“Harley de Dude was right…,” the prophet said pensively in English. “Life is basically a conservative option…” I wondered for a while who he was speaking to, before realizing that it was me. He stopped, then continued in French. “You see, Daniel,” he said with genuine sadness, which was surprising for him, “mankind’s only aim is to reproduce, to continue the species. Although this aim is obviously insignificant, mankind pursues it with terrifying relentlessness. Men may well be unhappy, atrociously unhappy, but they resist with all their strength the thing that could change their fate: they want children, and children similar to them, in order to dig their own grave and perpetuate the conditions for unhappiness. When you suggest that they accomplish a mutation, advance along another path, you come to expect ferocious rejection. I have no illusions about the years to come: as the conditions for the technical realization of the project come closer, opposition will become more and more fierce; and all the intellectual power is in the hands of supporters of the status quo. The battle will be tough, very tough…” He sighed, finished his glass of wine, and seemed to plunge into a personal meditation, unless he was simply struggling against apathy; Vincent fixed the prophet with an incredibly attentive look as his mood swung between discouragement and unconcern, between a tropism of death and the convulsions of life: he looked more and more like a tired old monkey. After a couple of minutes he stood up from his chair and cast a brighter look over the guests; it was only at that instant, I think, that he noticed Francesca’s beauty. He gestured to one of the girls serving, the Japanese one, and said a few words in her ear; she approached the Italian girl and passed on the message. Francesca jumped up, delighted, without even looking at her companion, and came to sit on the prophet’s left.
Gianpaolo sat up in his seat, his face completely still; I looked away and, despite myself, noticed the prophet passing a hand through the young woman’s hair; her face was full of a happiness that was—how shall I put it?—childlike, senile, and moving all at once. I looked down at my plate, but after thirty seconds I got tired of contemplating my pieces of cheese and risked a look to my side; Vincent continued to stare shamelessly at the prophet, with even a certain jubilation, it seemed to me; the latter was now holding the girl by the neck, and she had laid her head on his shoulder. When he put a hand in her blouse, I couldn’t help looking over at Gianpaolo: he had raised himself a little more out of his chair, I could see the fury burning in his eyes, and I wasn’t the only one, all conversation had ceased; then, defeated, he sat back slowly and lowered his head. Gradually the conversation started up again, first in low voices, then more normally. The prophet left the table in the company of Francesca before the desserts had even arrived.
The next day I came across the young woman as we left the morning lecture. She was speaking to an Italian girlfriend of hers. I slowed down as I passed, and heard her say: “Communicare…” Her face was radiant, serene, she seemed happy. The course itself had settled into a rhythm: I had decided to attend the morning lectures, but forgo the afternoon workshops. I joined the others for the evening meditation, immediately before the meal. I noticed that Francesca was again beside the prophet, and that they left together after dinner; however, I had not seen Gianpaolo all day.
A sort of herbal tea bar had been set up at the entrance to one of the caves. I came across Cop and Joker sitting in front of some lime tea. Cop was speaking with great animation, emphasizing his speech with energetic gestures; he was obviously talking about a subject very close to his heart. Joker did not reply; looking concerned, he nodded vaguely while waiting for the other’s virulence to burn out. I went over to the Elohimite stationed at the kettles; I didn’t know what to order, I have always hated infusions. In despair, I opted for a hot chocolate: the prophet tolerated cocoa, on the condition that it was greatly reduced in fat—probably in homage to Nietzsche, whose ideas he admired. When I passed by their table, the two leaders were silent; Cop was staring severely ahead of him. With a sharp hand gesture he invited me to join them, apparently redynamized by the prospect of a new interlocutor.
“What I was saying to Gérard,” he said (oh yes, even this poor deprived being had a first name, he doubtless had a family, maybe loving parents who had bounced him on their knees; life was truly too hard, if I thought about this kind of thing for too long I would end up blowing my brains out, there was no doubt about it), “what I was saying to Gérard is that in my view we communicate far too much about the scientific aspect of our teachings. There is a whole New Age, ecologist trend that is frightened off by intrusive technologies, because they take a dim view of man’s domination of nature. They are people who strongly reject the Christian tradition, who are often close to paganism or Buddhism; we could have potential sympathizers in them.”
“On the other hand,” Gérard said astutely, “you attract the techno-freaks.”
“Yes…,” Cop replied doubtfully. “But they’re mainly in California, I assure you that in Europe you don’t see many of them…” He turned to me again: “What do you think?”
I didn’t really have any opinion, it seemed to me that in the long term the supporters of genetic technology would become more numerous than its opponents; I was above all surprised that they were putting me yet again in the role of witness to their internal contradictions. I hadn’t yet realized it, but as a showman I was credited by them with a sort of intuitive understanding of the currents of thought, the fluctuations of public opinion; I saw no reason for disabusing them, and after having uttered a few banalities that they listened to respectfully I left the table with a smile, under the pretext of tiredness, slipped out of the cave, and walked toward the village of tents; I wanted to see the grassroots followers at first hand.
It was still early, and no one had gone to bed; most were sitting cross-legged, generally on their own, more rarely in couples, in front of their tents. Many of them were naked (without being obligatory, naturism was widely practiced by the Elohimites; our creators the Elohim, who had acquired a perfect mastery of the climate of their planet of origin, went around naked, as was appropriate for any liberated, proud being, having rejected guilt and shame; as the prophet taught, the traces of Adam’s sin had disappeared, and now we lived according to the new law of true love). On the whole they were doing nothing, or perhaps they were meditating in their own way—many had their palms open, and their eyes were turned toward the stars. The tents, provided by the organization, looked like teepees, but the canvas, which was white and slightly shiny, was very modern, of the “new materials from space research” type. All in all, it was a kind of tribe, a high-tech Indian tribe, I think all the tents had Internet connections, the prophet insisted repeatedly on this, it was indispensable in order for his directives to be instantly communicated to them. I suppose they must have conducted intense social relationships via the Internet, but what struck me on seeing them all together was rather their isolation and silence; each one stayed in front of his tent, without speaking or going to see his neighbors; they were only a few meters from each other but seemed oblivious even to their mutual existence. I knew that most of them didn’t have children or pets (it wasn’t forbidden, but strongly advised against all the same; the aim was above all to create a new species, and the reproduction of existing species was considered an outmoded and conservative option, proof of a flaky temperament, and one that did not exactly indicate a greater faith; it seemed rather implausible that a father could rise very far in the organization). I walked down all the pathways and passed in front of several hundred tents without anyone speaking to me; they contented themselves with a nod or a discreet smile. I told myself at first that they were perhaps a bit intimidated: I was a VIP, I had the privilege of direct access to the prophet’s conversation; but I quickly realized that when they came across each other on one of the pathways, their behavior was identical: a smile, a nod, and nothing more. After leaving the village I continued walking, and went for several hundred meters along the stony path before stopping. Ther
e was a full moon, and you could make out perfectly the gravel and blocks of lava; far to the east, I could see the weak luminosity of the metal barriers encircling the grounds; I was in the middle of nowhere, the temperature was mild, and I would have liked to reach some kind of conclusion.
I must have stayed like that for a while, in a state of great mental emptiness, because on my return the encampment was silent; everyone, apparently, was sleeping. I consulted my watch: it was just after three. A light was still on in Knowall’s cell; he was at his desk but he heard my footsteps and signaled for me to enter. The internal decor was less austere than I would have imagined: there was a divan with some quite pretty silk cushions, and rugs with abstract motifs covered the rocky floor; he offered me a glass of tea.
“You must have realized that there was some tension inside the leadership…,” he said before pausing. I was, obviously, in their view, a heavyweight; I couldn’t help thinking that they were exaggerating my importance. It’s true that I could say anything and the media would always be there to record my words; but to go from there to a point when people would listen to me, and change their point of view, was a rather giant leap: everyone had become used to celebrities expressing themselves in the media on the most varied subjects, saying things that were generally predictable, and no one paid them any real attention anymore; basically the system of the spectacle, obliged to produce a disgusting consensus, had long since collapsed under the weight of its own meaninglessness. But I did nothing to disabuse him; I acquiesced with that attitude of benevolent neutrality that had served me so well in life, that had enabled me to hear so many intimate confessions, in so many different milieus, which I then reused, crudely distorted out of recognition, in my sketches.
“I’m not really worried, the prophet trusts me…,” he continued. “But our image in the media is catastrophic. We’re seen as cranks, yet no laboratory in the world, at the moment, would be capable of producing results like ours…” He swept a hand around the room as if all the objects there, the biochemistry works in English from Elsevier Publications, the DVDs of data lined above his desk, the glowing computer screen, were there to bear witness to the seriousness of his research. “I ruined my career by coming here,” he went on bitterly, “I no longer have access to the top-ranking publications…” Society is an accumulation of layers, and I had never introduced scientists into my sketches, theirs was in my view a specific layer, motivated by ambitions and evaluative criteria that could not be transposed to mere mortals, there was no material in it for the general public; however, I listened, as I listened to everyone, motivated by an old habit—I was a sort of aging spy on mankind, a spy in retirement, but I could still do it, I still had good reflexes, I think I even nodded to encourage him to go on, but I sort of listened without hearing, his words just passed between my ears, I had established involuntarily a sort of filtering function in my brain. I was, however, conscious that Miskiewicz was an important man, perhaps one of the most important men in human history, he was going to change its destiny at the deepest biological level, he had at his disposal the know-how and the procedures, but maybe I was the one who was no longer really interested in human history, I too was a tired old man, and then, just as he was singing the praises of the rigor of his experimental protocols to me, of the seriousness he brought to the establishment and validation of his counterfactual propositions, I was suddenly seized by desire for Esther, for her nice supple vagina, I remembered the little movements of her vagina closing around my cock. I pleaded tiredness and was scarcely outside Knowall’s cave before dialing her cell phone number but there was no one there, just her voicemail, and I didn’t really feel like jerking off, the production of spermatozoids was slower at my age, the recovery period was getting longer, whatever sexual opportunities life had left to offer me were going to become rarer and rarer before they disappeared completely. I was, of course, in favor of immortality, Miskiewicz’s research undoubtedly constituted a hope, the only hope in fact, but it wouldn’t be for me, nor for anyone of my generation, on this subject I nurtured no illusion, the optimism he displayed with regard to imminent success was, moreover, probably not a lie but a necessary fiction, necessary not only for the Elohimites who financed his projects but also for himself; no human project has ever been undertaken without the hope of its accomplishment in a reasonable time, and more precisely with a maximum time frame delineated by the foreseeable life span of the one who conceived of the project, mankind has never operated according to a team spirit that spreads across generations, even though this is the way things actually happen at the end of the day: you work, you die, and future generations profit from it unless of course they prefer to destroy what you have done, but this thought has never been formulated by any of those who have committed themselves to a project, they have preferred to ignore it, for otherwise they would have simply ceased to act, they would have simply lain down and waited for death. It was for that reason that Knowall, however modern he was on an intellectual level, was still a romantic in my eyes, his life was guided by old illusions, and now I wondered what Esther could be up to, if her little vagina was contracting on other cocks, and I began to seriously want to rip out one or two of my organs, thankfully I had brought along a dozen boxes of Rohypnol—I had thought big—and I slept for more than fifteen hours.
When I awoke the sun was low in the sky, and I immediately sensed that something strange was going on. The weather was stormy, but I knew that it would not break, it never broke, the rainfall on the island was practically nil. A faint yellow light bathed the village of the followers; the openings of a few tents were lightly ruffled by the wind but apart from that the encampment was deserted, no one was on the pathways. In the absence of human activity, the silence was total. As I climbed the hill I passed in front of the bedrooms of Vincent, Knowall, and Cop, still without meeting anyone. The prophet’s residence was wide open, for the first time since I arrived there were no guards at the entrance. Despite myself, on entering the first room, I muffled the sound of my footsteps. While crossing the corridor that led to his private apartment I heard hushed voices, the sound of a piece of furniture being dragged across the floor, and something that resembled a sob.
All the lights were on in the main hall where the prophet had welcomed me on the day of my arrival, but here too there was no one. I walked around, pushed open a door that led to the office, then turned back. On the right-hand side, near the pool, I bumped into Gérard, who was standing in the doorway leading to the prophet’s bedroom. Joker was in a sorry state: his face was even more wan than usual, pitted with dark shadows under the eyes, I had the impression he had not slept all night. “Something terrible…something terrible…” His voice was weak and quavering, almost inaudible. “Something terrible has happened…,” he finally articulated. Cop joined him and stood in front of me, sizing me up. Joker finally made a kind of plaintive bleating noise. “Well, now we’ve reached this point, we might as well let him in…,” groaned Cop.
The interior of the bedroom was taken up by an immense round bed, three meters in diameter, covered with pink satin; pink-satin ottomans were placed here and there in the room, whose walls were covered on three sides with mirrors; the fourth side was a big bay window overlooking the stony plain and the volcanoes beyond, which were slightly menacing in the stormy light. The bay window had been smashed to pieces, and the corpse of the prophet lay in the middle of the bed, naked, his throat cut. He had lost an enormous amount of blood, the carotid had been cleanly severed. Knowall padded nervously around the room. Vincent, sitting on an ottoman, seemed rather absent, he scarcely looked up on hearing me approach. A young woman with long black hair, whom I recognized as Francesca, was prostrate in a corner of the room, dressed in a white nightdress stained with blood.
“It was the Italian…,” Cop said dryly.
It was the first time I had seen a corpse, and I wasn’t that impressed; I wasn’t particularly surprised either. At dinner two days before, when the prophet
had set his heart on the Italian girl, I had had the fleeting impression, in the space of a few seconds, on seeing her boyfriend’s expression, that this time the prophet had gone too far, and that things weren’t going to go as smoothly as usual; and then, when Gianpaolo had finally appeared to submit, I had told myself that he would be crushed like all the others; manifestly, I had been mistaken. Out of curiosity I approached the bay window: the slope was very steep, almost vertical; you could make out a few footholds, and the rock was good, not at all flaky or crumbly, but it was still quite a climb. “Yes,” Cop commented darkly as he moved closer to me, “he must have taken it very badly…” Then he continued to walk up and down the room, taking care to stay away from Knowall, who was walking on the other side of the bed. Joker remained rooted near the door, opening and shutting his hands mechanically, looking completely haggard, on the edge of panic. I then became conscious for the first time that despite the hedonistic and libertine position assumed by the sect none of the close companions of the prophet actually had any kind of sexual life: in the case of Joker and Knowall this was obvious—one through incapacity, the other through a lack of motivation. Cop, for his part, was married to a woman his age, in her late fifties, which is to say that they could hardly indulge in a frenzy of the senses every day; and he took no advantage at all of his lofty position in the organization to seduce young female followers. The followers themselves, as I had noticed with increasing surprise, were at best monogamous, and for the most part zerogamous—with the exception of the young and pretty female followers on the occasions when the prophet invited them to share his intimacy for one night. Basically, when you thought about it, the prophet had behaved in his own sect like an absolutely dominant male, and he had succeeded in breaking the virility of his companions: not only did the latter no longer have a sexual life, but they did not seek to have one, they forbade themselves any approach to the females, and had integrated the idea that sexuality was the prerogative of the prophet; I then understood why, in his lectures, he indulged in superfluous praise of feminine values and pitiless attacks on machismo: his wish was, quite simply, to castrate his listeners. It’s a fact that, among most monkeys, the production of testosterone by the dominated males falls, and ends up stopping altogether.
The Possibility of an Island Page 20
