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 (18 page)

We had breakfast on the terrace, by the swimming pool. As I was finishing my coffee, I saw Jean-Yves emerge from his room in the company of a girl I recognized as one of the dancers from the previous evening. She was black and slender, with long, graceful legs, and couldn't have been more than twenty. For a fleeting moment, he looked embarrassed, then came over to our table with a half smile and introduced Angelina.

"I've thought about your idea," he announced straight off. "What I'm worried about is how feminists will react."

"Some of the clients will be women," said Valérie.

"You think so?" "Oh, yes, I'm sure of it," she said, a little bitterly. "Look around you."

He glanced at the tables around the pool. There were indeed a number of single women accompanied by Cuban men; almost as many as there were single men in the same situation. He asked Angelina something and translated her reply: "She's been a
jinetera
for three years, and most of her clients are Italian or Spanish. She thinks it's because she's black. Germans and Anglo-Saxons are happy with Latino girls —to them that's exotic enough. She has a lot of friends who are
jineteros
:
their customers are mostly English and American women, and some Germans too."

He took a sip of coffee, thought for a moment:

"What are we going to call these clubs? We need to think of something evocative, something very different from Eldorador Adventure, but all the same, not too explicit."

"I thought maybe Eldorador Aphrodite," said Valérie.

"Aphrodite," he repeated the word thoughtfully. "It's not bad; it doesn't sound as vulgar as 'Venus.' Erotic, sophisticated, a little exotic: yes, I like it."

An hour later, we headed back toward Guardalavaca. A couple of meters from the minibus, Jean-Yves said his goodbyes to the
jinetera
;
he seemed a little sad. When he got back onto the bus, I noticed the student couple giving him black looks. The wine merchant, on the other hand, clearly looked as though he didn't give a damn.

The return trip was pretty gloomy. Of course there was still the diving, the karaoke evenings, and the archery. The muscles tire, then relax; sleep comes quickly. I remember nothing of the last days of the trip, nor of the last excursion, except that the lobster was rubbery and the cemetery disappointing—this despite the fact that it housed the tomb of Jose Marti, father of the nation, poet, politician, polemicist, thinker. He was depicted in a bas-relief sporting a mustache. His coffin, bedecked with flowers, lay at the foot of a circular pit on the walls of which were engraved his most notable
pens
é
es
— on
national independence, resistance to tyranny, justice. Nonetheless, you didn't get the sense that his spirit still animated the place; the poor man seemed quite simply dead. That said, he was not an unpleasant stiff. You felt you would have liked to meet him, if only to rib him about his rather narrow and earnest humanism, but it hardly seemed likely. He seemed to be good and stuck in the past. Could he rise up once more and galvanize his homeland toward the greater heights of the human spirit? One didn't really imagine so. All in all, it was a sad letdown, as indeed all republican cemeteries are. It was irritating, all the same, to realize that Catholics are the only people who have succeeded in creating a functional funeral system. It's true that the means they use to make death magnificent and affecting consists quite simply in denying it. Difficult to fail with arguments like that. But here, in the absence of the risen Christ, you needed nymphs, shepherdesses, tits and ass, basically. As it was, you couldn't imagine Jose Marti romping about in the great meadows of the hereafter. He looked more like he had been buried in the ashes of everlasting ennui.

The day after we got back, we found ourselves in Jean-Yves's office. We hadn't slept much on the plane. My memory of that day is of an atmosphere of blissful enchantment, rather strange, in the deserted building. Three thousand people worked there during the week, but on that Saturday there were just the three of us, apart from the security guards. Close by, on the forecourt of the Évry shopping center, a pair of rival gangs faced each other with Stanley knives, baseball bats, and containers of sulfuric acid. That evening the number of dead would stand at seven, among them two onlookers and a member of the riot squad. The incident would be the subject of considerable debate on national radio and television; but at that moment, we knew nothing about it. In a state of excitement that seemed slightly unreal, we set down our manifesto, our platform for dividing up the world. The suggestions that I was about to make might possibly result in millions of francs' worth of investment or hundreds of jobs; for me it was very new and very unsettling. I talked all afternoon, rambling a bit, but Jean-Yves listened to me attentively. He was convinced, he told Valérie later, that if I was given free rein I was likely to have a lightning bolt. In short, I brought in a note of creativity, while he remained the decision maker; that was his way of looking at things.

The Arab countries were the quickest to deal with. In view of their absurd religion, all possible sexual activity seemed to be ruled out. Tourists who opted for these countries would have to content themselves with the dubious delights of adventure. In any case, Jean-Yves had decided to sell off Agadir, Monastir, and Djerba, which were losing too much. That left two destinations, both of which could reasonably be classified under the category "adventure." The tourists in Marrakech would do a bit of camel trekking. Those at Sharm-el-Sheikh could observe the goldfish or take an excursion into the Sinai to the site of the burning bush —where Moses had "flipped his lid," to use the colorful expression of an Egyptian I had met three years earlier on a felucca trip to the Valley of the Kings. "Admittedly," he'd said emphatically, "it's a very impressive rock formation, but to go from that to affirming the existence of the one God!..." This intelligent and often funny man seemed to have a fondness for me—probably because I was the only Frenchman in the group, as for some obscure cultural or sentimental reasons he nurtured a lifelong, and, by then, it has to be said, a highly deluded passion for France. In speaking to me, he had literally saved my holiday. He was about fifty, always impeccably dressed, very dark-skinned, with a little mustache. A biochemist by training, he had emigrated to England as soon as he completed his studies and had been brilliantly successful working in genetic engineering there. He was revisiting his native land, for which, he said, he still had great affection. On the other hand, he could not find words harsh enough to revile Islam. Above all, he wanted to convince me, Egyptians were not Arabs. "When I think that this country invented everything!" he exclaimed, gesturing broadly toward the Nile Valley. "Architecture, astronomy, mathematics, agriculture, medicine" (he was exaggerating a little, but he was an Oriental, and he needed to convince me quickly). "Since the appearance of Islam, nothing. An intellectual vacuum, an absolute void. We've become a country of flea-ridden beggars. Beggars covered in fleas, that's what we are. Scum, scum!" (with a wave, he shooed away some boys who had come to beg for small change). "You must remember,
cher monsieur
"
(he spoke five foreign languages fluently: French, German, English, Spanish, and Russian), "that Islam was born deep in the desert amid scorpions, camels, and wild beasts of every order. Do you know what I call Muslims? The losers of the Sahara. That's what they deserve to be called. Do you think Islam could have been born in such a magnificent place?" (with genuine feeling, he motioned again to the Nile Valley). "No,
monsieur.
Islam could only have been born in a stupid desert, among filthy Bedouin who had nothing better to do —pardon me —than bugger their camels. The closer a religion comes to monotheism — consider this carefully,
cher monsieur
—
the
more cruel and inhuman it becomes: and of all religions, Islam imposes the most radical monotheism. From its beginnings, it has been characterized by an uninterrupted series of wars of invasion and massacres; never, for as long as it exists, will peace reign in the world. Neither, in Muslim countries, will intellect and talent find a home; if there were Arab mathematicians, poets, and scientists, it is simply because they lost the faith. Simply reading the Koran, one cannot help but be struck by the regrettable mood of tautology that typifies the work: 'There is no other God but God,' etc. You won't get very far with nonsense like that, you have to admit. Far from being an attempt at abstraction, as it is sometimes portrayed, the move toward monotheism is nothing more than a shift toward mindlessness. Note that Catholicism, a subtle religion, and one that I respect, that well knew what suited human nature, quickly moved away from the monotheism imposed by its initial doctrine. Through the dogma of the Trinity and the cult of the Virgin and the Saints, the recognition of the role played by the powers of darkness, the ingenious invention of the angels, little by little it reconstituted an authentic polytheism. It was only by doing so that it succeeded in covering the earth with numberless artistic splendors. One God! What an absurdity! What an inhuman, murderous absurdity! . . . A god of stone,
cher monsieur
,
a jealous, bloody god who should never have crossed over from Sinai. How much more profound, when you think about it, was our Egyptian religion, how much wiser and more humane . . . And our women! How beautiful our women were! Remember Cleopatra, who bewitched great Caesar. See what remains of them today?" Randomly he indicated two veiled women walking with difficulty carrying bundles of merchandise. "Lumps. Big shapeless lumps of fat who hide themselves beneath rags. As soon as they're married, they think of nothing but eating. They eat and eat and eat! .. ." He puffed out his cheeks and pulled a face like de Funès. "No, believe me,
cher monsieur
,
the desert has produced nothing but lunatics and morons. In your noble western culture, for which, by the way, I have great admiration and respect, can you name anyone who was drawn to the desert? Only pederasts, adventurers, and crooks. Take that ludicrous Colonel Lawrence, a decadent homosexual and a pathetic poseur. Or your despicable Henry de Monfreid, an unscrupulous trafficker, always ready to compromise his principles. Nothing great or noble, nothing generous or wholesome; nothing that has contributed to the progress of humanity or brought it to a new level."

"Okay, Egypt gets adventure," Jean-Yves concluded simply. He apologized for interrupting my story, but we had to move on to Kenya. A difficult case. "I'd be quite tempted to put it in with 'Adventure,'" he suggested, having consulted his files.

"Pity," sighed Valérie. "Kenyan women are very pretty."

"How do you know that?"

"Well, not just Kenyan women, African women in general."

"Yeah, but there are women everywhere. In Kenya, you've got rhinoceros, zebras, gnus, elephants, buffalo. What I suggest is that we put Senegal and the Ivory Coast into 'Aphrodite,' and leave Kenya in 'Adventure.' In any case, it's a former English colony, which is terrible for its erotic image, but okay for adventure."

"They smell good, the women of the Ivory Coast," I observed dreamily.

"What do you mean by that?"

"They smell of sex."

"Yes." He chewed unconsciously on his pen. "That could be good for an ad. "Something like 'The Ivory Coast, the realm of the scents' — with a girl in a grass skirt sweating, her hair tousled. I'll make a note of it."

" 'And the nude slaves imbued with fragrance . . .' Baudelaire, it's public domain."

"We'd never get away with it."

"I know."

The rest of the African countries posed fewer problems. "In fact," observed Jean-Yves, "in general you never have any problems with Africans. They'll fuck for free, even the fat ones. You just have to put condoms in the clubs, that's all. On that count, they can be a bit stubborn." He underlined "provide condoms" twice in his notebook.

Tenerife took us even less time. The club's takings were average, but, according to Jean-Yves, it was crucial to the Anglo-Saxon market. You could easily throw together an adventure circuit with a climb to the summit of Mount Teide and a trip on a hydrofoil to Lanzarote. The hotel setup was reasonable, it could be made viable.

We came to the two resorts that would be the chain's chief assets: Boca Chica in the Dominican Republic and Guardalavaca in Cuba.

"We could provide
king-size
*
beds," suggested Valérie. "Done," said Jean-Yves immediately. "Private Jacuzzis in the suites," I suggested. "No," he cut me off, "we're strictly midmarket." One thing led effortlessly to another, with no hesitations, no doubts. We would have to liaise with the resort managers to standardize the local prostitution rates.

We paused briefly to go for lunch. At that very moment, two teenagers from the Courtilières housing project were smashing in a sixty-year-old woman's head with a baseball bat. I ordered maquereau au vin blanc to start.

"Have you got anything planned for Thailand?" I asked.

"We've got a hotel under construction in Krabi. It's the new, hot destination after Phuket. We could easily speed up the building work, so that it would be ready by January 1. It would be good to have a high profile opening."

We devoted the afternoon to developing the various innovative aspects of the Aphrodite clubs. The central point, obviously, was authorized access for local prostitutes, male and female. Clearly, there was no question of offering to accommodate children; the best thing would be to restrict admission to the clubs to the over-sixteens. An ingenious idea, suggested by Valérie, was to list the single-room tariff as the basic catalogue price and to offer a discount of 10 percent for double occupancy; to reverse, in short, the standard system. I think I was the one who suggested that we put forward a
gay-friendly
*
policy, and to circulate rumors that homosexuals accounted for 20 percent of visitors to the clubs. That kind of information was enough to get them to come, and if you wanted a place to have an atmosphere of sex, they had it down to a fine art. The issue of the tag line kept us busy for some time. Jean-Yves hit on a solution that was basic and effective: "Going on vacation? Go wild," but in the end, I got a unanimous vote for "Eldorador Aphrodite: Because pleasure is a right." Since the NATO intervention in Kosovo, the notion of rights had become very persuasive, Jean-Yves explained to me half jokingly. But he was quite serious. He had just read an article on the subject in
Strat
é
gies
.
Every recent campaign based on the idea of rights had been a success: the right to innovation, the right to excellence ... The right to pleasure, he concluded sadly, was a new one. In fact, we were beginning to feel a little tired. He dropped us off at 2 + 2 before heading home. It was Saturday night, the place was quite full. We met a really nice black couple—she was a nurse, he was a jazz drummer, and a successful one, it seemed, as he recorded regularly. He admitted that he spent a lot of his time working on his technique, all his time in fact. "There's no secret to it," I said, a bit foolishly. Strangely, he agreed; without intending to, I had hit upon a profound truth. "The secret is, there is no secret," he said to me with conviction. We finished our drinks and headed up to the rooms. He suggested a double penetration to Valérie. She agreed, as long as I was the one to sodomize her—you had to take it very gently with her, and I was used to it. Jérôme agreed and lay down on the bed. Nicole stroked his cock to keep him hard, then slipped on a condom. I pushed Valerie's skirt up to her waist. She wasn't wearing anything underneath. In a single movement, she impaled herself on Jerome's prick, then lay clown on top of him. I spread her cheeks, lubricated her a little, and then started to fuck her up the ass with short, careful strokes. At the point when the head of my cock was completely inside her, I felt her rectal muscles contract. I stiffened immediately, breathed deeply; I had almost come. After a few seconds, I pushed in deeper. When I was halfway in, she started to move back and forth, rubbing her pubis against Jerome's. There was nothing more for me to do. She started a long, modulated groan; her ass opened and I pushed into her up to the hilt. It was like sliding down an inclined plane—she came surprisingly quickly. Then she became still, panting, happy. It was not that it was particularly more intense, she explained to me later, but when everything went well, there was a point when the two sensations fused, and it became something gentle and irresistible, like being warm all over.

Nicole had been watching us, fingering herself all the time. She was starting to get really excited and immediately took Valerie's place. I didn't have time to change my condom. "With me, you can just go for it," she whispered in my ear. "I really like to be fucked hard up the ass." Which is what I did, closing my eyes to lessen the excitement, trying to concentrate on pure sensation. Everything went smoothly, I was agreeably surprised by my own stamina. She, too, came very quickly with loud, hoarse cries.

Then Valérie and Nicole knelt down to suck us off while we talked. Jérôme was still touring, he told me, but he didn't like it so much anymore. As he got older, he felt the need to stay home more, to look after his family—they had two children—and to work on his technique by himself. Then he talked to me about new time signatures, 4/3 and 7/9; to be honest, I didn't really understand very much. Right in the middle of a sentence he gave a cry of surprise, and his eyes rolled back: he came all at once, ejaculating violently into Valerie's mouth. "Ha, she got me there," he said, half laughing. "She got me good." I felt I was not going to hold out much longer, either. Nicole had a most particular tongue, large and soft, eager; she licked slowly, the ascent was insidious, but almost irresistible. I motioned to Valérie to come nearer and explained to Nicole what I wanted: she was to close her lips round my glans, rest her tongue, and remain motionless while Valérie jerked hie off and licked my balls. She agreed, closed her eyes, waiting for the ejaculation. Valérie started immediately, her fingers quick and vigorous: already she seemed to be back in top form. I spread my arms and legs as far as I could, closed my eyes. The feeling mounted with sudden jolts, like bolts of lightning, then exploded just before I ejaculated into Nicole's mouth. For a brief moment I felt almost concussed. Points of light flashed beneath my eyelids. A little later I realized that I had been on the brink of passing out. I opened my eyes with difficulty. Nicole still had the tip of my cock in her mouth, sucking up the last drops of semen. Valérie had slipped her arm around my neck, looking at me tenderly, mysteriously; she told me I had screamed very loudly.

A little later, they drove us home. In the car, Nicole had another surge of desire. She slipped her breasts out of her basque, lifted her skirt, and lay down on the back seat, laying her head on my thighs. I masturbated her thoughtfully, confidently, expertly controlling her sensations, I felt her hard nipples and her wet pussy. The scent of her sex filled the car. Jérôme drove carefully, stopped at the red lights. Through the windows, I could make out the lights of the Place de la Concorde, the obelisk, then the Pont Alexandre III, Les Invalides. I felt good, at peace, but still a little energetic. She came as we neared the Place d'ltalie. We went our separate ways after exchanging phone numbers.

Jean-Yves, meanwhile, feeling a little depressed after he left us, had parked on the Avenue de la Republique. The excitement of the day had subsided. He knew that Audrey would not be home, but he was actually rather glad of that. He would run into her briefly tomorrow morning, before she went out rollerblading. Since coming back from vacation, they slept in separate rooms.

Why go home? He pushed back in his seat, thought about finding a station on the radio dial but didn't. Gangs of young people, boys and girls, went past on the street. They looked like they were having fun, or at least they were yelling. Some of them were carrying cases of beer. He could have gotten out and mingled with them, maybe started a fight. There were many things he could have done. In the end, he would go home. In some sense he loved his daughter. At least he supposed he did; he felt for her a primal, almost blood-bespattered, emotion that corresponded to the definition of the word. He felt nothing of the kind for his son. In fact, the boy might not even be his, making his reasons for marrying Audrey rather insufficient. For her, at any rate, he felt nothing more than contempt and disgust—too much disgust, in fact, as he would have preferred to feel indifferent. This state of indifference was probably the only thing he was waiting on before filing for divorce. At the moment, however, he still keenly felt that she should be made to
pay.
I'm more likely to be the one to pay, he thought suddenly and bitterly. She would get custody of the children, and he would be landed with huge alimony payments. Unless he tried to get custody of the children, unless he fought her on that. But no, he decided, it wasn't worth it. It would be too rough for Angelique. He would be better off on his own, when he could try to "start a new life," which meant, more or less, find some other girl. Saddled with two kids, Audrey would have it tougher, the bitch. He consoled himself with the thought that it would be hard for him to do worse, and that, at the.end of the day, she would be the one to suffer as a result of the divorce. She was already no longer as beautiful as when he had met her. She had style and dressed fashionably, but, knowing her body as he did, he knew she was already over the hill. On top of that, her career as a lawyer was far from being as brilliant as she made it out to be, and he had a feeling that having custody of the children would not help matters. People drag their progeny around with them like a ball and chain, like some terrible deadweight that hinders their every move—and that, as often as not, effectively winds up killing them. He would have his revenge later, at the point, it occurred to him, when it had become a matter of complete indifference to him. For some minutes more, parked near the bottom of the now-deserted avenue, he practiced feeling indifferent.

His worries came crashing down on him all at once as soon as he had walked through the door of the apartment. Johanna, the baby-sitter, was sprawled on the sofa watching MTV. He hated this listless, absurdly trendy preadolescent. Every time he saw her, he wanted to slap her, if only to wipe the jaded expression off her nasty, sulking, insipid face. She was the daughter of one of Audrey's friends.

"Everything OK?" he shouted. She nodded casually. "Could you turn that down?" She looked around for the remote control. Exasperated, he turned the television off. She shot him a hurt look.

"What about the children, everything go all right?" He was still shouting, though there was no longer a sound in the apartment.

"Yeah, I think they're asleep." She curled up, a little scared.

He went up to the second floor and pushed open the door to his son's bedroom. Nicolas looked around at him abstractedly, and then went back to his game of Tomb Raider. Angélique, on the other hand, was sleeping like a log. He went downstairs, a little calmer.

"Did you bathe them?"

"Yeah—No, I forgot." He wandered into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water.

His hands were shaking. On the counter, he saw a hammer. A slap wouldn't have been enough for Johanna; smashing her skull in with a hammer would be much better. He toyed with this idea for a while; thoughts crisscrossed his brain rapidly, barely controlled. In the hallway, he noticed in terror that he was holding the hammer. He placed it on a low table and looked in his wallet for the baby-sitter's taxi fare. She took it, mumbling thanks. He slammed the door behind her in a gesture of uncontrolled violence. The sound reverberated through the entire apartment. Something was clearly not right in his life. In the living room, the liquor cabinet was empty; Audrey wasn't even capable of looking after that. Thinking of her, a wave of hatred coursed through him, surprising him with its intensity. In the kitchen he found an open bottle of rum; that would probably do. In his bedroom he dialed in turn the numbers of three girls he had met on the Internet, getting an answering machine each time. They had probably gone out, fucking for their own pleasure. They were certainly sexy, cool, and fashionable, but they were costing him two thousand francs a night, which was humiliating after a while. I low had he come to this? He should go out, make friends, spend less time on his work. He thought about the Aphrodite clubs again, realizing for the first time that it might be difficult to get the idea past his superiors—there was a fairly negative attitude to sex tourism in France at the moment. Obviously, he could try getting a toned-down version past Leguen, but Espitalier wouldn't be fooled; he sensed a treacherous shrewdness in the man. Anyway, what choice did they have? Their midmarket positioning made no sense up against Club Med —he would have no problem in proving that. Rummaging through his desk drawers, he found the Aurore mission statement, drafted ten years earlier by its founder and displayed in every hotel in the group:

The spirit of Aurore is the art of marrying know-how, tradition, and innovation with rigor, imagination, and humanism to attain a certain form of excellence. The men and women of Aurore are the repositories of a unique cultural heritage: the art of welcoming. They know the rituals and the customs that transform living into an art, and the simplest of services into a privileged moment. It is a profession, it is an art; it is their gift. Creating the best in order to share it, getting in touch with the essential through hospitality, devising spaces of pleasure: these are what make Aurore a taste of France that is revered throughout the world.

He suddenly realized that this nauseating spiel could just as easily apply to a chain of well-run brothels. Maybe there was a card here he could play with the German tour operators. Defying all reason, Germans still thought of France as the country of romance, of masters of the art of love. If a major German tour operator agreed to include the Aphrodite clubs in its catalogue, it would mark a turning point: no one in the industry had yet succeeded in achieving such a thing. He was already in contact with Neckermann over the sale of the North African clubs. But there was also TUI, which had turned down their initial approaches because it was already well established in the bottom end of the market; it might be interested in a more narrowly targeted product.

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