Serotonin

by Michel Houellebecq

  That visit to Aymeric was, in short, a mistake, but not too severe a mistake; for two days we would put on a good performance, and after dinner he played the record of Jimi Hendrix live at the Isle of Wight – it certainly wasn’t his best concert, but it was the last one, less than two weeks before he died. I felt that Cécile was slightly appalled by this return to Aymeric’s past, she herself certainly hadn’t been a grunge girl – I saw her more as a Versaillaise, well, moderately Versaillaise, a bit traditional without being fundamentalist – Aymeric had married within his circle, that’s what happens most often in the end, and it’s what gives the best results in principle, well, that’s what I’d heard anyway, but my problem is that I had no circle, no precise circle.

  * * *

  The next morning I got up at about nine o’clock and found him sitting at the table in front of a hearty breakfast of fried eggs, grilled black sausage and bacon, accompanied by coffee and then calvados. His day had started a long time ago, he explained: he got up at five every morning for milking, he hadn’t bought a milking machine – it was a dis- proportionate investment for him, most of his colleagues who had got into that way of doing things had gone under shortly afterwards, and the cows liked being milked by human hands, or that was what he thought; there was a sentimental side to it too. He suggested that we go and see the herd.

  The brand-new metal shed that I had seen when I turned up the previous day was basically a byre, with the stalls arranged in four rows almost all occupied, by Normande cows only, I noticed immediately. ‘Yes, it’s a choice,’ Aymeric confirmed to me, ‘their yield isn’t quite as good as that of the Prim’Holstein, but I find their milk really superior. So obviously I was interested by what you were saying yesterday about the Livarot AOP – even though at the moment I tend to sell more to the producers of Pont-l’Évêque.’

  At the end of the building, plywood partitions isolated a little office with a computer, printer and metal filing cabinets. ‘Do you use the computer to order their food?’ I asked him.

  ‘Possibly, the computer regulates the maize silage food supply; I can also programme the addition of vitamin supplements because the chambers are connected. Well, yeah, it’s a bit gadgety – in fact I use it mostly to do the accounts.’ The word ‘accounts’ had been enough to darken his mood. We went out under the peaceful, bright blue sky. ‘Before DRAF I worked at Monsanto,’ I admitted, ‘but I don’t suppose you use GM maize.’

  ‘No, I respect organic specifications, and I try to limit my use of maize; in principle a cow eats grass and this isn’t industrial animal rearing here – you’ve seen the cows have plenty of room and they go out a little every day, even in winter. But the more I try to do things correctly, the harder it gets to make ends meet.’

  * * *

  What could I possibly say to that? I could easily have spent three hours in a debate devoted to these questions on some news channel or other. But it was Aymeric, and in his situation, I couldn’t tell him much; he knew all the elements as well as I did. The sky was so clear that morning that you could see the ocean in the distance. ‘Danone suggested that I stay with them at the end of my internship…’ he said thoughtfully.

  I devoted the rest of my day to seeing the château. There was a chapel where the lords of Harcourt must have worshipped, but the most impressive thing was a gigantic dining room: its walls were entirely covered with portraits of ancestors and with a seven-metre-wide fireplace that you could easily imagine being used to roast boar or deer during interminable medieval feasts; the idea of a hôtel de charme started to make a bit more sense. I hadn’t dared say so to Aymeric but it seemed unlikely to me that the situation for stockbreeders was getting any better, and I had heard rumours that they were starting to discuss the idea of getting rid of milk quotas in Brussels – that decision that would plunge millions of French stockbreeders into penury, and reduce them to bankruptcy, was only definitively adopted in 2015 under the presidency of François Hollande, but the arrival of ten new countries into the European space in 2002, following the Athens Treaty, put France in a clearly minority position, making it more or less inevitable. More generally, it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to speak to Aymeric; even though all my sympathy went out to the farmers, and I found myself prepared to argue their cause under any circumstance, I was forced to accept that I was now on the side of the French government, and so we were no longer entirely on the same side.

  * * *

  I left after breakfast the next day, under a brilliant Sunday sun, which contrasted with my growing sadness. It seems surprising to me today to think back to my sadness, while I drove at low speed along the deserted by-roads of Manche. We like there to be premonitions or signs, but as a rule there aren’t any, and nothing on that sunny and dead afternoon indicated to me that I would meet Camille the following morning, and that that Monday morning would be the start of the loveliest years of my life.

  Before we come to my first meeting with Camille, let’s go back almost twenty years to a very different November, a much sadder November in that the vital issues (as we might speak of vital functions) had already been broadly determined. Towards the end of the month, the first Christmas decorations started filling the Italie II shopping centre and I began to wonder if I would stay at the Hôtel Mercure during the holiday period. I had no real reason to leave other than shame, and that in itself is already a serious reason – confessing to absolute loneliness isn’t that easy, even today – and I started thinking of different destinations. The most obvious one was a monastery; during those long days commemorating the birth of the Saviour, many people want to reflect – at least that was what I read in a special edition of Pilgrim magazine – and in that case solitude isn’t just normal, it’s even recommended; yes, it was the best solution, I would find out immediately about a few potential monasteries, but it wasn’t just time, it was more than time (as an initial Internet search told me – and as that issue of Pilgrim magazine had already led me to suspect) and all the monasteries I contacted were fully booked.

  One other even more immediate problem was renewing my Captorix prescription; the usefulness of that drug was undeniable – thanks to it my social life was shock free, I was able to perform minimal but adequate ablutions each morning, and I greeted the waiters of the O’Jules with warmth and familiarity – but I had no desire to see a psychiatrist again, obviously not the psychiatrist on Rue des Cinq-Diamants, that caricature, but not any other psychiatrist either, psychiatrists in general made me want to spew; and it was then that I remembered Dr Azote.

  This GP with the strange name had a surgery on Rue d’Athènes, a stone’s throw from Gare Saint-Lazare, and I had seen him once for a kind of bronchitis I’d contracted after one of my weekly trips between Caen and Paris. I remembered him as a man in his forties, with a significant bald patch, his remaining hair long, grey and quite dirty; in fact he looked more like a heavy-metal bass player than a doctor. I also remembered that in the middle of the consultation he had lit a Camel – ‘excuse me, it’s a bad habit and I’m the first to advise against it…’ – and that he had, without making any fuss, prescribed me a codeine syrup, which had in itself aroused some suspicion among my colleagues.

  He was twenty years older now, but his baldness hadn’t really advanced (or of course retreated), and his remaining hair was still just as long, grey and dirty as before. ‘Yes, Captorix is valuable, I’ve had good results…’ he observed soberly. ‘Do you want six months’ worth?’

  ‘What are you doing over the holidays?’ he asked me a bit later. ‘You have to watch out for the holiday period, it’s often fatal for depressives. I’ve had lots of patients I thought were stable and bam! on the 31st they lose it, always on the evening of the 31st, once they’re past midnight it’s fine. You have to imagine it: Christmas has already dealt them a blow, they’ve had a whole week to ruminate on their shitty lives, maybe they had plans to get away on New Year’s Eve and those have collapsed, and then the 31st arrives and they
can’t bear it, so they go over to their window and throw themselves out or shoot themselves, it depends. I go on about it, that’s how it is, but my job is basically to stop people from killing themselves; well, for a while, for as long as possible.’ I opened up to him about my monastery idea. ‘Yeah, that’s not too fucked as ideas go,’ he said approvingly. ‘I have other clients who do that, but in my view you’ve left it a bit late. Otherwise there are also prostitutes in Thailand – people always forget how important Christmas is in Asia – and you can get yourself over there pretty easily for the 31st; you should be able to buy yourself a ticket, it’s less booked up than the monasteries. I’ve only ever had a good time there and sometimes it’s almost therapeutic; I’ve had guys coming back completely rebooted, with their belief in their seductive masculine charms right back up there; OK, these guys were a bit lame, the kind of idiot it’s easy to con and unfortunately you don’t give me that feeling. The other problem you’ve got, I guess, is that with Captorix you won’t be getting hard-ons. Even with two pretty little sixteen-year-old hookers I can’t guarantee it – that’s the boring thing about the product, but at the same time you can’t just come off it all at once, I’d honestly advise against that, it wouldn’t do you any good anyway, just give you two weeks of latency – but ultimately if it has to happen you’ll know that it’s the drug. Worst case you could sunbathe and eat prawn curries.’

  I replied that I would consider his suggestion, which was in fact interesting if not entirely appropriate to my case: it wasn’t just the ability to have an erection that had deserted me, but all desire; the idea of fucking now struck me as idiotic, inappropriate, and even two little sixteen-year-old Thai hookers – I felt that this was quite obvious – wouldn’t have been able to do anything. Anyway, Azote was right, it was OK for slightly pathetic guys, often working-class Brits, to believe in a woman’s manifestation of love or even just sexual arousal, as unlikely as it might seem, and they re-emerged regenerated by her hands, her pussy and her mouth; they certainly weren’t the same, ruined by Western women – the most flagrant cases in fact being those of Anglo-Saxon women – and they came back completely regenerated. But I wasn’t one of them, I had no complaints to make about women and in any case it had nothing to do with me, I would never get another hard-on ever again, and even sex had vanished from my mental horizon, something that oddly enough I wouldn’t have dared to confess to Azote – I’d only talked about ‘erectile difficulties’. But he was still an excellent doctor, and as I left his surgery some of my confidence in humanity, medicine and the world had been restored; I was almost light-footed as I turned into the Rue d’Amsterdam, and it was round about Gare Saint-Lazare that I made the mistake, but was it a mistake, I have no idea, and I’ll only know at the end – it’s true that the end is approaching but it’s not here yet, not completely the end.

  * * *

  I had the strange sense of entering a kind of autofiction as I walked into the entrance hall of Gare Saint-Lazare, which had been turned into quite an ordinary shopping centre based around clothes shops, but which deserved its name, the ‘hall of lost steps’; my steps really were lost, and I wandered blankly among incomprehensible signs. In fact the term ‘autofiction’ only suggested vague ideas to me, I had memorised it when reading a book by Christine Angot (well, OK, the first five pages) but as I approached the platforms it seemed to me more and more that the word suited my situation, that it had even been invented for me. My reality had become untenable, no human being could survive in such strict solitude; I was probably trying to create a kind of alternative reality, returning to the origin of a split in time as a way of acquiring additional life credits – perhaps they had remained hidden there during all those years, waiting for me between two platforms, my life credits concealed under the dust and grease of the engines. At that moment my heart started racing crazily, like that of a shrew spotted by a predator – pretty little things, shrews – I got to the end of platform 22 and it was there, exactly there, that Camille had waited for me, every Friday evening for almost a year, when I came back from Caen. As soon as she saw me, dragging my ‘cabin bag’ on its pathetic little wheels, she ran towards me, ran along the platform, ran as fast as she could, reaching the limit of her pulmonary capacities; then we were together and the idea of separation didn’t exist, ceased to exist, there wouldn’t even have been any point talking about it.

  I have known happiness, I know what it is, I can speak about it competently, and I also know how it ends, as it usually does. You’re missing a single person and everything is depopulated, as the poet said – in fact the term ‘depopulated’ is quite weak, it sounds a bit like that idiotic eighteenth century, where you haven’t yet arrived at the healthy violence of early romanticism – but the truth is that you’re missing a single person and everything is dead, the world is dead and you’re dead, or else you’re transformed into a ceramic figurine, and other people are ceramic figurines as well, perfect insulators from a thermal and electric point of view, and absolutely nothing can get to you but inner torment issuing from the collapse of your independent body; but I hadn’t yet reached that point, and for now my body was behaving reasonably well, there was just the fact that I was alone, literally alone, and drew no pleasure from solitude or from the free working of my mind; I needed love, and love in a very precise form, I needed love in general but in particular I needed a pussy, there were so many pussies – billions on the surface of a moderate-sized planet, it’s crazy how many pussies there are when you think about it, it makes you feel dizzy – and on the other hand pussies needed cocks, well, at least that’s what we imagine (a lucky misunderstanding upon which man’s pleasure and the perpetuation of the species, and perhaps even that of social democracy, is based), in principle the problem is solvable, but it no longer is in practice, it no longer is, and that’s how a civilisation dies; without worries, without danger or drama and with very little carnage; a civilisation just dies of weariness, of self-disgust – what could social democracy offer me? Nothing of course, just the perpetuation of absence, a call to oblivion.

  Being lost in thought on platform 22 at Gare Saint-Lazare cost me a few microseconds, I think, before it immediately occurred to me that our first meeting had actually taken place at the other end of the line – well, that depends on the trains, some go to Cherbourg and others stop in Caen; I don’t know why I’m mentioning the useless scraps of information about the train timetables of Paris–Saint-Lazare that pass intermittently through my dysfunctional brain – either way, we met on platform C of Caen station, one sunny Monday morning in November, seventeen years ago now, or nineteen, I can’t remember.

  The circumstances were already strange; it was unusual for me to be asked to welcome a trainee in the veterinary service (Camille was a veterinary science student at the time, in her second year at the school in Maisons-Alfort), but I was now seen as something like a luxury intern to whom anyone could assign various tasks as long as they weren’t too degrading; all the same I was an Agro alumnus but, well, there was an implicit admission that my ‘Normandy cheeses’ mission was being taken less and less seriously by my superiors. Having said that, we should not exaggerate the importance of chance in matters of love: if I had bumped into Camille a few days later in a corridor at DRAF, the same thing would have happened, more or less exactly; but it happened at Caen station, at the far end of platform C.

  The keenness of my perceptions had clearly increased even a few minutes before the train arrived, which suggests a case of bizarre precognition; between the tracks I had noticed the existence not only of grass but also of plants with yellow flowers whose name I had forgotten – I had learned of their existence during the elective module on ‘spontaneous vegetation in the urban setting’ which I had taken during my second year of studies at the Agro, quite a fun EM that involved going and collecting specimens among the stones of the church of Saint-Sulpice or on the ring-road embankments … Behind the station I had also noticed weird parallelepipeds with
salmon, ochre and greyish-brown stripes, which made me think of a futuristic Babylonian city – in fact it was the Bords de l’Orne shopping centre, one of the prides of the new municipality; all the major trademarks of modern consumerism were represented there, from Desigual to The Kooples; thanks to this centre even the inhabitants of Lower Normandy were granted access to the modern world.

  She came down the metal steps of her carriage and turned towards me, and I noted with strange satisfaction that she didn’t have a suitcase on wheels – just a big duffel bag, the kind that you wear over your shoulder. When she said to me, after quite a long time during which there wasn’t a hint of awkwardness (she looked at me, I looked at her, and that was absolutely all), but by the time she said to me, perhaps ten minutes later: ‘I’m Camille,’ the train had already left – for Bayeux, then Carentan and Valognes, and its final destination, Cherbourg station.