The Possibility of an Island (20 page)

Around mid-January, I had to go to Paris for a few days; an intense cold spell had fallen upon France, and every morning homeless people were found frozen on the pavements. I understood perfectly why they refused to go into the shelters opened for them, why they had no desire to mix with their fellows; it was a savage world, populated by cruel and stupid people, whose stupidity, by some peculiar and repugnant fusion, further exacerbated their cruelty; it was a world where you found neither solidarity nor pity—fights, rape, and acts of torture were commonplace, it was in fact a world that was almost as hard as the prisons, with the exception that surveillance was almost nonexistent, and danger constant. I visited Vincent, his house was overheated. He greeted me in slippers and a dressing gown, he screwed up his eyes and took a few minutes to manage to express himself normally; he had lost more weight. I had the impression I was his first visitor in months. He had worked a lot in his basement, he told me, would I like to have a look? I didn’t feel I had the courage and left after a coffee; he continued to shut himself up in his marvelous, dreamlike little world, and I realized that no one would ever have access to it again.

As I was in a hotel near the Place de Clichy, I took advantage of this to go into a few sex shops, to buy some sexy underwear for Esther—she had told me she particularly liked latex, that she also liked being masked, handcuffed, and wrapped in chains. The salesman seeming to be unusually competent, I spoke to him about my problem with premature ejaculation; he recommended a German cream, recently put on the market, whose composition was complex—it contained sulfate of benzocaine, some potassium hydrochloride, and some camphor. By applying it to the glans before sexual intercourse and massaging it in carefully, sensitivity was diminished, and the rise of pleasure and ejaculation happened much more slowly. I tried it on my return to Spain and it was an immediate and total success, I could penetrate her for hours, with no constraints except respiratory exhaustion—for the first time in my life I wanted to stop smoking. Generally, I woke up before her, my first move was to lick her, her pussy would quickly become moist and she would open her thighs to be taken: we made love in bed, on the settees, at the swimming pool, on the beach. Perhaps people live like this for years on end, but I personally had never known such happiness, and I wondered how I had been able to live up until then. She had instinctively the expressions, the little gestures (licking her lips greedily, squeezing her breasts in her palms to push them out toward you) that remind one of a slightly
sluttish
young girl, and that bring a man’s excitement to its highest point. To be inside her was a source of infinite joy, I could feel each of the movements of her pussy when she closed it, softly or more strongly, around my sex, for whole minutes I screamed and cried at the same time, I no longer knew where on earth I was, occasionally when she withdrew I noticed that very loud music had been playing, and that I had heard nothing. We rarely went out, sometimes we went to drink cocktails in a lounge bar in San Jose, but there too she would quickly come up to me, lay her head on my shoulder, press my cock with her fingers through the thin fabric, and often we left immediately to fuck in the toilets—I had given up underwear, and she never wore panties. She truly had very few inhibitions: sometimes, when we were alone in the bar, she knelt down between my legs on the carpet and sucked me off while finishing her cocktail with little sips. One day, late in the afternoon, we were surprised in this position by the waiter: she withdrew my cock from her mouth, but kept it in her hands, looked up, and gave him a big smile while continuing to jack me off me with two fingers; he also smiled, collected the bill, and it seemed to me at that moment as if all had long ago been foreseen and arranged by a higher authority, and that my happiness, too, was included in the economy of the system.

I was in paradise, and I would have had no objection to remaining there for the rest of my days, but she had to leave at the end of the week to start her piano lessons again. On the morning of her departure, before she woke up, I carefully massaged my glans with the German cream; then I knelt above her face, parted her long blond hair, and introduced my sex between her lips; she began to suck before even opening her eyes. Later, while we had breakfast, she told me that the more pronounced taste of my sex in the morning, mixed in with that of the cream, had reminded her of cocaine. I knew that after snorting much of their cocaine, a lot of people then liked to lick the remaining grains of powder. She explained to me then that, at certain parties, there was a game in which the girls did a line of coke off the sex of the boys who were there; anyway, she didn’t go to this kind of party very often nowadays, it had been mostly when she was sixteen, seventeen.

For me, the shock was quite painful; the dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity—which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are. Then, gradually, the girls quiet down, thus condemning men to remain eternally jealous of their depraved pasts as little sluts. To refuse to do something because you’ve already done it, because you’ve already
been there,
rapidly leads to the destruction, for yourself as much as for others, of any reason for living, for any possible future, and it plunges you into an oppressive ennui that will eventually transform into atrocious bitterness, accompanied by hatred and rancor toward those who still belong to the land of the living. Esther, thankfully, had not quieted down, but I couldn’t stop myself asking her questions about her sex life; she would answer me, as I had expected, candidly, and straightforwardly. She had first made love at the age of twelve, after a night out in a disco, on a language course in England; but it wasn’t very important, she told me, rather it was an isolated experience. Then, nothing had happened for about two years. Then she had begun to go out in Madrid, and there, yes, quite a lot of things had happened, she had really discovered sexual games. A few orgies, yes. A bit of S&M. Not really with girls—her sister was completely bisexual but no, she preferred boys. For her eighteenth birthday she had wanted, for the first time, to go to bed with two boys, and she kept an excellent memory of it, the boys were very fit, this threesome had continued for some time; as it went on the boys had gradually specialized, she jerked and sucked both of them off but one would more often penetrate her from the front, the other from behind, and this was perhaps what she preferred, he would really bugger her very hard, especially when she had bought poppers. I imagined her, a frail young girl, entering the sex shops of Madrid to ask for poppers. There is a brief ideal period, during the dissolution of societies with strong religious moral strictures, when young people truly desire a free, unbridled, and joyful life; then they grow weary, little by little narcissistic competition takes the upper hand, and in the end they fuck even less than at the time of strong religious morality; but Esther still belonged to that brief ideal period, which had come late to Spain. She had been so straightforwardly, so honestly sexual, she had indulged with such grace in all the games, all the experiences in the sexual arena, without ever thinking that there could have been anything
bad
in it, that I didn’t even manage to hold it against her. I just had the persistent and tormenting feeling of having met her too late, much too late, and of having wasted my life; that feeling, I knew, would never leave me, quite simply because it was true.

We saw each other very often in the following weeks, I spent practically all my weekends in Madrid. I had no idea if she slept with other boys in my absence, I suppose she did, but I managed pretty well to chase the thought from my mind, after all she was always available to me, happy to see me, she always made love with as much candor and as little reserve, and I truly can’t see what more I could have asked for. It didn’t even cross my mind, or very rarely, to ask what a pretty girl like her could see in me. After all, I was
a laugh,
she laughed a lot in my company, this was perhaps quite simply the only thing that saved me, now as it had with Sylvie, thirty years before when I had started out on a love life that had been, on the whole, unsatisfying and punctuated by long eclipses. It was certainly not my money that attracted her, nor my celebrity—in fact, every time I was recognized in the street when I was with her, she looked rather annoyed. Nor did she particularly like being recognized as an actress herself—this also happened, though more rarely. It is true that she didn’t consider herself to be an
actress;
most actors accept being loved for their celebrity without any problem, and why not? After all it’s part of themselves, of their most authentic personality, or in any case the one they have chosen for themselves. By contrast, men who can accept that they are loved for their money are rare, in the West at least; the same cannot be said for Chinese shopkeepers. In the simplicity of their souls, Chinese shopkeepers consider that their S-Class Mercedes, their bathrooms with hydromassage showers, and more generally their money are part of themselves, and therefore they have no objection to arousing the enthusiasm of young girls through these material attributes, they have the same immediate, direct relationship with them that a Westerner can have with the beauty of his face—and in fact theirs makes even more sense, since, in a sufficiently stable politico-economic system, if it’s often the case that a man is stripped of his physical beauty by illness, if aging will in any case inevitably strip him of it, it is far less likely that he will be stripped of his villas on the Côte d’Azur, or of his S-Class Mercedes. It’s true, however, that I was a Western neurotic, and not a Chinese shopkeeper, and that in the complexity of my soul I far preferred to be appreciated for my humor than for my money, or even for my celebrity—for I was in no way certain, during an otherwise long and active career, that I had given the best of me, that I had explored all the facets of my personality, I was not an authentic artist in the sense that Vincent, for example, could be, because I knew all too well in my heart of hearts that there was nothing funny about life, but I had refused to take this into account, I had been a bit of a whore, in fact, I had adapted to the tastes of the public, I had never been really sincere, supposing that is possible, but I knew that you had to suppose it, and that if sincerity, in itself, is nothing, it is nevertheless the condition for everything else. Deep down, I knew that not one of my miserable sketches, not one of my lamentable scripts, mechanically stitched together, with the skill of a wily professional, to entertain an audience of bastards and monkeys, deserved to survive me. This thought was, at moments, painful; but I knew that I would succeed, in this as in everything, in chasing it away quite quickly.

The only thing I had difficulty explaining to myself was the irritation Esther displayed whenever her sister phoned and she was with me in a hotel bedroom. On thinking of it, I became conscious that while I had met some of her friends—essentially homosexuals—I had never met her sister, with whom, moreover, she lived. After a moment’s hesitation, she confessed to me that she had never spoken to her sister about our relationship; every time we saw each other she pretended to be with a girlfriend, or another boy. I asked her why: she had never really reflected on the question; she felt that her sister would be shocked, but she did not elaborate on this. It was certainly not the content of my productions, shows, or films that was to blame; she was still only a teenager when Franco died, she had taken an active part in
la movida
that had followed, and led a pretty unbridled life. All drugs had their place in her world, from cocaine to LSD, via magic mushrooms, marijuana, and Ecstasy. When Esther was five her sister lived with two men, themselves bisexual; all three of them slept in the same bed, and came to say good night to her, together, before she went to sleep. Later she had lived with a woman, while still receiving many lovers, several times she had organized some pretty hot parties in the apartment. Esther would go in to say good night to everyone before returning to her bedroom to read
Tintin.
There were, however, some boundaries, and she had once kicked out a guest who was too heavy-handed in his caressing of the little girl, even threatening to call the police. “Between free and consenting adults,” that was the boundary, and adult life began at puberty, all that was made perfectly clear. I could see very plainly the kind of woman she was, and on the question of art she would certainly have been a supporter of total freedom of expression. As a left-wing journalist she had to respect money,
dinero,
so all in all I couldn’t see what she could have to reproach in me. There must have been something else, something less respectable, and in the end, to be clear in my own mind I asked Esther directly.

She replied after a few minutes’ reflection, in a pensive voice: “I think she is going to find you too old…” Yes, that was it, the moment she said it I knew it was true, and the revelation caused me no surprise, it was like the echo of a dull, not unexpected shock. The age difference was the last taboo, the final limit, all the stronger for the fact that it remained the last and had replaced all the others. In the modern world you could be a swinger, bi, trans, zoo, into S&M, but it was forbidden to be
old.
“She’s going to find it unhealthy, abnormal, that I’m not with a boy my own age…,” she continued with resignation. Well, yes, I was an aging man, this was my
disgrace
—to borrow Coetzee’s term; it seemed perfect to me, I could think of no better word, and this moral freedom that is charming, fresh, and seductive in adolescents could only become in my case, the repellent insistence of an old fart who refuses to
give up the ghost.
There was no escaping what her sister would think, or what almost anyone would have thought in her place—short of becoming a Chinese shopkeeper.