Serotonin

by Michel Houellebecq

  To make matters worse, she was wearing a pair of jeans and a light grey sweatshirt, exactly the same outfit as she had worn when she got off the train from Paris one Monday morning in November, with her bag over her shoulder, just before we looked deep into each other’s eyes for a few seconds or a few minutes – well, for an indeterminate amount of time – and she said to me: ‘I’m Camille,’ thus starting a new sequence of circumstances, a new existential configuration which I had not left, which I would probably never leave, and which, to tell the truth, I had no intention of leaving. I had a brief moment of terror when the two women, while leaving the veterinary clinic, chatted on the pavement: were they going for lunch at the Duc Normand? Finding myself face to face with Camille by chance seemed to me like the worst possible solution, certain failure. But no, they went back up Rue Saint-Gervais, and to tell the truth, taking a closer look at the Duc Normand, I understood that my worry had been in vain; the landlord offered no food of any kind, not even sandwiches, and the lunchtime rush wasn’t his style; instead he continued with his exhaustive reading of Paris-Normandie, in which he seemed to take an exaggerated and morbid interest.

  I didn’t wait for Camille to come back, paid for my beers straight away and returned in a state of slight intoxication to the house in Saint-Aubert-sur-Orne where I found myself confronted with the triangular walls of the bedroom, the copper pans on the walls and my memories; I still had a bottle of Grand Marnier but it wasn’t enough; my anxiety was mounting by the hour in abrupt little gradations, and the episodes of tachycardia began at about eleven in the evening, immediately followed by night sweats and nausea. At about two in the morning, I realised that it was a night from which I would never fully recover.

  In fact, it’s from that moment that my behaviour starts to escape me, that I am reluctant to assign a meaning to it, and that it manifestly begins to part company from ordinary morality and from ordinary reason, which I thought I shared until then. I hope I have explained clearly enough that I have never had what is called a strong personality; I wasn’t one of those people who leave indelible traces in history, or even in the memories of their contemporaries. For a few weeks I had started reading again – well, if you can put it that way; my curiosity as a reader was not very extensive, in fact I was only reading Dead Souls by Gogol, and I wasn’t even reading that very much, no more than one or two pages a day, and I was often rereading the same ones for several days in a row. That reading gave me boundless pleasure – perhaps I had never felt as close to another man as I had to that rather forgotten Russian author – but unlike Gogol, I couldn’t have said that God had given me a complex nature. God had given me a simple nature, infinitely simple in my opinion – it was more the world around me that had become complex, and now I could no longer deal with the complexity of the world, could no longer deal with the complexity of the world into which I had been plunged, and so my behaviour – and I’m not trying to justify it – became incomprehensible, shocking and erratic.

  * * *

  I went to the Duc Normand at five the next afternoon; the landlord had already got used to my presence, and while he had seemed a little surprised the previous day, today he wasn’t at all, and already had his hand on the handle of the beer pump before I even gave him my order, and I took a seat in exactly the same place. At around a quarter past seven, a girl of about fifteen opened the door of the veterinary clinic; she was holding a child by the hand, a very small boy – he might have been three or four. Camille rushed into the room and took him in her arms, spinning around several times and covering him with kisses.

  A child, then, she had a child; it’s what you call a new fact. I could have anticipated that – women do sometimes have children – but the fact is that I had thought about everything except that. And to tell the truth my first thoughts were not for the child itself: it usually takes two people to make a child, that’s what I said to myself, generally but not always; I’d heard of different medical possibilities these days, and in fact I would rather that the child had been the product of artificial insemination, he would have seemed somehow less real then, but that wasn’t the case: five years earlier, Camille had bought a train ticket and a ticket for the Festival des Vieilles Charrues when she was at the height of her fertility, and she slept with a guy she met at a concert – she didn’t remember the name of the band. She hadn’t exactly picked the first person she came across: the guy wasn’t too ugly or too stupid, and he was a business school student. The only slightly suspect point about him was that he was a heavy metal fan, but nobody’s perfect, and for a heavy metal fan he was polite and clean. The thing had happened in the guy’s tent, erected in a field a few kilometres from the concert stages; it had been neither good nor bad, but simply correct; the question of condoms had been avoided without much difficulty, as it always is with men. She had woken up first and left a page from her Rhodia notebook with a fake mobile phone number for him to find; it was a somewhat pointless precaution as there wasn’t much chance of him calling her back. The station was a five-kilometre walk away – that was the only downside – but otherwise it was fine, a bright and pleasant summer morning.

  Her parents had received the news with resignation; they were aware that the world had changed, not necessarily for the better they thought deep down, but it had changed, and the new generation had to go through strange detours to achieve their reproductive function. So they had shaken their heads, but each in a slightly different way: her father’s predominant response was one of shame, the feeling that he had at least partially failed in his child-rearing task, and that things should have happened differently; while her mother was delighted by the arrival of her grandson – because she knew that it would be a little boy, she had known for certain straight away, and it was in fact a little boy in the end.

  * * *

  At about seven o’clock, Camille came outside with the receptionist who walked off down Rue Saint-Gervais, after which Camille closed the clinic and sat down behind the wheel of her Nissan Micra. I had more or less assumed that I would follow her – or, rather, the idea of doing so had passed through my mind earlier in the day – but I had parked my car near the ramparts; it was too far away, I didn’t have time to go and get it, and anyway I didn’t feel strong enough, at least not that evening, and there was the child to think about; the whole situation needed to be rethought but for now it made more sense to go to the Carrefour Market in Falaise and buy a bottle of Grand Marnier, or maybe even two.

  * * *

  The next day was a Saturday, and Camille’s veterinary clinic couldn’t be closed, I said to myself, it was even probably her busiest day – people wait when their dog is dead, they wait until they have some free time, that’s how people’s lives work in general. On the other hand, her son’s school or crèche or nursery would be closed, so she would probably need a childminder for today, well, she would probably be on her own and that struck me as a favourable circumstance. I got there at half past eleven, in case of the very unlikely event that she closed on Saturday afternoons. The owner of the café had already finished Paris-Normandie but had embarked on an equally exhaustive reading of France Football; he was an exhaustive reader – they really exist – and I had known people like that, people who don’t just settle for the big stories, the statements of prime minister Édouard Philippe or the sum of Neymar’s transfer payment, but instead want to get to the bottom of things; they are the foundation of enlightened opinion, the pillars of representative democracy.

  A steady stream of customers went in and out of the veterinary clinic, but Camille closed earlier than she had the previous day, at about five. This time I had parked my car on the parallel road, a few metres away from hers; I was worried for a moment that she would recognise it, but that wasn’t very likely. When I bought it twenty years ago, the Mercedes G-Class wasn’t a very popular car; people bought it when they wanted to drive across Africa, or at least Sardinia; now it was fashionable, people had been charmed by its vintage side, and thes
e days it was seen as a bit of a gangster car.

  * * *

  She turned off at Bazoches-au-Houlme, and at the precise moment when her car headed towards Rabodanges I became sure that she must live alone with her son. It wasn’t just the expression of a desire; it was an intuitive certainty, powerful although unjustifiable.

  We were alone on the road to Rabodanges and I slowed down pointedly to let her get ahead; the fog was rising and I could hardly make out her rear lights.

  Reaching the shores of Lake Rabodanges, on which the sun was beginning to set, made an impression on me; it stretched for kilometres, on either side of a bridge, in the middle of dense forests of oaks and elms; it was probably a reservoir; there was hardly any sign of human occupation, and the landscape didn’t remind me of anything I had ever seen in France – it felt more like being in Norway or Canada.

  I parked at the top of a hill to the rear of a restaurant, shut for the season, whose terrace offered ‘panoramic views of the lakes’, and which claimed to be willing to provide banquets on request, as well as serving ice cream at all times of day. Camille’s car drove on to the bridge; I took my Schmidt & Bender binoculars out of the glove compartment, but was no longer worried about losing her because I’d already guessed where she was going: it was a little wooden chalet on the other side of the bridge, a few hundred metres away; a terrace at the front looked out over the lake. Stranded halfway up the slope in the middle of the woods, the chalet really looked like a doll’s house, surrounded by ogres.

  And in fact, after leaving the bridge, the Nissan Micra turned up a steep path and stopped just below the terrace. A girl of about fifteen greeted Camille – the same one that I had seen the day before. They talked for a moment, then the girl set off on a scooter.

  * * *

  So Camille lived there, in an isolated house in the middle of the woods, several kilometres away from her nearest neighbours – well, I was exaggerating, there was another house, a bit bigger and further to the north, one or two kilometres away, but it was clearly a holiday home: the shutters were closed. There was also the panoramic restaurant La Rotonde, the one I had parked behind, and closer examination revealed that it would reopen at the start of the Easter holidays in April (there was even a water-skiing club just beside it, which would resume its activities at more or less the same time). The entrance to the restaurant was protected by an alarm – a little red warning light flashed at the bottom of a digital receiver – but further along there was a service entrance for deliveries, and I forced the lock without difficulty. The temperature inside was quite mild, more pleasant than the one outside; there must have been a thermostat system, probably for the cellar – a very fine cellar, with hundreds of bottles. In terms of food, it was less impressive, there were a few shelves of preserves – tinned vegetables and fruit in syrup; I also discovered a thin mattress on a little iron bed in a utility room; it must have been intended for the employees, for use during high season when they were allowed a break. I easily carried it upstairs into the hall of the panoramic restaurant, and sat down with my binoculars beside me. The mattress was far from comfortable, but the bar was filled with aperitif bottles that had already been partly drunk; well, I can’t explain the whole situation, but for the first time in months – or years, rather – I felt I was in exactly the place where I was supposed to be, and to put it simply, I was happy.

  * * *

  She was sitting on the sofa in her living room with her son beside her, and they were immersed in a DVD that I struggled to identify, probably The Lion King; then the child fell asleep, and she picked him up and headed towards the stairs. A short time later the lights went out all over the house. I had nothing but a torch, and hardly any other solution: I was sure that at this distance she wouldn’t be able to see me, but if, on the other hand, I had turned on the lights in the restaurant she would have suspected something unusual. I ate quickly in the storeroom – a tin of peas and another of peaches in syrup, which I accompanied with a bottle of Saint-Émilion – and I went to sleep almost immediately.

  At about eleven the next day, Camille came out, strapped the child into a baby seat and drove off, taking the bridge in the other direction; her car passed about ten metres in front of the restaurant; she would be in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne before midday.

  Everything exists or asks to exist, which is why situations come together, sometimes bringing powerful emotional configurations, and a destiny is fulfilled. The situation that I have just described continued for almost three weeks. I generally arrived at about five o’clock and immediately took up position in my observation post; I was well organised now: I had my ashtray and my torch; sometimes I brought slices of ham to go with the tinned vegetables from the storeroom; once I even brought some garlic sausage. As to the alcohol reserves, they could have kept me going for months.

  Now it was clear not only that Camille lived alone, that she had no lovers, but also that she didn’t have many friends either; over those three weeks she didn’t have a single visitor. How had she ended up like that? How had we both ended up like that? And to borrow from the communist bard: is this how men live?

  Well, yes: the answer, Léo Ferré, is yes – I was gradually becoming aware of that. And I was also becoming aware that things weren’t going to work out. Camille was now involved in a deep and exclusive relationship with her son; it would last for at least another ten years, but more probably fifteen, before he left her to study – and because he would work hard at school, he would be followed with attentive devotion by his mother, and he would go to university – I had no doubt about that. Gradually things would get less simple; there would be girls and then, even worse, there would be a girl, who would not be well received; then Camille would become an embarrassment, an obstruction (and even if it wasn’t a girl but a boy the situation would hardly be any better; we were no longer living in a time when mothers were relieved to accept their son’s homosexuality – now they form couples, the little faggots, and still manage to escape maternal domination). Then she would fight, she would fight to keep the only love of her life, and the situation would be painful for a time, but she would face the facts in the end and she would bend to ‘natural laws’. Then she would be free, free again and alone – but she would also be fifty, and obviously it would be too late for her; as for me don’t even think about it: I was already barely alive now and in fifteen years I would be richly dead.

  * * *

  It was two months since I had used the Steyr Mannlicher, but the pieces fit together smoothly and precisely, the machining was truly admirable. I spent the rest of the after- noon practising on an abandoned house, a little further off in the woods, where there were still a few windows to break: I hadn’t forgotten anything, my precision from five hundred metres was still excellent.

  Was it imaginable that Camille would endanger that perfect symbiotic relationship that she had with her son for me? And was it imaginable that he, the child, would agree to share his mother’s affection with another male? The answer to those questions was fairly obvious, and the conclusion ineluctable: it was him or me.

  * * *

  The murder of a four-year-old inevitably provokes an intense emotion in the media so I could expect considerable investigative resources to be deployed. The panoramic restaurant would quickly be identified as the source of the shot, but I had never at any moment taken off my latex gloves in this establishment and I was sure I had left no prints. As to DNA, I didn’t know exactly what DNA could be taken from: blood, sperm, hair, saliva? I’d had the foresight to bring a plastic bag into which I poured the cigarette butts that I had held between my teeth; at the last moment I added the cutlery I had put in my mouth, although I had a sense that I was taking slightly unnecessary precautions; to tell the truth, my DNA had never been taken – the systematic recording of DNA in the absence of a crime had never been voted for so in some respects we lived in a free country – well, I didn’t have the sense of being in any great danger. The key to success seemed
to me to lie in rapid execution: in less than a minute after firing, I could have left La Rotonde once and for all; in less than an hour, I could be on the motorway to Paris.

  * * *

  One evening, while I was running through the parameters of the murder in my mind, I was pierced by the memory of an evening in Morzine, one 31st December, the first New Year’s Eve that my parents had let me stay up till midnight, and they were having some friends over – it was probably a small party but I have no memory of that aspect; what I remembered, on the other hand, was my absolute intoxication at the idea that we were entering a new year, an absolutely new year in which every action, however anodyne – even drinking a bowl of Nesquik – would in a sense be accomplished for the first time; I might have been five years old then, a bit older than Camille’s son, but at the time I saw life as a succession of joys that could only get greater – only give rise in the future to more varied and bigger joys – and it was as that memory came into my mind that I understood Camille’s son, that I was able to put myself in his place, and that identification gave me the right to kill him. To tell the truth, if I had been a stag or a Brazilian macaque, the question wouldn’t even have arisen: the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype. This attitude had been maintained for a long time in the first human populations.

  Now I had all the time in the world to think back to those few hours, and even those few minutes; I have little else in my life but to think about them again: I don’t think that contrary forces, the forces that tried to keep me on track for murder, had much to do with morality; it was more an anthropological matter, a matter of belonging to a late species, and of adhering to the code of that late species – a matter of conformity, in other words.