Unreconciled

by Michel Houellebecq

  To find a way to part our lungs and penetrate to the heart

  And we lost,

  Our bodies were so naked.

  Repetition of deaths and abandonments and the purest climbed the road to their calvary,

  I remember your cousin the morning he dyed his hair green

  Before jumping into the river,

  His life was brand new.

  We no longer like much the people who come and criticise our dreams,

  We let ourselves be slowly filled with an atmosphere of respite,

  We no longer believe much in jokes about the meaning of the cosmos,

  We know there exists a space of freedom between flesh and bone

  Where repetitions, complaints

  Toned down, reach

  A space of embraces,

  A body transfigured.

  When it is cold,

  Or rather when you feel cold

  When a centre of coldness settles with a gentle movement

  Deep in the chest

  And jumps heavily between the lungs

  Like a stupid fat animal;

  When your limbs beat weakly

  More and more weakly

  Before stopping on the sofa

  Definitively, it seems;

  When the years turn flashing

  In a smoky atmosphere

  You can no longer remember the scented river,

  The river of early childhood

  I call it, in accordance with an ancient tradition: the river of innocence.

  Now that we live in the light,

  Now that we live right next to the light,

  In endless afternoons

  Now that the light around our bodies has become palpable

  We can say that we have reached our destination

  The stars gather every night to celebrate our sufferings and their transfiguration

  Into indefinitely mysterious figures

  And this night of our arrival here, among all nights, remains infinitely precious to us.

  Traces of the night.

  A star shines, alone,

  Ready for distant Eucharists.

  Some destinies gather, perplexed,

  Immobile.

  We are marching I know towards strange mornings.

  Like a maize seedling dug up from its soil

  An old shell forgotten by the sea

  Outside of life

  I turn to you who dared love me;

  Come with me, let’s go, I’d like to find

  The traces of the night.

  I am like a child who no longer has the right to tears,

  Lead me to the country where the good people live

  Lead me through the night, surround me with a charm,

  I would like to meet different beings.

  I carry deep within me an ancient hope

  Like those old black men, princes in their land,

  Who sweep the metro with indifference;

  Like me they are alone, like me they smile.

  Outside there is the night

  Violence, carnage

  Come close to me, without a sound,

  I make out an image

  That moves

  And the contours blur,

  The light is trembling

  My eyes undress themselves

  I am there, waiting,

  Serene.

  We have gone through

  Ages of hatred,

  Controversial times

  With no human dimension

  And the world has taken shape,

  The world has appeared

  In its naked presence,

  The world.

  Gently, we moved towards a fictional palace

  Surrounded by tears.

  The azure lifted like a tethered balloon;

  Men were under arms.

  The fine and delicate texture of the clouds

  Disappears behind the trees

  And suddenly it’s the vagueness that comes before a storm;

  The sky is beautiful, hermetic as marble.

  The news mixes up like needles

  Poured into my brain

  By the blind hand of the newsreader;

  I’m scared.

  For eight hours now, cruel declarations

  Have followed one another in my receiver;

  High up there, the sun shines.

  The sky is slightly green,

  Like swimming pool lighting;

  The coffee is bitter,

  Murder is everywhere;

  Now the sky lights up only ruins.

  I went round and round in my bedroom,

  Corpses were fighting in my memory;

  There was really no hope any more.

  Down below, some women insulted each other

  Right next to the Monoprix shut since December.

  That day calm reigned,

  The gangs had retreated to the suburbs;

  I could smell napalm,

  The world became heavy.

  The news stopped around six o’clock,

  I felt my heart’s movements accelerate;

  The world became solid,

  Silent, the streets were empty

  And I felt death arrive.

  That day, it rained very hard.

  A station in the Yvelines

  Undamaged by the war

  At the end of the platform, a dog pees

  The conductor is in prayer.

  The metal of a sleeper train

  Rusting among the scrawny grass

  A blind man was selling socks,

  He belonged to the underworld.

  Hope deserted the city

  The day after the explosion,

  We were too subtle

  (A question of generation).

  The sun drowns, a green puddle

  On the horizon’s broken veins

  I no longer believe in levels of alert,

  The future is paralysed.

  When the meaning of things disappears

  In the middle of the afternoon

  In the gentleness of a Saturday,

  When paralysed by arthritis.

  The disappearance of railway sleepers

  On the iron tracks

  Happens just before the rain,

  Memories are exhumed.

  I think of my call signal

  Left at the pond’s edge

  I remember the real world

  Where I lived, long ago.

  Before, long before, there were beings

  Who gathered in a circle to escape from the wolves

  And to feel their warmth; they had to disappear,

  They were like us.

  We are gathered, our last words have died,

  The sea has disappeared

  One last time a few lovers embrace,

  The landscape is naked.

  Above our bodies pass Hertzian waves,

  They go around the world

  Our bodies are almost cold, death has to come,

  Death gentle and deep;

  Soon human beings will flee the world.

  Then will begin the dialogue of machines

  And information will fill, triumphant,

  The emptied corpse of the divine structure;

  And it will function till the end of time.

  Homages to humanity

  Multiply on the lawn

  There were twelve of them,

  Their life was very limited.

  They made cloths,

  Objects, little things,

  Their life was quite morose,

  They made coverings

  Shelters for their descendants,

  They had just a century to live

  But they could write books

  And they nourished beliefs.

  They fed sorrow

  And they modified nature

  Their universe was so hard;

  They had been so hungry, so afraid.

  THE DISAPPEARANCE

  We walk in the c
ity, our eyes meet

  And this defines our human presence;

  In the absolute calm of the weekend,

  We walk slowly at the edge of the station.

  Our clothes, too loose, shelter grey flesh

  Almost immobile at the end of day

  Our tiny souls, half-condemned,

  Writhe between the folds, then stop still.

  We have existed, that is our legend

  Some of our desires have built this city

  We have fought hostile powers,

  Then our wizened arms lost control

  And we have floated far from all possibilities;

  Life has gone cold, life has left us,

  We contemplate our half-erased bodies,

  In the silence emerges some sense data.

  We travel protected in the uniform light

  Amidst hills remodelled by man

  And the train has just reached its cruising speed

  We travel in the calm, in an Alsthom carriage,

  In the geometry of fragments of the Earth

  We travel protected by liquid crystals

  By perfect screens, by metal, glass,

  We travel slowly and dream of the void.

  To each his problems, to each his affairs;

  A dense and semi-social breathing

  Fills the carriage; neighbours sniff each other,

  They seem torn apart by their animal side.

  We travel protected in the middle of the Earth

  And our bodies draw closer in shells of emptiness

  Mid-journey our bodies are united,

  I want to get closer to your moistness.

  Buildings and people, a solitary lorry:

  We enter the city and the air gets fresher;

  We rejoin at last the productive mystery,

  In the soothing calm of bachelor factories.

  It is like a vein running beneath the skin, which the needle tries to reach,

  It is like a fire so beautiful you don’t want to put it out,

  The skin is hardened, in places almost blue, and yet the moment when the needle pierces is a bath of freshness,

  We walk in the night and our hands tremble slightly, yet our fingers seek each other, yet our eyes sparkle.

  It is morning in the kitchen and things are in their usual place,

  Through the window the ruins can be seen and in the sink some dishes linger,

  Yet everything is different, the novelty of the situation is infinite,

  Yesterday mid-evening, we tipped into the domain of the inevitable.

  At the moment when your tender fingers, little beasts, grabbed mine and began to press them gently

  I knew that it mattered very little that I be your lover at one moment or another

  I saw something form, which could not be understood with ordinary categories,

  After certain biological revolutions there truly are new skies, there truly is a new Earth.

  Almost nothing happened and yet it is impossible to free ourselves of the vertigo

  Something has begun to move, powers with which there is no question of compromise,

  Like those of opium or Christ, the victims of love are happy victims first of all

  And the life circulating in us this morning has just been increased to prodigious proportions.

  Yet it is the same light, in the morning, that arrives and increases

  But the world perceived through the eyes of two people has a completely different meaning;

  I no longer know if we are in love or in revolutionary action,

  After we both spoke, you bought a biography of Maximilien Robespierre.

  I know that resignation has just left with the ease of dead skin,

  I know that its departure fills me with an incredibly strong joy

  I know that a completely new period of history has just opened

  Today and for an indeterminate time we are penetrating another world, and I know that, in this other world, everything can be rebuilt.

  It is true that this world, where we have difficulty breathing

  Now inspires in us only evident disgust,

  A desire to flee without further ado,

  And we no longer read the headlines.

  We want to return to the ancient home

  Where our fathers lived under an archangel’s wing,

  We want to find again that strange morality

  Which sanctified life until the final hour.

  We want something like loyalty,

  Like a weaving of gentle dependencies,

  Something that goes beyond and contains existence;

  We can no longer live far from eternity.

  THE WILL TO FIGHT

  There were nights when we had lost even the will to fight;

  We shivered with fear, alone on the immense plain,

  Our arms were sore;

  There were nights uncertain and very dark.

  Like a wounded bird wheeling in the atmosphere

  Before crashing upon the road

  You stumbled, saying elementary words,

  Before collapsing upon the dusty ground;

  I took your hand.

  We had to choose another angle of attack,

  Aim towards the Good;

  I remember our Czechoslovakian pistols,

  Bought for next to nothing.

  Free, and conditioned by our ancient sorrows

  We crossed the plain

  And the rough hillocks resounded beneath our feet;

  Before the war, friend, wheat grew there.

  Like a cross planted in dry soil

  I stood firm, my brother;

  Like an iron cross with two outstretched arms.

  Today, I return to the house of the Father.

  Immobile grace

  Immobile grace

  Conspicuously crushing

  Flowing from the passage of civilisations

  Does not have death as corollary.

  The itemised lump

  Of the eye that closes

  In crushed space

  Contains the last term.

  THE IMMATERIALS

  The subtle, interstitial presence of God

  Has disappeared

  We now float in a deserted space

  And our bodies are naked.

  Floating, in the coldness of a suburban car park

  Facing the shopping centre

  We orient our torsos with supple movements

  Towards Saturday-morning couples

  Loaded with children, loaded with effort,

  And their children fight screaming over images of Grendizer.

  THE CORE OF THE MALAISE

  A white, overheated room, with numerous radiators (a bit like a classroom in a technical college).

  The bay window looks onto the modern, prefabricated suburbs of a semi-residential area.

  They don’t make you feel like going out, but staying in the room is disastrously boring

  (The game’s been up for a long time already, you only continue playing through habit).

  Sublime abstraction of the landscape.

  COURTENAY – AUXERRE NORD.

  We approach the Morvan foothills. Immobility, inside the compartment, is total. Béatrice is at my side. ‘It’s a good car,’ she tells me.

  The street lamps lean in a strange manner; you would think they were praying. Be that as it may, they begin to emit a faint yellow-orange light. The ‘yellow ray of sodium,’ claims Béatrice.

  Already, we have Avallon in view.

  The TGV Atlantique slipped through the night with terrifying efficiency; the lighting was discrete. Beneath walls of average grey plastic, human beings lay in their ergonomic seats. Their faces betrayed no emotion. To turn towards the window would be useless: the darkness was completely opaque. A few curtains, however, were drawn; their acid green composed a rather sad harmony with the dark grey of the carpet. The silence, almost absolute, was troubled only by the faint whining of Walkmans. M
y immediate neighbour, eyes closed, withdrew into a concentrated absence. Only the luminous play of the pictograms indicating the toilets, the telephone booths and the Cerberus bar betrayed a living presence in the carriage; sixty human beings were gathered there.

  Long and slender, made of grey steel marked by discrete coloured bands, the TGV Atlantique n°. 6557 was composed of twenty-three carriages. Between one thousand five-hundred and two thousand human beings had taken a seat there. We were flying at 300km/h towards the extreme limit of the Western world. And I suddenly had the sensation (we were crossing the night in padded silence, you could never guess our prodigious speed; the neon dispensed a moderate, pale and funereal light), I suddenly had the sensation that this long vessel of steel was carrying us (discreetly, efficiently, smoothly) towards the Realm of Shades, towards the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

  Ten minutes later, we arrived in Auray.

  The weather was nice; and I was walking along a dry and yellow hillside.

  The dry and irregular breathing of plants, in summer … that seem ready to die. The insects crackle, piercing the menacing, fixed vault of the white sky.

  After a certain amount of time, when you walk in the sun, in summer, the sensation of absurdity grows, imposes itself and invades space; it can be found everywhere. Even if on setting out you had a direction (which is alas very rare … most of the time, one is dealing with a ‘simple stroll’), this image of an aim evaporates, it seems to evaporate in the overheated air which burns you in short little waves as you advance in the implacable and fixed sunshine, in the sneaky complicity of dry grass, swift to burn.

  At the moment when a muggy heat begins to trap your neurons, it is too late. There is no time left to shake off with an impatient mane the blind wanderings of a captured mind, and slowly, very slowly, disgust, with its multiple rings, coils up and consolidates its position, right at the centre of the throne, the throne of dominations.

  WEDNESDAY. MAYENCE – RHINE VALLEY – KOBLENZ

  Evident duplicity of solitude. I see these old people seated around a table; there are at least ten of them. I could have fun counting them, but I am sure there are at least ten of them. And phwee! If only I could fly off to heaven, fly off to heaven straight away!