Basically I didn’t know, and I threw myself into quite a long explanation, which went back to when I was her age—her agent had already told me that she was twenty-two. It emerged from the story that I had led quite a sad and solitary life, marked by hard labor, and intercut with frequent periods of depression. Words came easily to me, I was speaking in English, and from time to time she had me repeat a sentence. All in all I was going to drop not just this film but almost everything, in conclusion I said I no longer felt the least ambition, or rage to win or anything of that kind, it seemed to me that at this point in my life I was truly tired.
She looked at me perplexed, as if the word seemed to her to be badly chosen. Yet that was it, perhaps in my case it was not a physical tiredness, rather a nervous one, but is there actually a difference? “I’ve lost faith…,” I said finally. “Maybe it’s better…,” she said; then she put a hand on my sex. Nuzzling her head in the hollow of my shoulder, she gently pressed my cock between her fingers.
In the hotel room, she told me a little more about her life. Certainly you could describe her as an actress, she had played in sitcoms and police series—where, generally, she was raped and strangled by more or less numerous psychopaths—and a few advertisements as well. She had even taken the starring role in a Spanish feature film, but it had not yet been released, and anyway it was a terrible film; Spanish cinema, she claimed, was on its last legs.
She could go abroad, I said; in France, for example, they still made films. Yes, but she didn’t know if she was a good actress, or, besides, whether she wanted to be an actress. In Spain she managed to work from time to time, thanks to her atypical physique; she was conscious of this blessing, and of its relative nature. Basically she considered her work as an actress to be nothing more than odd-jobbing, better paid than serving pizzas or distributing flyers for a disco night, but more difficult to find. Otherwise, she studied piano and philosophy. And, above all, she wanted to live.
Rather like the studies pursued by an accomplished young lady of the nineteenth century, I told myself mechanically as I unbuttoned her jeans. I have always had trouble with jeans, with their big metal buttons, and she had to help me. However, I immediately felt good inside her, I think that I had forgotten that it was so good. Or perhaps it had never been so good, perhaps I had never felt so much pleasure. At forty-seven; life is strange.
Esther lived alone with her sister, who was forty-four and had been more like a mother to her; her real mother was half insane. She did not know her father, even by name, she had never seen a photo of him, nothing.
Her skin was very soft.
Daniel25, 1
AT THE MOMENT when the protective fence closed, the sun pierced between two clouds, and the whole of the residence was bathed in a blinding light. The paint on the outside walls contained a small quantity of slightly radioactive radium, which gave effective protection from the magnetic clouds, but increased the reflectivity of the buildings; the wearing of protective glasses, in the first days, was recommended.
Fox came toward me, weakly wagging his tail. Canine companions rarely survive the disappearance of the neohuman with whom they have spent their lives. Of course, they recognize the genetic identity of the successor, whose body odor is identical, but in the majority of cases this is not sufficient, they stop playing and eating and die quickly, in the space of a few weeks. I thus knew that the beginning of my effective existence would be marked by mourning; I also knew that this existence would unfold in a region distinguished by a large density of savages, where the instructions on protection should be rigorously followed; what’s more, I was prepared for the basic elements of a classical life.
What I did not know, however, and which I discovered on entering the office of my predecessor, was that Daniel24 had made some handwritten notes without reporting them to the IP address of his commentary—which was rather unusual. Most of them displayed a curious, disabused bitterness—like this one, scribbled on a page taken from a spiral-bound notebook:
Insects bang between the walls,
Limited to their tedious flight
Which carries no message other
Than the repetition of the worst.
Others seemed marked by a strangely human weariness, a sensation of vacuity:
For the past months, not the slightest inscription
And nothing in the world worthy of inscription.
In both cases, he had proceeded in uncoded mode. Without being directly prepared for this eventuality, I was not totally surprised: I knew that the line of Daniels had, since its founder, been predisposed to a certain form of doubt and self-deprecation. I was, however, shocked to discover this final note, which he had left on his bedside table, and which, given the state of the paper, had to be very recent:
Reading the Bible at the swimming pool
In a down-at-heel hotel,
Daniel! Your prophecies drain me
The sky has the color of drama.
The humorous levity, the self-irony—as well as, besides, the direct allusion to human elements of life—were here so marked that such a note could easily have been attributed to Daniel1, our distant ancestor, rather than to one of his neohuman successors. The conclusion was unavoidable: by plunging into the at once ridiculous and tragic biography of Daniel1, my predecessor had let himself be gradually impregnated by certain features of his personality; in a sense, this was exactly the goal sought by the Founders; but, contrary to the teachings of the Supreme Sister, he had not been able to keep a sufficient critical distance. The danger existed, it had been noted, and I felt prepared to face it; I knew above all that there was no other way out. If we wanted to prepare for the coming of the Future Ones, we had first to follow mankind in its weaknesses, its neuroses, its doubts; we had to make them entirely ours, in order to go beyond them. The rigorous duplication of the genetic code, meditation on the life story of the predecessor, the writing of the commentary: such were the three pillars of our faith, unchanged since the time of the Founders. Before preparing myself a light meal, I joined my hands for a short prayer to the Supreme Sister and I felt lucid, balanced, and active again.
Before falling asleep, I skimmed over the commentary of Marie22; I knew that I would soon get back in contact with Marie23. Fox stretched out beside me and sighed softly. He was going to die next to me, and he knew it; he was already an old dog now; he fell asleep almost immediately.
Daniel1, 13
IT WAS ANOTHER WORLD, separated from the ordinary world by a few centimeters of fabric—indispensable social protection, since ninety percent of men who came across Belle would be seized by the immediate desire to penetrate her. Once her jeans were off, I played for a little while with her pink thong, noting that her sex quickly became moist; it was five in the afternoon. Yes, it was another world, and I stayed there until eleven the following morning—it was the cutoff point for breakfast, and I was beginning to get seriously hungry. I had probably slept, for brief periods. For the rest, those few hours justified my life. I was not exaggerating and I was conscious of not exaggerating: we were at that moment in the absolute simplicity of things. Sexuality, or more precisely desire, was of course a theme I had touched on many a time in my sketches; that many things in this world centered around sexuality, or more precisely desire, I was as conscious of as anyone else—and probably more so than many others. In these conditions, as an aging comedian, I had occasionally let myself be overcome by a sort of skeptical doubt: sexuality was perhaps, like so many other things and perhaps everything in this world, overrated; perhaps it was just a banal ruse, dreamed up to increase competition among men and the speed at which the whole system functioned. There was maybe nothing more to sexuality than there was in lunch at Taillevent, or in a Bentley Continental GT; nothing that justifies one getting that worked up.
That night would show me that I was wrong, and bring me to a more elementary view of things. The following day, back at San José, I went down to the Playa de Monsul. Observing the sea, a
nd the sun sinking into the sea, I wrote a poem. This fact was already curious in itself: not only had I never written poetry before, but I had practically never read any, with the exception of Baudelaire. Besides, poetry, as far as I knew, was dead. I quite regularly bought a quarterly literary review, of rather esoteric tendencies—without truly being part of the literary world, I occasionally felt close to it; after all, I did write my own sketches, and even if I aimed at nothing more than a rough parody of the “spoken word” I was conscious of how difficult the simple operation of aligning words and organizing them into sentences could be without the whole lot collapsing into incoherence, or sinking into tedium. In this review, two years earlier, I had read a long article devoted to the disappearance of poetry—a disappearance that the author judged inevitable. According to him, poetry, as noncontextual language, anterior to the objects-properties distinction, had definitively deserted the world of men. It was situated in a primitive elsewhere to which we would never again have access, because it came before the true formation of object and language. Unfit to transport information more precise than simple bodily or emotional sensations, and intrinsically linked to the magical state of the human mind, it had been rendered irredeemably obsolete by the appearance of reliable procedures of objective proof. I had been convinced by all this at the time, but that morning I hadn’t washed, I was still filled with the scent of Esther, and its savors (never with us had there been a question of using a condom, the subject had simply not been touched on, and I think she had never thought of it—I too hadn’t thought of it, and that was more surprising because my first sexual experiences had taken place at the time of AIDS, an AIDS that was then inevitably fatal, and this should have left its mark on me). Well, AIDS belonged no doubt to the domain of the contextual, that’s what you could say, and in any case I wrote my first poem, that morning, while I was still bathed in the scent of Esther. Here is that poem:
At heart I have always known
That I would find love
And that this would be
On the eve of my death.
I have always been confident,
I have not given up:
Long before your presence,
You were announced to me.
So you will be the one,
My real presence,
I will be in the joy
Of your nonfictional skin
So soft to the caress,
So light and so fine,
Entity nondivine,
Animal of tenderness.
At the end of that night, the sun had returned to Madrid. I called a taxi and waited a few minutes in the hotel lobby with Esther while she replied to the many messages that had accumulated on her cell phone. She had already made numerous calls during the night, and she seemed to have a very rich social life; most of her conversations ended with the expression un besito, or sometimes un beso. I didn’t really speak Spanish, the nuance, if there was one, escaped me, but I became conscious, at the moment when the taxi stopped in front of the hotel, that in practice she did not kiss much. It was quite curious because, by contrast, she liked penetration in all its forms, she presented her ass with a lot of grace (she had pert buttocks rather like those of a boy), and she sucked without hesitation and even with enthusiasm; but every time my lips approached hers she turned away, a little annoyed.
I put my travel bag in the trunk; she offered me a cheek, there were two quick kisses, then I got into the car. While moving off down the avenue, a few meters further on, I turned around to wave good-bye; but she was already on the phone, and did not notice my gesture.
As soon as I arrived at the Almería airport I understood how my life was going to be over the following weeks. For some years already, I had left my cell phone almost systematically off: it was a question of status; I was a European star; if people wanted to contact me they had to leave a message, and wait for me to reply. This had sometimes been hard, but I had stuck to my rule, and over the years I had been proven right: producers left messages; well-known actors, newspaper editors, they all left messages; I was at the top of the pyramid, and I intended to stay there, at least for a few years, until I officially retired from the stage. This time my first action, on getting off the plane, was to switch on my cell phone; I was surprised, and almost terrified, by the violence of the disappointment that seized me when I saw that I had no message from Esther.
Your only chance of survival, if you are sincerely smitten, lies in hiding this fact from the woman you love, of feigning a casual detachment under all circumstances. What sadness there is in this simple observation! What an accusation against man! However, it had never occurred to me to contest this law, nor to imagine disobeying it: love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed, tortured, and finally killed by the other, who in his or her turn oppresses, tortures, and kills without having evil intentions, without even getting pleasure from it, with complete indifference; that’s what men, normally, call love. During the first few days I went through great moments of hesitation regarding this phone. I walked up and down the rooms, lighting cigarette after cigarette, from time to time I walked to the sea, turned back, and realized that I had not seen the sea, that I would have been incapable of confirming its presence in that minute—during these walks, I forced myself to separate myself from my phone, to leave it on my bedside table, and more generally I forced myself to respect an interval of two hours before switching it back on, and seeing once again that she hadn’t left any message. On the morning of the third day I had the idea of leaving my telephone on permanently, and of trying to forget to wait for the ring; in the middle of the night, on swallowing my fifth Mepronizine tablet, I realized that this didn’t serve any purpose, and I began to resign myself to the fact that Esther was the stronger, and that I no longer had any power over my own life.
On the evening of the fifth day, I called her. She didn’t seem at all surprised to hear from me, time seemed to her to have passed very quickly. She happily agreed to come and visit me in San José; she knew the province of Almería, having vacationed there several times as a small girl; for the last few years she had been going instead to Ibiza or Formentera. She could spend a weekend, not the next one, but in a fortnight; I took a deep breath so as not to show my disappointment. “Un besito,” she said just before hanging up. We had stepped up another gear.
Daniel25, 2
TWO WEEKS AFTER my arrival, Fox died, just after sunset. I was stretched out on the bed when he approached and tried painfully to jump up; he wagged his tail nervously. Since the beginning, he hadn’t touched his bowl once; he had lost a lot of weight. I helped him to settle on my lap; for a few seconds, he looked at me, with a curious mixture of exhaustion and apology; then, calmed, he closed his eyes. Two minutes later, he gave out his last breath. I buried him inside the residence at the western extremity of the land surrounded by the protective fence, next to his predecessors. During the night, a rapid transport from the Central City dropped off an identical dog; they knew the codes and how to work the barrier, I didn’t have to get up to greet them. A small white-and-ginger mongrel came toward me wagging its tail. I gestured to him. He jumped on the bed and stretched out beside me.
Love is simple to define, but it seldom happens—in the series of beings. Through these dogs we pay homage to love, and to its possibility. What is a dog but a machine for loving? You introduce him to a human being, giving him the mission to love—and however ugly, perverse, deformed, or stupid this human being might be, the dog loves him. This characteristic was so surprising, so striking for the humans of the previous race that most of them—all testimonies agree on this point—came to love the dog back. The dog was therefore a machine for loving, which could also train others to love—its efficiency, however, remained limited to dogs, and never extended to other men.
No subject is more touched on than love, in the human life stories as well as in the literary corpus they have left us; homosexual love like heterosexual love is touched on, without u
s being able, up until now, to uncover any significant difference; no subject, either, is as discussed, as controversial, especially during the final period of human history, when the cyclothymic fluctuations concerning belief in love became constant and dizzying. In conclusion, no subject seems to have preoccupied man as much; even money, even the satisfaction derived from combat and glory, loses, by comparison, its dramatic power in human life stories. Love seems to have been, for humans of the final period, the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated. The life story of Daniel1, turbulent, painful, as often unreservedly sentimental as frankly cynical, and contradictory from all points of view, is in this regard characteristic.
The Possibility of an Island Page 13
