Serotonin

by Michel Houellebecq

  * * *

  I had never, at that point, set foot in a Leclerc Centre. I was dazzled. Never would I have imagined the existence of such a well-stocked shop – that kind of thing was inconceivable in Paris. Apart from that, I had spent my childhood in Senlis, an outmoded, bourgeois town, even anachronistic in some respects – and my parents had insisted, until their death, on supporting the existence of local shops through their purchases. As to Méribel, let’s not even mention it: it was an artificial, re-created place, far from the authentic flux of global trade, a pure piece of touristic play-acting. The Centre Leclerc in Coutances was something else; there, you were really in the presence of large-scale, massive-scale, retail distribution. Foodstuffs from every continent were displayed along interminable shelves, and I felt almost dizzy as I thought of the mobilised logistics, the vast container vessels crossing uncertain oceans.

  See on these canals

  The vessels slumber

  With their vagabond mood;

  It is to satisfy

  Your every desire

  That they come from the ends of the earth.

  After an hour of strolling, and with my trolley already more than half full, I couldn’t help thinking once again about the imaginary Moldovan girl to whom Aymeric could and should have brought happiness, and who would now be dying in an obscure corner of the Moldova of her birth, without even suspecting the existence of this paradise. Order and beauty – that was the least one could say. Luxury, calm and delight, really. Poor Moldovan girl; and poor Aymeric.

  The house was in Saint-Aubert-sur-Orne; it was a hamlet dependent on Putanges, but it didn’t appear on every GPS, the owner explained. He was in his forties, like me, his grey hair cut very short, almost shorn, like mine, and he had the air of someone quite sinister, the kind of man that scares me; he drove a Mercedes G class, a point in common between middle-aged men that helps a germ of communication come to life. Even better than that, he had a G 500 and I had a G 350, which established an acceptable mini-hierarchy between us. He came from Caen; I wondered what he did for a living, I couldn’t quite place him. He was an architect, he told me. A failed architect, he said by way of clarification. Well, like most architects, he added. Amongst other things he was responsible for Appart’City in the urban redevelopment zone in Caen Nord where Camille had lived for a week before really entering my life; that wasn’t anything to brag about, he observed; no, it really wasn’t.

  He obviously wanted to know how long I planned to stay; that was a good question, it could have been three days or three years. We agreed quite easily on a one-month lease, automatically renewable; I would pay him rent at the beginning of every month, a cheque was probably OK as he could put them through his business account. It wasn’t even to save on taxes, he added with disgust, it’s just that it was boring filling in the tax declaration – he never knew if he was supposed to put it under BZ or BY, so it was simpler not to put anything at all; I wasn’t surprised, I had spotted that casual attitude among independent professionals before. He never came back to the house, and he was beginning to have a sense that he never would; since his divorce two years previously he had lost a lot of his motivation with regard to property, and lots of other things too. Our lives were so similar that it was almost becoming oppressive.

  He had few tenants, and anyway none before the summer months, and would see about taking the notice off the website. And even in the summer, business wasn’t very good. ‘There’s no Internet,’ he said to me, suddenly anxious, ‘I hope you knew that – I’m pretty sure I mentioned it on the website.’ I told him I did know and that I had accepted the idea. I then saw a brief movement of fear in his eyes. There can be no shortage of depressives who want to isolate themselves, spend a few months in the woods to ‘come to terms with themselves’; but people who agree to cut themselves off from the Internet for an indefinite period without even wincing are up to no good – I read that in his anxious expression. ‘I’m not going to kill myself,’ I said with a smile that I hoped was disarming, but which must in reality have been quite creepy. ‘Well, not right now,’ I added by way of confession. He groaned and concentrated on the technical aspects of the house, which were incidentally quite simple. The electric radiators were regulated by a thermostat and I just had to turn a button to get the desired temperature; hot water came directly from the boiler; I had absolutely nothing to do. I could make a wood fire if I wanted; he showed me the firelighters, the store of logs. Mobile phones worked more or less, SFR not at all, Bouygues quite well, Orange he had forgotten about. Otherwise there was a landline, but he hadn’t put in a metering system because he preferred to trust people, he added with a wave of his arm that he seemed to use to mock his own attitude, he just hoped I wasn’t going to spend my nights calling Japan. ‘Certainly not Japan,’ I cut in with an abruptness that I hadn’t premeditated; he frowned and I sensed that he wanted to ask me some questions to try to find out more, but after a few seconds he gave up, turned around and headed for his 4x4. I thought we would see each other again, that this was the start of a relationship, but before setting off he handed me a business card: ‘My address, for the rent…’

  So now I was on earth, as Rousseau writes in his Reveries, without any brother, neighbour, friend, or society but myself. That was accurate enough, but the resemblance stopped there: in the following sentence Rousseau proclaimed himself ‘the most sociable and the most loving of humans’. I didn’t fall under that category; I have mentioned Aymeric, I have mentioned certain women, the final list is short. Unlike Rousseau, neither could I say that I had been ‘banished from human society by unanimous agreement’; humanity was not at all in league against me; it was simply that there hadn’t been anything, that my connection with the world, which had already been limited, had gradually dwindled to zero, until nothing could halt that slide.

  I turned up the thermostat before deciding to go to sleep, or at least to lie down on the bed – sleeping was something else – it was the heart of winter, the days had started to lengthen but the nights were still long, and in the middle of the woods they would be impenetrable.

  I finally slipped into fitful sleep, not without repeated recourse to an aged calvados from the Centre Leclerc in Coutances. There had not been a single dream before it, but I was woken abruptly in the dead of night by the sense of something brushing or caressing my shoulders. I got back up and paced around the room to calm down, and went to the window: the darkness was total, it must have been during that phase of the moon when it is completely concealed and not a single star could be seen, the cloud cover was too low. It was two o’clock in the morning, only halfway through the night, in monasteries it was the hour when the vigils are held; I turned on every available light without really feeling reassured: I had dreamt about Camille, that was certain, in my dream it was Camille who had caressed my shoulders, as she used to do every night a few years ago, many years ago in fact. I hardly expected that I would still be happy, but I still hoped to escape dementia, pure and simple.

  I lay down and glanced around the room in a circle: it formed a perfect equilateral triangle, the two sloping walls met in the middle where the roof beam was. Then I understood the trap that had closed on me: it was in a bedroom precisely identical to this one that I had slept with Camille every night in Clécy during the first three months of our life together. There was nothing surprising about coincidences as such, all Norman houses are built on more or less the same lines, and we were only twenty kilometres from Clécy; but I hadn’t anticipated this: the two houses didn’t look similar from the outside as the one in Clécy was half-timbered, while the walls of this one were rough stone – probably sandstone. I got dressed hastily and went back down to the dining room; it was freezing and the fire hadn’t taken; I had never been good at lighting fires. I didn’t understand the assembly of logs and kindling that you were supposed to build – so in many respects I was a long way from being the model of masculinity – Harrison Ford, let’s say – that I would have
liked to be; well, for now that wasn’t the issue and an excruciating pain twisted my heart while memories came back in a steady flow; it isn’t the future but the past that kills you, that comes back to torment and undermine you, and effectively ends up killing you. The dining room was also identical to the one in which I had dined for three months with Camille after shopping at the artisanal boucherie-charcuterie in Clécy, at the equally artisanal boulangerie–patisserie, at various greengrocers’ shops as well, and after she had set to work at the stove with that enthusiasm that is so painful in retrospect. I recognised the row of copper saucepans, which gleamed gently on the stone wall. I recognised the massive walnut dresser, its shelves perforated to show off the Rouen porcelain, with its colourful and naive pattern, to its best advantage. I recognised the oak grandfather clock, stopped forever at some point in the past at one o’clock – some people stopped them at the death of a son or a close relative; others at the time of France’s declaration of war on Germany in 1914; others at the time when the vote was taken for absolute power to be granted to Marshal Pétain.

  * * *

  I couldn’t stay there like that, and picked up a big metal key that gave access to the other wing; it wasn’t very habitable right now, the architect had warned me, and was impossible to heat, but well, if I stayed until the summer I’d be able to enjoy it. I found myself in an enormous room, which in other times must have been the main room in the house, and which was now filled with a stack of armchairs and garden furniture, but a whole wall was occupied by bookshelves on which I was surprised to discover a complete works of the Marquis de Sade. It must have been from the 19th century; it was fully leather-bound with various gilded flourishes on the boards and the edge – fuck, that must have cost an arm and a leg, I said to myself briefly, flicking through the book which was illustrated with numerous engravings; well, I lingered particularly over the engravings and the curious point was that I didn’t understand them at all: different sexual positions were represented involving varying numbers of protagonists, but I couldn’t locate myself among them, or imagine the place that I might have occupied in the whole thing; it got me nowhere and so I headed towards the mezzanine – it must once have been more funky and cool up there, but what remained was disembowelled sofas with mouldy fabric, half upside-down on the floor. There was also a record player and a collection of discs, mostly 45s, which I identified after a few moments as twist records – you could tell by the postures of the dancers on the covers, while the singers and musicians had fallen into oblivion once and for all.

  I remembered the architect had seemed uneasy throughout the visit, he had stayed only long enough to explain to me how things worked – ten minutes at the absolute maximum – and he had told me several times that he would be better off selling this house if the legal formalities weren’t so complicated, and more particularly if he had a chance of finding a buyer. In fact he must have had a past in this house, a past whose outlines I struggled to define – somewhere between the Marquis de Sade and the twist – a past that he needed to get rid of, even though that wouldn’t open up the possibility of a future; but in any case the contents of that wing evoked nothing for me that I could have encountered in the house in Clécy: it was a different pathology, a different history, and I went back to bed almost comforted, since it’s true that in the middle of our own dramas we are reassured by the existence of others that we have been spared.

  The following morning, a half-hour stroll took me to the banks of the Orne. The route wasn’t very interesting, except for people who are interested in the transformation of dead leaves into humus – which I had been in the past, more than twenty years ago now; I had even carried out various calculations on the quantity of humus produced as a function of the density of forest cover. Other half-memories, extremely imprecise, returned to me from my studies: for example I thought that I noticed this forest was badly kept – the density of vines and parasitic plants was too great and must have hindered the growth of the trees; it is wrong to imagine that nature left to its own devices produces splendid plantations with powerfully well-proportioned trees, plantations that people have compared to cathedrals, and have also prompted religious emotions of a pantheistic kind; nature left to its own devices generally produces nothing but a shapeless and chaotic mess, made up of various plants, and is as a whole quite ugly; that was more or less the spectacle presented to me by my stroll to the banks of the Orne.

  The landlord had advised me to avoid feeding the deer if I happened to come across any. Not that such an operation struck him as contrary to their dignity as wild animals (he shrugged impatiently as if to stress how ridiculous that objection was) – deer, like most wild animals, are opportunistic omnivores and eat more or less anything, nothing brings them more joy than happening upon the leftovers of a picnic, or a disembowelled bin bag; it was just that if I started feeding them they would come back every day and then I wouldn’t be able to get rid of them – they can be real limpets when they put their minds to it, deer. If, on the other hand, the grace of their leaps stirred an animal-loving emotion in me, he advised pains au chocolat, an almost incredible predilection – in that respect they were very different from wolves, whose tastes inclined more towards cheese, but in any case there were no wolves, so for now the deer had nothing to worry about; it would be a few years before wolves came up from the Alps, or even from the Gévaudan.

  Either way I didn’t encounter a single deer. More generally I didn’t encounter anything that could justify my presence in this house stranded in the middle of the woods, and it seemed almost inevitable to me that I should have laid my hand on the sheet of paper on which I had jotted down the address and telephone number of Camille’s veterinary practice after searching for it on the computer in the corner office in Aymeric’s byre, at a time that seemed very long ago, which seemed almost to belong to a previous life; a time that was in fact less than two months ago.

  * * *

  It was only about twenty kilometres to Falaise, but the journey took me almost two hours. I stayed parked in the main square in Putanges for a long time, fascinated by the Hôtel du Lion Verd for no perceptible reason other than its strangely spelled name – but would a correctly spelled green lion have been any more acceptable? With even less reason I then stopped in Bazoches-au-Houlme. After that the road left the Suisse Normande with its dips and bends, and the last ten kilometres of the road to Falaise were perfectly straight; I felt as if I was sliding along an inclined plane and noticed that I had involuntarily gone up to 160 kilometres per hour: a stupid mistake as this was exactly the kind of area where they put up speed cameras and, more importantly, the easy glide was probably leading me towards the void; Camille would inevitably have remade her life, she would inevitably have found a guy, it was seven years ago now – how could I have imagined anything else?

  I parked at the foot of the fortifications surrounding Falaise, overlooked by the castle where William the Conqueror was born. Falaise’s street plan was simple and I found Camille’s veterinary practice without any difficulty: it was on Place du Docteur Paul-Germain, at the end of Rue Saint-Gervais – clearly one of the main shopping streets in the town – and near the church of the same name – whose foundations, in the primitive gothic style, had suffered a great deal in the siege laid by Philippe Auguste. At that point I could have gone straight in, spoken to the receptionist and asked to see her. That was what other people would have done, and perhaps what I would end up doing after various pointless and boring prevarications. I had also ruled out the option of making a phone call; the idea of writing a letter had held my interest for longer – personal letters are now so rare that they always have an impact – but it was mostly my sense of incompetence that had led me to abandon the idea.

  There was a bar directly opposite, Au Duc Normand, and in the end that was the solution I chose, expecting that my strength or my desire to live or anything else of that kind would gain the upper hand. I ordered a beer, which I sensed would be the first
of a long series; it was only eleven o’clock in the morning. The bar was tiny, there were no more than five tables and I was the only guest. I had a perfect view of the veterinary clinic; people turned up occasionally with a pet – most often a dog, sometimes in a basket – and exchanged the appropriate words with the receptionist. From time to time, people also came into the bar, sat down a few metres away from me and ordered a coffee with a shot – old men for the most part, but they didn’t sit down, preferring to have their drinks at the counter; I understood and admired their choice: these were spirited old men who wanted to show they weren’t finished yet, whose hamstrings still held them upright; it wouldn’t have been a good idea to slap with the back of your hand. While his regular customers indulged in this mini-display of strength, the landlord continued, with almost priestly slowness, his reading of Paris-Normandie.

  I was on my third beer, and my attention had slightly lost its focus, when Camille appeared in front of me. She came out of the room where she saw her patients, and exchanged a few words with the receptionist – it was plainly time for a lunch break. She was about twenty metres away from me, no more, and she hadn’t changed, physically she hadn’t changed at all; it was frightening, she was over thirty-five now and she still had the appearance of a nineteen-year-old girl. I had changed physically – I was aware that I had put on a bit of mileage – I knew that from occasionally catching sight of myself in the mirror without any real satisfaction but without any real displeasure either, a bit like bumping into a very awkward neighbour from across the hall.