Serotonin

by Michel Houellebecq

  * * *

  That was where I had got to, and the video was reaching its end – ejaculation couldn’t have been far off in my opinion – when I heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel. I leapt to my feet, immediately aware that there was no other means of access, no way to avoid confronting him, and that that confrontation could be fatal: he could kill me immediately and hope to get away with it, there wasn’t much of a chance but he could still hope. When he came in he gave an almost cataleptic jump – his whole body was trembling and for a moment I hoped that he would faint but in the end he didn’t, he stood there on his feet with his face extraordinarily red. ‘I’m not going to report you!’ I yelled – I sensed that I had to yell, that only yelling could get me out of this, and then immediately afterwards I worked out that he probably didn’t know the word ‘report’, and started yelling louder than ever: ‘I’m not going to talk! I’m not going to say anything to anybody!’ and I started yelling several times: ‘I’m not going to talk! I’m not going to say anything to anybody!’ while moving slowly towards the door. Still yelling, I raised my arms, spread out in front of me in a gesture of innocence. He couldn’t have been used to physical violence: that was my hope, my only chance.

  I went on gently shuffling forwards, repeating in a lower voice, to a rhythm that I hoped was obsessive: ‘I’m not going to talk. I’m not going to say anything to anybody.’ And all of a sudden, when I was less than a metre away from him and I had entered his personal physical space, I don’t know, but he leapt backwards, giving me access to the door, so I hurried into the gap, ran on to the path and in less than a minute I’d locked myself up in my bungalow.

  * * *

  I poured myself a big glass of Poire Williams and quickly came to my senses: he was the one who was in danger, not me; he was the one who was risking thirty years’ jail without remission, not me; he wasn’t about to make a fuss. And in fact, less than five minutes later, I watched him – those binoculars really were remarkable – as he stowed his luggage in the boot of his Defender, sat down at the wheel and disappeared towards an unknown destiny.

  On the morning of the 31st I got up in an almost tranquil mood and cast a serene eye over the landscape of bungalows, of which I was now the only tenant; if the birdwatcher had driven well, he would now be somewhere near Mainz or Koblenz, and he was bound to be happy, that brief happiness that comes with having just escaped a considerable misfortune and finding oneself confronted once again with ordinary unhappiness. Even though my attention had been focused on the German, I hadn’t neglected the lovers of shore fishing, who had arrived throughout the week in tight bursts; it’s true that it was the holiday season. A good little guide, published by Éditions Ouest-France and which I had bought at the Super U in Saint-Nicolas-le-Bréhal, had revealed to me the extent of the phenomenon of shore fishing, as well as the existence of certain animal species such as the pelagic red crab, the various species of surf clam, the saddle oyster and the peppery furrow shell, not to mention the banded wedge shell which is eaten pan-fried in a parsley sauce. There was a kind of conviviality at work there, I was sure of it; I had seen that way of life being celebrated on TF1, and more rarely on France 2; people assembled in families or sometimes in pairs of friends, then they grilled razor shells and clams on hot embers, accompanied by a Muscadet consumed in moderation; here we were dealing with a higher stage of civilisation in which wild appetites were sated by shore fishing. The confrontation was not without its risks: the lesser weaver could inflict unbearable pain, it was the most virulent of fish; if the surf clam was easy to fish, catching the peppery wedge shell required patience and agility; fishing for ear shells was unimaginable without the help of a long-handled grapple; there was no single distinguishing feature, it was important to know, that enabled one to identify a clam. Personally I hadn’t reached that stage of civilisation, and neither had the German paedophile, who by now would be somewhere near Dresden, or might even have crossed over to Poland, where extradition was more difficult. At about five in the evening, as she did every day, the little girl stopped her bike outside the birdwatcher’s bungalow. She knocked on the door for a long time, walked over to look through the curtains, then went back to the door and knocked again for a long time before giving up. Her expression was difficult to decipher; she didn’t really seem truly sad (or at least not yet?), but rather surprised and disappointed. At that moment, I wondered if he paid her; there was no way of knowing, but the answer in my view was probably yes.

  * * *

  At about seven I headed towards the château; it was time to get this year over with. Aymeric wasn’t there but he had done some preparation: arranged on the dining room table was an assortment of pork products, along with some andouille de Vire, some artisanal black pudding, different kinds of Italian charcuterie and also a variety of cheeses, and there were bound to be drinks – I had no worries on that score.

  At night, the byre was a calming place; the herd of three hundred cows made a gentle noise consisting of sighs, light mooing, movement in the straw – because there was straw; he had rejected the ease of racks, and preferred to produce dung to cover his fields; his goal was really to work in the old style. I had a moment of unease as I remembered that in accounting terms he was fucked, and then something else happened: the gentle mooing of the cows, the not entirely disagreeable smell of dung, they all briefly gave me the sense of – I wouldn’t say of having a place in the world, let’s not overstate the case – but of belonging to a kind of organic continuum, of animal regrouping.

  The light was on in the little cubbyhole that served as his office, and Aymeric was sitting at the computer with a microphone headset on his head, fascinated by the contents of the screen, and only noticed me at the last second. He jumped to his feet and made an absurd protective gesture as if trying to hide the image, which I couldn’t see in any case. ‘Don’t worry, take your time, don’t worry, I’ll go back to the château…’ I said to him with a vague wave of the hand (I was probably unconsciously trying to imitate Inspector Columbo, Inspector Columbo had had a surprising impact on young people my age), before heading back. I had raised my hands to accompany my words, a bit like I had done the day before with the German paedophile, but sadly this wasn’t about paedophilia, it was worse: I was sure he wanted to Skype-call London on this last day of the year, probably not with Cécile but certainly with his daughters; he must have communicated with his daughters by Skype at least once a week. ‘And how are you, Dad?’ I could see it as if I was there, and I understood the little girls’ view: could a classical concert pianist give them a manly paternal image? Absolutely not, obviously (Rachmaninov?) – he was just one more London queer, while their father dealt with adult cows, big mammals, at least five hundred kilos either way. And what could he talk to his little girls about? Just nonsense, obviously; he told them he was fine, the dick, while in fact he was anything but fine, he was being destroyed by their absence, and by the absence of love more generally. So to all intents and purposes he was fucked, I said to myself as I crossed the farmyard again; he would never get out of this business and would suffer from it until the end of his days, and all my patter about the Moldovan girl would have been pointless. I was in a bad mood, and I poured myself a big glass of vodka without waiting for him while devouring slices of artisanal black pudding; you really can’t do anything about people’s lives, I said to myself, neither friendship nor compassion nor the intelligence of situations is of any use: people manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning, ineluctably, with the odd mistake, a few errors when there’s sickness in the mix, but it goes on turning to the end, to the final second.

  * * *

  Aymeric arrived a quarter of an hour later, trying to seem casual, as if to make me forget the incident, which only confirmed my certainties, and above that my impotence. But I wasn’t completely reassured, nor entirely resigned, and I began the conversation by going straight for the most painful
topic.

  ‘Are you getting divorced?’ I asked very calmly, almost with indifference.

  He literally slumped on the sofa, and I poured him a big glass of vodka; it took him at least three minutes to bring it to his lips and for a moment I even thought he was going to start crying, which would have been embarrassing. There was nothing original about what he had to tell me; not only do people torture one another, they torture one another with a complete absence of originality. It’s obviously painful to see someone you’ve been fond of, someone you’ve spent the night with and woken up with, maybe been sick with or been worried about the health of your children with, turning within a few days into a kind of ghoul, a harpy with bottomless financial greed; it’s a painful experience that you never fully get over, but it may in a sense be healthy (obviously to the extent that you think love might be a healthy thing): going through a divorce may be the only effective way of putting an end to love, and if I had married Camille and then divorced her maybe I’d have managed to stop loving her – and it was at that precise moment, as I listened to Aymeric’s story, that for the first time, without any kind of protection, falsification or constraint, I allowed my consciousness to be penetrated by the painful, atrocious and fatally obvious fact that I still loved Camille; this New Year’s Eve had definitely got off to a bad start.

  In Aymeric’s case it was even worse; even the end of his love for Cécile would be of no use to him, there were the little girls, the trap was perfect. And on the financial side his story had some particularly worrying aspects, even though it conformed absolutely to what may commonly be observed in cases of divorce. Community reduced to property, fine, that was the usual deal, but in his case the properties were far from negligible. First of all there was the farm, the new byre, the farming machinery (agriculture is a heavy industry, which freezes major production capital in order to generate a low income, if any; indeed, in Aymeric’s case, a negative income): did half of that capital belong to Cécile? Overcoming his revulsion for legal niceties, the members of the bar and probably the law more generally, Aymeric’s father had decided to take on a lawyer, recommended to him by a contact at the Jockey Club. The consultant’s first conclusions had been relatively reassuring, at least where the farm was concerned: the land still belonged to Aymeric’s father, and all the improvements he had carried out – the new byre, the machinery – could also be considered to belong to him; in legal terms, it was possible to support the argument that Aymeric was only a kind of administrator over the land. The bungalows were another story: the hotel business and all the buildings were in his name; only the land had remained the property of his father. If Cécile insisted on demanding half the value of the bungalows, they would have no choice but to put the business in compulsory liquidation and wait for a buyer, which would take time, probably years. All in all, Aymeric concluded with a mixture of despair and disgust, that mixture which becomes your permanent state of mind as the procedure of a divorce falls into place – as the negotiations, the horse-trading, the proposals and counter-proposals of lawyers and notaries, fall into place – all in all, he was nowhere close to seeing the end of this divorce.

  ‘Apart from anything else, for my father there’s no question of selling the land that overlooks the sea, the land the bungalows are built on – he could never bring himself to do that…’ He added: ‘For years he’s taken it personally every time I’ve been forced to sell a plot of land to balance the books. I know it hurts him – it hurts him almost physically – but you’ve got to remember that for a traditional aristocrat – and that’s exactly what he is – the most important thing is to pass the family estate on to the next generations, and if possible to enlarge it a little but at the very least not to reduce it, and from the beginning that’s what I’ve been doing; I’ve been reducing the family estate, but there’s no other way I can manage, and so he’s starting to get fed up with it all. I wish he’d throw in the towel – the last time he told me openly: “The vocation of the Harcourts has never been as farmers…” He said it to me just like that, and maybe it’s true but it isn’t their vocation to be hoteliers either, and strangely enough he liked Cécile’s plan – the plan for the stately-home hotel – but it’s probably only because it would have allowed him to restore the château. He doesn’t give a damn about the bungalows, you could blow them up with a bazooka tomorrow and he wouldn’t care. What’s terrible is that he’s someone who has hardly ever done anything useful with his life – he’s just gone along to weddings, funerals, the occasional fox hunt, a drink at the Jockey Club from time to time; he’s also had a few mistresses I think, but nothing excessive – and he’s left the inheritance of the Harcourts intact. I’m trying to build something, the work’s killing me, I get up at five every day, I spend my evenings doing the accounts – and the end result is that I’m impoverishing my family…’

  * * *

  He talked for a long time; this time he really had told me the whole story, and I think it was nearly midnight when I suggested that he put on some music, which had for some time been the right thing to do – the only possible thing in our situation – and he nodded gratefully; I don’t remember very clearly what he put on because I was completely pissed myself, pissed and in despair; thinking about Camille again had finished me off in a few seconds; immediately before that I had felt like a strong man, a wise and consoling man, and then all of a sudden I felt like a drifting pile of misery; well, I’m sure that he put on the best music he had, the music he was most fond of. The only precise memory I have is a recording of Child in Time, a bootleg made in Duisburg in 1970, and the sound quality of his Klipschorns was truly exceptional; it was perhaps the most aesthetically beautiful moment of my life. I like to mention it in the context of beauty being useful in some way; in fact we must have put it on thirty or forty times, captivated each time it came on by the movement of absolute flight with which Ian Gillan moved from word to song, then from song to cry before, against the background of Jon Lord’s calm mastery, returning to word; immediately after that came the majestic break of Ian Paice – admittedly Jon Lord was supporting him with his usual mixture of effectiveness and grandeur, but Ian Paice’s break was still sumptuous, probably the most beautiful break in the history of rock, and then Gillan came back and the second part of the sacrifice was performed; Ian Gillan flew off again from word to song, then from song to pure cry, and unfortunately shortly after that the piece came to an end and there was nothing left but to put the needle back to the beginning and we could have lived like that for ever, for ever – I don’t know, it was probably an illusion but a beautiful one – I had gone, I remembered, with Aymeric to a Deep Purple concert at the Palais des Sports, and it was a good concert but not as good as the one in Duisburg; we were old, moments like this would become rare from now on, but it would all return when we were in our death throes, both his and mine; there would also be Camille in my case, and probably Kate – I don’t know how I managed to get back, but I remember picking up a slice of artisanal black pudding which I chewed for a long time, at the wheel of my 4x4, without really tasting it.

  The morning of 1st January broke, like all mornings in the world, on to our problematic lives. I got up, paid a small amount of attention to the morning – which was foggy, but not excessively so, a morning of ordinary fog: there were New Year programmes on the main entertainment channels, but I didn’t know any of the singers; however, it did seem to me that the hot Latina babe was yielding ground to the concerned Celt, but I had only an anecdotal and approximate, generally optimistic, vision of that aspect of life: if that was what audiences had decided, then it was fine. At about four o’clock I headed towards the château. Aymeric had returned to his usual state: morose, stubborn and desperate; rather mechanically stripping and reassembling his Schmeisser assault rifle. It was then that I told him I wanted to learn to shoot.

  ‘Shoot how? Shoot to defend yourself, or shoot for sport?’ He looked delighted that I was addressing a concrete, technical subject, an
d most importantly relieved that I wasn’t returning to the previous day’s conversation.

  ‘A bit of both, I think…’ In fact, during my confrontation with the birdwatcher, I would have felt more comfortable with a revolver; but there was also something about precision shooting that had attracted me for a long time.

  ‘As a defensive weapon I can give you a short-barrelled Smith & Wesson – a bit less accurate than the long-barrelled one, but a lot easier to transport. It’s a 357 Magnum, easily fatal at ten metres, and it’s really easy to use, I can explain it to you in five minutes. For sport…’ His voice had become more sonorous; I heard it quivering with an enthusiasm that I hadn’t known him to have for years, since we were twenty, in fact. ‘I really love shooting for sport, I’ve been doing it for years, you know. It’s really extraordinary: the moment when you get the target in the centre you take aim, you stop thinking about anything, you forget all your worries. For the first few years after I moved here it was so hard – so much harder than I had imagined – and I don’t think I would have managed without my shooting sessions. Now, obviously…’ He held out his right hand horizontally, and in fact after a few seconds it started trembling, in a faint but unmistakeable way. ‘The vodka … there’s no comparison, you have to choose.’ Had he had a choice? Does anyone have a choice? I had my doubts on the matter.

  ‘For sport shooting there’s one weapon that I’ve loved, a Steyr Mannlicher HS50. I can lend it to you if you like but I have to check it, give it a deep clean. I haven’t used it for three years, but I’ll look into it this evening.’