The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  A few months passed. Summer returned, then autumn; Isabelle didn’t seem unhappy. She played with Fox, and tended the azaleas; I devoted myself to swimming and rereading Balzac. One evening, while the sun fell behind the residence, she looked me straight in the eye and told me softly: “You are going to ditch me for someone younger…”

  I protested that I had never been unfaithful.

  “I know…,” she replied. “At one moment, I thought you were going to be: that you’d bang one of the sluts who hung around the magazine, then come back to me, bang another slut, and so on. I would have suffered greatly, but perhaps it would have been better like that, at the end of the day.”

  “I tried once; the girl turned me down.” I remembered passing the morning in front of the Lycée Fénelon. It was between classes, the girls were fourteen, fifteen, and all of them more beautiful and desirable than Isabelle, simply because they were younger. No doubt they were themselves engaged in a ferocious narcissistic competition—between those considered cute by boys their age, and those considered insignificant or, frankly, ugly; all the same, for any one of those young bodies a fiftysomething would have been ready to risk his reputation, his freedom, and even his life. How simple, indeed, existence was! And how devoid it was of any way out! Once, on passing by the magazine’s offices to pick up Isabelle, I had chatted up a sort of Belorussian, who was waiting to pose on page eight. The girl had accepted my invitation for a drink, but had asked for five hundred euros for a blow job; I had declined. At that time, the judicial arsenal aimed at repressing sexual relations with minors was getting tougher; crusades for chemical castration were multiplying. To increase desires to an unbearable level while making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based. I knew all this, I knew it inside out, in fact I had used it as material for many a sketch; this did not stop me from succumbing to the same process. I woke up in the middle of the night, and downed three glasses of water. I imagined the humiliations I would have to endure to seduce any teenage girl; the painfully extracted consent, the girl’s shame as we went out together in the street, her hesitation to introduce me to her friends, the carefree way in which she would ditch me for a boy of her age. I imagined all this, over and over again, and I understood that I could not survive it. In no way did I pretend to escape from the laws of nature: the inevitable decrease of the erectile capacities of the penis, the necessity of finding young bodies to jam that mechanism…I opened a packet of salami and a bottle of wine. Oh well, I told myself, I will pay; when I reach that point, when I need tight little asses to keep up my erection, then I’ll pay. I’ll pay the market price. Five hundred euros for a blow job, who did that Slav girl think she was? It was worth fifty, no more. In the vegetable drawer, I discovered an opened chestnut mousse. What seemed shocking to me, at this stage in my reflection, was not that there were young girls available for money, but that there were some who are not available, or only at prohibitive prices; in short, I wanted a regulation of the market.

  “That said, you did not pay…,” Isabelle pointed out. “And, five years later, you still haven’t made your mind up about doing it. No, what’s going to happen is that you’ll meet a young girl—not a Lolita, rather a girl aged twenty, twenty-five—and you will fall in love with her. She’ll be intelligent, a nice girl, no doubt very pretty. A girl who could have been a friend…” Night had fallen, and I could no longer make out the features of her face. “Who could have been me…” She spoke calmly, but I did not know how to interpret this calm, there was something rather unusual in the tone of her voice and I had, after all, no experience of the situation, I had never been in love before Isabelle and no woman had been in love with me either, with the exception of Fat Ass—but that was another issue, she was at least fifty-five years old when I met her, at least that’s what I believed at the time, she could have been my mother, it was not a question of love on my part, the idea hadn’t even crossed my mind. And love without hope is something else, something painful certainly, but something that never generates the same sense of closeness, the same sensitivity to the intonations of the other, even in the one who loves without hope, they are too lost in vain and frenetic expectation to retain even the smallest amount of lucidity, to be able to interpret any signal correctly; in short I was in a situation that had, in my life, no precedent.

  “No one can see above himself,” writes Schopenhauer to make us understand the impossibility of an exchange of ideas between two individuals of too different an intellectual level. At that moment, obviously, Isabelle could see above me; I had the prudence to stay quiet. After all, she told me, I might just as easily not meet the girl; given the thinness of my social relations, this was the most likely scenario.

  She continued to buy French newspapers, although not that often, not more than once a week, and from time to time she would hand me an article with a sniff of contempt. It was around this time that the French media began a big campaign to promote friendship, probably launched by Le Nouvel Observateur. “Love can break your heart, friendship never will,” that was more or less the theme of the articles. I didn’t understand why they were interested in spouting such absurdities; Isabelle explained that it was an old chestnut, that we were simply dealing with an annual variation on the theme: “How to break up and remain good friends.” According to her, this would last another four or five years before we could admit that the passage from love to friendship, i.e., from a strong feeling to a weak one, was patently the prelude to the disappearance of all feeling—on the historical level, I mean, for on the individual one, indifference was by far the most favorable situation: once love had broken down, it was generally not transformed into indifference, and even less frequently into friendship. On the basis of this remark, I laid the foundations of a script entitled Two Flies Later, which was to constitute the apex—and end—of my cinematic career. My agent was delighted to learn that I was getting back to work—two and a half years’ absence was a long time. He was less delighted when he held the finished product in his hands. I had not hidden from him the fact that it was a film script, which I aimed to produce and act in myself; that wasn’t the problem—on the contrary, he said, people have been waiting for a long time, it’s good they’re going to be surprised, it could have cult status. The content, however…Frankly, was I not going a bit too far?

  The film related the life of a man whose favorite pastime was killing flies with an elastic band (hence the title); in general, he missed them—you were, however, talking about a three-hour-long feature. The second-favorite pastime of this cultivated man, a great reader of Pierre Louÿs, was having his cock sucked by little prepubescent girls—well, fourteen at the oldest; he had more success with this than with the flies.

  Contrary to what has since been repeated by media hirelings, this film was not a monumental flop; it was even a triumph in certain foreign countries, and made a considerable profit in France, without, however, reaching the numbers that one could have expected, given the until then vertiginous rise of my career; that’s all.

  Its failure with the critics, on the other hand, was real; to this day I still think it was undeserved. “An undistinguished knockabout farce,” was the headline in Le Monde, differentiating itself from its more moralistic peers, who raised, especially in their editorials, the question of banning it. It was certainly a comedy, and most of the gags were very obvious, if not vulgar; but there were certain passages of dialogue, in certain scenes, which seem to me, with hindsight, to be the best thing I ever produced. In particular in Corsica, in the long sequence filmed on the slopes of Bavella, where the hero (played by me) shows the little Aurore (nine years old), whom he has just conquered over a Disney tea at Marineland in Bonifacio, around his second home.

  “There’s no point in living in Corsica,” she hurled insolently, “if it means living on a bend in the road.”

  “To see cars pass,” he (I) replied, “is already to live a little.”
>
  No one had laughed; neither during the screen test, nor at the comic film festival in Montbazon. And yet, and yet, I told myself, never had I reached such heights. Could Shakespeare himself have produced such dialogue? Could he have even imagined it, the sad fool?

  Beyond the hackneyed subject of pedophilia, this film strove to be a vigorous plea against friendship, and more generally against all nonsexual relationships. What in fact could two men talk about, beyond a certain age? What reason could two men find for being together, except, of course, in the case of a conflict of interests, or of some common project (overthrowing a government, building a motorway, writing a script for a cartoon, exterminating the Jews)? After a certain age (I am talking about men of a certain level of intelligence, not aged brutes), it’s quite obvious that everything has been said and done. How could a project as intrinsically empty as two men spending some time together lead to anything other than boredom, annoyance, and, at the end of the day, outright hostility? While between a man and a woman there still remained, despite everything, something: a little bit of attraction, a little bit of hope, a little bit of a dream. Speech, which was basically designed for controversy and disagreement, was still scarred by its warlike origins. Speech destroys, separates, and when it is all that remains between a man and a woman, then you can consider the relationship over. When, however, it is accompanied, softened, and in some way sanctified by caresses, speech itself can take on a completely different meaning, one that is less dramatic but more profound, that of a detached intellectual counterpoint, free and uninvolved in immediate issues.

  Launching an attack not only on friendship but on all social relationships as soon as they are unaccompanied by physical contact, this film thus constituted—only the magazine Slut Zone had the perspicacity to notice this—an indirect eulogy to bisexuality, if not hermaphroditism. All in all, I was harking back to the ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the ancient Greeks.

  Daniel24, 7

  THE NUMBER OF HUMAN LIFE STORIES is 6174, which corresponds to Kapreker’s first constant. Whether they come from men or women, from Europe or Asia, America or Africa, whether they are complete or not, all agree on one point, and one point only: the unbearable nature of the mental suffering caused by old age.

  It is no doubt Bruno1, with his brutal succinctness, who gives us its most striking image when he describes himself as “full of a young man’s desires, with the body of an old man”; but I repeat, all the testimonies concur, whether it is that of Daniel1, my distant predecessor, or of Rachid1, Paul1, John1, Felicity1, or that particularly poignant one of Esperanza1. At no moment in human history does growing old seem to have been a pleasure cruise; but, in the years preceding the disappearance of the species, it had manifestly become atrocious to the point where the level of voluntary deaths, prudishly renamed departures by the public-health bodies, was nearing 100 percent, and the average age of departure, estimated at sixty across the entire globe, was falling toward fifty in the most developed countries.

  This figure was the result of a long evolution, scarcely begun at the time of Daniel1, when the average age at death was much higher, and suicide by old people was still infrequent. The now-ugly, deteriorated bodies of the elderly were, however, already the object of unanimous disgust, and it was undoubtedly the heat wave of summer 2003, which was particularly deadly in France, that provoked the first consciousness of the phenomenon. “The Death March of the Elderly” was the headline in Libération on the day after the first figures became known—more than ten thousand people, in the space of two weeks, had died in the country; some had died alone in their apartments, others in the hospital or in retirement homes, but all had essentially died because of a lack of care. In the weeks that followed, that same newspaper published a series of atrocious reports, illustrated with photos that were reminiscent of concentration camps, relating the agony of old people crammed into communal rooms, naked on their beds, in diapers, moaning all day without anyone coming to rehydrate them or even to give them a glass of water; describing the rounds made by nurses unable to contact the families who were on vacation, regularly gathering up the corpses to make space for new arrivals. “Scenes unworthy of a modern country,” wrote the journalist, without realizing that they were in fact the proof that France was becoming a modern country, that only an authentically modern country was capable of treating old people purely as rubbish, and that such contempt for one’s ancestors would have been inconceivable in Africa, or in a traditional Asian country.

  The obligatory indignation aroused by these images quickly faded, and the development of active euthanasia—or, increasingly often, active voluntary euthanasia—would, in the course of the following decades, solve the problem.

  It was recommended to humans, wherever possible, that they end up with a complete life story, before they died, in accordance with the belief, widespread at the time, that the last moments of life might be accompanied by some kind of revelation. The example cited most often was that of Marcel Proust, whose first reflex upon sensing death’s approach was to rush to the manuscript of Remembrance of Things Past in order to note his impressions of dying.

  Very few, in practice, had this courage.

  Daniel1, 8

  All in all, Barnaby, we would need a powerful ship, with a thrust of three hundred kilotons. Then we could escape the Earth’s gravity and make for the satellites of Jupiter.

  —Captain Clark

  PREPARATION, FILMING, post-production, a limited promotional tour (Two Flies Later had been released simultaneously in most of the European capitals, but I restricted myself to France and Germany): in all, I had stayed away from home for just over a year. The first surprise awaited me at the Almería airport: a compact group of around fifty people, massed behind the barriers at the exit, were brandishing diaries, T-shirts, and posters of the film. I already knew this much from the early viewing figures: the movie, which had modest takings in Paris, had been a hit in Madrid—as well as, I might add, in London, Rome, and Berlin; I had become a star in Europe.

  Once the group had dispersed, I noticed Isabelle, on a seat at the back of the arrivals hall. That too was a shock. Dressed in trousers and a shapeless T-shirt, she screwed up her eyes in my direction with a mixture of fear and shame. When I was a few meters away from her she began to cry, the tears streamed down her cheeks without her trying to wipe them away. She had put on at least twenty kilos. Even her face, this time, had not been spared: puffy and blotchy, her hair greasy and unkempt, she looked awful.

  Obviously Fox was overjoyed, jumped in the air, licked my face for a good quarter of an hour; I sensed easily that that was not going to be enough. She refused to undress in my presence, and reappeared dressed in a flannelette tracksuit that she wore to bed. In the taxi from the airport, we did not exchange a word. Empty bottles of Cointreau were scattered on the bedroom floor; that said, the house had been tidied.

  In the course of my career, I had blathered enough about the opposition between eroticism and tenderness, and I had played the roles of all the characters: the girl who goes to gang bangs and yet seeks a very chaste, refined, and sisterly relationship with the true love of her life; the half-impotent simpleton who accepts her; the gangbanger who takes advantage. Consummation, forgetting, misery. I had made entire theaters laugh their heads off with these kinds of themes; and they had earned me considerable sums of money. Nevertheless, this time they concerned me directly, and this opposition between eroticism and tenderness appeared to me as it really is: one of the worst examples of bullshit of our time, one of those that sign, definitively, the death warrant of civilization. “The laughing’s over, you little bugger…,” I repeated to myself with disturbing gaiety (because at that time the sentence turned over and over in my head, I couldn’t stop it, eighteen tablets of Atarax made no difference, and I ended up resorting to a pastis-Tranxene cocktail). “But the one who loves someone for her beauty, does he love her? No: for the pox, which will kill beauty without ki
lling the person, will make him stop loving her.” Pascal did not know Cointreau. It is also true that, living in a time when bodies were less on show, he overestimated the importance of the beauty of the face. The worst part of it is that it was not her beauty, in the first place, that I had found attractive in Isabelle: intelligent women have always turned me on. To tell the truth, intelligence is not very useful in sexual intercourse, and it serves really only one purpose: to know at which moment you should put your hand on a man’s cock in a public place. All men like this; it’s the monkey’s sense of domination, residual traces of that kind of thing, and it would be stupid not to realize it; the only issue is the choice of the time, and the place. Some men prefer that the indecent gesture be witnessed by a woman; others, probably those who are a little gay or very dominant, prefer it to be another man; others still find nothing pleases them as much as a couple giving them a complicit look. Some prefer trains, others swimming pools, others nightclubs or bars; an intelligent woman knows this. Anyway, I still had good memories of being with Isabelle. At the end of each night I could conjure up sweeter and quasi-nostalgic thoughts; at this point, at my side, she would be snoring like a cow. Dawn approached, and I realized that these memories, also, would vanish quite quickly; it was then that I opted for the pastis-Tranxene cocktail.

  On the practical level, there was no immediate problem: we had seventeen bedrooms. I moved into one of those overlooking the cliffs and the sea; Isabelle, apparently, preferred to contemplate inland. Fox went from room to room, it amused him a lot; he suffered no more from it than a child from the divorce of his parents, rather less, I’d say.