5
Many of the people who went to the Lieu du Changement were, like Bruno, over forty, and many, also like him, worked in the public sector or in education and were safeguarded from poverty by their status as civil servants. Most of them would have put themselves on the political left; most of them lived alone, usually as the result of divorce. He was, therefore, a pretty typical visitor. After a few days he noticed that he felt somewhat less bad than usual. The women were intolerable at breakfast, but by cocktail hour the mystical tarts were hopelessly vying with younger women once again. Death is the great leveler. On Wednesday afternoon he met Catherine, a fifty-year-old who had been a feminist of the old school. She was tanned, with dark, curly hair; she must have been very attractive when she was twenty. Her breasts were still in good shape, he thought when he saw her by the pool, but she had a fat ass. She had reinvented herself through Egyptian symbolism, tarot and the like. She was talking about the god Anubis as Bruno lowered his boxer shorts; he decided she probably wouldn’t be offended by his erection and that they might become friends. Unfortunately, the erection didn’t appear. She had rolls of fat between her thighs, which remained closed. They parted on less than friendly terms.
That evening, just before dinner, a guy called Pierre-Louis introduced himself. He was a math teacher, and looked the part. Bruno had noticed him a couple of days earlier at the theatrical evening; he had done a stand-up routine about a mathematical proof that went around in circles—some kind of comedy of the absurd, not the slightest bit funny. He scribbled furiously on a white board. From time to time he would stop abruptly, marker raised, motionless, bald head furrowed in thought, eyebrows raised in an expression that was supposed to be funny, before scribbling furiously and stammering more than ever. When the sketch ended, five or six people applauded, mostly out of pity. He blushed wildly; it was over.
In the days that followed, Bruno had managed to avoid him on several occasions. He usually wore a sun hat. He was at least six foot four and skinny, but he had a bit of a paunch and made a curious sight walking along the diving board with his fat little belly. He was probably about forty-five.
That evening Bruno again made a quick getaway while the beanpole joined the others in an improvised African dance. He walked up the hill toward the communal restaurant. There was a seat free beside the ex-feminist, who was sitting opposite a sister symbolist. He had barely started his tofu ragout when Pierre-Louis appeared at the far end of the row of tables; he beamed when he noticed a vacant chair opposite Bruno. He had been talking for some time before Bruno noticed, partly because he had a rather bad stammer, and partly because of the shrill nattering of the imbeciles next to them. What about the reincarnation of Osiris? What do you think of Egyptian marionettes? They were paying not the slightest attention to the men. At some point Bruno realized that the poor fool was asking him about his job. “Oh, nothing much . . .” he replied vaguely; he was happy to talk about anything except the national curriculum. The meal was beginning to get on his nerves; he got up to go out for a cigarette. Unfortunately, at precisely that moment the symbolists left, hips swinging, without so much as a glance in their direction. This probably is what triggered the incident.
Bruno was about ten meters from the table when he heard a loud whistle, or rather a strangled cry, high-pitched, almost inhuman. He turned around: Pierre-Louis was red-faced, his fists balled; from a standing start, he leapt onto the table with both feet. He took a deep breath and the wheezing from his chest stopped. He started to pace up and down the table, thumping himself on the head with his fist as the glasses and plates danced around him. He kicked out at everything within reach, screaming, “You can’t do this! You can’t treat me like this!” For once he didn’t stutter. It took five people to calm him down. He was admitted to the psychiatric ward of the hospital in Angoulême that evening.
At three a.m. Bruno woke with a start and scrabbled his way out of the tent, soaked in sweat. The Lieu was quiet, the moon was full and the monotonous croak of tree frogs filled the air. He sat by the pond and waited for daybreak. Just before dawn, he felt a little cold. The morning sessions would start at ten o’clock. At a quarter past ten he walked down to the pyramid. He hesitated outside the creative writing workshop, then went down to the next floor, where he studied the program for the watercolor class for about twenty seconds before walking up a couple of steps. The stairway was made up of straight flights, each with a curved section in the middle. The steps grew wider toward the middle and narrowed again as one approached the landing. In the curve was a step wider than all the others. It was here that Bruno sat, leaning against the wall. He began to feel well.
As a schoolboy, he would often sit on a step between floors just after class began; these were his rare moments of happiness. Midway between landings, he would lean back against the wall, eyes half-closed, sometimes wide open, and wait. Of course someone might come, in which case he would have to get up, pick up his schoolbag and walk quickly to his classroom, where class already had started. But often no one came, and here on the gray-tiled steps (he wasn’t in history class anymore, he wasn’t in physics class yet) everything was so peaceful; then gently, almost furtively, his heart soared in short bursts toward joy.
The circumstances were very different now: he had chosen to come to the Lieu; chosen to take part in its activities. Upstairs was a creative writing class; just below the workshop on watercolor; farther down there would be classes on massage or holotropic breathing; farther still, the African dance classes had clearly started up again. All around him human beings were living, breathing, striving for pleasure or trying to develop their personal potential. On every floor, human beings were improving, or trying to improve, their social, sexual or professional skills or find their place within the cosmos. They were “bettering themselves,” in the expression commonly used in the Lieu. Bruno was beginning to feel a little sleepy. He had stopped wishing, he had stopped wanting, he was nowhere. Slowly, by degrees, his spirit filled to a state of nothingness, the sheer joy that comes of not being part of the world. For the first time since he was thirteen, Bruno was almost happy.
Would you mind telling me where I might find the nearest candy shop?
He went back to his tent and slept for three hours. When he awoke he was in top form, and he had a hard-on. Sexual frustration in the human male manifests itself as a violent contraction in the lower abdomen as the sperm seems to back up, and pangs shoot toward the chest. The penis itself is painful, constantly hot and slightly sweaty; Bruno had not masturbated since Sunday, which probably had been a mistake. The last remaining myth of Western civilization was that sex was something to do; something expedient, a diversion. He put on a pair of swimming trunks and slipped some condoms into his bag—snorting with laughter as he did so. He had been carrying condoms around for years and had never used one of them—after all, whores always had their own.
The beach at Meschers was crawling with jerk-offs in shorts and bimbos in thongs; this was reassuring. He bought an order of French fries and circulated among the vacationers before settling on a girl of about twenty with beautiful breasts—round, firm and pert, with caramel-colored nipples. “Hello,” he said. He waited a beat; the girl frowned nervously. “Hello,” he said again. “Would you mind telling me where I might find the nearest candy shop?”
“Hmm?” she said, raising herself up on one elbow. It was then that he noticed she was wearing a Walkman; he backed off, pumping his arm by his side like Peter Falk in
Columbo
. There was no point in pushing it; it was all just too complicated, too second-rate.
As he walked through the crowd toward the surf he tried to keep an image of the girl’s breasts in his mind. Suddenly, directly in front of him, three teenage girls stepped out of the waves. They couldn’t be more than fourteen, he decided. He noticed their towels and spread his own on the sand a couple of meters away. They hadn’t even noticed him. He quickly took off his T-shirt and draped it across his lap, rolled onto his side and took out his penis. With the precision of synchronized swimmers, the girls rolled down the tops of their swimsuits to get the sun on their breasts. Before he had time to touch himself, Bruno came violently onto his T-shirt. He let out a moan and rolled over on the sand. It was done.
The primitive rituals of happy hour
The high point of social life at the Lieu du Changement was over aperitifs, which usually featured live music. That evening there were three guys playing tom-toms to fifty or so guests who danced rooted to the spot and waved their arms in all directions. These were harvest dances, apparently, which some of them had been practicing in the African dance workshop; customarily, after a number of hours, some of them would go into a trance—or pretend to. The archaic or literal sense of the word
trance
is extreme anxiety, fear at the idea of imminent danger.
I would rather leave my home than go on living through such a trance
(Émile Zola). Bruno offered the Catholic girl a glass of Pineau des Charentes. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Sophie,” she replied.
“Not dancing?”
“No, I don’t really like African dance, it’s too . . .”
Too what? He understood her dilemma. Too primitive? Certainly not. Too rhythmic? Even that bordered on racism. There was nothing you could say about African fucking dance. Poor Sophie was trying her best. Her face was pretty: pale-skinned with blue eyes framed by her dark hair. She had small breasts, but they were probably very sensitive. She had to be Breton.
“Are you from Brittany?” he asked.
“Yes—from Saint-Brieuc!” she replied happily. “But I really like Brazilian dance,” she added, obviously trying to absolve herself for her disinterest in African dance. Much more of this and Bruno would really get irritated. He was starting to get pissed off about the world’s stupid obsession with Brazil. What was so great about Brazil? As far as he knew, Brazil was a shithole full of morons obsessed with soccer and Formula One. It was the
ne plus ultra
of violence, corruption and misery. If ever a country were loathsome, that country, specifically, was Brazil.
“Sophie,” announced Bruno, “I could go on vacation to Brazil tomorrow. I’d look around a favela. The minibus would be armor-plated; so in the morning, safe, unafraid, I’d go sightseeing, check out eight-year-old murderers who dream of growing up to be gangsters; thirteen-year-old prostitutes dying of AIDS. I’d spend the afternoon at the beach surrounded by filthy-rich drug barons and pimps. I’m sure that in such a passionate, not to mention liberal, society I could shake off the malaise of Western civilization. You’re right, Sophie: I’ll go straight to a travel agent as soon as I get home.”
Sophie considered him for a moment, her expression thoughtful, her brow lined with concern. Eventually she said sadly, “You must have really suffered . . .”
“You know what Nietzsche said about Shakespeare, Sophie?” said Bruno. “ ‘The man must have suffered greatly to have such passion for playing the fool!’ Personally, I’ve always thought that Shakespeare was overrated, but now that I think about it, he is a big fool.” He stopped and realized to his surprise that he really was beginning to suffer. Sometimes women were so compassionate; they met aggression with empathy, cynicism with tenderness. No man would do any such thing. “Sophie,” he said with heartfelt emotion, “I’d like to lick your pussy,” but she didn’t hear him. She had turned away and struck up a conversation with the ski instructor who had groped her ass three days earlier.
Bruno stood speechless for a moment or two before crossing the lawn to the parking lot. The Leclerc supermarket at Royan was open until ten o’clock. As he wandered through the aisles he thought about Aristotle’s claim that small women were of a different species.
A small man still seems to me to be a man,
he wrote,
whereas a small woman appears to me to belong to a new type of animal.
How could you square such a strange assertion with the habitual good sense of the Stagirite? Bruno bought a bottle of whiskey, a box of ravioli and a pack of ginger snaps. By the time he got back, the Lieu was dark. Passing the Jacuzzi, he heard whispering and a muffled laugh. He stopped and peeked through the branches, plastic bag in hand. There were two or three couples; they were quiet now, the only sound the rippling of the water. The moon came out from behind the clouds. At that moment another couple arrived and began to undress. The whispering began again. Bruno put the bag down, took out his penis and started to masturbate. He ejaculated quickly, just as the woman slipped into the warm water.
It was already Friday night. He was going to have to extend his stay by a week. He had to get ahold of himself, find a woman, talk to people.
6
On Friday night Bruno slept badly and had a terrible dream. He was a piglet, his little body fat and sleek. With the other little piglets he was sucked by a vortex into a vast, dark tunnel, its walls rusted, and carried by the slow drift of the current. At times his feet touched the bottom, but then a powerful swell would carry him on. Sometimes he could make out the whitish flesh of one of his companions as it was brutally sucked down. They struggled through the darkness and a silence broken only by the scraping of their hooves on the metal walls. As they plunged deeper, he could hear the dull sound of machines coming from the end of the tunnel. He began to realize that the vortex was pulling them toward turbines with huge, razor-sharp blades.
Later, his severed head was lying in a meadow below the mouth of the drainpipe. His skull had been split from top to bottom, though what remained, lying on the grass, was still conscious. He knew that ants would slowly work their way into the exposed brain tissue to eat away at the neurons and finally he would slip into unconsciousness. As he waited, he looked at the horizon through his one remaining eye. The grass seemed to stretch out forever. Huge cogwheels turned counterclockwise under a metallic sky. Perhaps this was the end of time; at least the world he’d known had ceased to exist.
Over breakfast he met the leader of the watercolor workshop—a veteran of ’68 from Brittany. His name was Paul Le Dantec, one of the founding members of the Lieu; his brother was the current director. He was the archetypal old hippie: long gray beard, Indian vest and an ankh on a chain around his neck. At fifty-five this old wreck lived a peaceful life. He would get up at dawn to go bird-watching in the hills, then sit down to a bowl of coffee and Calvados, and roll a cigarette amid the human bustle. The watercolor class didn’t start until ten o’clock; he had all the time in the world to chat.
“As a veteran of the Lieu,” said Bruno, laughing to establish a sense of complicity, however false, “you must have a lot of stories about this place when it first opened—the seventies, sexual liberation . . .”
“Liberation my ass,” groaned the geezer. “There were always women who were wallflowers at orgies, and guys who just stood there waving their dicks. Take it from me, nothing much has changed.”
“But I thought AIDS changed everything,” said Bruno.
“I suppose it’s true that it used to be easier for men,” the watercolorist admitted, clearing his throat. “You’d find a mouth or a pussy wide open and you could dive right in—no standing on ceremony. But for that it had to be a proper orgy, invitation only, usually only couples. I tell you, I saw women with their legs wide open, wet and up for it, spending the whole evening masturbating because no one would fuck them. They couldn’t even find someone to get them off—you had to be able to get it up first.”
“So what you’re saying,” Bruno said thoughtfully, “is that there never was real sexual liberation—just another form of seduction.”
“Oh yeah,” the old fart agreed, “there’s always been a lot of seduction.”
This didn’t exactly sound promising. Still, it was Saturday, so there would probably be a crop of newcomers. Bruno decided to chill out, take things as they came, go with the flow. As a result, his day passed without incident; in fact, without the slightest event. At about eleven o’clock that evening he went down to the Jacuzzi. A delicate haze rose above the gentle rumble of the water, lit by the full moon. He approached soundlessly. A couple were entwined on the far side of the pool; it looked as if she had mounted him like a horse. I have as much right as they have, thought Bruno furiously. He undressed quickly and slipped into the Jacuzzi. The night air was cool, the water, by contrast, deliciously warm. Between the twisted branches of the pine trees he could see the stars, and felt himself relax a little. The couple paid no attention to him; the girl continued to pump up and down on the guy, now starting to whimper. It was impossible to see her face. The man began to breathe heavily too. The woman’s rhythm began to pick up tempo; she threw her head back and, for a moment, the moon lit up her breasts, her face still hidden behind a dark mass of hair. Then she crushed herself against her partner and wrapped herself around him; his breathing was heavier now, then he let out a long moan and was silent.
They stayed there for a couple of minutes, wrapped around each other, then the man stood up and got out of the pool. He unrolled the condom on his penis before dressing. Bruno was surprised to see that the woman was not leaving with him. The man’s footsteps died away and there was silence once more. She stretched out her legs in the water. Bruno did likewise. He felt her foot on his thigh, brushing against his penis. With a soft splash she pushed herself from the edge and came to him. Clouds shadowed the moon; the woman was barely a half meter away but still he could not make out her face. He felt an arm against his thigh and another wrap around his shoulder. Bruno pressed his body to hers, his face against her small, firm breasts. He let go of the edge and gave himself up to her embrace. He could feel her drawing him toward the center of the pool, then slowly she began to turn. He felt the muscles in his neck give, his head suddenly heavy. Below the surface, the gentle murmur of the water became a thunderous roar. He saw the stars as they wheeled slowly overhead. He relaxed into her arms, and his erect penis broke the surface of the water. She moved her hands gently, barely a caress. He was completely weightless. Her long hair brushed his stomach and then her tongue touched the tip of his glans. His whole body shuddered with happiness. She closed her lips and slowly, so slowly, took him in her mouth. He closed his eyes, his body shuddering in ecstasy. The underwater roar was infinitely reassuring. When he felt her lips at the base of his penis, he could feel the movement of her throat. He felt himself flooded with intense waves of pleasure and buoyed up by the whirlpool. All at once he felt very hot. She gently allowed her throat to contract around him; all the energy in his being rushed suddenly to his penis. He howled as he came. He had never felt such fulfillment in his life.