When he came down from the podium everyone stood up; a line of disciples formed around him as he passed, waving their arms to the sky and repeating rhythmically: “Eeee-looo-hiiim!”; some were laughing uncontrollably, others burst into tears. Once he reached Fadiah, the prophet stopped and lightly caressed her breasts. She started joyfully and emitted a sort of “Yeep!” They went off together, through the crowd of disciples who sang and applauded wildly. “It is the third time! The third time she has had this distinction!” Patrick proudly whispered to me. He then informed me that in addition to his twelve fiancées, the prophet would from time to time give an ordinary female disciple the honor of spending a night in his company. The excitement gradually calmed down, and the followers returned to their tents. Patrick wiped the lenses of his glasses, which were misted over with tears, then put an arm around my shoulders, looking up to the sky. It was an exceptional night, he told me; he could feel the waves coming from the stars even more than normal, the waves full of love that the Elohim were carrying to us; it was on such a night, he was convinced, that they would return among us. I didn’t really know what to say in reply. I had not only never held any religious belief, but I hadn’t even envisaged the possibility of doing so. For me, things were exactly as they appeared to be: man was a species of animal, descended from other animal species through a tortuous and difficult process of evolution; he was made up of matter configured in organs, and after his death these organs would decompose and transform into simpler molecules; no trace of brain activity would remain, nor of thought, nor, evidently, of anything that might be described as a spirit or a soul. My atheism was so monolithic, so radical, that I had never been able to take these subjects completely seriously. During my days at secondary school, when I would debate with a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew, I had always had the impression that their beliefs were to be taken ironically; that they obviously didn’t believe, in the proper sense of the term, in the reality of the dogmas they professed, but that they were a sign of recognition, a sort of password allowing them access to the community of believers—a bit like grunge music was, or Doom Generation for fans of that game. The weighty seriousness they sometimes brought to debates between equally absurd theological positions seemed to contradict this hypothesis; but the same thing, basically, could be said for the fans of a game: for a chess player, or a participant who is truly immersed in a roleplay, the fictional space of the game becomes something completely serious and real, you could even say that nothing else exists for him, for the duration of the game at least.
This annoying enigma of those who believe was therefore being posed to me once again, in practically the same terms, with regard to the Elohimites. Of course in certain cases the dilemma was easy to resolve. Knowall, for example, obviously could not take this twaddle seriously, but he had very good reasons to remain in the sect: given the heterodox character of his research, he would never have been able to obtain as much financial support elsewhere, or a laboratory with as much modern equipment. The other leaders—Cop, Joker, and, of course, the prophet—also drew a material benefit from their membership. The case of Patrick was more curious. Certainly, the Elohimite sect had enabled him to find a lover who was explosively erotic, and probably as hot as she appeared to be—which would not have been so easy in the outside world: the sex life of bankers and business leaders, in spite of all their money, is in general absolutely miserable, they have to content themselves with brief and highly expensive rendezvous with escort girls who despise them and never miss an opportunity to make them feel the physical disgust they inspire. However, Patrick seemed to exhibit a real faith, an unfeigned hope in the eternity of delights that the prophet offered a glimpse of; all the same, in a man whose behavior bore the imprint of a great bourgeois rationality, it was troubling.
Before falling asleep, I thought again at length about the case of Patrick, and that of Vincent. Since the first evening, the latter had not spoken to me. Waking early the following morning, I saw him again walking down the winding road along the hillside in the company of Susan; they appeared to be plunged once again into an intense and interminable discussion. They separated at the top of the first terreplein, with a nod, and Vincent went back in the direction of his bedroom. I was waiting for him near the entrance; he jumped at the sight of me. I invited him for coffee at my place; taken aback, he accepted. While the water was heating, I put the cups and cutlery on the little garden table on the terrace. The sun was emerging with difficulty between some bumpy dark gray clouds; a thin violet ray ran just above the line of the horizon. I poured him a cup of coffee; he added a sugar cube, and pensively stirred the mixture in his cup. I sat down in front of him; he remained silent, lowered his eyes, and brought the cup to his lips. “Are you in love with Susan?” I asked him. He raised an anxious look toward me. “It’s as obvious as that?” he asked after a long pause. I nodded in agreement. “You should take a step back…,” I said, and my calm, firm tone gave the impression that I had been reflecting on this deeply, earlier, while in fact I had only just thought of it for the first time, but I forged ahead:
“We could take a trip around the island…”
“You mean…leave the camp?”
“Is it forbidden?”
“No…No, I don’t think so. We’d have to ask Jérôme how we go about it…” All the same, the prospect seemed to worry him a little.
“Of course you can! Of course you can!” Cop exclaimed good-humoredly. “We’re not in a prison here! I’ll ask someone to drive you to Arrecife; or perhaps to the airport, that’ll be more practical for renting a car.”
“But you’ll be coming back this evening?” he asked just as we were getting into the minibus. “It’s just so I know…”
I had no precise plan, other than to bring Vincent back to the normal world for a day, i.e., almost anywhere; i.e., given the place we were in, it would most likely be the beach. He exhibited a surprising docility and lack of initiative; the car-rental man had provided us with a map of the island. “We could go to Teguise beach…,” I said, “it’s the easiest to get to.” He didn’t even bother to reply.
He had brought along a pair of trunks and a towel, and he sat placidly between the dunes, he even seemed ready to spend the day there if he had to. “There are a lot of other women…,” I said, out of the blue, to begin a conversation, before I became aware that this wasn’t that straightforward. It was the low season, there were probably about fifty people in our field of vision: teenage girls with attractive bodies, flanked by boys; young mothers whose bodies were already less attractive, accompanied by small children. Our mutual sharing of a common space with them was fated to remain purely theoretical; none of these people belonged to a kind of reality with which we could, in one way or another, interact; in our eyes they had no more existence than if they had been images on a cinema screen—in fact, rather less, I’d say. I was beginning to feel that this excursion into the normal world was doomed to failure when I became aware that there was, moreover, a risk of it ending in quite an unpleasant manner.
I hadn’t done it deliberately, but we had installed ourselves in the portion of beach that belonged to a Thomson Holidays club. On returning from the sea, which had been rather cold, and which I hadn’t managed to get into, I saw that a hundred or so people were thronging around a podium on which a mobile sound system had been set up. Vincent hadn’t moved; sitting in the middle of the crowd, he regarded the surrounding agitation with perfect indifference. As I rejoined him, I was able to read “Miss Bikini Contest” on a banner that hung above the podium. Indeed, about ten little sluts aged thirteen to fifteen waited by one of the stairs to the podium, wiggling and emitting little cries. After a spectacular musical gimmick, a tall black man dressed like a circus chimp bounded onto the podium and invited the girls to come up one by one. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” he shouted in English into his HF microphone, “welcome to the ‘Miss Bikini’ contest! Have we got some sexy girls for you today!” He turned
to the first girl, a leggy red-haired teenager sporting a minimal white bikini. “What’s your name?” he asked her. “Ilona,” the girl replied. “A beautiful name for a beautiful girl!” he shouted with gusto. “And where are you from, Ilona?” She came from Budapest. “Budaaaa-pest! That city’s ho-ooot!” he roared with enthusiasm; the girl burst into nervous laughter. He moved on to the next girl, a platinum-blond Russian, very curvaceous in spite of her fourteen years, who looked a right tart, then he asked each of the others a couple of questions, bounding around and puffing out his chest in his silver lamé smoking jacket, making essentially more and more obscene remarks. I threw a despairing look at Vincent: he was as much at home in this seaside spectacle as Samuel Beckett in a rap video. Having gone through all the girls, the black man turned toward four paunchy sixtysomethings, seated behind a small table, notebooks in front of them, and made a great show of pointing them out to the public: “And judging the-eem…is our international jury!…The four members of our panel have been around the world a few times—that’s the least you can say! They know what sexy boys and girls look like! Ladies and gentlemen, a special hand for our experts!” There was some weak applause, during which the ridiculed seniors waved to their families in the audience, then the competition began in earnest: one after the other, the girls took to the stage, in their bikinis, to do a sort of erotic dance: they wiggled their bottoms, smeared themselves with suntan oil, played with their bra straps, etc. The music was house, played at full volume. And so, that was it: we were in the normal world. I thought again of what Isabelle had told me on our first evening together: a world of definitive kids. The black man was an adult kid, the members of the jury aging kids; there was nothing here that might actually encourage Vincent to return to his place in society. I suggested that we leave at the point when the Russian girl began stuffing her hand down her bikini bottom; he accepted with indifference.
On a map on the 1:200,000 scale, especially on a Michelin map, the whole world seems happy; on a map of a larger scale, like the one I had of Lanzarote, things deteriorate: you start to make out the hotels, the leisure infrastructures. On a scale of 1:1 you find yourself back in the normal world, which is not very pleasant; but if you increase the scale even more, you are plunged into a nightmare: you start to make out the dust mites, mycoses, and parasites that eat away at the flesh. By two p.m., we were back at the center.
“Good timing, that’s very good timing,” declared Cop as he welcomed us, jumping with enthusiasm; the prophet had just decided, in an impromptu fashion, to organize a little dinner that evening to bring together the celebrities present, that is to say all those who could, in one way or another, provide media contacts or have a public profile. Joker, who was standing next to him, nodded vigorously and winked at me as if to suggest that I didn’t have to take it all that seriously. In reality, I think he was counting on me to improve the situation: as the person responsible for public relations, he had up until then only known failure; in the best cases, the sect was portrayed as a bunch of cranks and UFO freaks, and in the worst, as a dangerous organization propagating ideas that flirted with eugenics, if not Nazism; as for the prophet, he was regularly ridiculed for his successive failures in his previous careers (race-car driver, cabaret singer…). In short, the presence of a fairly substantial VIP like myself was an unexpected stroke of luck for them; you could say I was extra air in their tires.
Ten or so people were gathered in the dining room; I recognized Gianpaolo, accompanied by Francesca. He probably owed this invitation to his acting career, however modest; evidently, the term celebrities had to be taken in its broadest sense. I also recognized a woman of about fifty, platinum blond, quite plump, who had performed the welcome song for the Elohim with a scarcely bearable sonic intensity; she introduced herself as an opera singer, or more accurately a choral singer. I had the place of honor, just in front of the prophet; he greeted me cordially, but seemed tense and anxious, and looked nervously around in every direction; he calmed down a little when Joker sat down next to him. Vincent sat on my right, and threw a sharp look at the prophet, who was rubbing bread into little balls and rolling them mechanically on the table; at that instant he seemed tired and distracted, for once he really looked his sixty-five years. “The media hate us…,” he said bitterly. “If I was to disappear now, I don’t know what would remain of my work. They would move in for the kill…” Joker, who was getting ready to make some witty remark, turned to him, gathered from his tone of voice that he was speaking seriously, and was left gaping. His face, flattened as if by an iron, his small nose, and the few spiky hairs on his head: everything predisposed him to playing the clown, he was one of those unfortunate beings whose very despair cannot be taken completely seriously; the fact remains that, in the event of a sudden collapse of the sect, his fate would not have been an enviable one, I wasn’t even sure he had another source of income. He lived with the prophet in Santa Monica, in the same house occupied by the twelve fiancées. He had no sexual life himself, and generally he didn’t do much with his days, his only eccentricity was to have garlic sausage flown over from France, the Californian delicatessen shops seeming to him to be insufficient; he also collected fishhooks and appeared on the whole to be quite a miserable puppet, emptied of any personal desire and any living substance, whom the prophet kept at his side more or less out of charity, to basically be used as a foil or a whipping boy when the opportunity arose.
The prophet’s fiancées made their appearance, carrying plates of hors d’oeuvres; doubtless in homage to the artistic nature of the assembled guests, they had exchanged their tunics for cheeky Mélusine fairy costumes, with conical hats covered in stars and skintight dresses in silvery sequins that exposed their asses. An effort had been made that evening with the food; there were little meat pastries and various zakouskis. Mechanically, the prophet caressed the bottom of the brunette who was serving him zakouskis, but that didn’t seem to be sufficient to improve his morale; nervously, he asked that the wine be served immediately, downed two glasses in one go, then slumped back into his chair, looking long and hard at those present.
“We must do something with the media…,” he said at last to Joker. “I’ve just read this week’s Nouvel Observateur, this systematic smear campaign, it’s just uncalled-for…” The other frowned, then after a minute’s reflection, as if stating an utterly remarkable truth, he said: “It’s difficult…,” in a dubious tone. I thought he was responding with slightly surprising detachment, because he was, after all, officially the only one responsible—and this was all the more obvious as neither Knowall nor Cop was present at this dinner. He was without doubt completely incompetent in this field, as in all others, he had got used to getting bad results, and thought that it would always be thus, that everyone around him had also got used to the results being bad; he too must have been almost sixty-five, and he no longer expected much from life. His mouth opened and closed silently, he was apparently looking for something funny to say, but couldn’t find it, he was the victim of a temporary comedy breakdown. He finally gave up: the prophet, he must have thought, was in a bad mood this evening, but he would get over it; he calmly tucked into his meat pastry.
“In your view…,” the prophet addressed me directly, looking me straight in the eye, “…is the hostility of the press truly a long-term problem?”
“On the whole, yes. Of course, by posing as a martyr, by complaining of being unjustifiably ostracized, you can successfully attract a few deviants—Le Pen managed this in his time. But at the end of the day you lose—especially when you want to express a unifying message, that is, from the moment you try to increase your appeal beyond a certain audience.”
“There you go! There you go!…Listen to what Daniel has just told me!” He got up in his chair, enlisting the entire table as witnesses. “The media accuse us of being a sect when they are the ones who stop us from becoming a religion by systematically misrepresenting our ideas, by denying us access to the general public, whi
le the solutions we propose are for every human being, regardless of their nationality, race, previous beliefs…”
The guests stopped eating; some nodded, but no one could formulate the slightest remark. The prophet sat down again, discouraged, and nodded to the brunette, who served him another glass of wine. After some silence, the conversations round the table started up again: most were about various acting roles, scripts, and movie projects. Many of the guests appeared to be actors—novices or D-list; probably as a result of the determining role that chance plays in their lives, actors are often, I had already remarked, easy prey for all kinds of bizarre sects, beliefs, and spiritual disciplines. Strangely, none of them had recognized me, which was rather a good thing.
The Possibility of an Island Page 19