Serotonin

by Michel Houellebecq

  * * *

  I knocked on the door of the château again at about seven in the evening; this time Aymeric was there and he looked not only drunk but also a bit stoned. ‘Been at the weed again?’ I asked him. ‘Yeah, I’ve got a dealer in Saint-Lô,’ he confirmed, taking a bottle of vodka out of the freezer; for my part, I preferred to stick to Chablis. This time he wasn’t stripping his assault rifle, but he had taken out a portrait of an ancestor, which was leaning against an armchair; it showed a squat man, with a square and perfectly hairless face, his eye malicious and beady, strapped into a suit of metal armour. In one hand he held a huge sword that almost came up to his chest, and in the other an axe; overall he emanated an impression of extraordinary physical power and brutality. ‘Robert d’Harcourt, known as the Strong…’ Aymeric observed, ‘the sixth generation of Harcourts; so a good while after William the Conqueror. He went with Richard the Lionheart on the Third Crusade.’ I said to myself that it must actually be nice to have roots.

  * * *

  ‘Cécile left two years ago,’ he went on without changing his tone. Here we go, we’re getting to it, I said to myself; he was going to broach the topic at last. ‘In a sense it’s my fault: I made her work too hard; managing the farm was already a huge task but with the bungalows it got insane; I should have helped her, tried to pay her more attention. After moving here we didn’t get a single day’s holiday. Women need holidays…’ He talked about her quite vaguely, as if discussing a species closely related to him but with which he was relatively unfamiliar. ‘And then you saw where we’d got to: cultural distractions. Women need cultural distractions…’ He waved a hand evasively, as if to avoid specifying what he meant by that. He could have added that from a shopping point of view it wasn’t exactly Babylone, and that fashion week wasn’t about to move to Vanville-la-Rocque. At the same time, I said to myself, all she had to do was marry someone else, the slut.

  ‘Or buy her things, you know, pretty things…’ he took another drag on his joint; it seemed to me that he was getting a bit lost. He could have added, more to the point, that they’d stopped fucking, and that that was the heart of the problem, women are less bribable than is sometimes claimed, as far as jewellery is concerned you get them an African trinket and that’ll do the trick, but if you’re not fucking them any more, if you don’t even desire them any more, things get worrying, and Aymeric knew that; with sex everything can be resolved, and without sex nothing can, but I knew he wouldn’t tell me any more about it, not under any pretext, not even to me and probably especially not to me; he might have talked to a woman, but to tell the truth there would have been no point talking about it and it might even have been counterproductive, and twisting the knife in the wound wasn’t a good option – obviously I’d worked out the previous day that his wife had left him and during that day I’d had time to prepare a counter-attack, to develop a positive plan, but it wasn’t yet the moment to go there, and I lit another cigarette.

  * * *

  ‘I should mention that she went off with a guy,’ he added after a very long silence. He gave a kind of painful little involuntary groan just after the word ‘guy’. There was no answer to that: this was a tough position, masculine humiliation in its raw state, and all I could do in turn was to emit a corresponding painful groan. ‘He was a pianist,’ he went on, ‘a well-known pianist – he gives concerts all over the world, he’s made records. He came here to rest, to take a break, and then he ran off with my wife…’

  There was another silence, but I had plenty of ways of filling it; pouring another glass of Chablis, cracking the joints of my fingers. ‘I’m a real idiot, I didn’t notice…’ Aymeric went on at last, in a voice so low that it was getting alarming. ‘We’ve got a very good piano in the château, a Bösendorfer baby grand that belonged to one of my ancestors – she hosted a kind of salon during the Second Empire – but to tell the truth we were never really patrons of the arts, not like the Noailles, but she held a salon anyway, and apparently Berlioz played on that piano; in short, I suggested that he play it if he wanted to, though it had to be restrung of course, but in the end he was spending more and more time in the château, and there you have it: they live in London but they travel around a lot because he gives concerts all over the world, in South Korea, in Japan…’

  ‘And what about your daughters?’ I sensed it was a good idea to move away from the business with the Bösendorfer; I suspected that things weren’t all that great with the daughters, but the Bösendorfer was the kind of detail that literally kills you, that pushes you right towards suicide, and it absolutely had to be banished from his mind; with the girls there was at least the possibility of starting a new conversation.

  ‘I have access in theory, obviously, but in practice they’re in London, and so I haven’t seen them for two years; what am I supposed to do here, with two little girls of five and seven?’

  I glanced around the dining room, with the empty tins of cassoulet and cannelloni lying on the floor, and the battered dresser revealing a shattered china set (and it was probably Aymeric himself who had knocked over the dresser during an outburst of alcoholic fury); in fact it was impossible to disagree with him: it’s amazing how quickly men let themselves go. I had noticed the previous day that Aymeric’s clothes were frankly filthy, and that they smelled a little; even while he was at Agro he took his clothes back to his mother to wash every weekend – so did I but I’d still learned how to work the washing machines placed at the disposal of the students in the basement of the residence, and I had done it two or three times, but he never had; I don’t think he’d even suspected their existence. Perhaps it was better to forget about the little girls, and concentrate on the matter at hand; after all he could always make new little girls.

  * * *

  He poured himself another large glass of vodka, which he drained in one, and concluded soberly: ‘My life is fucked.’ At that point a kind of click ran through me, and I smiled inwardly because I had known from the start that he would get there, and during the few silences that had interrupted his narrative I had had time to refine my answer, my counter-attack, that positive plan that I had secretly been developing during my afternoon devoted to the observation of seabirds.

  ‘Your fundamental mistake,’ I launched in with alacrity, ‘was to marry within your own circle. All those chicks, the Rohan-Chabots, the Clermont-Tonnerres, what are they now, really? Just little bitches ready to do anything to get an internship in a weekly cultural magazine, or with an alternative fashion designer.’ (There I hit the nail on the head without knowing it, because Cécile was a Faucigny-Lucinge, a family from exactly the same class, the same class of aristocracy, obviously.) ‘In short, not farmers’ wives. Whereas you’ve got hundreds, thousands, millions of girls’ (I was getting a bit carried away) ‘for whom you represent the absolute masculine ideal. Take a Moldovan girl, or a Cameroonian or a Malagasy girl, a Laotian even: they’re girls who aren’t very rich and they’re poor quite honestly; they’ve come from an absolutely rural background, they’ve never known another world, they don’t even know that another world exists. And then you turn up, in the prime of life, in not bad physical shape, a sturdy, handsome guy in his forties, and you own half the pastures in the area.’ (I was exaggerating a bit, but, well, that’s the idea.) ‘Obviously it brings you in bugger all, but they can’t guess that and they will never understand because in their minds land is land, it’s land and the herd, so I can assure you that they won’t abandon the business; they’ll work hard on the task at hand, and never give up, they’ll be up and about at five in the morning to do the milking. And also they’ll be young, a lot more sexy than all those aristocratic bitches, and they’ll fuck forty times better. You’ll just have to hold off a bit on the vodka; it risks reminding them of their origins, particularly if it’s a girl from an Eastern country, but anyway it can’t hurt you to hold off a bit on the vodka. They’ll get up at five in the morning to do the milking,’ I said enthusiastically, increasingl
y convinced of my own vision (I could see the Moldovan girl already) ‘then they’ll wake you up with a blow-job, and breakfast will be ready as well…’

  I cast a glance at Aymeric; I was convinced he’d been listening to me attentively until then but he was beginning to doze off – he must have started boozing before I got there, probably in the early afternoon. ‘Your father would agree with me…’ I concluded, having somewhat run out of arguments; here I was less sure of myself; I barely knew Aymeric’s father, in fact I’d only seen him once, and he’d seemed like a decent type but a bit stiff; the social transformations that had taken place in France after 1794 had probably more or less passed him by. Historically I knew that I wasn’t wrong; the aristocracy had never hesitated, when they spotted signs of decadence, to renew the genetics of the flock by going out in search of washer-women or laundry-maids, and now you had to go a bit further to find them, that was all, but was Aymeric in a fit state to demonstrate common sense? Then I had a more general doubt, a more biological one: what was the point of saving a defeated old male? We had both reached more or less the same point; our fates were different, but the ending wasn’t dissimilar.

  Now he had really fallen asleep. Perhaps I hadn’t spoken in vain, perhaps the Moldovan girl could slip inside his dreams. He was asleep, sitting bolt upright on the sofa, his eyes wide open.

  I knew I wouldn’t see Aymeric the next day, or probably for days after that, and that he would regret his confession – he would come back on the 31st because you can’t do nothing on the evening of the 31st; well, that had happened to me several times before but I was different from him, I was impervious to convention. I still had four days of solitude and I immediately sensed that the birds wouldn’t be enough – neither the television nor the birds, either taken together or separately, could be enough – and it was then that I thought again of the German, so on the morning of the 27th I turned my Schmidt & Bender binoculars on the German; basically I think I would like to have been a cop, insinuating myself into people’s lives, penetrating their secrets. I didn’t expect anything exciting as far as the German was concerned; I was mistaken. At about five o’clock in the afternoon, a little girl knocked at the door of his bungalow; well, I say a little girl but let’s get this straight; she was a brunette of about ten with a childish face, though she was tall for her age. She had cycled there, so she must have lived very close by. Of course, I immediately expected a case of paedophilia: what reason could a little ten-year-old girl have for knocking at the door of a sinister and misanthropic forty-year-old man, and a German to boot? Did she want him to read poems by Schiller to her? It was more likely so he could show her his cock. And he very much had the profile of a paedophile; cultured and in his forties, solitary, incapable of forming relationships with others let alone with women; that was what I said to myself before realising that the same could have been said about me, that I could have been described in exactly the same terms, and I was appalled, so to calm myself I trained my binoculars on the windows of the bungalow, but the curtains were drawn, and I could find out nothing more that evening, except that she came out almost two hours later and consulted the messages on her mobile phone before getting back on her bike.

  The next day she returned at about the same time, but this time he forgot to draw the curtains, enabling me to make out a video camera fitted on a tripod; my suspicions were confirmed. Unfortunately, immediately after the girl arrived he noticed that the curtains were open, walked towards the window and hid the room from my view. Those binoculars were extraordinary; I had had a perfect view of his face, and saw he was in an extreme state of arousal, and I even had a sense right then that he was salivating slightly; I’m sure that for his part he didn’t suspect my surveillance in the slightest. The little girl left again, like the day before, after just under two hours.

  The same scenario played out two days later, apart from the fact that I thought I briefly saw the little girl moving in the background, in a T-shirt, with her bottom bare; but it was vague and fleeting, I’d been focusing on the guy’s face and that uncertainty was frankly becoming exasperating.

  * * *

  An opening appeared at last on the morning of the 30th. At about ten o’clock I saw him leaving in his 4x4 (a collector’s Defender, probably from 1953 or something; the idiot wasn’t only a misanthrope and probably a paedophile, but also a snob of the worst kind – why couldn’t he be satisfied with a Mercedes 4x4 like me and everyone else? He would pay for it, he would pay dearly for it); in short, the paedophile (I hadn’t noticed earlier, but he had the exact face of a German academic, a German academic on sick leave or more probably on research leave, where he was probably going to observe Arctic terns in the north-west of Cotentin, near Cap de la Hague or something); so he put an ice-box – it must have contained some special Bavarian beers – and a plastic bag probably full of sandwiches in the boot of his Defender; he had enough to keep him going for the morning, and would probably come back just before his ritual five o’clock appointment; it was time to spring into action and unmask him.

  I still waited for an hour to be certain he wasn’t coming back, then strolled calmly towards his bungalow. I had brought an emergency tool kit, which I always kept in the boot of my Mercedes, but the door wasn’t even closed – it’s amazing how trusting people are when they get to Manche, they feel that they’re entering a foggy, peaceful space, far from the usual human troubles and in a sense far from evil; well, that’s the image they have of it. I still had to turn on the computer; he must have been very careful about consuming electricity even in sleep mode – he probably had ecological beliefs – but on the other hand there was no password and that was frankly baffling; everyone has a password these days, even six-year-old children have a password on their tablets, so what kind of person was this guy?

  * * *

  The files were organised by year and by month, and in the file for December there was only one video, entitled ‘Nathalie’. I’d never seen a paedophilic video – I knew they existed but nothing more than that – and suddenly I sensed that the amateurish quality of the filming was going to be hard to bear: in the first few seconds he accidentally pointed the camera at the tiles in the bathroom, then returned to the face of the little girl who was busy putting on make-up; she spread a thick layer of vermilion on her lips, too thick a layer and it spilled over, then she put on some blue eyeshadow in great lumps – she wasn’t brilliant at doing that either – but the birdwatcher seemed to like it a lot, and I heard him muttering: ‘Gut … gut…’; so far that was the only slightly disgusting thing about the film. Then he tried a reverse tracking shot – well, to be more precise he pulled back to show the girl at the bathroom mirror, naked apart from a pair of denim mini-shorts, the same she had had on when she arrived. She had hardly any breasts, or rather one could make out a swelling, a promise. He said a few words that I didn’t understand and she immediately took off her shorts and sat down on the bathroom stool, spread her legs and started running her middle finger over her pussy; she had a small pussy that was well-formed but perfectly hairless and at that point I suppose a paedophile must have started getting seriously aroused, and in fact I could hear his breathing getting harder and harder, making the camera shake slightly.

  Suddenly the shot changed and the girl could be seen in the sitting room. She was already wearing a tartan mini-skirt and was putting on a pair of fishnet stockings which she hooked to a suspender belt – it was all a bit big for her, they must have been XS but for adults; they fit but only just. Then she tied a little top, also in tartan, around her chest, and I thought she got that right, because it gave the idea of breasts even though she had none.

  Then came a slightly confused passage during which he looked for an audio cassette that he inserted into a radio cassette player; I didn’t know those things still existed, well, it was like the Defender; it was vintage. The girl waited calmly, arms dangling. I had trouble recognising the song when it got going – it sounded like a disco thing fro
m the late seventies or early eighties, maybe something by Corona – but the girl reacted well and immediately started spinning around and dancing and it was then that I really started feeling sick to my stomach, not because of the content but because of the filming; he must have crouched down to get her in a low-angle shot, he must have been hopping around her like an old toad. The girl danced with real enthusiasm, carried away by the rhythm, every now and again she threw up her mini-skirt, enabling the birdwatcher to get some very good angles of her little bum; at other times she froze facing the camera and opened her thighs, putting in one or two fingers, then she put those fingers in her mouth and sucked on them for a long time; either way he was getting more and more aroused, the camera movements became frankly chaotic and I was starting to get a bit bored, when at last he calmed himself, set the camera on its tripod and sat back down on the sofa. The girl went on spinning to the music for some time, while he looked at her with adoration; he had already come – intellectually, you must understand – but there was still a physical dimension, and I suppose he had already started masturbating.

  The cassette suddenly stopped, with a distinct click. The girl gave a little bow – she had a kind of ironic rictus – and came over to the German, kneeling down between his thighs: he had lowered his trousers, but without taking them off. He hadn’t moved the camera from its plinth, which meant that you could hardly see anything – contrary to all the codes of pornography, amateur included. In spite of her youth, the girl seemed to acquit herself of her task with competence, and every now and again the birdwatcher uttered a groan of satisfaction, which he interrupted with tender words along the lines of ‘Mein Liebchen ’, well, he seemed extremely fond of that girl, and I never would have believed that of such a cold character.