The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq

  The French Touch guide, on the other hand, proposed a range of limited but attestable pleasures. You could share the satisfaction of the owner of the Laughing Marmot when he concluded his introduction with this serene and assured sentence: “Spacious bedrooms with terrasses and Jacuzzi bathtubs, menus séduction, ten homemade jams at breakfast: you are well and truly in a hôtel de charme.” You could let yourself be carried away by the poetic prose of the manager of the Carpe Diem when he presented a visit to his establishment in the following terms: “A smile will lead you from the garden (Mediterranean species) to your suite, a place which will stimulate your senses. Then you will need only close your eyes to remember the scents of paradise, the fountain murmuring in the white marble Turkish bath which lets one simple truth filter through: ‘Here, life is beautiful.’ ” In the grandiose setting of the Château de Bourbon-Busset, whose descendants elegantly perpetuated the art of hospitality, you could contemplate deeply moving souvenirs (moving for the Bourbon-Busset family, probably) that went back to the Crusades; some bedrooms were fitted with waterbeds. This juxtaposition of Old France or terroir elements with contemporary hedonistic facilities sometimes had a strange effect, almost that of an error of taste; but it was perhaps this improbable mixture, Jed thought, that was sought by the chain’s clientele, or at least its core target. The factual promises in the presentation were kept all the same. The park of the Château des Gorges du Haut-Cézallier was supposed to be home to does, roe deer, and a little donkey; there was indeed a little donkey. While strolling in the gardens of the Vertical Inn, you were supposed to catch sight of Miguel Santamayor, an intuitive chef who carried out an “extraordinary synthesis of tradition and futurism”; in fact, you saw a guy who vaguely looked like a guru busying himself in the kitchen, until at the end of his “symphony of vegetables and seasoning” he personally came to offer you one of his favorite Havanas.

  They spent their last weekend, over Pentecost, in the Château de Vault de Lugny, a résidence d’exception whose sumptuous bedrooms opened onto a park of forty hectares whose original layout was attributed to Le Nôtre. The cuisine, according to the guide, “lifted to sublime heights a terroir of infinite wealth”; you were in the presence of “one of the most beautiful compendiums of France.” It was there, on the Monday of Pentecost, that Olga announced to Jed that she was returning to Russia at the end of the month. At that moment she was tasting a wild-strawberry jam, and some birds indifferent to any human drama were twittering in the park originally designed by Le Nôtre. A few meters away, a Chinese family were stuffing their faces with Belgian waffles and sausages. The sausages at breakfast had originally been introduced at the Château de Vault de Lugny to appeal to the desires of a traditionalist Anglo-Saxon clientele, who were attached to a fatty, high-protein breakfast; they had been put under discussion, in the course of a brief but decisive business meeting; the tastes of this new Chinese clientele, which were still uncertain and clumsily formulated, but apparently drawn to sausages, had led to this food line being preserved on the menu. Other hôtels de charme in Burgundy, during those same years, reached an identical conclusion, and it was thus that the Martenot Sausages and Salted Meat Company, operating in the region since 1927, escaped bankruptcy, and the “Social Affairs” segment of the regional news program on FR3.

  Olga, however, a girl in any case not very taken with protein, preferred the wild-strawberry jam, and she began to feel really nervous because she understood that her life was going to be decided there, in the next few minutes, and men were so difficult to work out these days—not so much at the start, when miniskirts always worked, but then they became more and more bizarre. Michelin’s big ambition was to strengthen its presence in Russia, one of its priority areas for expansion; her salary was going to be tripled, and she would have about fifty people working under her. It was a transfer that she could in no way refuse: in the eyes of top management, a refusal would have been not only incomprehensible but even criminal. A manager of a certain level has obligations not only in relation to the company but also to himself. He must look after and cherish his career like Christ does for the Church, or the wife for her husband. He at least owes it to himself to give the demands of his career that minimum of attention without which he proves to his dismayed superior that he is unworthy of rising above a subaltern position.

  Jed kept stubbornly silent, turning his spoon in a boiled egg, glancing up at Olga like a punished child.

  “You can come to Russia,” she said. “You can come whenever you like.”

  She was young, or more precisely she was still young, she still imagined that life offered various possibilities, that a human relationship could go through successive and contradictory developments.

  A breeze rustled the curtains of the French windows opening onto the park. The twittering of the birds suddenly became louder, then stopped. The table of Chinese had disappeared without any warning; they had in some way dematerialized. Jed was still silent, and then he put down his spoon.

  “You are taking time to reply,” she said. “Little Frenchman,” she added with gentle reproach. “Little indecisive Frenchman …”

  9

  On Sunday 28 June, mid-afternoon, Jed accompanied Olga to Roissy airport. It was sad: something inside him understood that they were living a moment of mortal sadness. The fine, calm weather did not favor the expression of the appropriate feelings. He could have interrupted the process of breaking up, thrown himself at her feet, begged her not to take this plane; she probably would have listened to him. But what would you do next? Look for a new flat (the lease on the rue Guynemer expired at the end of the month)? Cancel the movers scheduled for the following day? It was possible; the technical difficulties were not enormous.

  Jed wasn’t young—strictly speaking he never had been—but he was a relatively inexperienced man. In terms of human beings he knew only his father, and still not very well. This could not encourage in him any great optimism about human relations. From what he had been able to observe, the existence of men was organized around work, which occupied most of life, and took place in organizations of variable dimension. At the end of the years of work opened a briefer period, marked by the development of various pathologies. Moreover, some human beings, during the most active period of their lives, tried to associate in micro-groups called families, with the aim of reproducing the species; but these attempts, most often, came to a sudden end, for reasons linked to the “nature of the times,” he thought vaguely while sharing an espresso with his lover (they were alone at the counter of the Segafredo bar, and, more generally, there was little activity in the airport, the hubbub of the inevitable conversations muffled by a silence that seemed consubstantial to the place, as in certain private clinics). But this was only an illusion. The general transport system of human beings, which played such an important role today in the accomplishment of human destinies, simply marked a short pause before starting a sequence of functioning at full capacity, during the period of the first holiday departures. It was, however, tempting to see in it a homage, a discreet homage from the social machinery to their love which had been so quickly interrupted.

  Jed did not react when Olga, after one last kiss, walked toward the passport control, and it was only on returning home, in the boulevard de l’Hôpital, that he realized that he had just, almost unknowingly, entered a new stage in the course of his life. He understood this because everything that, a few days previously, had constituted his world suddenly seemed completely empty to him. Road maps and photographic prints were spread out by the hundreds on the floor, and not a single one of them meant anything anymore. In resignation, he went out and bought two rolls of “garden waste” bags at the Casino supermarket in the boulevard Vincent-Auriol, then went home and began to fill them. Paper’s heavy, he thought. He would need to make several trips to take the bags down. It was months, or rather years, of work that he was in the process of destroying; and yet he didn’t hesitate for one moment. Many years later, when he
had become famous—extremely famous, truth be told—Jed would be asked numerous times what it meant, in his eyes, to be an artist. He would find nothing very interesting or original to say, except one thing, which he would consequently repeat in each interview: to be an artist, in his view, was above all to be someone submissive. Someone who submitted himself to mysterious, unpredictable messages, that you would be led, for want of a better word and in the absence of any religious belief, to describe as intuitions, messages which nonetheless commanded you in an imperious and categorical manner, without leaving the slightest possibility of escape—except by losing any notion of integrity and self-respect. These messages could involve destroying a work, or even an entire body of work, to set off in a radically new direction, or even occasionally no direction at all, without having any project at all, or the slightest hope of continuing. It was thus, and only thus, that the artist’s condition could, sometimes, be described as difficult. It was also thus, and only thus, that it distinguished itself from other professions or trades, to which he would pay homage in the second part of his career, the one which would earn him worldwide renown.

  The following day, he took down the first garbage bags, then slowly, meticulously dismantled his photographic camera before putting away the bellows, the ground glasses, the lenses, the digital back, and the body of the apparatus in their traveling cases. The weather in Paris remained fine. In the middle of the afternoon he switched on his television to follow the prologue of the Tour de France, which was won by an unknown Ukrainian rider. Once he had switched it off, he told himself he should probably phone Patrick Forestier.

  The director of communications of the Michelin France group greeted the news without real emotion. If Jed was deciding to stop making photos of Michelin maps, nothing could force him to continue; he could stop at any moment, as was spelled out in the contract. In fact he almost gave the impression that he didn’t care, and Jed was rather surprised when he proposed a meeting for the next morning.

  Not long after his arrival at the office in the avenue de la Grande Armée, he understood that what Forestier really wanted was to hold forth, to air his professional concerns to a sympathetic listener. With Olga’s transfer, he had just lost an intelligent, devoted, and polyglot colleague; and, almost unbelievably, for the moment no one was offering him a replacement. In his bitter terms, he had been “completely fucked over” by the general management. Obviously she was leaving for Russia, obviously it was her country, obviously those fucking Russians were buying billions of tires, with their fucking potholed roads and fucking awful climate; nevertheless, Michelin remained a French company, and things would not have turned out this way even a few years ago. Until very recently, the desiderata of the French branch had been orders, or at least they were given special attention; but ever since the foreign institutional investors had taken the majority of capital in the group all that was well and truly over. Yes, things had truly changed, he repeated with morose delectation, obviously the interests of Michelin France no longer counted for much by comparison with Russia, not to mention China, but if that was to continue you had to wonder if he wasn’t to return to Bridgestone, or even Goodyear. I mean, that’s between you and me, he said, suddenly afraid.

  Jed assured him he would be completely discreet, and tried to redirect the conversation back to his own case. “Ah, yes, the Internet site …” Forestier seemed only just then to remember it. “Ah, well, we’re going to add a message indicating that you consider this series of works over. The previous prints will remain on sale. Do you have any objection?” Jed saw none. “Besides, there’s not many left, they’ve sold very well,” Forestier continued in a voice that conveyed a touch of revived optimism. “We will also continue to state in our publicity that the Michelin maps have been the basis of an artistic work unanimously praised by the critics. That doesn’t bother you, either?” It in no way bothered Jed.

  Forestier felt much brighter when he accompanied Jed to the door of his office, and while warmly shaking his hand he concluded: “I’ve been very happy to know you. It was win-win between us, absolutely win-win.”

  10

  Nothing, or almost nothing, happened for several weeks; and then one morning, when coming back from shopping, Jed saw a man of about fifty, dressed in jeans and an old leather jacket, who was waiting in front of the entrance to his block of flats; he seemed to have been there for a long time.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry to approach you like this, but I haven’t found any other way. I’ve seen you in the neighborhood several times already. Am I right in thinking you’re Jed Martin?”

  Jed nodded. The voice of his interlocutor was that of an educated man who was accustomed to speaking; he looked like a Belgian situationist, or a proletarian intellectual—from his strong, worn hands, you guessed that he had indeed done manual labor.

  “I’m familiar with your work using road maps, and I’ve followed it almost from the start. I’m also from around here.” He held out his hand. “I’m Franz Teller. I own the gallery.”

  On the way to his gallery in the rue de Domrémy (he had bought the premises just before the area became more or less fashionable; it had been, he said, one of the few good ideas in his life), they stopped to drink something at Chez Claude, in the rue du Château-des-Rentiers, which would later become their habitual café, and give Jed the subject for his second painting in the Series of Simple Professions. The establishment persisted in serving glasses of cheap red wine and pâté and gherkin sandwiches for the last “working-class” pensioners of the thirteenth arrondissement. They were dying one by one, without being replaced by new customers.

  “I read in an article that, since the end of the Second World War, eighty percent of the cafés have disappeared in France,” remarked Franz while looking around the place. Not far from them, four pensioners were silently pushing cards around on the Formica table, according to incomprehensible rules that seemed to belong to the prehistory of card games (belote? piquet?). Farther away, a fat woman with broken veins on her face downed her pastis in a single gulp. “People have begun to spend half an hour over lunch, to drink less alcohol as well; and then the coup de grâce was the smoking ban.”

  “I think it’ll come back, in different forms,” Jed said. “There has been a long historical phase of increased productivity, which is reaching an end, at least in the West.”

  “You have a really strange way of seeing things …” Franz said after taking a long look at him. “It had interested me, your work on Michelin maps, really interested me; however, I wouldn’t have taken you in my gallery. You were, I would say, too sure of yourself; that didn’t seem to me completely normal for someone so young. And then, when I read on the Internet that you had decided to stop the map series, I decided to come and see you. To propose that you be one of the artists I represent.”

  “But I’m not at all sure what I’m going to do. I don’t even know if I want to continue with art at all.”

  “You don’t understand,” Franz said patiently. “It’s not a particular art form, or manner, that interests me, it’s a personality, a view of the artistic gesture, of its situation in society. If you came here tomorrow with a simple sheet of paper, torn from a spiral notebook, on which you’d written ‘I don’t even know if I want to continue with art at all,’ I would exhibit this sheet without hesitation. Yet I’m not an intellectual. But you interest me.

  “No, no, I’m not an intellectual,” he insisted. “I try to look more or less like an intellectual from the fashionable side of town, because it’s useful in my milieu, but I’m not one, I never even got past the baccalaureate. I started by putting on and taking down exhibitions, and then I bought this little premise, and I had a few strokes of luck with artists. But I’ve always made my choices intuitively, uniquely so.”

  They then visited the gallery, which was bigger than Jed had imagined, with a high ceiling and concrete walls supported by metal girders. “It was a mechanical construction factory,” Franz tol
d him. “They went bust in the mid-eighties, then it stayed empty for quite a long time, until I bought it. There was a lot of cleaning work to be done, but it was worth it. It’s a beautiful space, I find.”