Authors: Michel Houellebecq
Tags: #Social life and customs, #1986-, #20th century, #Sex tourism, #Fiction, #Literary, #Social conditions, #France, #France - Social life and customs - 20th century, #Psychological, #Fiction - General, #Humorous fiction, #Thailand, #Erotica, #General, #Thailand - Social conditions - 1986
Platform (20 page)
12
At the end of October, Jean-Yves's father died. Audrey refused to accompany him to the funeral; actually, he had been expecting as much, he had only asked her for the sake of propriety. It would be a modest funeral. He was an only child, there would be some family, very few friends. His father would have a brief obituary in his alumni newsletter and that would be it, the end of the line. He had hardly seen anyone recently. Jean-Yves had never really understood what had moved him to retire to this undistinguished area, rural in the most depressing sense of the word and to which, moreover, he had no ties. Probably a last vestige of the masochism that had dogged him more or less his whole life. Having been a rather brilliant student, he had become bogged down in a lackluster career as a manufacturing engineer. Though he had always dreamed of having a daughter, he had consciously limited himself to only one child — in order, he maintained, to give the boy a better education. The argument didn't stand up, since he earned a very good salary. He gave the impression of being accustomed to his wife rather than truly loving her. Perhaps he was proud of his son's professional successes — but, truth be told, the fact was he never spoke of them. He had no hobby, and no leisure activity to speak of, in fact, apart from breeding rabbits and doing the crossword in
La R
é
publique du Centre-Ouest
.
We are probably wrong to assume that each individual has some secret passion, some mystery, some weakness. If Jean-Yves's father had had to express his innermost convictions, the profound meaning he ascribed to life, he would probably have cited nothing more than a slight disappointment. Indeed, his favorite expression, what Jean-Yves remembered him saying most often, what best encapsulated his experience of the human condition, was limited to the words "You get old."
La R
é
publique du Centre-Ouest
.
We are probably wrong to assume that each individual has some secret passion, some mystery, some weakness. If Jean-Yves's father had had to express his innermost convictions, the profound meaning he ascribed to life, he would probably have cited nothing more than a slight disappointment. Indeed, his favorite expression, what Jean-Yves remembered him saying most often, what best encapsulated his experience of the human condition, was limited to the words "You get old."
Jean-Yves's mother seemed reasonably affected by her bereavement he had, after all, been her lifelong companion—without really seeming to be shattered for all that. "He'd really gone downhill," she remarked. The cause of death was so vague that one might well have been talking about a general fatigue, or even despondency. "He had lost all interest in anything," his mother said again. That, more or less, was her funerary oration.
Audrey's absence was, of course, noticed, but during the ceremony his mother refrained from mentioning it. The evening meal was a frugal affair —in any case, she had never been a good cook. He knew she would broach the subject at some point. Bearing in mind the circumstances, it was quite difficult to avoid the issue as he usually did, by turning on the television, for example. His mother finished putting away the dishes, then sat opposite him, her elbows on the table.
"How are things, with your wife?"
"Not great." He expanded on this for a few minutes, getting ever more bogged down in his own boredom. In conclusion, he indicated that he was thinking of divorce. His mother, he knew, hated Audrey, whom she accused of keeping her from her grandchildren. This was quite true, but her grandchildren weren't too keen to see her either. If things had been different, they could have become used to it— Angélique at least, in her case it wasn't too late. But it would have meant different circumstances, a different life, all things that were difficult to imagine. Jean-Yves looked up at his mother's face, her graying chignon, her harsh features. It was difficult to feel a rush of tenderness, of affection for this woman. As far back as he could remember, she had never really been one for hugs. It was equally difficult to imagine her in the role of a sensual lover, a slut. He suddenly realized that his father must have been bored shitless his whole life. He felt terribly shocked by this, his hands tensed on the edge of the table. This time it was irreparable, it was definitive. In despair, he tried to recall a moment when he had seen his father beaming, happy, genuinely glad to be alive. There was one time, possibly, when he had been five and his father had been trying to show him how a Meccano worked. Yes, his father had loved engineering, truly loved it. He remembered his father's disappointment the day he had announced he was going to study marketing. Perhaps it was enough, after all, to fill a life.
The next day, he made a quick tour of the garden, which, to tell the truth, seemed quite anonymous to him. It evoked no memories of his childhood. The rabbits shifted nervously in their hutches; they hadn't been fed yet. His mother was going to sell them immediately; she didn't like looking after them. In reality, they were the real losers in this whole business, the only real victims of this death. Jean-Yves took a sack of feed granules and poured a couple of handfuls into the hutches. This gesture, at least, he could make in memory of his father.
He left early, just before the Michel Drucker show, but that did not stop him from getting caught up, just before Fontainebleau, in an endless traffic jam. He tried a number of different stations and ended up turning off the radio. From time to time the queue moved forward a few meters. He could hear nothing but the purring of engines, the splat of solitary raindrops against the windshield. His mood was attuned to this melancholy emptiness. The good thing about this weekend, he thought, was that he would never have to see Johanna the baby-sitter again, as they had finally decided to change baby-sitters. The new one, Eucharistie, had been recommended by a neighbor. She was a girl from Dahomey, serious, worked hard at school. At fifteen, she was already two years from graduation. Later, she hoped to be a doctor, possibly a pediatrician. In any case, she was very good with the children. She had succeeded in tearing Nicolas away from his video games and getting him to bed before ten o'clock —something that they had never been able to do.
She was wonderful with Angélique, fed her, bathed her, played with her. The little girl obviously adored her.
He arrived at half past ten, exhausted from the journey. Audrey was, as far as he could remember, in Milan for the weekend; she would fly back the following morning and go straight to work. Divorce was seriously going to cramp her lifestyle, he thought with malicious satisfaction. It was easy to understand why she should want to put off broaching the subject. On the other hand, she did not go so far as to feign any affection, any rush of tenderness; that at least was to her credit.
Eucharistie was sitting on the sofa reading a paperback of
Life:
A
User's Manual
,
by Georges Perec. Everything had gone okay. She accepted a glass of orange juice; he poured himself a cognac. Usually, when he came home, she would tell him about the day, what she and the children had done together. This would last for a few minutes before she went. This time, too, she did the same as he poured himself a second cognac. He realized lie hadn't been listening to a word. "My father died," he said, realizing the fact again as he said the words. Eucharistie stopped abruptly and looked at him hesitantly. She did not know how to react, but he had clearly succeeded in capturing her attention. "My parents were never happy together. . . ," he continued, and this second observation was even worse. It seemed to deny his existence, to deprive him of a certain right to life. He was the fruit of an unhappy, mismatched union, something that would have been better if it had never been. He looked around him anxiously. In a few months, at most, he would leave this apartment, never again to see these curtains, this furniture. Everything already seemed to be fading, losing its solidity. He could just as easily be in the showroom of a department store after it had closed, or in a photo from a catalogue, in something, at any rate, that had no real existence. He stood up unsteadily, walked over to Eucharistie, and took the young girl's body violently into his arms. He slipped a hand under her sweater. Her flesh was living, real. All of a sudden he came to himself and stopped, ashamed. She, too, had stopped struggling. He looked straight into her eyes, then kissed her on the mouth. She responded to his kiss, pushed her tongue against his. He slipped his hand higher under her sweater to her breasts.
Life:
A
User's Manual
,
by Georges Perec. Everything had gone okay. She accepted a glass of orange juice; he poured himself a cognac. Usually, when he came home, she would tell him about the day, what she and the children had done together. This would last for a few minutes before she went. This time, too, she did the same as he poured himself a second cognac. He realized lie hadn't been listening to a word. "My father died," he said, realizing the fact again as he said the words. Eucharistie stopped abruptly and looked at him hesitantly. She did not know how to react, but he had clearly succeeded in capturing her attention. "My parents were never happy together. . . ," he continued, and this second observation was even worse. It seemed to deny his existence, to deprive him of a certain right to life. He was the fruit of an unhappy, mismatched union, something that would have been better if it had never been. He looked around him anxiously. In a few months, at most, he would leave this apartment, never again to see these curtains, this furniture. Everything already seemed to be fading, losing its solidity. He could just as easily be in the showroom of a department store after it had closed, or in a photo from a catalogue, in something, at any rate, that had no real existence. He stood up unsteadily, walked over to Eucharistie, and took the young girl's body violently into his arms. He slipped a hand under her sweater. Her flesh was living, real. All of a sudden he came to himself and stopped, ashamed. She, too, had stopped struggling. He looked straight into her eyes, then kissed her on the mouth. She responded to his kiss, pushed her tongue against his. He slipped his hand higher under her sweater to her breasts.
They made love in the bedroom without a word. She had undressed quickly and then crouched on the bed, so that he could take her. Even after they had come, they remained silent for some minutes and avoided mentioning the subject afterwards. She told him about her day again, what she and the children had been up to. Then she told him that she could not stay the night.
In the weeks that followed, they did it again many times, every time she came over, in fact. He had more or less been waiting for her to broach the subject of the
legitimacy
of their relations. After all, she was only fifteen, he was thirty-five. He could, with a small stretch of the imagination, have been her father. But she did not seem in the least inclined to see things in that light. In what light, then? In the end he realized, in a rush of emotion and of gratitude: in the simple light of
pleasure
.
His marriage manifestly cut him off, he was out of touch. He had quite simply forgotten that certain women, in certain circumstances, make love
for
pleasure
.
He was not Eucharisties first. She had already been with a boy the year before, a guy in his final year with whom she'd lost touch afterwards. But there were things she was unaware of, fellatio for example. The first time, he held back, was hesitant about coming in her mouth; but he quickly realized that she enjoyed it. or rather that it amused her to feel his semen spurt out. Usually, he had no trouble bringing her to orgasm. For his part, it was immensely pleasurable feeling her firm, supple body in his arms. She was intelligent, curious; she was interested in his work and asked him lots of questions: she was almost everything Audrey was not. The universe of business was, to her, a curious, exotic world whose customs she wanted to learn. She would not have asked all these questions of her own father, who, in any case, would have been unable to answer —he worked in a public hospital. In short, he thought, with a strange feeling of relativism, there was an
equilibrium
to their relationship. Even so, he was lucky that his first child had not been a daughter. Under certain circumstances he found it difficult to imagine how—and more especially why—incest might be avoided.
legitimacy
of their relations. After all, she was only fifteen, he was thirty-five. He could, with a small stretch of the imagination, have been her father. But she did not seem in the least inclined to see things in that light. In what light, then? In the end he realized, in a rush of emotion and of gratitude: in the simple light of
pleasure
.
His marriage manifestly cut him off, he was out of touch. He had quite simply forgotten that certain women, in certain circumstances, make love
for
pleasure
.
He was not Eucharisties first. She had already been with a boy the year before, a guy in his final year with whom she'd lost touch afterwards. But there were things she was unaware of, fellatio for example. The first time, he held back, was hesitant about coming in her mouth; but he quickly realized that she enjoyed it. or rather that it amused her to feel his semen spurt out. Usually, he had no trouble bringing her to orgasm. For his part, it was immensely pleasurable feeling her firm, supple body in his arms. She was intelligent, curious; she was interested in his work and asked him lots of questions: she was almost everything Audrey was not. The universe of business was, to her, a curious, exotic world whose customs she wanted to learn. She would not have asked all these questions of her own father, who, in any case, would have been unable to answer —he worked in a public hospital. In short, he thought, with a strange feeling of relativism, there was an
equilibrium
to their relationship. Even so, he was lucky that his first child had not been a daughter. Under certain circumstances he found it difficult to imagine how—and more especially why—incest might be avoided.
Three weeks after their first time, Eucharistie announced that she had met a boy. Under the circumstances it was best for them to end it.
At any rate, it complicated matters. He seemed so desolate at the news that, the next time she came around, she offered to continue giving him blow jobs. In all honest}', he couldn't really see how that was less serious. But in any case, he had more or less forgotten how he had felt when he was fifteen. When he got home, he would talk for a long time about this and that, and it was always she who decided on the moment. She would strip to the waist and allow him to caress her breasts. Then he would lean back against the wall and she would kneel in front of him. From his moans, she could tell precisely when he was going to come. She would then take her mouth away, and with small, precise movements, she would direct his ejaculation, sometimes toward her breasts, sometimes toward her mouth. In those moments she had a playful, almost childlike, expression. Thinking back on it, he realized gloomily that her love life was just beginning, that she would make many lovers happy. Their paths had crossed, that was all, and that in itself was a lucky accident.
The second Saturday, at the moment when Eucharistie, eyes half-closed, mouth wide open, was beginning to jerk him off vigorously, he suddenly noticed his son popping his head around the door. He started, turned his head away; when he looked up again the child had disappeared. Eucharistie hadn't noticed anything; she slid her hand between his thighs, delicately squeezed his balls. At that moment, he had a strange sensation of immobility. Suddenly, it occurred to him, like a revelation, an impasse: there was too much overlap between the generations —fatherhood no longer had any meaning. He drew Eucharistie's mouth toward his penis. Without quite understanding completely, he sensed that this would be the last time, and he needed her mouth. As soon as her lips closed over him, he spurted several times, shoving his cock deep into her throat as shudders coursed through his body. She looked up at him. He kept his hands on the girl's head. She kept his penis in her mouth for two or three minutes, running her tongue slowly over the head, her eyes closed. Shortly before she left, he told her that they wouldn't do it again. He didn't really know why. If his son said anything, it would surely do him a lot of harm when the divorce settlement was decided, but there was something else that he wasn't able to identify. He told me all of this a week later, in an irritating tone of self-reproach, begging me not to say anything to Valérie. I found him a little annoying, to tell the truth. I really couldn't see what the problem was. Purely out of friendship I pretended to take an interest, to weigh up the pros and cons, but I couldn't take the situation seriously. I felt a little as if I were on the Mireille Dumas show.
From a professional point of view, on the other hand, everything was going well, he informed me with satisfaction. There had almost been a problem with the Thailand club a couple of weeks earlier. To meet customer expectations for that location, there had to be at least one hostess bar and one massage parlor. This would be a little difficult to justify in the budget for the hotel. He telephoned Gottfried Rembke. The boss of TUI rapidly found a solution. He had an associate on-site, a Chinese building contractor based in Phuket, who would sort out the building of a leisure complex just beside the hotel. The German tour operator seemed to be in a great mood; apparently things were looking good. At the beginning of November, Jean-Yves received a copy of the catalogue destined for the German market. He immediately saw that they hadn't pulled any punches. In every photo, the local girls were topless, wearing minuscule G-strings or see-through skirts. Photographed on the beach or right in the hotel rooms, they smiled teasingly, ran their tongues over their lips: it was almost impossible to misunderstand. "In France," he remarked to Valérie, "you would never get away with something like this." It was curious to note, he mused, that as Europe became ever closer, and the idea of a federation of states was ever more current, there was no noticeable standardization of moral legislation. Although prostitution was accepted in Holland and Germany and was governed by statute, many people in France were calling for it to be criminalized, even for clients to be prosecuted, as they were in Sweden. Valérie looked at him, surprised. He had been odd lately, launching increasingly frequently into aimless, unproductive ruminations. She herself coped with a punishing workload, methodically and with a sort of cold determination. She regularly made decisions without consulting him. It was something she was not really used to, and at times I sensed she felt lost, uncertain. The board of directors would not get involved, affording them complete freedom. "They're waiting, that's all, they're waiting to see whether we fall flat on our faces," she confided one day, with suppressed rage. She was right, it was obvious, I couldn't disagree with her. That was the way the game worked.
For my part, I had no objection to sex being subject to market forces. There were many ways of acquiring money, honest and dishonest, cerebral or, by contrast, brutally physical. It was possible to make money using one's intellect, talent, strength, or courage, even one's beauty; it was also possible to acquire money through a banal stroke of luck. Most often, money was acquired through inheritance, as in my case, conferring the problem of how it had been earned on the previous generation. Many very different people had acquired money on this earth: former top athletes, gangsters, artists, models, actors; a great number of entrepreneurs and talented financiers; a number of engineers, too, more rarely a few inventors. Money was sometimes acquired mechanically, by simple accumulation; or, on the other hand, by some audacious but successful move. There was no great logic to it, but the possibilities were endless. By contrast, the criteria for sexual selection were unduly simple, consisting merely of youth and physical beauty. These features had a price, certainly, but not an infinite price. The situation, of course, had been very different in earlier centuries, at a time when sex was essentially linked to reproduction. To maintain the genetic value of the species, humanity was compelled seriously to take into account criteria like health, strength, youth, and physical prowess —of which beauty was merely a handy indicator. Nowadays, the order of things had changed: beauty had retained all of its value, but that value was now something marketable, narcissistic. If sex was really to come into the category of tradable commodities, the best solution was probably to involve money, that universal mediator that already made it possible to assure an exact equivalence between intelligence, talent, and technical competence, and that had already made it possible to assure a perfect standardization of opinions, tastes, and lifestyles. Unlike the aristocracy, the rich made no claim to being different in constitution from the rest of the population: they simply claimed to be richer. Essentially abstract, money was a concept in which neither race, physical appearance, age, intelligence, nor distinction played any part, nothing, in fact, but money. My European ancestors had worked hard for several centuries, seeking to dominate, then to transform the world, and to a certain extent they had succeeded. They had done so out of economic self-interest, out of a taste for work, but also because they believed in the superiority of their civilization. They had invented dreams, progress, Utopia, the future. Their sense of a mission to civilize had disappeared in the course of the twentieth century. Europeans, at least some of them, continued to work, and sometimes to work hard, but they did so for money, or from a neurotic attachment to their work. The innocent sense of their natural right to dominate the world and direct the path of history had disappeared. As a consequence of their accumulated efforts, Europe remained a wealthy continent. Those qualities of intelligence and determination shown by my ancestors, I had manifestly lost. As a wealthy European, I could obtain food and the services of women more cheaply in other countries; as a decadent European, conscious of my approaching death, and given over entirely to selfishness, I could see no reason to deprive myself of such things. I was aware, however, that such a situation was barely tenable, that people like me were incapable of ensuring the survival of a society. Perhaps, more simply, we were unworthy of life. Mutations would occur, were already occurring, but I found it difficult to feel truly concerned. My only genuine motivation was to get the hell out of this shithole as quickly as possible. November was cold, bleak; I hadn't been reading Auguste Comte that much recently. My great diversion when Valérie was out consisted of watching the movement of the clouds through the bay window. Immense flocks of starlings formed over Gentilly in the late afternoon, describing inclined planes and spirals in the sky. I was quite tempted to ascribe meaning to them, to interpret them as the heralds of an apocalypse.
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