Fool’s Paradise
Azure water, azure air. And it’s right between the two, red on the white rocks like a drop of blood that years had made solid. I put my feet on it at last, my bag on my shoulder, the boat disappearing towards the mainland in a bubbling of foam, the engines at full speed, as if it feared the spells of a siren. We were here at their home.
Evening was falling on the inverted pyramid of the staircase roof. Is it since “Le Mépris”, Moravia revamped by Godard, that I have been dreaming of Villa Malaparte? But for what dark reason did the film make it the scene of an amorous catastrophe? A Godard perversion: choose a paradise of light to bring down the night. Arx tarpeia Capitoli proxima. It is never far from the Capitol to the Tarpeian rock. From glory to the abyss. From love to contempt.
I had come to the island to forget about my disgrace in travelling in the past. My vehicle? Noire Idole, as its worshipers called it. Black, and hidden. To find its trace I had to follow the thread along a very strange track: a museum director, a specialist in sharks and a Burmese escort girl had led me to here at the price of many riddles to remove the untoward. It was a sort of club, a brotherhood for modern lotus-eaters, in other words, seekers of oblivion.
A colossus in a boubou relieve me of my bag and my clothes. It was naked, caressed by the last fires of the sun, a scarlet sphere, sinking in the waves reddened by its burn, that I climbed the steps of this roof that led me to my paradise lost and found. Black idol: I had drunk so much at your lips, so loved your sophisticated and barbaric caresses, and I still wanted more. To plunge back into your largesse, your high viewpoint, to make love to your visions to forget the pain. Your feast was alluring, Black idol. On this solarium possessed by the night, where Bardot used to tan her bare buttocks in 1967, skins were now offered to the moon, hair to comets. Everywhere, bodies stretched out, entangled at times, but always perfused by your juice, your perfumes, your powers, and the wonderful but irreversible drunkenness you lavished, Noire Idole.
In turn, I lay naked on the still burning flagstones, my eyes in the Tyrrhenian night splashed with stars. And in the noise of the waves that were constantly dying and resuscitated on the sharp reefs, I opened my lips to your source of youth, Black idol. Exit contempt, and finally forgetfulness. I hunted the dragon in the territory of the siren. • original text page 118