Unreconciled

by Michel Houellebecq

  The previous morning I had swum towards an island

  That seemed near to me

  I did not reach the island

  There was a current

  Something like that

  I could not return

  And I really thought I’d die,

  I felt very sad

  At the idea of drowning

  Life seemed long to me

  And very sunny

  I was only seventeen,

  To die without making love

  Seemed very sad to me.

  Must we touch death

  To reach life?

  We all have bodies

  Fragile, unsatisfied.

  17–23

  That way Patrick Hallali had of persuading girls

  To come into our compartment

  We were seventeen eighteen

  When I think back to them, I see their eyes shining;

  And now saying a word to another person, another human being

  Is work in itself, a pain

  (In the strongest sense of these words, in the sense they have in ancient writing).

  Solitude of the light

  In the mountain’s hollow,

  While the cold reaches

  And closes your eyelids.

  Until the day of our death,

  Will it be like this?

  The aged body desires just as strongly

  In the middle of the night

  Body all alone in the night,

  Starving for tenderness,

  The almost-crushed body feels a heart-rending youth reborn within it.

  Despite the physical fatigue,

  Despite the long walk yesterday

  Despite the ‘gastronomical’ meal,

  Despite the litres of beer

  The tense body, starving for caresses and smiles

  Continues to tremble in the morning light

  In the eternal, miraculous morning light

  On the mountains.

  The slightly cool air, the scent of thyme:

  These mountains inspire happiness

  My gaze rests, moves on,

  I strive to chase away fear.

  I know that all evil comes from the self,

  But the self comes from within

  In the clear air there is joy,

  But there is fear underneath the skin.

  In the heart of this landscape

  Of mid-height mountains

  I gradually regain courage,

  I access the opening of the heart

  My hands are no longer shackled,

  I feel ready for happiness.

  My former obsession and my new fervour,

  You quiver in me for a new desire

  That’s paradoxical, light like a distant smile

  And yet profound like the essential shadow.

  (The space between skins

  When it can shrink

  Opens a world as lovely

  As a loud burst of laughter.)

  In the morning, chaste and tranquil,

  Hope suspended over the city

  Hesitates to join men.

  (A certain quality of joy,

  In the middle of the night,

  Is precious.)

  DJERBA ‘THE SWEET’

  An old man was training for the mini-golf

  And birds were singing for no reason:

  Was it the happiness from camping at the Gulf?

  Was it the heat? Was it the season?

  The sun projected my black silhouette

  On a grey earth, recently disturbed;

  We must interpret the signs of history

  And the design of flowers, so snake like.

  A second old man near his fellow creature

  Wordlessly observed the waves on the horizon

  Like a chopped-down tree observes without anger

  The muscular movement of the lumberjack.

  Towards my shadow advanced lively red ants,

  They entered my skin without causing pain;

  I suddenly desired a calm and gentle life

  Where my intact presence would be passed through.

  HOLIDAY-CLUB

  The poet is he who smears himself with oil

  Before wearing out the masks of survival;

  Yesterday afternoon the world was docile,

  A breeze blew on the delighted palm trees

  And I was both elsewhere and in space,

  I knew the South and the three directions

  In the impoverished sky traces were drawn,

  I imagined executives sitting in their planes

  And the hairs of their legs, very similar to mine,

  And their moral values, their Hindu mistresses;

  The poet is he, almost similar to us,

  Who wags his tail in the company of dogs.

  I’ll have spent three years at the edge of the pool

  Without really making out the tourists’ bodies;

  The surface of skins penetrates my retina

  Without arousing any living desire.

  HOLIDAY-CLUB 2

  The sun turned on the waters

  Between the edges of the pool;

  Monday morning, new desires,

  A smell of urine floats in the air.

  Right next to the kids club,

  A decapitated teddy bear

  A disappointed old Tunisian

  Blasphemes while baring his teeth.

  I was registered for two weeks

  On a relational trip,

  The nights were a long tunnel

  I left covered in hate.

  Monday morning, life moves in;

  Indifferent ashtrays

  Mark my movements

  Amidst convivial zones.

  HOLIDAYS

  Idle time. A white hole appears in life.

  Rays of sunlight pivot on the slabs,

  The sun sleeps; the afternoon is invariable.

  Metallic reflections meet on the sand.

  In simmering air, moist and scarcely moving,

  You hear passing female insects;

  I want to kill myself, join a sect;

  I want to move, but it would be useless.

  In five hours at most the sky will be dark;

  I will wait for morning while crushing flies.

  The tenebrae twitch like little mouths;

  Morning returns, dry and white, without hope.

  The light evolves almost in the forms;

  I am still lying on the paving.

  I would have to die or go to the beach;

  It’s already seven. They’re probably asleep.

  I know they will be there if I leave the hotel,

  I know they will see me and wear shorts,

  I have a diagram of the heart; near the aorta,

  The blood turns back. The day will be fine.

  Near the parasols, various mammals

  Some on a leash and wagging their tails;

  In the photo I look like a happy child;

  I’d like to lie down in the Umbelliferae.

  No shadow replies; the heavens are blue and empty

  And that mongoloid girl in a ‘Predator’ t-shirt

  Vainly strings words in morbid gurglings

  While her parents support her efforts.

  A retired postman slips on his cycling shorts

  Before trying his best acrobatic moves

  To suck in his belly. A very sad young girl

  Follows the waterline; holds an ace of spades.

  No noise on the horizon, no cries in the clouds;

  The day is organised into groups of habits

  And some pensioners gather seashells;

  All breathe the flat, the white, the finite.

  An Algerian sweeps the floor of the ‘Dallas’,

  Opens the bay windows; his eyes are pensive.

  On the beach a few condoms can be found;

  A new day is rising on Palavas.

  This desire to no longer do an
ything and especially to no longer feel anything,

  This sudden need to fall silent and detach oneself

  In the Jardin du Luxembourg, so calm

  To be an old senator growing old under its palms

  And nothing at all, not the children, not their boats, especially not the music

  Would come and trouble this disenchanted and almost ataraxic meditation;

  Especially not love, not fear.

  Ah! to no longer remember embraces.

  A rapid sunny morning,

  And I want to succeed at death.

  I read in their eyes an effort:

  My God, how insipid is man!

  One is never serene enough

  To bear the autumn days,

  God how life is monotonous,

  How distant are the horizons!

  One winter morning, gently,

  Far from the homes of men;

  Desire for a dream, absolutely,

  For a memory that nothing erases.

  The abolished arc of slender sadness

  In an imperceptible, final struggle

  Hardens jointly, minimal;

  The dice are half cast.

  The central exhaustion of a starless night

  Adorned with nothingness

  (Compassionate oblivion has drawn its veil

  Over things and men).

  The bizarre element

  Scattered in the water

  Awakens memory,

  Rises to the brain

  Like Bulgarian wine.

  THE MEMORY OF THE SEA

  A blue light settles on the city;

  It is time to play your games.

  The traffic decreases. Everything stops. The city is so tranquil.

  In a grey fog, fear at the back of our eyes,

  We march towards the city,

  We cross the city.

  Near the armoured cars, the army of beggars,

  Like a puddle of shadow,

  Wends its way amidst the debris;

  Your brother is one of the beggars

  He is one of the wanderers

  I do not forget your brother,

  I do not forget the game.

  Rice is bought in covered arcades,

  Encircled by hate

  The night is uncertain

  The night is almost red

  Crossing all the years, deep inside me, it moves,

  The memory of the sea.

  She lived in a bijou cottage

  With some thread and dolls

  The sun and rain passed without pausing on her little home

  Nothing happened except the sound of the clock hands

  And the little embroidered objects

  Amassed for her nephews and nieces

  For she had three sisters

  Who had children,

  Since her heartbreak

  She no longer had lovers

  And in her bijou cottage

  She sewed as she dreamed.

  Around her house there were fields

  And high grassy slopes,

  Superb poppies

  Where she sometimes liked to walk for a very long time.

  So calm, in her coma

  She had agreed to take some risks

  (Like you sometimes bear the sun, and its disk,

  Before the pain becomes too cruel),

  Supposing that everyone was like her,

  But of course this was not the case.

  She could have led a full and gentle life

  Among animals and little children

  But she had chosen human society,

  And she was so beautiful, aged nineteen.

  Her blond hair on the pillow

  Formed a strange halo,

  Like the intercessor of an angel

  And of a drowned man.

  So calm, definitively beautiful,

  She barely moved the sheets

  While breathing; but did she dream?

  She seemed happy, in any case.

  HMT

  I. At heart I have always known

  That I would find love

  And that this would be

  On the eve of my death.

  I have always been confident,

  I have never given up

  Long before your presence,

  You were announced to me.

  So you will be the one

  My real presence

  I will bask in the joy

  Of your non-fictional skin

  So soft to the caress,

  So light and so fine

  Entity non-divine,

  Animal of tenderness.

  II. For I who was King of Bohemia

  Who was an innocent animal

  Desire for life, insistent dream,

  A theorem’s demonstration

  There is no essential enigma

  I know the place and the instant

  The central point, absolutely,

  Of the partial revelation.

  In the sleeping starless night,

  At the confines of matter,

  A state of prayer settles:

  The second secret is revealed.

  III. When I have to leave this world

  Make it be in your presence

  Make it that in my last seconds

  I look at you with trust

  Tender animal with arousing breasts

  That I cup in my hands;

  I close my eyes: your white body

  Marks the limit of the kingdom.

  IV. A morning of grand clear fine weather,

  Filled with carnal thoughts

  And then the great ebb of blood,

  The essential condemnation;

  Life that leaves laughing

  To fill new entities

  Life has not lasted long,

  The end of day is so fine.

  V. A mobile phone

  Left on the beach,

  The inevitable end

  Of a passing affair

  And death that advances

  With little plaintive cries,

  Dancing its odd dance

  On my emotional centre

  Which climbs into the bed,

  Lifts the covers;

  My abolished love,

  Why is everything so hard?

  VI. After a few months

  (Or a few weeks)

  You got tired of me,

  You I had made queen.

  I knew the risk,

  As an experienced mortal;

  The sun, like a disk,

  Shines on my broken life.

  VII. There is no love

  (Not nearly, not enough)

  We live unaided,

  We die abandoned.

  The appeal for pity

  Resonates in the void

  Our bodies are crippled,

  But our flesh is eager.

  Gone are the promises

  Of a teenage body,

  We enter an old age

  Where nothing awaits us

  Except the vain memory

  Of our lost days,

  A convulsion of hate

  And naked despair.

  VIII. My life, my life, my ancient one

  My first badly healed desire

  My first crippled love

  You had to return

  It was necessary to know

  What is best in our lives,

  When two bodies play with happiness,

  Unite, are reborn without end.

  Entered into complete dependency

  I know the trembling of being

  The hesitation to disappear

  The sunlight upon the forest’s edge

  And love, where all is easy,

  Where all is given in the instant

  There exists, in the midst of time,

  The possibility of an island.

  I am in a tunnel made of compact rocks

  RELIGIOUS VOCATION

  I am in a tunnel made of compact rocks;

  Two
feet from my left a man with no eyelids

  Gazes at me; he says he is free and proud.

  Far away, farther than everything, a waterfall roars.

  It is the mountains’ end and the final stop;

  The other man has disappeared. I will go on alone;

  The tunnel’s walls seem to be made of basalt,

  It is cold. I think again of the land of gladioli.

  The next morning the air tastes of salt;

  Then I can feel a double presence.

  On the grey earth snakes a deep and dense line,

  Like the abolished ark of an ancient religion.

  I have always had the impression that we were close, like two pieces of fruit from the same branch. Day is dawning as I write to you, thunder rumbles faintly; today it will rain. I imagine you rising in your bed. That anguish you feel, I feel it too.

  Night abandons us,

  Light again

  Defines people,

  Tiny people.

  Lying on the carpet, I observe with resignation the rising light. I see some strands of hair on the carpet; it is not your hair. A solitary insect climbs the stalks of wool. My head slumps down, lifts back up; I feel like truly closing my eyes. I have not slept for three days; I have not worked for three months. I think of you.

  NEW ORDER

  for Michel Bulteau

  We had reached a moment in our life when you felt the imperious necessity to negotiate a new order,

  Or just to die.

  When we were face to face with ourselves on the seat at the back of the garage there was no one else left,

  We liked seeking ourselves.

  The slightly oily ground where we slipped with a bottle of beer in our hands

  And your satin dress,

  My angel

  We have lived some very strange moments

  When friends disappeared one by one and when the gentle ones became the hardest,

  Settled into a sort of fissure

  Between the long white walls of pharmaceutical dependency

  They became ironic puppets,

  Pathetic.

  Lyricism and passion, we have known them better than anyone,

  Much better than anyone

  For we dug to the depths of our organs to try to transform them from within