* * *
Strangely, my departure from the Hôtel Mercure was a difficult moment, particularly because of little Audrey; she had tears in her eyes, but at the same time what could I do? If she couldn’t bear this she wouldn’t be able to bear anything in her life – she was twenty-five at most but she was going to have to toughen up. All of a sudden, I gave her a kiss, and then two, and then four; she threw herself into those kisses with real abandon, even fleetingly held me in her arms, and then that was it; my taxi was at the door.
Moving was easy: I quickly got hold of some furniture and renewed my subscription to an SFR box – I had decided to remain loyal to this supplier, loyal until the end of my days, that was one of the things that life had taught me. But I was less interested in their sports package; I realised after a few weeks that I was getting older, so it was normal that I was becoming less sporty. But there were some gems in the SFR mix, particularly in terms of cookery programmes; I was now turning into a really fat old man – an Epicurean philosophy, why not; what else did Epicurus have in mind in the end? At the same time, a crust of dry bread with a drop of olive oil was really a bit limiting – what I needed were lobster medallions and scallops with garden vegetables; I was a decadent, not a rural Greek queer.
* * *
In about mid-October, I started getting bored with cookery programmes – however faultless they might have been – and that was the real start of my decline. I tried to take an interest in social debates, but that period was disappointing and brief: the extremely conformist nature of the speakers, the dreadful uniformity of their outrage and enthusiasm, had become such that I could now predict what they were going to say, not only in terms of their broad lines, but even the details, to the word in fact; columnists and major witnesses passed by like pointless European puppets, cretin after cretin, congratulating themselves on the pertinence and morality of their views – I could have written their dialogue for them and in the end I turned off my television for good; it would only have made me sadder if I had had the strength to carry on.
For a long time I had planned to read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; I had a sense that it was a gloomy book, but that suited my situation and it was probably time. So I dived into it, at first with admiration, then with mounting reservations. Even though its range and ambitions were considerably greater, the ultimate meaning of the work was basically the same as Death in Venice. No more than that old imbecile Goethe (the German humanist with a Mediterranean inclination, one of the most sinister dotards in the whole of world literature), no more than his hero Aschenbach (broadly more sympathetic, however), Thomas Mann, Thomas Mann himself – and this was extremely serious – had been incapable of escaping the fascination of youth and beauty, which he had in the end placed above everything, above all intellectual and moral qualities, and in which, at the end of the day, he too, without the slightest restraint, had abjectly wallowed. So the whole of the world’s culture was pointless – the whole of the world’s culture provided no moral benefit and no advantage – because during those same years, exactly those same years, Marcel Proust, at the end of Time Regained, concluded with remarkable frankness that it was not only social relationships that supplied nothing substantial, friendships didn’t either, they were quite simply a waste of time; and that what the writer needed was not intellectual conversations, contrary to popular belief, but ‘light affairs with young girls in bloom’. At this stage of the argument, I am keen to replace ‘young girls in bloom’ with ‘young wet pussies’; that would, it seems to me, contribute to the clarity of the debate without detracting from its poetry. (What could be more beautiful, more poetic, than a pussy that is starting to get wet? I ask you to think about that seriously before giving me an answer. A cock beginning its vertical ascent? There are arguments in favour. It all depends, like so many things in this world, on the sexual point of view that one adopts.)
Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann, to return to my subject, might have had all the culture in the world, they might (in those impressive early years of the twentieth century, which summarised eight centuries and even a bit of European culture all by themselves) have been at the head of all the knowledge and intelligence in the world, they might respectively have represented the peak of French and German civilisation – that is to say, the most brilliant, the most profound and the most refined cultures of their time – but they were at the mercy of, and ready to prostrate themselves before, any wet young pussy or any valiantly upright cock – according to their personal preferences, Thomas Mann remaining undecided in this respect, and Proust being somewhat vague as well. The end of The Magic Mountain was thus even sadder than a first reading suggested; it didn’t just signify, with the two highest civilisations of the day rushing, in 1914, into a war as absurd as it was bloody, the failure of the very idea of European culture; it signified the final victory of animal attraction, the definitive end of all civilisation and of all culture. A Lolita could have made Thomas Mann lose his marbles; Marcel Proust would have crushed on Rihanna; these two authors, the crowns of their respective literary cultures, were not, to put it another way, honourable men, and we would have had to go further back, probably to the start of the nineteenth century, to the days of early Romanticism, to breathe a healthier and a purer air.
That was still open to debate, that purity; Lamartine was basically only a kind of Elvis Presley; he had the ability to make the chicks melt with his lyricism, but at least those conquests were made in the name of pure lyricism – Lamartine gyrated his hips with greater moderation than Elvis, well, I assume he did; we would need to be able to examine television footage which didn’t exist at the time, but that didn’t matter hugely: that world was dead in any case, it was dead for me and not only for me; it was simply dead. In the end, I found certain comfort in the more accessible reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Apart from the Sherlock Holmes series, Conan Doyle was the author of an impressive number of short stories, all agreeable to read and often enthralling; throughout his life he had been an exceptional page turner, perhaps the best in the history of world literature, but that probably didn’t count for much in his own eyes – that wasn’t his message – rather, Conan Doyle’s message was that each page had to vibrate with the protestations of a noble soul, of a sincere and good heart. The most touching aspect of this was probably his personal attitude towards death: separated from the Christian faith by his gruesomely materialistic medical studies, confronted all through his life with cruel and repeated loss – including the loss of his own sons, who were sacrificed to England’s warlike plans – his last resort was to turn towards spiritualism; the last hope, the final consolation of all those who can neither accept the deaths of their loved ones nor remain attached to Christianity.
* * *
For my part, without loved ones, it seemed to me that I was accepting the idea of death more and more easily; of course I would have liked to be happy, to be part of a happy community – all humans want that – but, well, it was really out of the question at this stage. In early December, I bought a photographic printer and a hundred boxes of Epson matt paper, 10 x 15 cm. Of the four walls of my studio flat, one was occupied by a picture window at waist height whose roller blinds I kept closed, with a big radiator below it. The available space of the second was limited by my bed, a bedside table and two half-height bookshelves. The third wall was almost entirely free, apart from a doorway leading to the bathroom area on the right and the kitchenette on the left. Only the fourth wall, facing my bed, was fully available. Limiting myself for the sake of ease to the two last walls, I had an exhibition space of 16 square metres; taking into account a printing format of 10 x 15 cm, I could exhibit a little over a thousand photographs. There were just over three thousand on my laptop, representing the whole of my life. Choosing one out of three struck me as reasonable, very reasonable, and gave me the impression of having lived rather well.
(Although looking at it closely, it had followed a strange course. Basically, for several y
ears after my separation from Camille, I had told myself that we would find one another again sooner or later, that it was inevitable since we loved each other, that we just needed to let the wounds heal, as they say, but we were still young and had our whole lives ahead of us. Now, I turned around and noticed that life was over, that it had passed us by without really giving us any clear signs, then it had quietly, discreetly and elegantly taken its cards back and simply turned away from us; really, if you looked at it closely, it hadn’t been very long, our life.)
* * *
In a sense I wanted to make a Facebook wall, but for my own personal use: a Facebook wall that would never be seen by anyone but me – and, very briefly, by the estate agent who would have to value my apartment after my death; he would be a bit surprised, then would throw everything in the bin and bring in a cleaning company to remove the traces of glue from the walls.
The task was an easy one thanks to modern cameras; each of my pictures was linked to the time and date when it was taken, so there was nothing simpler than filtering them all according to those criteria. If I had activated the GPS function on each of my cameras, I could also have identified the locations beyond any doubt; but in fact there was no point in that – I remembered all the places of my life, I remembered them perfectly, with surgical and pointless precision. My memory of dates was more vague, but dates were unimportant; everything that had happened had happened for all eternity, I knew that now, but it was an eternity that was closed and inaccessible.
In the course of this story, I have mentioned a number of photographs; two with Camille, one with Kate. There were others, just over three thousand others, of much less interest; it was surprising to note how mediocre my photographs were: tourist snapshots in Venice or Florence, exactly like the ones taken by thousands of other tourists; why had I thought it was a good idea to take them? And what had led me to have these banal images developed? Now, however, I was going to stick them on the wall, each one in its place, not in the hope that they would exude any kind of beauty or meaning; but I would still carry on to the end, because I could, I could in material terms; it was a task physically within my range.
* * *
So I did.
In the end, I developed an interest in service charges too. They were extraordinarily high in the tower blocks in the thirteenth arrondissement – that was something which I hadn’t anticipated, and which would interfere with my plan for my life. A few months previously (only a few months? A whole year, even two? I could no longer give my life a chronology and only a few images survived in the midst of a confused nothingness, but the attentive reader will fill in the gaps), well, in short, when I decided to disappear, to leave the Ministry of Agriculture and Yuzu once and for all, I still had a sense that I was rich, and that the inheritance from my parents would give me a limitless amount of time.
Now I had just over two hundred thousand euros left in my account. Of course going on holiday was out of the question. (A holiday to do what? Funboarding, skiing in the Alps? And in what context? Once, in some club in Fuerteventura I had gone to with Camille, I had come across a guy who had gone there on his own: he had dinner on his own, and as far as one could tell he would go on having dinner on his own until the end of his stay; he was in his thirties, Spanish I thought, not in bad physical shape and probably of an acceptable social status – he might have been a cashier in a bank; the courage he had to display every day, particularly during mealtimes, had startled me, had almost plunged me into a state of terror.) I wouldn’t be going away for the weekend either; I was finished with country-house hotels: if you’re going to a country-house hotel on your own you might as well blow your brains out; I had had a moment of genuine sadness as I parked my G 350 on the third underground level of this grim car park that came with my apartment; the floor was repellent and oily, the atmosphere nauseating, there were vegetable peelings lying around here and there: it was a very sad end for my old G 350, shut away in this dirty and sordid car park after devouring mountain roads, crossing swamps, passing through fords and racking up just over 380,000 kilometres on the clock, and never for one moment disappointing me.
Neither did I think of calling escorts, and besides I had lost the piece of paper that Dr Azote had given me. When I noticed that and reflected that I had probably left it in my room at the Hôtel Mercure, I was worried for a moment that Audrey might have happened upon it, that it might have affected her esteem for me. (But why on earth would I have cared? My mind was all over the place.) I could obviously ask Azote again, or do a search of my own – there was no shortage of websites – but it seemed pointless: nothing resembling an erection seemed imaginable for now – my sporadic attempts at masturbation left me in no doubt about that – so the world had become a neutral surface without relief or attraction and my working expenses were considerably reduced; but the sum of charges was so indecently high that even with restricting myself to the moderate joys of food and wine, I could only afford ten years at most before my bank account dwindled to zero and brought the process to an end.
* * *
I planned to work at night so as not to be put off by the sight of the concrete forecourt; I didn’t have much faith in my own courage. In the sequence I had planned, the order of events was brief and perfect: a switch by the door to the main room let me raise the roller blinds in a few seconds. Trying to avoid thinking, I would walk to the window, slide the picture window open, lean out and it would be over.
For a long time, I was restrained by the thought of falling: I imagined myself floating in space for several minutes, becoming increasingly aware of the inevitable bursting of my organs at the moment of impact, the absolute agony that would run through me, and I filled more and more, with each second of my fall, with a terrible state of total terror that would not be softened even by the blessed mercy of unconsciousness.
This was the problem of having studied science for a long time: height, h, travelled by a body in free fall for a time, t, was in fact given precisely by the formula h = 1/2gt2, with g being the gravitational constant, giving a falling time, for height h, of √2h/g. Taking into account the height of my building (almost exactly one hundred metres), and the fact that air resistance could be neglected for a fall from such an altitude, that meant a falling time of four and a half seconds – five seconds at most if one absolutely insisted on including air resistance; nothing, as we can see, to get worked up about; with a few glasses of calvados under one’s belt, it wasn’t even certain that one would have time to think clearly. There would certainly be more suicides if people knew that simple figure: four and a half seconds. I would hit the ground at a speed of 159 kilometres per hour, which was a bit less pleasant to imagine; but all right, it wasn’t the impact that I was afraid of but the flight, and physics established with certainty that my flight would be brief.
* * *
Ten years was much too much – my spiritual suffering would have reached an unbearable and fatal level long before then – but at the same time, I couldn’t see myself leaving an inheritance (and anyway who to, the state? The prospect was extraordinarily disagreeable), so I had to increase the rhythm of my expenditure – it was worse than mean, it was frankly stingy – but I couldn’t bear the prospect of dying with any money in my account. I could have given it away, shown generosity, but to whom? I wasn’t about to hand over my cash to a bunch of Romanians. I hadn’t been given much, and I didn’t have much desire to give anything myself; goodness had not developed in me, the psychological process had not taken place and human beings as a whole had, on the contrary, become increasingly indifferent to me; not to mention the cases of hostility pure and simple. I had tried to get close to certain human beings (and female human beings in particular, first of all because they were more attractive to me, but I’ve already mentioned that), well, I think I’d made a number of normal, standard, average attempts, but for different reasons (which I have also mentioned) nothing concrete had come of them – nothing had given me the feeling that I
had a place to live, or a context, let alone a reason.
The only solution to reduce my sum in the bank was to carry on eating, to try and cultivate an interest in expensive and refined foods (Alba truffles? Maine lobsters?); I had just passed eighty kilos, but that wouldn’t influence the duration of my fall, as the remarkable experiments of Galileo had already confirmed, carried out, legend has it, from the top of the Tower of Pisa; but more probably from the top of a tower in Padua.
My own tower block also had the name of an Italian city. (Ravenna? Ancona? Rimini?) There was nothing comical about that coincidence, but it didn’t strike me as absurd to try and develop a humorous attitude, to imagine the moment when I would lean out of the window, when I would abandon myself to the force of gravity, as a joke; after all, the jocular spirit concerning death was entirely possible: lots of people died every second and they managed to do so perfectly, first time, without making a fuss; some had even taken advantage of the situation to deliver one-liners.
* * *
I would get there, I felt I was about to get there: it was the home stretch. I still had prescriptions for two months’ worth of Captorix and would probably have to see Dr Azote for one last appointment; this time I would have to lie to him, pretend that my condition had improved to make sure that he didn’t attempt a rescue operation, an emergency hospitalisation or whatever; I would have to appear optimistic and carefree, but without overdoing it; my abilities as an actor were limited. It wouldn’t be easy, and he was far from stupid; but giving up Captorix, even for a single day, was unthinkable. You can’t let pain go beyond a certain level or you start doing crazy things: you swallow some Destop Turbo and your internal organs, composed of the same substances that usually block sinks, break down amidst horrible pain; or else you throw yourself under a metro and find yourself two legs short and with your balls crushed to bits, but still not dead.
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