The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq

  Asubha, he now realized, had been a total success, so much so that he would have recommended it without hesitation to any policeman. He had not, however, become a Buddhist, and even if his feelings of repulsion at the sight of a corpse had been reduced by notable proportions, he still felt hatred for the murderer, hatred and fear. He wanted to see the murderer annihilated, eradicated from the surface of the globe. On passing through the writer’s door, enveloped by the rays of the setting sun which illuminated the meadow, he rejoiced at the persistence, in him, of that hatred, which was necessary, he thought, for effective police work. The rational motivation, that of the quest for truth, was not generally sufficient; it was, however, sometimes unusually strong. He felt confronted by a complex, monstrous but rational mind, probably that of a schizophrenic. On their return to Paris, they would have to consult the files of serial killers, and probably ask for the delivery of foreign files, as he had no memory of such a crime ever being committed in France.

  When he left the house he saw Ferber among his team, giving them instructions: lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t heard the cars arrive. There was also a big guy, in suit and tie, whom he didn’t know—probably the deputy public prosecutor from Montargis. He waited for Ferber to finish distributing the tasks to explain again what he wanted: general shots of the crime scene, wide shots.

  “I’m returning to Paris,” he then announced. “You coming with me, Christian?”

  “Yes, I think everything’s in place. Will we have a meeting tomorrow morning?”

  “Not too early. Around midday will be fine.” He knew they would have to work late, no doubt until dawn.

  28

  Night was falling when they got onto the A10 motorway. Ferber turned the cruise control to 80 mph and asked if Jasselin minded him putting on some music. He replied no.

  There is perhaps no music that expresses better than Franz Liszt’s last pieces of chamber music that funereal and gentle feeling of the old man whose friends are all dead, who in some way already belongs to the past and who in turn feels death approaching, who sees it as a sister, a friend, the promise of a return to the childhood home. In the middle of “Prayer to the Guardian Angels,” Jasselin began to think about his youth, his student days.

  Quite ironically, he had interrupted his medical studies between the first and second years because he could no longer bear the dissections, nor even the sight of corpses. Law had immediately interested him a lot, and like almost all his classmates he considered a career as a lawyer, but his parents’ divorce was to make him change his mind. It was a divorce between old people; he was already twenty-three, and their only child. In young people’s divorces, the presence of children, whose care they have to share, and who are loved more or less despite everything, often lessens the violence of the confrontation; but in old people’s divorces, where there remain only financial and inheritance interests, the savagery of the fight no longer knows any limits. He had then realized exactly what a lawyer is, he had got a full sense of that mixture of deceit and laziness which sums up the professional behavior of a lawyer, and most particularly of a lawyer specializing in divorce. The procedure had lasted more than two years, two years of endless struggle at the end of which his parents felt for each other a hatred so violent that they were never to see or even phone each other for the rest of their lives, and all that just to reach a divorce agreement of depressing banality, that any cretin could have written in a quarter of an hour after reading Divorce for Dummies. It was surprising, he’d thought several times, that spouses engaged in divorce proceedings do not more frequently murder their former partners—either directly or via a professional. The fear of the gendarme, he realized, was undoubtedly the true basis of human society, and it was in some way natural that he took the police entrance exam. He had entered at a good rank and, being from Paris, did a year’s training at the police station in the thirteenth arrondissement. It was demanding. Nothing, in all the cases he would be confronted with later, was to surpass in complexity and impenetrability the settling of accounts in the Chinese mafia, which he’d been confronted with at the start of his career.

  Among the students at the police academy of Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d’Or, many dreamed of a career at the quai des Orfèvres, sometimes since childhood. Some had joined the police solely for this reason, so he was a bit surprised that his application for a transfer to the crime squad was accepted, after five years’ service in local police stations. He had then just set up home with a woman he’d met while she was studying economics, who then went into teaching and was subsequently appointed a lecturer at the University of Paris–Dauphiné; but he never considered marrying her, or even having a civil partnership: the mark left by his parents’ divorce was to remain indelible.

  “Should I drop you off at your place?” Ferber asked him gently. They had arrived at the porte d’Orléans. He noticed that they hadn’t exchanged a word during the entire journey; lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t even noticed the stops at the tollbooths. Anyway, it was too early to say anything about the case; a night would allow them to settle, to absorb the shock. But he had no illusions: given the horror of the crime, and the fact that, what’s more, the victim was a personality, things would move very quickly; the pressure was going to be enormous. The press had not yet been informed, but this respite would last only one night; that very evening, he was going to have to phone the detective chief inspector on his cell phone. And the latter, probably, would immediately call the prefect of police.

  He lived in the rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, almost at the corner of the rue Poliveau, two steps from the Jardin des Plantes. At night, during their nocturnal strolls, they sometimes heard the trumpeting of the elephants and the impressive roaring of the wild cats—lions? panthers? cougars?—they were unable to tell them apart by the noise. They could also hear, especially when there was a full moon, the conjugated howling of the wolves, which plunged Michou, their Bolognese bichon, into fits of atavistic and insurmountable terror. They were childless. A few years after they had begun living together, and while their sex life was—according to the classic expression—“completely satisfying,” and Hélène took “no particular precaution,” they decided to consult a doctor. Some slightly humiliating but quick examinations showed he was oligospermic. The name of the affliction appeared, in this case, quite euphemistic; his ejaculations, besides being of moderate quantity, didn’t contain an insufficient quantity of spermatozoa, they didn’t contain any spermatozoa at all. Oligospermia can have very different origins: testicular varicocela, testicular atrophy, hormonal deficit, chronic infection of the prostate, flu, or other causes. Most of the time it has nothing to do with virile strength. Some men who produce very few or no spermatozoa can have hard-ons like stags, while men who are almost impotent can have ejaculations so abundant and fertile that they could repopulate Western Europe; the conjunction of these two qualities is enough to characterize the male ideal promoted in pornographic productions. Jasselin didn’t fit into this perfect configuration: if he could still, aged over fifty, gratify his partner with firm and durable erections, he would certainly not have been able to offer her a sperm shower, should she have so desired; his ejaculations, when they took place, were no more than a teaspoonful.

  Oligospermia, the main cause of male sterility, is always difficult and often impossible to treat. There remained only two solutions: the spermatozoa of a male donor, or adoption. After discussing it several times, they decided to give up. Hélène, in truth, didn’t have that strong a desire to have a child, and a few years later it was she who proposed that they buy a dog. In a passage where he laments French decadence and the fall in the birth rate (already in the news in the 1930s), the fascist author Drieu La Rochelle imitates, in order to attack it, the conversation between a decadent French couple of his times, which goes more or less like this: “And then Kiki, the dog—that’s easily enough to amuse us.” She was basically in total agreement with this view, she ended up confessing to Jasselin. A dog was a
s amusing as, and even much more amusing than, a child, and if she had at one moment considered having a child, it was above all out of conformism, a little also to please her mother. But in fact she didn’t really like children, she had never really liked them; nor did he like children when he thought about it. He didn’t like their natural and systematic selfishness, their innate ignorance of the law, their utter immorality that required an exhausting and almost always fruitless education. No, he really didn’t like children, or in any case human children.

  He heard a screeching on his right and noticed suddenly that they had stopped outside his home, possibly for a long time. The rue Poliveau was deserted under the line of streetlights.

  “Sorry, Christian,” he said, embarrassed. “I was … distracted.”

  “No problem.”

  It was only nine, he thought as he climbed the stairs, and Hélène had probably waited to have dinner with him. She liked to cook. Sometimes he accompanied her on Sunday mornings when she did her shopping at the market in the rue Mouffetard; every time he was charmed by that corner of Paris, the Saint-Médard church by its little square, with a weathercock on top of the steeple, just like a village church.

  Indeed, on arriving on the third-floor landing, he was greeted by the characteristic smell of rabbit in mustard sauce and the joyful yapping of Michou, who had recognized his footsteps. He turned his key in the lock. They were an old couple, he thought, a traditional couple, of a model quite rare in the 2010s among people their age, but which again, it seemed, constituted for young people an ideal to be hoped for, although it was generally inaccessible. He was aware of living on an improbable islet of happiness and peace; he was aware that they had created for themselves a sort of peaceful niche, far from the noises of the world, of an almost childlike mildness, in absolute opposition to the barbarism and violence that confronted him every day in his work. They had been happy together; they were still happy together, and probably would be until death do them part.

  He took Michou, who was leaping and yapping happily, in his hands and lifted him to his face, the little body frozen in an ecstatic joy. If the origin of bichons goes back to antiquity (statues of bichons were found in the tomb of the pharaoh Ramses II), the introduction of the Bolognese bichon to the court of François I came as a present from the duke of Ferrara; the delivery, accompanied by two miniatures from Correggio, was enormously appreciated by the French sovereign, who judged the animal “more lovable than a hundred maidens” and sent the duke military aid that was decisive in his conquest of the principality of Mantua. The bichon then became the favorite breed of several French kings, including Henri II, before being dethroned by the pug and the poodle. Unlike such dogs as the Shetland or the Tibetan terrier, who have only lately attained the status of pet dogs after a difficult past as working dogs, the bichon seems from the start to have had no reason to exist other than to bring joy and happiness to human beings. It has acquitted itself of this task with great constancy, being patient with children and gentle with old people, for innumerable generations. It suffers enormously from being alone, and this must be taken into account when buying a bichon: any absence of its masters will be considered by it an abandonment, and its entire world, the structure and essence of its world, will collapse in an instant. It will be subject to severe bouts of depression and will frequently refuse to eat; in fact, you are strongly advised never to leave a bichon alone, even for a few hours. The French university system had ended up accepting that, and Hélène could take Michou to her classes, or at least the habit had taken hold, without any formal authorization. He stayed calmly in his carrier, moving a little, sometimes asking to come out. Hélène would then put him on the desk, to the joy of the students. He walked across the desk for a few minutes, looking up from time to time at his mistress, occasionally reacting with a yawn or a brief bark to such-and-such a quotation from Schumpeter or Keynes; then he returned to his flexible bag. On the other hand, the airline companies, intrinsically fascist organizations, refused to display the same tolerance, and they had been obliged, with regret, to abandon any plans for long-distance travel. They left by car every summer in August, confining themselves to the discovery of France and neighboring countries. With its status classically categorized by jurisprudence as belonging to the individual home, the car remained, for pet owners as well as for smokers, one of the last spaces of freedom, one of the last temporary autonomous zones available to humans at the start of the third millennium.

  It wasn’t their first bichon: they had bought his predecessor and father, Michel, shortly after the doctors had informed Jasselin of the probably incurable nature of his sterility. They had been very happy together, so much so that they were genuinely shocked when Michel was struck down with dirofilariasis, at the age of eight. Dirofilariasis is a parasitic illness; the parasite is a nematode that lodges in the right ventricle of the heart and in the pulmonary artery. The symptoms are increased tiredness, then coughing, and heart trouble that can provoke fainting. The treatment is not without risks: several dozen worms, some of which can reach thirty centimeters in length, sometimes coexist in the dog’s heart. For several days, they feared for its life. The dog is a sort of definitive child, more docile and gentle, a child who could be said to have stopped growing at the age of reason, but it is also a child which will be outlived: to accept to love a dog is to accept to love a being which will, inevitably, be torn from you, and, curiously, they had not become aware of that before Michel’s illness. On the day after he was cured, they decided to give him descendants. The breeders they consulted displayed certain misgivings: they had waited too long, the dog was already a bit old, the quality of his spermatozoa risked being degraded. Finally, one of them, based near Fontainebleau, agreed, and from the union of Michel and a young bitch called Lizzy Lady de Heurtebise were born two pups, a male and a female. As owners of the stud (according to the classic expression), custom gave them the choice of the first puppy. They chose the male, which they called Michou. It had no apparent imperfection, and, contrary to their fears, was accepted very well by its father, who did not display any particular jealousy.

  After a few weeks, however, they noticed that Michou’s testicles had not yet dropped, which began to become abnormal. They consulted one vet, then another: both agreed that the sire had been too old. The second hazarded the hypothesis of a surgical intervention before changing his mind, declaring it dangerous and almost impossible. It was a terrible blow for them, much more than Jasselin’s own sterility had been. This poor dog not only would have no descendants but also would experience no sexual drive or satisfaction. It would be a diminished dog, incapable of transmitting life, cut off from the elementary appeal of the race and limited in time—definitively.

  Gradually they got used to the idea, just as they realized that their little dog wouldn’t miss the sexual life of which it had been deprived. Anyway, dogs are scarcely hedonistic or libertine, and any kind of erotic refinement is unknown to them. The satisfaction they feel at the moment of coitus doesn’t go beyond the brief and mechanical relief of the life instincts of the species. The bichon’s willpower is in all cases very weak; but Michou, delivered from the ultimate attachments of the propagation of the genome, seemed even more submissive, gentle, joyful, and pure than his father had been. He was an absolute mascot, innocent and flawless, whose life was entirely devoted to his adored masters, a continual and unfailing source of joy. Jasselin was by this point approaching fifty. While watching that small being play with its soft toys on the living-room carpet, he was occasionally, despite himself, filled with dark thoughts. Marked no doubt by the ideas fashionable in his generation, he had up until then considered sexuality to be a positive power, a source of union that increased the concord between humans through the innocence of shared pleasure. On the contrary, he now saw in it more and more often the struggle, the brutal fight for domination, the elimination of the rival and the hazardous multiplication of coitus without any reason other than ensuring the maximum
propagation of genes. He saw in it the source of all conflict, of all massacres and suffering. Sexuality increasingly appeared to him as the most direct and obvious manifestation of evil. And his career in the police was not going to change his mind: the crimes which were not motivated by money were motivated by sex. It was one or the other. Mankind seemed incapable of imagining anything beyond it, at least concerning crime. The new case on their hands seemed original at first sight, but it was his first murder in at least three years, and the uniformity of criminal motives was, on the whole, tedious. Like most of his colleagues, Jasselin rarely read detective novels; he had, however, the previous year, come across a book which wasn’t, strictly speaking, a novel, but the memoirs of a former private detective who had worked in Bangkok, and who had chosen to retrace his career in the form of about thirty short stories. In almost all the cases, his clients were Westerners who’d fallen in love with a young Thai girl, and who wanted to know if, as she assured them, she was faithful in their absence. And in almost every case the girl had one or several lovers—with whom she blithely spent their money—and often a child from a previous union. In a sense it was certainly a bad book, or at least a bad detective novel: the author made no imaginative effort and never tried to vary the motives or the plots; but it was precisely this crushing monotony that gave it a unique flavor of authenticity, of realism.

  “Jean-Pierre!” Hélène’s voice came to him as if muffled, but then he came back to full consciousness and realized that she was standing a a meter in front of him, her hair undone, wearing a housecoat. He was still clutching Michou, his arms raised to chest height, and had been for a time that was difficult to calculate; the little dog looked at him with surprise, but without fear.