*
Visits the grave of E. M. Cioran in Montparnasse cemetery with a slender blonde who stands slightly back, her features suggesting keen observational faculties and a cool temperament. A cloudy afternoon, the cemetery all but deserted. ‘This is as fine a place to make love as any.’ They lie down together and couple efficiently, though without any great passion. ‘Beckett is buried here too,’ he murmurs afterwards, fixing himself. She remains sitting on the ground for a spell, silently contemplative. ‘Pessimism as a philosophy is about as interesting to me as heavyweight boxing.’ They go for coffee in a nearby café.
*
Phrases from the philosophers of Despair start appearing on advertising billboards: Man? A twilight sigh. . All thought craves the Night in which it will capsize. . Gaze into the corpse — know thyself!
In a nearby motel, the champion fighter holds his head in his hands. ‘I’ve lost my ferocity. May as well be a limp-dick sonofabitch.’ His young wife (blonde, Caucasian) tries to soothe him: ‘Don’t fret, baby.’
‘I fear everything.’
Their marriage dissolves.
*
Done with hitch-hiking, we perch on a hillside overlooking the freeway, out where the billboards are. Binoculars, a blanket, a selection of cheeses, two wine glasses. ‘Cities are becoming conscious, let’s hope they’re benign.’ Through the binoculars, she sees a car with tinted windows glide towards the desert.
‘You love me. But is it for ever? Youth is fleeting, a wild fuck astride a grave. In a matter of hours we’ll have changed beyond recognition.’
*
She can never tell her husband about the erotic dreams she has of heavyweight boxers. Black, glistening men who make her cry out in her sleep. ‘I’m a brutal tyrant, a vicious ruthless killer, I live on fear and nails, there’s no one like me.’ When she wakes, she still loves him, but her love is frayed at the edges by contempt and a mild disgust. Lying beside her, he smiles and looks towards the ceiling, speaking softly of his hopes, always of his hopes. Men are redundant, she decides, little more than playthings. This year, she will take a holiday alone. Madagascar, Barbados, Jamaica. .
*
Another billboard: Your bitterest enemy lives in your own home.
*
‘I wasn’t looking for the “Grand Love”.’ He cracks open a beer and slugs savagely. ‘You have no idea how hard I’ve worked to keep this family together.’ ‘Yeah well, all I ever learned from you is the art of skulduggery. Is that what marriage is? That and nothing more?’ They agree to stay together for the kids, though they soon fuck them up. (Round of applause.)
Saddest thing I ever heard.
The Closest I Ever Got
A dead body rolled up in a carpet and kicked down the basement stairs. The barman kept pouring till all the glasses overflowed. ‘It’s worth it in the end.’ ‘Not really,’ said the blonde. ‘Aggressive, ready for violence — the usual sexual competition between young men. I get it everywhere I go.’ This broad drinks to forget, the barman thinks.
*
A fountain in the main square. An Australian psychologist admiring the quality of the European light. Those glamorous years. . The same canals, the hot, sensual cities. A beautiful girl on the back of a motorbike, rides off down the Calle de Noche Triste. Traces of a higher culture, though all of that has long passed. . A young author types rapidly with the blinds drawn in a small, hot apartment (green T-shirt, trilby). Hearing the laughter of teenagers down in the street, he sighs, then goes out and stands on the balcony. Black lace panties. The phrase captivates him; he returns to his desk and types it out seven times, then stares at the screen, mesmerised. The teenagers are flirting. A boy in a black leather jacket rides off on his Vespa with a girl whose body justifies everything. Later, the author opens a bottle of port and weeps.
*
Through cigar smoke, they regard the loose pages: shards of text, impressionistic photographs, a semi-coherent polemic. ‘Pessimistic novelists, a veritable production line of them. What are they trying to do, overthrow our civilisation? They’ll only overthrow themselves.’ ‘One of them has made a million since last February. . Anyway, how do you know the blonde has beautiful eyes?’ ‘Because every time she walks into a bar, some guy buys her a drink.’ They say nothing, sip their cognac. Two jaded ex-revolutionaries, sitting in this sepulchral bar all week, like they’re afraid. This stale, stinging air.
*
Young people on a beach, preparing a meal. It’s an overcast day, a little windy. ‘Eat something.’ A dog sitting on the bonnet of a car, seems to know more than anyone. The exceptional beauty of these girls. ‘I couldn’t eat another morsel.’. . ‘No god lingers in my blood.’ A poet masturbates in a cave, out where the rocks are jagged.
When the tide comes in, the youths have disappeared.
*
Madam’s erotic dreams. . Fearsome tyrants butchered on camera — the embassy in flames — ‘We reject in the strongest terms this —’ Hot tongues of mongrel dogs. They approach slowly and lick the glass. . She wakes drenched in sweat, panting. All this opulence, yet so many nights since she’s had a man beside her. Every woman needs it.
*
‘Your father’s dead,’ says her teacher. The gamine Nicole has always had troublesome fantasies. Now they might become real. ‘Take me.’ They fall together, a pleasure intimating total annihilation. ‘All I want is to vanish from the earth,’ she whimpers as he moves inside her. ‘With you!’ The teacher’s urgent words: ‘We are not bound to “real life”, nor to their shitty morality.’ He comes inside her with a howl.
*
The blonde girl kneels down and takes it. Pornography, shotguns, occasional music. (In her latest painting, crucifixes line both sides of the autostrada to Salerno, a groaning fascist on each one.) At first I made her read the Marquis de Sade aloud while I explored her with my fingers. But Christ — that girl soon brought me to my knees. In a voice as delicate as an hourglass: Love is best conveyed with the fist. Against a severe desert sky, a towering phallus glistens like an obelisk. ‘Past the age of twenty-four, men just don’t fuck the same,’ she tells her friend over the phone. ‘Sexual morality. . crucifixes. . Men are terrified, and they’re right to be. I’m young, sexy, and as beautiful as death. Tell me that’s not power!’
I wasn’t insane. I had sought a return to animal life, that kind of debased magnificence. The next time we met, she dangled the keys in front of me. Then she locked the monotonous hotel room from the inside. ‘I’ve always had a thing for panting blondes.’ ‘You and everyone else.’ She made me slide a finger in her asshole. I could feel flakes of shit against my fingertip. My breath in her hair, on her neck. Nothing had changed. ‘You get happier, and more fatalistic.’ Brazen and vulgar, as intoxicating as an open sewer. The closest to love I ever got.
4
Baby, the West Will Fear Us
Passion festers within the camp perimeter. The odour of dust, excrement and coffee seeps into the affair itself. She looks at him now with mistrust. Writes her nightmares in notebooks she conceals in her mattress. (‘In this mirror full of screams.’) On the walls of the camp, relief maps, aerial photographs, refugee statistics. All that textual babbling. Midnight in the canteen: ‘Your attitude is bizarre and sometimes sickening.’ ‘Look, just tell me you won’t make an issue with my wife.’ ‘We have nothing more to talk about.’ Out here, all tensions are exacerbated. Desert truth.