I digested the information, and showed by a slight nod that I had understood. “She is, in fact, a descendant of the same Esther your ancestor knew,” she went on. “I had thought for a moment that she was going to agree to accompany me; finally, she gave up on the idea, at least for the moment, but I have the impression that she, too, isn’t satisfied with our way of life. We spoke about you, several times; I think that she would be happy to enter a phase of intermediation.”
I nodded again. She stared into the lens once more for a few seconds, saying nothing, then, with a bizarre smile, she put a light backpack on her shoulders, turned around, and exited to the left of the camera’s field. I remained immobile for a long time in front of the screen as it transmitted the image of the empty room.
Daniel1, 24
AFTER A FEW WEEKS OF PROSTRATION I took up my life story again, but that afforded me only slight relief; I was almost up to the moment of my encounter with Isabelle, and the creation of this attenuated copy of my real existence seemed like a slightly unhealthy exercise to me, I had no impression at all that I was accomplishing something important or remarkable, but Vincent, on the other hand, seemed to attach a great value to it, every week he phoned to find out where I was at, once he even told me that in a way what I was doing was as important as Knowall’s research on Lanzarote. He was exaggerating, obviously, nevertheless I returned to the task with more ardor; it was curious how I had come to trust him, to listen to his words as though to an oracle.
Little by little the days grew longer, the weather became warmer and drier, and I began to go out a bit more; avoiding the building site in front of the house, I took the path up through the hills, then I went back down as far as the cliffs; from there I contemplated the sea, which was immense and gray; as flat and as gray as my life. I stopped at each bend, adopting the rhythm of Fox; he was happy, I could tell, with these long outings, even if he now had some difficulty walking. We went to bed early, before sunset; I never watched television, I had omitted to renew my satellite subscription; I no longer read much either, and I had even ended up getting tired of Balzac. Social life concerned me less, without doubt, than at the time when I was writing my sketches; I already knew then that I had chosen a limited genre that would not allow me to accomplish, in all my career, a tenth of what Balzac could do in a single novel. Furthermore, I was completely conscious of what I owed him: I had kept all of my sketches, all of the shows I had recorded, which amounted to about fifteen DVDs; I had never, in the course of those quite interminable days, thought of taking a look at them. I had often been compared to the French moralists, occasionally to Lichtenberg; but never had anyone thought of Molière, or Balzac. Even so, I reread Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, above all for the character of Nucingen. Still, it was remarkable that Balzac had been able to give the character of that lovesick fogey such a pathetic dimension, a dimension that’s frankly obvious once you think about it, which is inscribed in its very definition, and which Molière had not dreamed of at all; it’s true that Molière was working in comedy, and the same problem always arises: you always end up crashing into the same difficulty, which is that life, fundamentally, is not comical.
One April morning, a rainy morning, after wading about for five minutes in some muddy tire tracks, I decided to stop walking. As I arrived at the door of my residence, I realized that Fox wasn’t there; the rain had begun to pour down, you couldn’t see further than five meters; I could hear the nearby din of a digger, but I couldn’t make it out. I went inside to get a raincoat, then set out in search of him, in the driving rain; one by one, I searched all the places where he liked to stop, whose smells he liked to sniff.
I found him only late that afternoon; he was just three hundred meters from the residence, I must have passed him several times without noticing. Only his head was sticking out of the mud, slightly stained with blood, the tongue protruding, his eyes frozen in a rictus of horror. Scrabbling in the mud with my bare hands, I freed his body, which had burst like a sausage, the intestines had spurted out; he was far off the roadside, the truck must have veered to run him over. I took off my raincoat to wrap him up and returned home, my shoulders bowed, my face streaming with tears, looking away so as not to see the eyes of the workers who stopped to watch me pass, evil smiles on their lips.
Doubtless I wept for a long time, then I calmed down, night had almost fallen; the site was deserted, but the rain was still falling. I went out into the garden, into what had been the garden, which was now a dusty waste ground in summer and a lake of mud in winter; I had no difficulty digging a grave, at the corner of the house; I put one of his favorite toys on top of it, a small plastic duck. The rain set off another mudslide that in turn engulfed the toy; I began to cry again.
I don’t know why but something broke in me that night, like a last protective fence that had not given way at the time of Esther’s departure, nor at Isabelle’s death. Perhaps because the death of Fox coincided with the moment in my life story where I was recounting how we had met him, on the hard shoulder of a highway between Saragossa and Tarragón; perhaps simply because I was older, and my resistance was diminishing. Still, it was in tears that I phoned Vincent, in the middle of the night, under the impression that my tears would never stop, that I could no longer do anything, till the end of my days, but cry. Such a thing can be observed, I had already observed it in some old people: occasionally their face is calm and static, their mind seems peaceful and empty; but as soon as they regain contact with reality, as soon as they regain consciousness and start thinking again, they immediately start crying—softly, without interruption, for whole days on end. Vincent listened to me attentively, without protesting, despite the late hour; then he promised he would phone Knowall immediately. The genetic code of Fox had been preserved, he reminded me, and we had become immortal; we, but also, if we wished it, our household pets.
He seemed to believe what he was saying; he seemed absolutely to believe it, and I suddenly felt paralyzed by joy. By incredulity as well: I had grown up and grown old in the idea of death, and in the certainty of its empire. It was in a strange state of mind, as if I were about to wake up in a magical world, that I waited for the dawn. It broke, colorless, on the sea; the clouds had disappeared, a tiny corner of blue sky appeared on the horizon.
Miskiewicz called a little before seven. Fox’s DNA had been preserved, yes, and it was stored under good conditions, there was no reason to worry; unfortunately, for the moment, the cloning operation was as impossible for dogs as it was for humans. But only a few things separated them from their goal, it was only a question of years, probably months; the operation had already been successfully carried out with rats and even—although in an unreproducible way—with a domestic cat. Bizarrely, dogs seemed to pose more complex problems; but he promised to keep me informed, and that Fox would be the first to benefit from the technique.
His voice, which I had not heard for a long time, still produced the same impression of technical expertise, of competence, and as I hung up, I felt something strange: this was a failure, right now, it was a failure, and I had no doubt that I was condemned to end my life alone; for the first time, however, I began to understand Vincent, and the other followers; I began to understand the true significance of the Promise; and as the sun emerged and rose above the sea, for the first time, I felt an emotion that, although still obscure, distant, and veiled, resembled hope.
Daniel25, 13
THE DEPARTURE OF MARIE 23 troubles me more than I had anticipated; I had become used to our conversations; their disappearance has left a void in me, a sadness, and I can’t yet bring myself to resume contact with Esther31.
On the day after her departure, I printed off the topographical maps of the zone Marie23 would have to cross on her way to Lanzarote; I think about her frequently, and imagine her on the stages of her journey. She is no longer a neohuman, she has decided to separate herself from our community, which means her departure was freely chosen and definitive; I must
repeat this to myself several times a day to get used to the idea. I also devote an hour every day to reading Spinoza, whom the Supreme Sister recommended in such circumstances.
Daniel1, 25
IT WAS ONLY AFTER THE DEATH OF FOX that I really became fully conscious of the parameters of the aporia. The weather was changing quickly, it wasn’t long before the heat settled on the south of Spain; naked young girls began to tan themselves, especially on weekends, on the beach near the residence, and I began to feel the return, albeit weak and flaccid, of something that wasn’t really even desire—for the word would seem to me, despite everything, to imply a minimum belief in the possibility of its fulfillment—but the memory, the phantom of what could have been desire. I could now make out clearly the cosa mentale, the ultimate torment, and at that moment I could say at last that I had understood. Sexual pleasure was not only superior, in refinement and violence, to all the other pleasures life had to offer; it was not only the one pleasure with which there is no collateral damage to the organism, but which on the contrary contributes to maintaining it at its highest level of vitality and strength; it was in truth the sole pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, and all other pleasures—whether associated with rich food, tobacco, alcohol, or drugs—were only derisory and desperate compensations, mini-suicides that did not have the courage to speak their name, attempts to speed up the destruction of a body that no longer had access to the one real pleasure. Thus human life was organized in a terribly simple fashion, and for twenty years or so, in my scripts and sketches, I had pussyfooted around a reality that I could have expressed in just a few sentences. Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love, and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible. Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility, and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witness—powerless and shame-filled—to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies, which would be slow at first, then increasingly rapid; above all, they would have to look after children, mortal enemies, in their own homes, they would have to pamper them, feed them, worry about their illnesses, provide the means for their education and their pleasure, and unlike in the world of animals, this would last not just for a season, they would remain slaves of their offspring always, the time of joy was well and truly over for them, they would have to continue to suffer until the end, in pain and with increasing health problems, until they were no longer good for anything and were definitively thrown onto the rubbish heap, cumbersome and useless. In return, their children would not be at all grateful, on the contrary their efforts, however strenuous, would never be considered enough, they would, until the bitter end, be considered guilty because of the simple fact of being parents. From this sad life, marked by shame, all joy would be pitilessly banished. When they wanted to draw near to young people’s bodies, they would be chased away, rejected, ridiculed, insulted, and, more and more often nowadays, imprisoned. The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. This was the true meaning of solidarity between generations; it was a pure and simple holocaust of each generation in favor of the one that replaced it, a cruel, prolonged holocaust that brought with it no consolation, no comfort, nor any material or emotional compensation.
I myself had betrayed. I had left my wife just after she had become pregnant, I had refused to be interested in my son, I had remained indifferent to his death; I had rejected the chain, broken the endless cycle of the reproduction of suffering, and this was perhaps the only noble gesture, the only act of authentic rebellion in which, after a life that was, despite its apparently artistic character, mediocre, I could take any pride; I had even, albeit for only a short period, slept with a girl who was the same age as my son would have been. Like the admirable Jeanne Calment, once the oldest woman alive, finally dead at one hundred and twenty, who, to the idiotic questions of journalists: “Come on, Jeanne, don’t you believe you’re going to see your daughter again? Don’t you believe in an afterlife?” replied inflexibly, with a magnificent straightforwardness: “No. Nothing. There is nothing. And I won’t see my daughter again, because my daughter is dead,” I had maintained to the bitter end the words and attitude of the truth. Incidentally, I had briefly paid homage to Jeanne Calment, in the past, in a sketch that evoked her moving testimony: “I am one hundred and sixteen and I don’t want to die.” At the time no one had understood that I was being doubly ironic; I regretted this misunderstanding, I regretted above all not having insisted more, not having emphasized sufficiently that her struggle was that of all mankind, that it was basically the only one worth fighting. Of course, Jeanne Calment had died, Esther had left me, and biology, generally, had reasserted itself; this had happened all the same, despite us, despite me, despite Jeanne, we had not surrendered, to the end we had refused to collaborate and to accept a system that was designed to destroy us.
Consciousness of my heroism allowed me to while away an excellent afternoon; however, I decided to leave for Paris the following morning, probably because of the beach, and the breasts and bushes of the young girls; in Paris there were also young girls, but you saw less of their breasts and bushes. Anyway, this wasn’t the only reason, although I did need to take a step back (from breasts and bushes). My reflections the previous day had plunged me into such a state that I envisaged writing a new show: something hard and radical this time, next to which my previous provocations would look like saccharine humanist blather. I telephoned my agent, and we arranged to meet and talk about it; he was a bit surprised, I had been saying for so long that I was finished, washed-up, dead, that he had ended up believing it. That said, he was pleasantly surprised: I had caused him a few problems, but earned him quite a lot of money: on the whole he liked me.
On the plane to Paris, under the influence of a liter of Southern Comfort bought at the duty-free in Almería, my hateful heroism turned into a self-pity that was somewhat alleviated by alcohol, and I composed the following poem, which was fairly representative of my state of mind over the preceding weeks, and that I dedicated mentally to Esther:
There is no love
(Not really, not enough).
We live unaided,
We die abandoned.
The appeal for pity
Resonates in the void,
Our bodies are crippled
But our flesh is eager.
Gone are the promises
Of a teenage body,
We enter an old age
Where nothing awaits us
But the vain memory
Of our lost days,
A convulsion of hate
And naked despair.
At the Roissy airport, I drank a double espresso, which completely sobered me up, and while searching for my credit card I found the poem again. It’s impossible, I imagine, to write anything without experiencing a sort of edginess, a nervous excitement, which means that, however sinister the content of what you write might be, you do not immediately find it depressing. With hindsight things look different, and I realized at once that this poem corresponded not simply to my state of mind, but to a starkly observable reality: whatever my convulsions, protestations, and side steps might have been, I had well and truly fallen into the camp of the elderly, and there was no hope of return. I ruminated on this distressing thought for some time, as though chewing a meal
to get used to its bitterness. It was in vain: the thought was depressing at first, and it remained, on further examination, just as depressing.
The eager welcome I received from the waiters at the Lutétia proved to me in any case that I was not forgotten, that in media terms I was still in the race. “Are you here for work?” the receptionist asked with a knowing smile, it was rather like he was wanting to know whether he should send a whore up to my room; I confirmed with a wink, which provoked another fit of attentiveness and a “hope you will be fine…” whispered like a prayer. It was after this first night in Paris, however, that my motivation started to waver. My convictions remained just as strong, but it appeared derisory to me to return to using an artistic mode of expression while somewhere in the world, just around the corner in fact, a real revolution was taking place; two days later, I took the train to Chevilly-Larue. When I explained to Vincent my conclusions about the unacceptable character of sacrifice that was now attached to procreation, I noted a sort of hesitation in him, an uneasiness that I had difficulty putting my finger on.
“You know that we are quite involved in the childfree movement…,” he replied slightly impatiently. “I must introduce you to Lucas. We have just bought a television program, or rather part of a television program, on a channel dedicated to new cults. He is head of programming, we’ve taken him on to deal with all our communications. I think you’ll like him.”
Lucas was a young man of about thirty, with a sharp and intelligent face, who wore a white shirt and a loose-fitting black suit. He, too, listened to me with some unease, before showing me the first of a series of ads they planned to broadcast, the following week, on most of the global channels. Lasting thirty seconds, it showed, in a single sequence that gave an unbearable impression of veracity, a six-year-old child throwing a tantrum in a supermarket. He was demanding an extra bag of candy, first in a whining—and already unpleasant—voice, then, when his parents refused, by beginning to scream and roll around on the ground, apparently on the verge of apoplexy but stopping from time to time to check, with cunning little looks, that his progenitors were still under his complete mental domination; the other customers flashed indignant looks as they passed by, the checkout staff themselves began to approach the source of trouble, and the parents, growing more and more flustered, ended up kneeling before the little monster and snatching all the packets of candy within reach to hold out to him, like so many offerings. The image then froze while the following message appeared on the screen in capital letters: “JUST SAY NO. USE CONDOMS.”
The Possibility of an Island Page 29