The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  Could things continue in this way for a long time? Well, unfortunately, yes. During my absence, I had received 732 faxes (and I must acknowledge, there too, that Isabelle had regularly changed the paper tray); I could spend the rest of my days running from one festival invitation to the next. From time to time, I’d stop by: a little caress for Fox, a little bit of Tranxene, and Bob’s your uncle. For the moment, however, I was in need of a complete rest. I therefore went to the beach, on my own, obviously—I wanked a little on the terrace while ogling naked teenage girls (I too had bought a telescope, but it wasn’t for looking at the stars, ha ha ha); in short, I was muddling through. I muddled more or less well; although, all the same, I almost threw myself off the cliff three times in two weeks.

  I revisited Harry, and he was on form; Truman, however, had aged. We were invited again to dinner, this time in the company of a Belgian couple who had just settled in the region. Harry had introduced the man as a Belgian philosopher. In reality, after completing his doctorate in philosophy, he had passed the civil service exam, then led the dreary life of a tax inspector (with conviction, however, for, as a socialist supporter, he believed in the benefits of high taxation). He had published, here and there, a few philosophical articles in journals of a materialist bent. His wife, a sort of gnome with short white hair, had also spent her life as a tax inspector. Oddly, she believed in astrology, and insisted on doing my horoscope. I was Pisces with Gemini in the ascendant, but for all I fucking cared I could well have been Poodle with Mechanical Digger in the ascendant, ha ha ha. This witty remark won me the esteem of the philosopher, who liked to smirk at his wife’s fads—they had been married for thirty-three years. He, for his own part, had always fought obscurantism; he came from a very Catholic family, and this, he assured me, with a little quaver in his voice, had been a great obstacle to his sexual development. “Who are these people? Who are these people?” I repeated to myself in despair as I fiddled with my herrings. (When he became nostalgic for his native Mecklenburg, Harry bought his food in a German supermarket in Almería.) Evidently, the two gnomes had not had any sex life, other than, perhaps, one that was vaguely procreative (subsequent events, in fact, were to reveal that they had begotten a son); they simply did not belong to that group of people who have access to sexuality. This did not prevent them from becoming indignant, criticizing the pope, bemoaning an AIDS virus that they would never have the chance to catch; all this made me feel like dying, but I restrained myself.

  Fortunately Harry intervened, and the conversation was raised to more transcendent subjects (the stars, infinity, etc.), which allowed me to tuck into my plate of sausages without trembling. Naturally, there too the materialist and the Teilhardian were in disagreement—I became conscious at that moment that they must have met up with each other often, drawing pleasure from this exchange, and that this could go on for thirty years, to their mutual satisfaction. We got onto the subject of death. After having fought all his life for a sexual liberation he had never experienced, Robert the Belgian now fought for euthanasia—which he had, on the contrary, every chance of experiencing. “And the soul? What about the soul?” gasped Harry. All in all, their little double-act was running smoothly; Truman fell asleep at about the same time as me.

  Hildegarde’s harp brought everyone into harmony. Ah yes, music; especially when the volume is down. There wasn’t even material here for a sketch, I told myself. I could no longer laugh at the idiotic militants of immorality, at the kind of remark: “It is, all the same, more pleasant to be virtuous when you have access to vice,” no, I couldn’t. Nor could I laugh anymore at the terrible distress of cellulite-ridden fiftysomething women, and their unfulfilled desire for passionate love; nor at the handicapped child they had succeeded in procreating by half raping an autistic man (“David is my sunshine”). All in all, I couldn’t laugh at anything anymore; I had reached the end of my career, that was clear.

  There was no lovemaking, that evening, as we went home through the dunes. We had to put an end to it all, however, and a few days later Isabelle announced her decision to leave. “I don’t want to be a burden,” she said. “I wish you all the happiness you deserve,” she said as well—and I still wonder to this day if it was a bitchy remark.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Go back to my mother’s, I suppose…it’s what women generally do in my situation, no?”

  It was the only moment, the only one, when she let a little bitterness show. I knew that her father had left her mother, ten years before, for a younger woman; the phenomenon was certainly becoming more widespread, but of course, there was nothing new about it.

  We behaved like a civilized couple. In all, I had earned forty-two million euros. Isabelle was happy with half of our assets, and she did not demand any compensation. This still added up to seven million euros; she wouldn’t be joining the ranks of the poor.

  “You could do a bit of sex tourism…,” I proposed. “In Cuba, there are some very nice men.”

  She smiled and nodded. “They prefer Soviet queers…,” she said lightheartedly, furtively imitating the style of my glory days. Then she became serious again and looked me straight in the eye (it was a very still morning; the sea was blue and slack).

  “Have you still not fucked any whores?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, me neither. So,” she continued, “you haven’t fucked for two years?”

  “No.”

  “Well, me neither.”

  Oh, we were little darlings, sentimental little darlings; and it was going to kill us.

  There was still the last morning, and the last walk; the sea was as blue as always, the cliffs just as black, and Fox trotting along beside us. “I’m taking him,” Isabelle had said abruptly. “It’s to be expected, he’s been with me longer; but you can have him when you want.” As civilized as you could get.

  Everything was already packed, the moving van was going to pass by the following day to transport her things to Biarritz—although a retired schoolteacher, her mother had bizarrely chosen to end her days in this region full of ultrarich bourgeois women who had nothing but contempt for her.

  We waited together another fifteen minutes for the taxi that would take her to the airport. “Oh, life will pass quickly…,” she said. It seemed to me that she was speaking mostly to herself; I said nothing in reply. Once she was in the taxi, she gave me a last wave with her hand. Yes; now, things were going to be very calm.

  Daniel24, 8

  IT IS NOT GENERAL PRACTICE to shorten human life stories, whatever the repugnance or boredom they may inspire in us. It is precisely this repugnance and boredom that we must cultivate, in order to distinguish ourselves from the species. It is on this condition, the Supreme Sister warns us, that the coming of the Future Ones will be made possible.

  If I am deviating here from this rule, in accordance with tradition uninterrupted since Daniel17, it is because the following ninety pages of the manuscript of Daniel1 have been made completely obsolete by scientific development.* At the time when Daniel1 was alive, male impotence was often attributed to psychological causes; we know today that it was essentially a hormonal phenomenon, in which psychological causes played only a small, and always reversible, part.

  A tormented meditation on the decline of virility, intercut with the at once pornographic and depressing description of failed attempts with various Andalusian prostitutes, these ninety pages contain, however, a lesson perfectly summed up for us by Daniel17 in the following lines, which I have extracted from his commentary:

  The aging of the human female encompassed, in fact, the degradation of such a large number of characteristics, as aesthetic as they were functional, that it is very difficult to determine which was the most painful, and it is almost impossible, in the majority of cases, to cite a single cause behind the choice of suicide.

  The situation seems to be very different in the case of the human male. Subject to aesthetic and functional degradati
ons as much as, if not more than, the female, he nevertheless managed to overcome them for as long as the erectile capacities of the penis were maintained. When these disappeared forever, suicide generally followed within two weeks.

  It is no doubt this difference that explains a curious statistical observation, already made by Daniel3: while in the last generations of the human species, the average age for departure was 54.1 years among women, it rose to 63.2 years among men.

  Daniel1, 9

  What you call dreaming is very real for the warrior.

  —André Bercoff

  I SOLD THE BENTLEY —it reminded me too much of Isabelle, and its ostentation was beginning to annoy me—in order to buy a Mercedes 600 SL, a car that in reality was just as expensive, but more discreet. All the rich Spaniards drove Mercedes—they weren’t snobs, the Spanish, they showed off in a conventional way; and also a cabriolet is better for the babes—known locally as chicas, a word I liked. The classified ads in Voz de Almería were explicit: piel dorada, culito melocotón, guapísima, boca supersensual, labios expertos, muy simpática, complaciente. A very beautiful and expressive language, naturally suited to poetry—you can rhyme almost everything. There were brothel bars, as well, for those who had difficulty visualizing the descriptions. Physically, the girls were in good shape, they corresponded to the wording of the ad, and they kept to the advertised price; as for the rest, well…They turned the television or CD player up too loud, turned the light down to a minimum, in other words they tried to cut themselves off; they hadn’t the vocation for it, that was clear. Obviously, you could oblige them to turn the volume down and turn the lights up; after all, they expected a tip, and every little thing counts. There are certainly people who get off on this kind of intercourse, and I could easily imagine the type; but I was quite simply not one of them. What’s more, most of the girls were Romanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian, in other words from one of those absurd countries that emerged from the implosion of the Eastern bloc; and one cannot say that Communism has particularly fostered sentimentality in human relations; it is, on the whole, brutality that is predominant among the ex-Communists—in comparison, Balzacian society, which emerged from the decomposition of royalty, seems a miracle of charity and gentleness. It is good to distrust doctrines preaching fraternity.

  It was only after Isabelle left that I truly discovered the world of men, in the course of pathetic wanderings along the virtually deserted highways of central and southern Spain. Except for the weekends and the start of the holidays, when you encounter families and couples, the highways are an almost exclusively male universe, populated by salesmen and truck drivers, a sad and violent world where the only publications available are porn mags and magazines for car maintenance, where the plastic revolving stand presenting a choice of DVDs under the title Tus mejores películas generally only enables you to complete your collection of Dirty Debutantes. This universe is not much talked about, and it’s true that there’s not much to say about it; no new form of behavior is experimented with in it, it can’t provide any valuable fodder for color supplements, in short it is a little-known world, and it gains nothing from being so. I formed no virile friendship, and more generally I felt close to no one during those few weeks, but that wasn’t a problem; in this universe no one is close to anyone, and even the smutty complicity of the tired waitresses who had pressed their sagging breasts into a “Naughty Girl” T-shirt could, I knew, only lead to copulation that came at a price, and was always too brief. I could, if push came to shove, start a fight with a heavy-goods truck driver and get my teeth smashed in in a parking lot, amid the gasoline fumes; that was basically the only possibility of adventure on offer in this universe. I lived in this way for a little more than two months, I burned thousands of euros on glasses of French champagne for mindless Romanian girls who, after all that, would still refuse, ten minutes later, to suck me off without a condom. It was on the Autovía Mediterráneo, precisely at the exit for Totana Sur, that I decided to put an end to this dismal ride. I had parked my car in the last available space in the parking lot of the hotel and restaurant Los Camioneros, where I went in to have a beer; the atmosphere inside was exactly what I’d come to expect over the previous weeks, and I stayed for ten minutes without really fixing my attention on anything, only conscious of a general, muffled weariness that made my movements more uncertain and tired, and of a certain gastric heaviness. On leaving I realized that a carelessly parked Chevrolet Corvette was blocking my car in. The prospect of returning to the bar and searching for the owner was enough to plunge me into a discouraged gloom; I leaned back against a concrete wall, trying to get the whole picture of the situation, but mostly smoking cigarettes. Out of all the sports cars available on the market, the Chevrolet Corvette, with its uselessly and aggressively virile lines, with its absence of true mechanical nobility wedded to its overall modest price, is undoubtedly the one that corresponds best to the notion of pimpmobile; what sort of sordid Andalusian macho type was I going to bump into? Like all individuals of his kind, the man undoubtedly had a solid understanding of cars, and was therefore perfectly poised to recognize that my car, being more discreet than his, cost three times more. To the act of virile self-assertion he had made by parking in such a way as to block me in, was therefore added, undoubtedly, an undercurrent of social hatred, and I was right to fear the worst. It took me three-quarters of an hour, and half a packet of Camels, to pluck up the courage to return to the bar.

  I immediately identified the individual, slouched at the end of the counter in front of a saucer of peanuts, letting his beer go warm while he shot, from time to time, desperate looks at the giant television screen where girls in hot pants gyrated their pelvises to a fairly slow groove; it was obviously a foam party, the outline of the girls’ buttocks became clearer and clearer, as they were molded by the hot pants, and the man’s despair was increasing. He was small, potbellied, and bald, doubtless around fifty years old, dressed in a jacket and tie, and a wave of sad compassion crashed over me; his Chevrolet Corvette was certainly not going to help him to pick up babes, it would just make him look, at best, like a fat old fart, and I found myself admiring the quotidian courage that made it possible, despite everything, for him to drive a Chevrolet Corvette. How could a suitably young and sexy girl do anything other than snigger at the sight of that little man getting out of his Chevrolet Corvette? I had to put a stop to this, despite everything, and I went over to him with all the smiley indulgence I could muster. As I had feared, he was combative at first, and tried to get the waitress to act as a witness—she didn’t even raise her eyes from the sink where she was washing glasses. Then he gave me a second look, and what he saw must have calmed him down—I myself felt so old, weary, unhappy, and mediocre: for obscure reasons, he must have concluded that the owner of the Mercedes SL was also a loser, almost a companion in misfortune, and he tried then to establish a male bond, offered me a beer, then a second one, and proposed that we end the evening at the New Orleans. To get out of it, I pretended that I still had a long road ahead of me—it is an argument that men generally respect. I was in reality less than fifty kilometers from my house, but I had just realized that I might as well continue my road movie at home.

  In fact, there was a highway a few kilometers from my residence, and beside it there was a similar kind of establishment. After leaving Diamond Nights, I drove, as usual, across the beach of Rodalquilar. My Mercedes 600 SL coupe skimmed over the sand; I activated the door-opening mechanism: in twenty-two seconds it transformed into a cabriolet. It was a splendid beach, almost completely deserted, of a geometrical flatness, with immaculate sand, and surrounded by cliffs with strikingly black vertical faces; a man graced with a real artistic temperament would undoubtedly have been able to make the most of this solitude, this beauty. For my part, I felt myself faced with infinity like a flea on a sheet of flypaper. I couldn’t give a fuck about this beauty, this geological transcendence, in fact I even found it all vaguely menacing. “The world i
s not a panorama,” notes Schopenhauer, dryly. I had probably placed too much importance on sexuality, in fact, that’s indisputable; but the only place in the world where I felt good was snug in the arms of a woman, snug inside her vagina; and at my age I saw no reason for that to change. The existence of the pussy was already in itself a blessing, I told myself, the simple fact that I could be in there, and feel good, already constituted sufficient reason for prolonging this dismal journey. Others hadn’t had this chance. “The truth is that nothing could suit me on this Earth,” noted Kleist in his diary just before he committed suicide on the banks of the Wannsee. I often thought of Kleist, in those days; some of his verse had been engraved on his tomb:

  Nun

  O Unsterblichkeit

  Bist du ganz mein.

  I had gone there in February, I had made the pilgrimage. There was twenty centimeters of snow, naked, black branches twisted beneath the gray sky, the atmosphere seemed filled with creeping movements. Every day, a fresh bouquet was placed on his grave; I had never met the person who did this. Goethe had come across Schopenhauer, then Kleist, without really understanding them; pessimistic Prussians, that’s what he must have thought, in both cases. The Italian poems of Goethe have always made me puke. Did you have to be born under a completely gray sky to understand? I didn’t think so; the sky was a brilliant blue, and no vegetation crept over the cliffs of Carboneras; this didn’t make much difference. No, I was certainly not exaggerating the importance of woman. And what’s more, coupling…geometrical perfection.