The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  I had imagined then—and fifteen years later I thought of it again with shame and disgust—I had imagined that after a certain age, sexual desire disappears and leaves you at least relatively tranquil. How had I, the one who had pretended to himself that he had a caustic and cutting mind, been able to fashion such a ridiculous illusion? I understood life, in principle at least, I had even read some books; and if there was one simple subject, one subject on which, as they say, all the testimonies are in agreement, it was certainly this. Not only does sexual desire not disappear, but with age it becomes even crueler, more and more wrenching and insatiable—and even among those, quite rare, men whose hormonal secretions, erections, and all associated phenomena disappear, the attraction to young female bodies does not diminish, it becomes, and this is maybe even worse, cosa mentale, the desire for desire. This is the truth, this is the evidence, this is what, tirelessly, all serious authors have constantly repeated.

  At the absolute limit, I could have performed cunnilingus on the person of Fat Ass—I imagined my face venturing between her flabby thighs, their pale rolls of fat, trying to revive her sagging clitoris. But even that, I was sure, would not have been enough—and would perhaps only have aggravated her suffering. She wanted, like all women, to be penetrated, she would not be satisfied with less, it was nonnegotiable.

  I took flight; like all men put in the same circumstances, I ran away: I stopped replying to her e-mails, I forbade her access to my dressing room. She insisted for years, five, maybe seven, she insisted for a terrifying number of years; I think she insisted right up to the day after my encounter with Isabelle. I had obviously not told her anything, I no longer had any contact; maybe at the end of the day intuition does exist, female intuition as they say, it was in any case the moment she chose to disappear, to leave my life, and maybe life itself, as she had, several times, threatened to do.

  On the day after that difficult night, I took the first plane to Paris. Esther was slightly surprised, she had thought I would spend the whole week in Madrid, and so had I as that was what I had planned. I didn’t fully understand the reason for this sudden departure, maybe I wanted to be clever, to show that I too had my life, my activities, and my independence—in which case I had failed, she didn’t seem upset or destabilized by the news in the slightest, she said: “Bueno…” and that was that. Above all, I suppose my actions didn’t really make any sense, I was beginning to behave like a fatally wounded old animal that charges in all directions, bumps into every obstacle, falls and gets up, more and more furious, more and more weakened, crazed and intoxicated by the smell of its own blood.

  I had used as a pretext my desire to see Vincent again, or at least that’s what I had explained to Esther, but it was only when I landed at Roissy that I realized how much I really wanted to see him; with this, too, I didn’t know why, maybe just to verify that happiness is possible. With Susan he had moved back into his grandparents’ house—the house he had, in fact, lived in all his life. It was the end of May but the weather was overcast, and the redbrick exterior rather sinister; I was surprised by the names on the mailbox. “Susan Longfellow,” okay, but “Vincent Macaury”? Well, yes, the prophet was called Macaury, Robert Macaury; and Vincent no longer had the right to use his mother’s name; the name Macaury had been given to him by the lawyers, because he needed one, while awaiting a legal decision. “I am a mistake…,” Vincent had once told me, alluding to his relationship with the prophet. Maybe; but his grandparents had welcomed him and cherished him like a victim, they had been bitterly disappointed by the hedonistic and irresponsible selfishness of their son—indeed of an entire generation, before things turned bad, and only selfishness remained, hedonism having flown; they had welcomed him in any case, they had opened the doors of their home to him, and this was something, for example, that I would never have done for my own son, the very thought of living under the same roof as that little ass-hole would have been unbearable, we were simply, he and I, people who should not have been born. Unlike, say, Susan, who now lived among these old, cluttered, gloomy furnishings, so far from her native California, and who had immediately felt good there; she had thrown out nothing, I recognized the framed family photos, the grandfather’s work medals, and the souvenir mechanical bulls bought during a holiday on the Costa Brava; maybe she had let in some fresh air, bought some flowers, I haven’t a clue, I’ve always lived as though I were in a hotel, I don’t have the homemaking instinct, in the absence of women, I believe I wouldn’t even have given it a thought; in any case it was now a house in which you had the impression that people could be happy, she had the power to do that. She loved Vincent, I realized immediately, it was obvious, but above all she loved. It was in her nature to love, as it was for a cow to graze (or a bird to sing; or a rat to sniff about). Having lost her previous master, she had almost instantaneously found another, and the world around her had once again been filled with a positive clarity. I dined with them, and it was a pleasant and harmonious evening, with very little suffering; I did not, however, have the courage to stay the night, and I left at about eleven, having reserved a room at the Lutétia.

  At the Montparnasse-Bienvenue station I thought again about poetry, probably because I had just seen Vincent, and that always brought me back to a clear consciousness of my limits: creative limitations on one hand, but also limitations in love. It must be said that I had just passed by a “Poetry on the Metro” poster, more precisely the one that reproduced “Free Love” by André Breton, and, whatever the disgust inspired by the personality of André Breton, whatever the stupidity of the title, its pitiful antinomy, which only demonstrated, in addition to a certain softening of the brain, the instinct for publicity that characterized and ultimately summed up Surrealism, you had to admit it: this idiot had, under the circumstances, written a very beautiful poem. I was not the only one, however, to have some reservations, and two days later, passing by the same poster again, I noticed that it was smeared with graffiti, which said: “Instead of your stupid poems, give us some trains at rush hour,” which was enough to put me in a good mood for the entire afternoon, and even to give me back some self-confidence: I was only a comedian, I know, but I was still a comedian.

  The day after my dinner at Vincent’s, I had informed the reception desk at the Lutétia that I would be keeping the room, probably for a few days. They had welcomed the news with a conniving courtesy. After all, don’t forget, I was a celebrity; I could easily burn my cash by drinking Alexandras at the bar with Philippe Sollers, or Philippe Bouvard—maybe not Philippe Léotard, he was dead; but anyway, given my notoriety, I would have access to these categories of Philippes. I could spend the night with a transsexual Slovenian whore; in short, I could have a brilliant social life, it was probably even expected of me, people become famous as a result of one or two talented productions, no more, it’s sufficiently surprising that a human being has one or two things to say, after that they manage their decline more or less peacefully, more or less painfully, that’s the way it goes.

  I did none of that, however, in the days that followed; instead, first thing that morning, I phoned Vincent again. He understood quickly that the spectacle of his conjugal bliss risked hurting me, and suggested that we meet up in the bar of the Lutétia. He really only spoke to me about his embassy project, which had become an installation whose visitors would be the men of the future. He had ordered a lemonade, but didn’t touch his drink; from time to time, some celeb crossed the bar, noticed me, and made me a sign of complicity; Vincent paid no attention. He spoke without looking at me, without even checking that I was listening, in a voice that was both thoughtful and distant, as though he were speaking into a tape recorder, or were testifying at an inquiry. As he explained his idea to me, I became conscious that he was moving little by little further away from his initial plan, that the project was growing more and more ambitious, that his goal was now nothing less than to bear witness to what a pompous author of the twentieth century had felt fit to call th
e “human condition.” There were already, he pointed out, many testimonies about mankind, which all agreed in their lamentable assessment; the subject, in short, was covered. Calmly, but irreversibly, he was leaving the human shores to sail toward the absolute beyond, where I did not feel capable of following him, and no doubt it was the only space where he felt himself able to breathe, no doubt his life had never had any other objective, but it was, of course, an objective he needed to pursue alone; that said, he had always been alone.

  We were no longer the same, he insisted in a gentle voice, we had become eternal; granted, we would need some time to master the idea, to become familiar with it; nevertheless, fundamentally, and from now on, things had changed. Knowall had stayed on Lanzarote after the departure of all the followers, with a few technicians, and he was pursuing his research; he would succeed in the end, there was no doubt about it. Man had a large brain, disproportionate in relation to the primitive demands arising from the struggle to survive, from the elementary quest for food and sex; we were, at last, going to be able to use it. No culture of the mind, he reminded me, had ever been able to develop in societies with a high level of delinquency, simply because physical security is the condition for free thought; no reflection, no poetry nor idea of the slightest creativity has ever been engendered in an individual who has to worry about his survival, who has to be constantly on his guard. Once the preservation of our DNA had been ensured, once we had become potentially immortal, we were going, he went on, to find ourselves in conditions of absolute physical safety, in conditions that no human being had ever known; no one could predict what was going to be the result of this, as far as the mind was concerned.

  This peaceful, almost disengaged, conversation did me an immense amount of good, and for the first time I began to think of my own immortality, to look at things in a slightly more open manner; but back in my room I found a message on my cell phone from Esther, which simply said: “I miss you,” and I felt all over again, encrusted in my flesh, my need for her. Joy is such a rare thing. The following morning, I took the plane back to Madrid.

  Daniel25, 8

  THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE accorded to sexual matters among humans has always plunged their neohuman commentators into horrified amazement. It was nonetheless painful to see Daniel1 gradually come closer to the Evil Secret, as the Supreme Sister calls it; it was painful to feel him gradually overcome by the consciousness of a truth that, once revealed, could only annihilate him. Throughout history, most men have deemed it correct, at a certain point in life, to allude to sexual problems as though they were just trivial childish games, and to assume that the real subjects, the subjects worthy of a man’s attention, were politics, business, or war, etc. The truth, in Daniel1’s time, began to be unearthed; it became more and more clear, and more and more difficult to hide, that the true goals of men, the only ones they would have pursued spontaneously if it were still possible for them to do so, were of an exclusively sexual nature. For us neohumans it is a genuine stumbling block. We can never, the Supreme Sister warns us, get a clear enough idea of it; we will only ever be able to approach an understanding of it by constantly keeping in mind certain regulatory ideas, the most important of which is that in the human species, as in all the animal species that preceded it, individual survival counted for absolutely nothing. The Darwinian fiction of the “struggle for life” had long hidden this elementary fact that the genetic value of an individual, his power to pass on his characteristics to his descendants, could be summed up, very brutally, by a single parameter: the number of descendants that he was, in the end, capable of procreating. Thus it was completely unsurprising that an animal, any animal, was prepared to sacrifice its happiness, its physical well-being, and even its life, in the hope of sexual intercourse alone: the will of the species (to speak in finalist terms), a powerfully regulated hormonal system (if you hold to a determinist approach), led them almost inevitably to this choice. The marvelous finery and plumage, the noisy and spectacular parades could easily result in the male animals being spotted and devoured by their predators; such a solution was no less systematically favored, in genetic terms, as long as it permitted more effective reproduction. This subordination of the individual to the species, based on immutable biochemical mechanisms, was just as strong in the human animal, with the added aggravation that their sexual drives, not limited to the rutting period, could operate permanently—human life stories show us, for example, evidence that maintaining a physical appearance capable of seducing representatives of the opposite sex was the only reason for staying healthy, and that the meticulous care of their bodies, to which Daniel1’s contemporaries devoted an increasing proportion of their free time, had no other aim.

  The sexual biochemistry of the neohumans—and this was undoubtedly the real reason for the sensation of suffocation and malaise that overcame me as I advanced through Daniel1’s story, as I followed the stations of his calvary—had remained almost identical.

  Daniel1, 20

  Nothingness turns to nothing.

  —Martin Heidegger

  A ZONE OF HIGH PRESSURE had settled, since the start of August, on the central plain, and from the moment of my arrival at the Barajas airport I sensed that things were going to turn out badly. The heat was almost unbearable and Esther was late; she arrived half an hour later, naked under her summer dress.

  I had left my coitus cream at the Lutétia, and this was my first mistake; I came much too quickly, and, for the first time, I sensed she was a little disappointed. She continued to move, a little, on my sex, which was becoming irredeemably soft, then moved aside with a resigned grimace. I would have given a great deal to get another hard-on; from the moment they are born, men live in a difficult world, a world where the stakes are simplistic and pitiless, and without the understanding of women there are very few who manage to survive. It seemed to me that I understood, from that moment onward, that she had slept with someone else in my absence.

  We took the Metro to have a drink with two of her friends; sweat made the fabric cling to her body, it was easy to make out the areolas of her breasts, the outline of her ass; all the boys in the compartment, obviously, stared at her; some even smiled at her.

  I found it very difficult to take part in the conversation, from time to time I managed to catch a sentence, to offer a few replies, but very soon I was out of my depth and, besides, I was thinking of something else, I felt like I was on a slippery, a very slippery slope. On our return to the hotel, I asked her the question; she acknowledged it without making any excuses. “It was an ex-boyfriend…,” she said, in English, as if to convey that it wasn’t very important. “And a friend of his,” she added after a few seconds’ hesitation.

  So two boys; oh yes, two boys, after all it wasn’t the first time. She had met her ex by chance in a bar, he was with one of his friends, one thing led to another, and so, in short, the three of them ended up in the same bed. I asked her how it had been, I couldn’t stop myself. “Good…good…,” she told me, slightly worried by the direction the conversation was taking. “It was…comfortable,” she added, without being able to repress a smile. Yes, comfortable; I could imagine. It took a terrible effort to ask her if she had sucked him off, him, his friend, both of them, if she had been sodomized. I felt the images flood my brain, this must have been obvious because she stopped talking and her forehead became more and more creased with concern. Very quickly she made the only decision possible, to take care of my sex, and she did it with such tenderness, such skill, with her fingers and her mouth, that against all expectation I began to get hard again, and a minute later I was inside her, and it was good, it was good again, I was completely in the moment and so was she, I even believe that she hadn’t felt such pleasure in a long time—with me at least, I told myself a couple of minutes later, but this time I managed to chase the thought from my mind, and I held her very tenderly in my arms, with all the tenderness I was capable of, and I concentrated with all my strength on her body, on the act
ual, warm, living presence of her body.

  This little scene, so sweet, so unobtrusive and implicit, had, I now think, a decisive influence on Esther, and her behavior in the following weeks was guided by only one thought: to avoid hurting me; to try, even, with all the means at her disposal, to make me happy. The means available to her for making a man happy were considerable, and I have the memory of a period of immense joy, irradiated at every moment by a carnal felicity, a felicity I would not have believed could be bearable, nor believed myself capable of surviving. I also retain the memory of her kindness, her intelligence, her compassionate insight, and her grace, but, basically, I don’t really have what you’d call a memory, or any clear image, I only know that I lived for at least a few days and doubtless a few weeks in a certain state, a state of perfection that was sufficient and complete, yet human, of which some men have occasionally sensed the possibility, even though none until now have been able to provide a plausible description of it.

  For a long time she had been planning a party for her birthday on August 17, and she began over the following days to occupy herself with its preparations. She wanted to invite quite a lot of people, about a hundred, and decided to call upon the help of a friend who lived in the Calle San Isidor. He had a big loft on the top floor, with a terrace and a swimming pool; he invited us to talk about it over a drink. He was a big guy called Pablo, with long curly black hair, rather cool; he had slipped on a light dressing gown to let us in, but took it off once he was on the terrace; his naked body was muscled and tanned. He offered us orange juice. Had he slept with Esther? And was I going to ask myself this question, from now on, of all the men I happened to come across? She was attentive, on her guard since the evening of my return; probably spotting a glimmer of concern in my eyes, she turned down the proposition of a little sunbathing by the pool and tried to limit the conversation to the party preparations. There was no question of buying enough cocaine and Ecstasy for everyone; she offered to cover the purchase of a first bag to start the evening, and to ask the dealers to stop by later. Pablo could look after that, he had excellent dealers at the time; he even proposed, in a burst of generosity, to take care of the purchase of some poppers.