway,” said Jane as they drove through the pine forests, “there’d be kids your own age there. It would be good for you. We all thought you were pretty hung up about sex while you were here this summer.”
The Western concept of sexuality was perverse and unnatural, she went on. In many primitive societies, sexual initiation was a natural thing that took place early in adolescence under the supervision of the tribal elders. “I am your mother,” she stressed. She did not mention that she had initiated di Meola’s son David in 1963. David was thirteen at the time. In the first encounter, she had undressed in front of him and encouraged him to masturbate. The second afternoon, she had masturbated him and sucked him off. On the third and final afternoon, he had been able to penetrate her. Jane had pleasant memories of it; the young boy’s rock-hard cock never seemed to go down, even after he had come several times. It was probably this experience which converted her to young men. “Of course,” she went on, “the initiation should always take place outside of the immediate family—that’s very important. It opens the world up to the adolescent.”
Bruno jumped, afraid that his mother had been awake that morning as he was staring at her vagina. In fact, his mother’s remark was banal: the incest taboo is well documented in the animal kingdom, especially among mandrills and gray geese. The car sped toward Sainte-Maxime.
“When I got to my father’s house I realized that he wasn’t well,”
Bruno would go on. “He had only taken a couple of weeks off that summer. I didn’t know it at the time, but for the first time the business was doing badly and he had money problems. He told me later that it was because he had completely missed out on the market for silicone breast implants. He thought it was a passing fad that would never catch on outside the U.S. Which was utterly stupid. Nothing has ever caught on in America that didn’t engulf Western Europe a couple of years later—nothing. One of his junior associates had left the clinic and set up on his own. He’d poached a lot of my father’s clients simply by offering silicone implants as his specialty.”
Bruno’s father was seventy when he made this confession. He would die shortly afterward of cirrhosis of the liver. “History repeats itself,” he told Bruno, tinkling the ice in his glass. “That idiot Poncet . . . [He was talking about the dynamic young surgeon who twenty years earlier had been his ruination.] That idiot Poncet just refused to diversify into penis enlargement—thinks it’s too much like butchery. He doesn’t think the men’s market will catch on in Europe. Moron. Almost as much of a moron as I was twenty years ago. If I was thirty years old now, I’d set myself up in prick enlargement.” Having said this, he usually slipped back into a daydream at the edge of consciousness. Conversation tended to stagnate at his age.
In July 1974 Bruno’s father was only at the beginning of a long, slow decline. He would spend the afternoons locked in his room with a pile of cigars and a bottle of bourbon. He would come downstairs at seven and heat up something, his hands shaking. It was not that he didn’t want to speak to his son, but that he couldn’t; he really couldn’t. After two days, the atmosphere had become oppressive. Bruno started to go out; he would spend whole afternoons at the beach.
The psychiatrist was less interested in the part of the story that followed, but Bruno thought it was important and had no intention of passing over it. After all, he was paying the bastard to listen to him, wasn’t he?
“She was alone,” Bruno went on. “She went to the beach every afternoon on her own. She was seventeen, a poor little rich girl—a bit like me. A chubby little thing, she was shy and very pale and had pimples. The fourth afternoon—it was the day before I left, in fact—I put down my towel and sat beside her. She was lying on her stomach and she’d unfastened her bikini top. I remember the only thing I could think to say was ‘You on vacation?’ She looked up. I’m sure she wasn’t expecting brilliant conversation, but maybe not something quite so moronic. Anyway, we introduced ourselves: her name was Annick. I knew she would have to sit up sooner or later and I wondered would she try to fasten her bikini top behind her? Would she sit up and show me her breasts? She did something midway between the two; she turned over, holding the ends of her top together. When she’d finished, the bra was a bit lopsided and only half covered her breasts. She had big tits, which were already sagging a bit and must have got a lot worse later. I thought she was very brave. I reached over and slipped my hand under her bra, feeling her breast as I did. She didn’t move, but she stiffened a little and closed her eyes. I went on stroking her tits; her nipples were hard. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life.
“Things got complicated after that. I took her back to my house and we went up to my room. I was scared my father would see her. He had been with a lot of beautiful women in his life, but he was asleep—actually, he was completely drunk, he didn’t wake up until ten o’clock that night. Strangely, she wouldn’t let me take off her panties. She told me she’d never done it before, in fact she’d never really done anything with a boy before. But she was quite happy to jerk me off, she was pretty enthusiastic; I remember she was smiling. Then I moved my cock up to her mouth; she sucked it a little bit but she didn’t really like it. I didn’t push it. I straddled her, and when I slipped my cock between her tits she moaned a bit and seemed happy. I was really turned on. I pushed down her underpants—she didn’t stop me this time, she even lifted herself up to help me. She wasn’t particularly pretty, but her pussy was as beautiful as any pussy in the world. Her eyes were closed. When I slipped my hands under her ass, she parted her thighs completely. I was so excited that I came right there before I could even put it in her. There was jism in her pubic hair. I was really upset, but she said that it didn’t matter, that she was happy.
“We didn’t really have much time to talk. It was nearly eight o’clock and she had to get back to her parents. I remember she told me she was an only child, I don’t know why. She seemed so happy, so proud to have a good reason to be late for dinner that I nearly cried. We kissed for a long time in the garden in front of the house. The next day I went back to Paris.”
When he finished his story, Bruno paused for a moment. The psychiatrist discreetly shifted in his chair and said, about nothing in particular, “Good.” Depending on how much of the hour had elapsed, he would prompt Bruno again, or simply say, “We’ll leave it there for today?” stressing the last word a little to make this a question. As he said this, his smile was polished and effortless.
13
In that same summer of 1974, at a disco in Saint-Palais, Annabelle let a boy kiss her. She had just read an article about boy-girl relationships in Stéphanie. The article had propounded a miserable rationalization on the subject of childhood friendships. It was extremely rare that a childhood friend became a boyfriend, according to the magazine. His natural role was to become a friend—a loyal friend; he might perhaps be a confidant and offer emotional support through the trials of first boyfriends.
In the seconds that followed that first kiss, despite the assertions of the article, Annabelle was horribly sad. She felt flooded by some new, painful sensation. She left the Kathmandu and refused to let the boy come with her. She was trembling slightly as she unlocked her moped. She had worn her prettiest dress that evening. Her brother’s house was only a kilometer away. It was barely eleven o’clock when she arrived, and there was a light on in the living room. When she saw the light, she started to cry. It was here, on a July night in 1974, that Annabelle accepted the painful but unequivocal truth that she was an individual. An animal’s sense of self emerges through physical pain, but individuality in human society only attains true self-consciousness by the intermediary of mendacity, with which it is sometimes confused. At the age of sixteen, Annabelle had kept no secrets from her parents, nor—and she now realized that this was a rare and precious thing—from Michel. In a few short hours that evening, Annabelle had come to understand that life was an unrelenting succession of lies. It was then, too, that she became aware of her beauty.
Individuality, and the sense of freedom that flows from it, is the natural basis of democracy. In a democratic regime, relations between individuals are commonly regulated by a social contract. A pact which exceeds the natural rights of one of the co-contractors, or which does not provide a clear retraction clause, is considered de facto null and void.
If he was willing to talk in some detail about the summer of 1974, Bruno talked little about his final year at school. In truth, all he remembered of that year was a growing sense of unease. His memories of that time were vague and a little gray. He continued to see Michel and Annabelle regularly, and to all intents and purposes they remained close, but their baccalauréat was fast approaching and they would inevitably go their separate ways at the end of the year. Michel had changed: he was very intense, listened to Jimi Hendrix and rolled around on the carpet. Long after his peers, he was finally beginning to show visible signs of adolescence. He and Annabelle seemed more awkward with each other and held hands less and less frequently. In short, as Bruno summed up the situation for his psychiatrist, “everything was going to hell in a handbasket.”
Since his episode with Annick, which in hindsight he had a tendency to embroider (he had sensibly avoided telephoning her), Bruno felt a little more confident despite the fact that he had had no encounters since. In fact, he had been brutally rejected when he had tried to kiss Sylvie, a pretty little brunette in Annabelle’s class. Still,
a girl had found him attractive, and if one girl could, there might be others. He began to feel protective toward Michel. After all, he was the older brother. “You have to do something. Everyone knows Annabelle is in love with you—she’s just waiting for you to make the first move. And she’s the prettiest girl in school.” Michel would fidget in his chair and say “Yes.” Weeks passed. He was visibly faltering on the threshold of adulthood. Kissing Annabelle was the only way for both of them to avoid crossing that threshold, though he did not realize it, lulled as he was by a sense that there would always be time. In April he vexed his teachers when he failed to fill out his matriculation papers. It was clear to everyone that, more than anyone, he stood an excellent chance of being accepted into one of the Grandes Écoles. With his baccalauréat barely a month away, Michel seemed to be coasting. He would sit and stare through the narrow bars of the classroom window at the clouds, the trees, the other pupils; it was as though human affairs could not really touch him.
Bruno, on the other hand, had decided to apply to study the humanities: he was bored with the developments of Taylor–Maclaurin; moreover, in liberal arts there would be girls—lots of girls. His father did not object. Like all old libertines, he had become maudlin with age and bitterly regretted that his selfishness had ruined his son’s life—which was not entirely untrue. In May he separated from his last mistress, Julie, though she was a remarkably beautiful woman. Her name was Julie Lamour, but she had taken the stage name Julie Love. She starred in the first French porn films, long-forgotten films by Burd Tranbaree and Francis Leroi. She looked a little like Janine but was considerably more stupid. “I’m cursed . . . cursed . . .” Bruno’s father murmured over and over when, happening on a photograph of his ex-wife as a young woman, he saw the resemblance. Julie had become intolerable. Since meeting Deleuze at one of Bénazéraf’s dinner parties, she had taken to giving lengthy intellectual justifications of porn. In any case, she was costing him a fortune: on the set, she demanded a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, a fur coat, all of the erotic trappings, which as he grew older became more and more of a drain. Late in 1974 he had to sell the house in Sainte-Maxime. Some months later he bought an apartment for his son—a bright, peaceful studio—near the gardens at the Observatoire. Taking Bruno to view it, he did not think of it as a gift, but rather as a way of making amends; besides, it was obviously a bargain. But as he looked around the apartment he became excited. “You could have girls over,” he said inadvertently, and, seeing his son’s face, regretted it at once.