The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq

  Jed nodded. The movable dividing walls had been put away to the side, so that the exhibition space was at its maximum dimensions—thirty meters by twenty—and at the moment was occupied by big sculptures made of dark metal. They could have been inspired by traditional African statuary, but their subjects clearly recalled contemporary Africa: all the figures were in agony, or were massacring one another with machetes and Kalashnikovs. This juxtaposition of the violent actions with the fixed expressions of the figures produced a particularly sinister effect.

  “For storage,” Franz continued, “I’ve got a hangar in the Eure-et-Loir. The hygrometrical conditions aren’t great, and security’s nonexistent—in short, they’re very bad storage conditions—but, so far, I haven’t had any problems.”

  They said goodbye a few minutes later, leaving Jed extremely troubled. He wandered for a long time across Paris, getting lost twice, before returning home. And in the following weeks it was the same: he went out, walked aimlessly in the streets of this city that in the end he barely knew. From time to time he stopped to ask for directions at a brasserie. More often he needed the help of a map.

  One October afternoon, returning up the rue des Martyrs, he was suddenly seized by a vague feeling of familiarity. Farther up, he remembered, there was the boulevard de Clichy, with its sex shops and boutiques of erotic lingerie. Both Geneviève and Olga had liked, from time to time, to buy erotic outfits there in his company, but generally they went to Rebecca Ribs, much farther down the boulevard. No, there was something else.

  He stopped at the corner of the avenue Trudaine, looked right—and then he knew. A few dozen yards away were the offices where his father, now at the end of his career, worked. Jed had gone there only once, right after the death of his grandmother. The practice had just then moved into its new premises. After the contract for the cultural center in Port-Ambonne, they had felt the necessity of going upmarket, and the headquarters now had to be in a townhouse, preferably in a cobbled square, or at least in an avenue lined with trees. And the avenue Trudaine, which was wide, with an almost provincial calm thanks to its rows of plane trees, suited perfectly an architectural practice of some renown.

  Jean-Pierre Martin was in meetings all afternoon, the receptionist told him. “I’m his son,” Jed gently insisted. She hesitated, then picked up her phone.

  His father burst into the hallway a few minutes later, in shirtsleeves, his tie undone, holding a thin dossier. He was breathing heavily, under the effect of a violent emotion.

  “What’s happening? Has there been an accident?”

  “No, nothing. I was just passing through the area.”

  “I’m a bit busy, but … wait. We’ll go out and have a coffee.”

  The company was going through a difficult period, he explained to Jed. The new headquarters cost a lot, and they’d failed to land a big contract for the renovation of a tourist resort on the Black Sea coast; he’d just had a violent shouting match with one of his associates. He was breathing more normally, though, and was gradually calming down.

  “Why don’t you stop?” Jed asked. His father looked at him without reacting, with an expression of total incomprehension.

  “I mean, you’ve made a lot of money. You could certainly retire, and take advantage of life.” His father was still staring at him, as if the words weren’t registering, or he was not managing to give them a meaning. Then, after a minute, he asked, “But what would I do?” and his voice was that of a lost child.

  Springtime in Paris is often simply a continuation of winter—rainy, cold, muddy, and dirty. Summer there is unpleasant more often than not: the city is noisy and dusty; the hot seasons never last long and end after two or three days with a storm, followed by a sharp drop in temperature. It is only in autumn that Paris is truly a pleasant city, offering short sunny days, where the dry and clear air leaves an invigorating sensation of freshness. During the whole of October Jed continued his long strolls, if that’s what you would call an almost robotic walking during which no external impressions reached his brain, and no meditation or project came, either, to fill it, and whose only aim was to bring him each evening to a sufficient state of fatigue.

  One afternoon in early November, at about five, he found himself in front of Olga’s old flat in the rue Guynemer. That had to happen, he thought: trapped by his automatisms, he had followed, almost to the very second, the path he had taken every day for months. Speechless, he turned back to the Jardin du Luxembourg and collapsed on the first bench he could find. He was just next to that curious redbrick pavilion, adorned with mosaics, which occupies one of the corners of the garden, at the corner of the rue Guynemer and the rue d’Assas. In the distance, the setting sun bathed the chestnut trees with an extraordinary orangey and warm shade—almost an Indian yellow, thought Jed, and effortlessly the words of “Le Jardin du Luxembourg” came back in his memory:

  Another day

  Without love

  Another day

  Of my life

  The Luxembourg

  Has aged

  Is it the gardens?

  Is it me?

  I don’t know.

  Like many Russians, Olga adored Joe Dassin, especially the songs on his last album, with their resigned, lucid melancholy. Jed shivered, feeling an irrepressible crisis coming on, and when he remembered the words of “Hello Lovers” he began to cry.

  We loved like we leave each other

  Simply, with no thought of tomorrow,

  Tomorrow that comes a little too fast,

  Of farewells that come a little too easy.

  In the café on the corner of the rue Vavin he ordered a bourbon, and immediately noticed his mistake. After the comfort of the burning sensation in his throat, he was again engulfed by sadness, and tears streamed down his face. He looked around worriedly, but fortunately no one was paying him any attention; all the tables were taken by law students who were talking about rave parties or “junior associates,” in other words those things which interest law students. He could cry in peace.

  Once he had left he took a wrong turn, then wandered for a few minutes in a state of numb semi-consciousness and found himself standing in front of the Sennelier Frères shop in the rue de la Grande-Chaumière. In the window were displayed brushes, current-format canvases, pastels, and tubes of color. He went in and, without thinking, bought a basic “oil painting” box. Rectangular, made of beechwood, and divided into compartments, it contained twelve tubes of Sennelier extra-fine oil, an assortment of brushes, and a flask of thinner.

  These were the circumstances that began his “return to painting,” which would become the subject of so much comment.

  11

  Jed was not to remain faithful to the Sennelier brand, and his mature paintings are almost entirely made with Mussini oils by Schmincke. There are exceptions, and certain greens, particularly the cinnabar greens that give such a magical glow to the forests of California pine descending toward the sea in Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology, are borrowed from the Rembrandt range of oils by the firm Royal Talens. And for the whites he almost always used Old Holland oils, whose opacity he appreciated.

  Jed Martin’s first paintings, art historians have later emphasized, could easily lead you down the wrong track. By devoting his first two canvases—Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher, then Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager—to professions in decline, Martin could give the impression of nostalgia for a past age, real or fantasized, in France. Nothing, and this is the conclusion that has ended up emerging about all his works, was more foreign to his real preoccupations; and if Martin began by looking at two washed-up professions, it was in no way because he wanted to encourage lamentations on their probable disappearance: it was simply that they were indeed going to disappear soon, and it was important to fix their images on canvas while there was still time. For his third painting in the series of professions, Maya Dubois, Remote Maintenance Assistant, he devoted himself to a profes
sion that was in no way stricken or old-fashioned, a profession on the contrary emblematic of the policy of just-in-time production which had oriented the entire economic redeployment of Western Europe at the turn of the third millennium.

  In the first monograph he devoted to Martin, Wong Fu Xin develops a curious analogy based on colorimetry. The colors of the objects in the world can be represented by a certain number of primary colors; the minimum number, to achieve an almost realistic representation, is three. But you can perfectly build a colorimetric chart on the basis of four, five, six, or even more primary colors; the spectrum of representation would in this way become more extensive and subtle.

  In the same way, asserts the Chinese essayist, the productive conditions of a given society may be re-created by means of a number of typical professions, whose number, according to him (it is a figure he gives without any empirical evidence), can be fixed at between ten and twenty. In the numerically most important part of the Professions series, the one that art historians have taken the habit of entitling the Series of Simple Professions, Jed Martin portrays no fewer than forty-two typical professions, thus offering, for the study of the productive conditions of the society of his times, a spectrum of analysis that is particularly extensive and rich. The following twenty-two paintings, centered on confrontations and encounters, classically called the Series of Business Compositions, themselves aimed to give a relational and dialectical image of the functioning of the economy as a whole.

  The Series of Simple Professions took Jed Martin a little more than seven years to paint. During these years, he didn’t meet many people, and formed no new relationship—whether sentimental or simply friendly. He had moments of sensory pleasure: an orgy of Italian pasta after a raid on the Casino supermarket in the boulevard Vincent-Auriol; such-and-such an evening with a Lebanese escort whose sexual performances amply justified the ecstatic reviews she received on the site Niamodel.com. “Layla, I love you, you are the sunshine of my days in the office, my little oriental star,” wrote some unfortunate fiftysomethings, while Layla for her part dreamed of muscular men, virile, poor, and strong: this was the life, basically, as she saw it. Easily identified as a guy who was “a bit bizarre but nice, not at all dangerous,” Jed benefited with Layla from that kind of exception of extra-territoriality that has always been attributed to artists by the girls. It is maybe Layla, but more certainly Geneviève, his Malagasy ex-girlfriend, who is recalled in one of his most touching canvases, Aimée, Escort Girl, treated with an exceptionally warm palette based on umber, Indian orange, and Naples yellow. At the opposite extreme from Toulouse-Lautrec’s representation of a made-up, chlorotic, and unhealthy prostitute, Jed Martin paints a fulfilled young woman, both sensual and intelligent, in a modern flat bathed in light. With her back to the window, which opens onto a public garden since identified as the square des Batignolles, and simply dressed in a tight white miniskirt, Aimée is finishing putting on a tiny orange-yellow top that only very partially covers her magnificent breasts.

  Martin’s only erotic painting, it is also the first where openly autobiographical echoes have been uncovered. The second one, The Architect Jean-Pierre Martin Leaving the Management of His Business, was painted two years later, and marks the beginning of a genuine period of creative frenzy that would last for a year and a half and end with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology, subtitled The Conversation at Palo Alto, which many consider his masterpiece. It is astonishing to think that the twenty-two paintings of the Series of Business Compositions, often complex and in wide format, were made in just eighteen months. It is also surprising that Jed Martin finally hit a snag on a canvas, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market, which could have, in many regards, matched his Jobs-Gates composition. Analyzing this failure, Wong Fu Xin sees in it the reason for his return, a year later, to the Series of Simple Professions through his sixty-fifth and final painting. Here, the clarity of the Chinese essayist’s thesis carries conviction: in his desire to give an exhaustive view of the productive sector of the society of his time, Jed Martin was inevitably, at one moment or another in his career, going to portray an artist.

  PART TWO

  12

  Jed woke up with a start at about eight on the morning of 25 December. Dawn was breaking on the place des Alpes. He found a towel in the kitchen, wiped up his vomit, then contemplated the sticky debris of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market. Franz was right: it was time to organize an exhibition. He had been going round in circles for a few months, and it was beginning to rub off on his mood. You can work alone for years, it’s actually the only way to work, truth be told; but there always comes a moment when you feel the need to show your work to the world, less to receive its judgment than to reassure yourself about the existence of this work, or even of your own existence, for in a social species individuality is little more than a short piece of fiction.

  Thinking again of Franz’s exhortations, he wrote an e-mail reminder to Houellebecq, then made some coffee. A few minutes later, he felt nauseous reading his words. “In this festive period, which I imagine you are spending with your family …” What made him write such a load of rubbish? It was public knowledge that Houellebecq was a loner with strong misanthropic tendencies: it was rare for him even to say a word to his dog. “I know that you are very much in demand. Therefore please forgive me for taking the liberty of stressing again how important, in my view and that of my gallerist, your participation in the catalogue of my future exhibition would be.” Yes, that was better: a dose of toadying does no harm. “I attach a few photographs of my paintings, and I am at your complete disposal to present my work to you in a more complete manner, where and when you so wish. I am led to believe you live in Ireland; I am perfectly happy to come over if that is more convenient for you.” Good, that’ll do the trick, he thought, and he clicked the Send button.

  The square of the Olympiades shopping center was deserted on this December morning, and the high quadrangular buildings looked like dead glaciers. As he entered the cold shadow cast by the Omega tower, Jed thought again of Frédéric Beigbeder. Beigbeder was a close friend of Houellebecq, or at least he had that reputation; maybe he could intervene. But Jed had only an old cell-phone number, and anyway Beigbeder surely wouldn’t answer on Christmas Day.

  He did, however, reply. “I’m with my daughter,” he said angrily. “But I’m taking her back to her mother in a minute,” he added, toning down the reproach.

  “I’ve a favor to ask.”

  “Ha ha ha!” scoffed Beigbeder with contrived gaiety. “You know, you’re a wonderful guy. You haven’t called me for ten years. And then you call me, on Christmas Day, to ask a favor. You’re probably a genius. Only a genius could be so egocentric, autistic even … Okay, we’ll see each other in the Flore at seven,” the author of A French Novel concluded, unexpectedly.

  Jed arrived five minutes late and immediately spotted the writer at a table at the back. The neighboring tables were unoccupied, forming a sort of security perimeter with two meters’ radius. Some provincials entering the café, and even a few tourists, were nudging one another and pointing at him in wonderment. An acquaintance, penetrating the perimeter, kissed him before disappearing. There was certainly a bit of a financial shortfall for the establishment to make up (similarly, the illustrious Philippe Sollers had, it seems, a table reserved at the Closerie des Lilas that could be taken by no one else, whether or not he came to have lunch). This minimal loss of revenue was largely compensated for by the tourist attraction that the regular, attestable presence of the author of 99 Francs represented—a presence, what’s more, completely in keeping with the establishment’s historical vocation. By his courageous stands in favor of legalizing of drugs and granting legal status to prostitutes of both sexes, as well as the more consensual ones on illegal immigrants and the living conditions of prisoners, Frédéric Beigbeder had progressively become a sort of Sartre of the 2010s, and this to ge
neral surprise and even slightly to his own, the past predisposing him to play instead the role of a Jean-Edern Hallier, or even a Gonzague Saint-Bris. A demanding fellow traveler of Olivier Besancenot’s New Anticapitalist Party, which, he pointed out to Der Spiegel, risked drifting toward anti-Semitism, he had succeeded in making people forget the half-bourgeois, half-aristocratic origins of his family, and even the presence of his brother in the top echelons of French business. Sartre himself, it’s true, was hardly born destitute.

  Sitting in front of a Mauresque cocktail, the author stared melancholically at an almost empty metal pill case that now contained only a few specks of cocaine. Catching sight of Jed, he beckoned him to sit down at his table. A waiter quickly approached to take the order.

  “Uh, I don’t know. A Viandox? Does that still exist?”

  “A Viandox,” repeated Beigbeder pensively. “You really are a strange guy.”

  “I was surprised you remembered me.”

  “Oh, yes,” the author replied in a peculiarly sad voice. “Oh, yes, I remember you …”

  Jed explained what it was about. At the name of Houellebecq, he noticed, Beigbeder suddenly became tense. “I’m not asking you for his phone number,” Jed quickly added. “I’m just asking if you can phone him to talk about my request.”

  The waiter brought the Viandox. Beigbeder sat silently, deep in thought.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “Okay, I’m going to call him. With him, you never quite know how he’ll react; but in the circumstances it might be useful for him as well.”

  “You think he’ll accept?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “Is there anything that could persuade him?”

  “Well … This may surprise you, because he doesn’t have this reputation at all: money. In principle he doesn’t care about money, he lives on sweet fuck all; but his divorce has left him high and dry. What’s more, he’d bought flats in Spain at the seaside that are going to be repossessed without compensation, because of a law protecting the coastline with retroactive effect—a crazy story. In reality, I think he’s a bit hard up at the moment—it’s unbelievable, no, with all that he could have earned? So, there you go: if you offer him a lot of money, I think you’ve got a good chance.”