The Possibility of an Island (33 page)

She spent the next day preparing for the party; in a nearby beauty salon she had a clay mask and a facial scrub. I waited, smoking cigarettes in the hotel bedroom; the following day it was more or less the same thing, after her appointment at the hairdresser she stopped by a few shops, bought some earrings and a new belt. My mind felt strangely empty, rather, I imagined, like that of prisoners on death row: I have never believed that they spend their last hours, with the exception perhaps of those who believe in God, going back over their lives and drawing up a balance sheet; I believe that they simply try to spend the time in the most neutral manner possible; the most fortunate ones sleep, but I wasn’t one of those, I don’t think I closed my eyes during those two days.

When she knocked on the door of my bedroom, on August 17, at about eight in the evening, and appeared in the doorway, I understood that I would not survive her leaving. She was wearing a small see-through top, tied beneath her breasts, letting you make out their curves; her golden stockings, held up by garters, stopped a centimeter below her skirt—an ultrashort miniskirt, almost a belt, made of golden vinyl. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, and when she leaned down to relace her high boots the movement revealed most of her ass; despite myself I stretched out my hand to caress it. She turned around, took me in her arms, and looked at me so compassionately, so tenderly, that I thought for an instant she was going to say she had changed her mind, that she was staying with me, now and forever, but this didn’t happen and we took a taxi to Pablo’s loft.

The first guests arrived around eleven p.m., but the party only really got going after three in the morning. At the start I behaved quite properly, circulating half-nonchalantly around the guests, a glass in my hand; many knew me or had seen me at the cinema, which gave rise to a few simple conversations, the music was too loud anyway and very soon I contented myself with just nodding my head. There were almost two hundred people and I was undoubtedly the only one older than twenty-five, but even that did not manage to destabilize me, I was in a strangely calm state; it is true that, in a sense, the catastrophe had already happened. Esther was resplendent, and greeted the new arrivals with effusive kisses. Everybody now knew that she was leaving for New York in two weeks’ time, and I had been afraid at the start of feeling a bit ridiculous, after all I was in the position of the guy who
gets dumped,
but no one made me feel that way, people spoke to me as if my situation were unexceptional.

Around ten in the morning, the house music gave way to trance, I had been regularly emptying and refilling my glass of punch, I began to feel a little tired, I told myself it would be wonderful if I could manage to get some sleep, but I didn’t really believe this, alcohol had helped to halt the rise in my anxiety but I could still feel that it was there, living inside me, ready to devour me at the slightest sign of weakness. A little earlier, a few people had formed into couples, I had observed movements in the direction of the bedrooms. I chose a corridor at random, and opened a door decorated with a poster depicting a close-up of spermatozoids. I had the impression of arriving at the end of a mini-orgy; some half-naked boys and girls were flopped across the bed. In the corner, a blond teenage girl, her T-shirt pulled up above her breasts, was giving blow jobs; I approached her, but she gestured for me to move away. I sat against the bed, not far from a brunette with dusky skin and magnificent breasts, whose skirt was hiked up around her waist. She seemed fast asleep and didn’t react when I parted her thighs, but when I introduced a finger into her pussy, she pushed my hand away mechanically, without fully waking up. Resigned, I sat back down at the foot of the bed, and I had been plunged for maybe half an hour into a morose state of exhaustion when I saw Esther come in. She was vivacious, in top form, and accompanied by a male friend—a small homosexual who was very blond and cute, with short hair, whom I knew by sight. She had bought two bags of coke, and knelt down to prepare lines, then put the bit of cardboard she had used on the floor; she had not noticed my presence. Her friend took the first line. When she took her turn to kneel on the floor, her skirt rose very high over her ass. She introduced the cardboard tube into her nostril, and at the moment when she rapidly snorted the white powder, with a well-practiced, precise gesture, I knew that I would keep engraved in my memory the image of this little animal, who was innocent, amoral, neither good nor evil, who was simply in search of her ration of excitement and pleasure. Suddenly I thought again of the way in which Knowall had described the Italian girl: a pretty arrangement of particles, a smooth surface, without individuality, whose disappearance would hold no importance…and it was this that I had been in love with, that had constituted my only reason for living—and, and this was the worst of it,
still
constituted it. She leaped up, opened the door—the music reached us, much louder—and set off in the direction of the party. I rose reluctantly to follow her; when I got to the main room, she had already started dancing again. I began to dance near her but she didn’t seem to see me, her hair twirled around her face, her blouse was soaked with sweat, her nipples were erect under the fabric, the beat became more and more rapid—at least 160 bpm—and I had more and more trouble following it, we were briefly separated by a group of three boys, then we were together again back to back, I stuck my ass against hers, and she began to move in response, our asses rubbed against one another harder and harder then she turned around and recognized me. “
Hola,
Daniel…,” she said smiling before starting to dance again, then we were separated by another group of boys and I suddenly felt extremely tired, about to fall down, I sat on a sofa before pouring myself a whisky but it wasn’t a good idea, I was immediately overcome with horrible nausea, the door of the bathroom was locked and I knocked loudly several times repeating: “I’m sick! I’m sick!” before a girl came to open it, she had wrapped a towel around her waist, and closed the door again behind me before going back into the bathtub where two guys were waiting for her, she knelt down and one of them penetrated her immediately while the other positioned himself to be sucked off, I rushed over to the basin and stuck a hand down my throat, I vomited long and painfully before I felt a bit better, then I went off to lie down in the bedroom, there was no one left except the brunette who had pushed me away earlier, she was still sleeping peacefully, her skirt hiked up to the waist, and despite myself I began to feel terribly sad, so I got up again, went after Esther and attached myself to her, literally and shamelessly, I grabbed her by the waist and begged her to speak to me, to speak to me again, to stay at my side, not to leave me alone, she disengaged with increasing impatience and tried to head toward her friends but I came back at her, took her in my arms, she pushed me away again, and I saw their faces close around me, no doubt they were speaking to me as well but I couldn’t make anything out, the din of the bass covered everything. I finally heard her saying: “Please, Daniel, please…It’s a party!” in an urgent voice, but it did no good, the feeling of being abandoned continued to rise within me, to submerge me, I laid my head back on her shoulder, and at this she pushed me away violently with both arms, shouting: “Stop that!,” now she looked really furious, I turned around and left for the bedroom again, I curled up on the floor, held my head in my hands, and for the first time in at least twenty years I began to cry.

The party continued the whole day, at about five in the afternoon Pablo returned with some
pains au chocolat
and croissants, I accepted a croissant, which I dipped in a bowl of café au lait, the music was calmer, it was a kind of melodious and serene chill-out track, several girls were dancing, slowly moving their arms, like big wings. Esther was a few meters away but paid no attention to me when I sat down, she continued to chat with her friends, to evoke memories of other parties, and it was at that moment that I understood. She was leaving for the United States for a year, maybe forever; over there she would make new friends, and, of course, she would find a new boyfriend. I was abandoned, certainly, but in exactly the same way that they were, I had no special status. This feeling of exclusive attachment I had, which was going to torture me until it eventually annihilated me, found no correspondence at all in her, it had no justification, no raison d’être: our flesh was distinct, we were unable to experience either the same suffering or the same joy, we were obviously separate beings. Isabelle did not like sexual pleasure, but Esther did not like love, she
did not want
to be in love, she refused this feeling of exclusivity, of dependence, and her whole generation refused it with her. I was wandering among them like some kind of prehistoric monster with my romantic silliness, my attachments, my chains. For Esther, as for all the young girls of her generation, sexuality was just a pleasant pastime, driven by seduction and eroticism, which implied no particular sentimental commitment; undoubtedly love, like pity, according to Nietzsche, had never been anything but a fiction invented by the weak to make the strong feel guilty, to introduce limits to their natural freedom and ferocity. Women had been weak, in particular at the moment of giving birth, early on they had needed to live under the guardianship of a powerful protector, and to this end they had invented love, but now they had become strong, they were independent and free, and they had given up inspiring or indeed feeling a sentiment that no longer had any concrete justification. The centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by pornographic films, that consisted of ridding sexuality of any emotional connotation in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment had finally, in this generation, been accomplished. What I was feeling, these young people could not feel, nor even exactly understand, and if they had been able to feel something like it, it would have made them uncomfortable, as if it were something ridiculous and a little shameful, like stigmata in ancient times. They had succeeded, after decades of conditioning and effort, they had finally succeeded in tearing from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done, what had been destroyed could no longer be put back together, no more than the pieces of a broken cup can be reassembled, they had reached their goal: at no moment in their lives would they ever know love. They were free.

Around midnight, someone put some techno back on, and people started to dance again; the dealers had left, but there were still quite a lot of poppers and Ecstasy left. Inside my head I wandered around oppressive, claustrophobic zones, which were like a succession of dark rooms. For no precise reason I thought again of Gérard, the Elohimite comedian. “That has ass-hole-utely no importance…,” I said at one moment to a girl, a mindless Swede who only spoke English anyway; she looked at me strangely, then I noticed that several people were looking at me strangely, and that I had been speaking to myself, apparently for several minutes. I nodded my head, looked at my watch, then went to sit down on a deck chair by the pool; it was already two in the morning, but the heat was still stifling.

Later I realized I hadn’t caught sight of Esther for some time, and I began vaguely to search for her. There weren’t many people left in the main room; I stepped over several bodies in the corridor and in the end I discovered her in one of the far bedrooms, stretched out in the middle of a group; she had taken off most of her clothes, and now wore only her gold miniskirt, hiked up around her waist. A boy lying behind her, tall with long curly brown hair, who could have been Pablo, was caressing her ass, and readying himself to penetrate her. She was speaking to another boy, also brown and very muscular, whom I didn’t recognize; at the same time, she was playing with his sex, tapping it against her nose and her cheeks and smiling all the while. I closed the door discreetly; I didn’t know it yet, but this was to be the last image I would keep of her.

Later still, as dawn was breaking on Madrid, I masturbated quickly near the pool. A few meters away from me there was a girl dressed in black, with a vacant look in her eyes; I thought she wouldn’t even notice my presence, but she spat to one side when I ejaculated.

I ended up falling asleep, and I probably slept for a long time, because when I awoke there was nobody left; even Pablo had gone. There was dried sperm on my trousers, and I must have spilled whisky on my shirt, it was reeking. I got up with difficulty, and crossed the terrace amid piles of food and empty bottles. I leaned against the balcony, and observed the street below. The sun had already begun its descent in the sky, night would not take long to fall, and I knew more or less what awaited me. I was evidently now on the home stretch.

Daniel25, 9

SPHERES OF SHINY METAL
levitated in the atmosphere; they slowly turned around, emitting a lightly vibrant song. The local population’s behavior toward them was strange, a mixture of veneration and sarcasm. This population was undoubtedly composed of social primates—were we dealing here with savages, neohumans, or a third species? Their outfits, consisting of large black capes, black masks with holes pierced in them for the eyes, would not allow this to be determined. The collapsed scenery was made up of references to real landscapes—some views might have recalled the description Daniel1 gives of Lanzarote; I didn’t understand exactly where Marie23 was coming from, with this iconographic reconstruction.

We bear witness to

The apperceptive center,

To the emotional IGUS

Surviving the shipwreck.