Whatever

by Michel Houellebecq

  He fell silent once more. On the TV screen now there was an ad for the Renault Clio. The car looked ultra-comfortable.

  -Last Monday Patricia announced to me that she'd met another guy. In a discothèque, the Metropolis. She told me we wouldn't see each other again, but that she was glad to have known me; she really liked changing boyfriends; she was only twenty. Basically she liked me a lot, but no more than that; it was mainly the idea of sleeping with a priest that excited her, that she found droll; but she wouldn't say anything to anybody, that was a promise.

  This time the silence was to last two minutes or more. I asked myself what a psychologist would have said in my place; probably nothing.

  Finally an absurd thought came to me:

  -You should go and confess.

  -Tomorrow I must say mass. I don't see how I can do it. I don't think I can cope. I no longer feel the presence.

  -What presence?

  After that we didn't say much. From time to time I was uttering phrases like Òh, come on, come on'; he continued regularly putting away the beers. Clearly I could do nothing for him. In the end I called a taxi.

  As I was crossing the threshold he said to me, `See you soon.' I don't believe it for a moment. I get the feeling we'll never see each other again.

  It's freezing in my place. I remember that earlier in the evening, just before leaving, I smashed a window with a blow of the fist. Yet, oddly, my hand is intact; no cuts.

  I lie down even so, and I sleep. The nightmares will only appear much later in the night. Not instantly recognizable as nightmares; even rather pleasant.

  I am gliding over Chartres Cathedral. I have a mystical vision concerning Chartres Cathedral. It seems to hold and to symbolize a secret - an ultimate secret. During all this time groups of nuns are forming in the gardens by the side entrances. They greet the old and even the dying, explaining to them that I am going to unveil a secret.

  Meanwhile I am walking down the corridors of a hospital. A man has given me an appointment, but he isn't there. I must wait a moment in a refrigerated storeroom, then I reach a new corridor. He still isn't there, the man who could get me out of hospital. Then I attend an exhibition. It's Patrick Leroy from the Ministry of Agriculture who's organized it all. He has cut people's heads out of some illustrated periodicals, stuck them on to various paintings (representing, for instance, Triassic flora), and is selling his little figurines very expensively. I have the feeling he wants me to buy one; he has a self-satisfied, almost menacing air.

  Then I'm flying once again over Chartres Cathedral. The cold is extreme. I am absolutely alone. My wings easily bear me up. I am nearing some towers, but I no longer recognize anything. These towers are immense, black, maleficent, they are made of black marble which emits a harsh glare, the marble is encrusted with violently coloured figurines in which the horrors of organic life are glaringly apparent.

  I fall, I fall between the towers. My face, which is going to be smashed to smithereens, is covered over with lines of blood which precisely delineate the location of the fractures. My nose is a gaping hole from which organic matter oozes.

  And now I am on the deserted plains of Champagne. There are tiny snowflakes flying all about, along with pages from an illustrated periodical, printed in huge screaming type. The periodical must date from around 1900.

  Am I a reporter or journalist? It would seem so, since the style of the articles is familiar to me. They are written in that tone of bitter lament dear to the anarchists and surrealists.

  Octavie Léoncet, ninety-two, has been found murdered in her barn. A little farm in the Vosges. Her sister, Léontine Léoncet, eighty-seven, takes pleasure in showing the corpse to journalists. The crime weapons are there, clearly visible: a wood saw and a brace and bit. Everything blood-stained, of course.

  And the crimes are on the increase. Always old women isolated on their farms. On each occasion the young and elusive murderer leaves the tools of his trade in evidence: sometimes a burin, sometimes a pair of secateurs, sometimes simply a small hand saw.

  And all this is magical, adventurous, libertarian.

  I wake up. It is cold. I dive back into the dream.

  Each time, faced with these blood-stained tools, I experience the sufferings of the victim in gruesome detail. Soon I have an erection. There are some scissors on the table near my bed. The idea comes to me: to cut off my penis. I imagine myself with the pair of scissors in my hand, the slight resistance of the flesh, and suddenly the bloody stump, the probable fainting.

  The sectioned end on the moquette. Matted with blood.

  Around eleven I wake up once again. I have two pairs of scissors, one in each room. I go and fetch them and place them under several books. It is an effort of will, probably insufficient. The need persists, increases and evolves. This time my plan is to take a pair of scissors, plant them in my eyes and tear them out. More precisely in the left eye, in a place I know well, there where it seems so hollow in the socket.

  And then I take some sedatives, and everything's dandy. Everything's dandy.

  5

  Venus and Mars

  Following that night I thought it wise to reconsider Doctor Népote's suggestion about staying in a rest home. He warmly congratulated me on this. According to him, I was thereby taking the shortest road to a complete recovery. The fact that the initiative might come from me was highly positive; I was beginning to take responsibility for my own cure. This was good; this was even very good.

  So, provided with his letter of introduction, I presented myself at Rueil-Malmaison. There was a park, and the meals were taken communally. In point of fact all ingestion of solid food was impossible for me at first; I was vomiting it up straightaway, with painful hiccups; I had the feeling my teeth were going to leave with it. It was necessary to resort to perfusions.

  Colombian in origin, the chief doctor was of little help to me. With the imperturbable seriousness of the neurotic, I was putting forward incontrovertible arguments against my survival; the least among them seemed enough to warrant instant suicide. He appeared to listen; at all events he remained silent; occasionally it was all he could do to stifle a slight yawn. It was only after a number of weeks that the truth dawned on me: I was speaking softly; he only had a very approximate knowledge of the French language; in effect he didn't understand a word of my stories.

  Slightly older, more modest in social origin, the psychologist who assisted him did on the other hand give me much-needed help. It's true that she was compiling a thesis on anxiety, and so was in need of data. She used a Radiola tape-recorder; she asked my permission to turn it on. Naturally I said yes. I rather liked her chapped hands, her bitten nails, as she pressed Record. Nevertheless, I've always hated female psychology students: vile creatures, that's how I perceive them. But this older woman, who looked like she'd been through a wringer, face framed by a turban, almost inspired my confidence.

  At first, though, our relations were not easy. She took me to task for speaking in general, overly sociological, terms. This, according to her, was not interesting: instead I ought to involve myself, try and `get myself centred'.

  -But I've had a bellyful of myself, I objected.

  -As a psychologist I can't accept such a statement, nor encourage it in any way. In speaking of society all the time you create a barrier behind which you can hide; it's up to me to break down this barrier so that we can work on your personal problems.

  This dialogue of the deaf went on for a little over two months. I think that basically she liked me well enough. I remember one morning, it was already the beginning of Spring; through the window birds could be seen, hopping on the lawn. She was looking fresh and relaxed.

  First off, there was a brief conversation about the dosage of my medication; then in a direct, spontaneous, completely unexpected way she asked me: `Basically, why is it you're so unhappy?' It was something totally unexpected , this frankness. And I too did something unexpected: I proffered her a short text I'd written the night
before to occupy my insomnia.

  -I'd prefer to hear you speak, she said.

  -Read it all the same.

  Èarly on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living by themselves; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.'

  I raised my eyes, looked her way. She had a somewhat astonished air. Finally she came out with: `That's interesting, the mirror . . '. She must have read something in Freud, or in The Mickey Mouse Annual. In the last analysis she was doing what she could, she was kind. Plucking up courage, she added:

  -But I'd prefer that you spoke directly of your problems. Once again you're being too abstract.

  -Maybe. But I don't understand, basically, how people manage to go on living. I get the impression everybody must be unhappy; we live in such a simple world, you understand. There's a system based on domination, money and fear - a somewhat masculine system, let's call it Mars; there's a feminine system based on seduction and sex, Venus let's say. And that's it. Is it really possible to live and to believe that there's nothing else? Along with the late nineteenth-century realists, Maupassant believed there was nothing else; and it drove him completely mad.

  -You're mixing everything up. Maupassant's madness was only a classic stage in the development of syphilis. Any normal human being accepts the two systems you're talking about.

  -No. If Maupassant went mad it's because he had an acute awareness of matter, of nothingness and death - and that he had no awareness of anything else. Alike in this to our contemporaries, he established an absolute separation between his individual existence and the rest of the world. It's the only way in which we can conceive the world today. For example, a bullet from a .45 Magnum may graze my cheek and end up hitting the wall behind me; I'll be unscathed. Taking the opposite example, the bullet will splatter my flesh, my physical suffering will be enormous; will be enormous; at the end of the day my face will be disfigured; perhaps the eye will be splattered too, in which case I'll be both disfigured and blind; from then on I'll inspire repugnance in other men. At a more general level, we are all subject to ageing and to death. This notion of ageing and death is insupportable for the individual human being, in the kind of civilization we live in it develops in a sovereign and unconditional manner, it gradually occupies the whole field of consciousness , it allows nothing else to subsist. In this way, and little by little, knowledge of the world's constraints is established. Desire itself disappears; only bitterness, jealousy and fear remain. Above all there remains bitterness ; an immense and inconceivable bitterness. No civilization, no epoch has been capable of developing such a quantity of bitterness in its subjects. In that sense we are living through unprecedented times. If it was necessary to sum up the contemporary mental state in a word, that's the one I'd undoubtedly choose: bitterness.

  She didn't reply at first, thought for a few seconds, then asked me:

  -When did you last have sexual relations?

  -Just over two years ago.

  -Ah! she exclaimed, almost in triumph. There you are then! Given that, how can you possibly feel good about life? . . .

  -Would you be willing to make love with me?

  She was flustered, I think she even blushed a bit. She was forty, thin and very much the worse for wear; but that morning she appeared really charming to me. I have a very tender memory of that moment. She was smiling, somewhat despite herself; I even thought she was going to say yes. But finally she collected herself:

  -That's not my role. As a psychologist my role is to equip you to undertake the process of seduction so that you might again have normal relations with young women.

  For the remaining sessions she had herself replaced by a male colleague.

  It was around about this time that I began taking an interest in my companions in misery. There were few deranged types, mainly sufferers from depression and anxiety; I suppose that was deliberate. People who experience these kinds of states quickly give up drawing attention to themselves. On the whole they remain lying down all day with their tranquillizers; from time to time they take a turn in the corridor, smoke four or five cigarettes, one after the other, then go back to bed. Meals, however, constituted a collective moment; the nurse on duty used to say

  `Help yourselves.' No other word was uttered; each person chewed his food. Sometimes one of the inmates was overcome by a fit of trembling, or began to sob; he went back to his room, and that was that. The idea gradually dawned on me that all these people - men or women - were not in the least deranged; they were simply lacking in love. Their gestures, their attitudes, their dumb show betrayed an excruciating craving for physical contact and caresses; but that wasn't possible, of course. So they sobbed, emitted cries, lacerated themselves with their nails; during my stay we had a successful attempt at castration.

  As the weeks went by my conviction grew that I was there to accomplish some prearranged plan - a bit like how in the Gospels Christ accomplishes what the prophets had already announced. At the same time the intuition was dawning that this stay was just the first in a succession of progressively longer internments in increasingly closed and tougher psychiatric establishments. The idea saddened me enormously.

  I saw the psychologist from time to time in the corridor, but no real interchange came about; our relations had taken a highly formal turn. Her work on anxiety was progressing, she told me; she had to take some exams in June.

  Doubtless I have some vague existence today in a doctoral dissertation, alongside other real-life cases. The thought of having become an item in a file calms me. I imagine the volume, its cloth binding, its slightly sad cover; I gently flatten myself between the pages; I am squashed.

  I left the clinic on 26th of May; I recall the sunshine, the heat, the atmosphere of freedom in the streets. It was unbearable.

  It was also on a 26th of May that I'd been conceived, late in the afternoon. The coitus had taken place in the living room, on a fake Pakistani rug. At the moment my father took my mother from behind she'd had the unfortunate idea of stretching out a hand and caressing him on the testicles, so adroitly that ejaculation was produced. She'd felt pleasure, but not true orgasm. They'd eaten cold chicken afterwards. That was thirty-two years ago now; at that time you could still find real chicken.

  On the subject of my life, post-clinic, I had no precise instructions; I just had to show up once a week. The rest of the time it was, however, up to me to look after myself.

  6

  Saint-Cirgues-en-Montagne

  As paradoxical as it may seem, there is a road to travel and it must be travelled, yet there is no traveller. Acts are accomplished, yet there is no actor.

  - Sattipathana-Sutta, XLII, 16

  On 20 June of the same year, I got up at six a.m. and turned on the radio, Radio Nostalgie to be exact. There was a song by Marcel Amont which spoke of a swarthy Mexican: light, carefree, a bit silly; exactly what I needed. I got washed listening to the radio, then collected a few things together. I'd decided to go back to SaintCirgues-en-Montagne; at least, to have another stab at it.

  Before setting off, I finish what there is left to eat in the house. This is somewhat difficult
as I'm not hungry. Fortunately there isn't much: four biscuits and a tin of sardines. I don't know why I'm doing it, it's obvious that these products keep. But it's been a while since the meaning of my actions has seemed clear to me; they don't seem clear very often, let's say. The rest of the time I'm more or less in the position of observer.

  On entering the compartment I'm aware, even so, that I'm gradually losing it; I choose to ignore this, and settle into a seat. At Langogne I rent a bicycle at the SNCF

  station; I've telephoned in advance to reserve it, I've organized things well. Then I get on the bike, and am instantly aware of the absurdity of the project: it's ten years since I've done any cycling, Saint-Cirgues is forty kilometres away, the road there is very mountainous and I feel barely capable of covering two kilometres on the flat. I've lost all aptitude, and what's more all appetite, for physical effort.