Authors: Michel Houellebecq
The very next morning, I started going through the small ads; somewhere in the southern arrondissements would be best for Valerie's work. A week later, I had found if. it was a large two-bedroom on the thirtieth floor of the Opale tower near the Porte de Choisy. I had never had a beautiful view of Paris before; I had never really looked for one, to be honest. When we were about to move in, I realised that I didn't feel the least attachment to anything in my apartment. I could have felt a certain joy, something like intoxication, at this freedom; on the contrary, I felt slightly scared. I had managed, it seemed, to live for forty years without forming the most tenuous of attachments to a single object. All told, I had two suits which I wore alternately. Books, sure, I had books; but I could easily have bought them again, not one of them was in any way precious or rare. Several women had crossed my path; I didn't have a photograph or a letter from any of them. Nor did I have any photos of myself: I had no memory of what I might have been like when I was fifteen, or twenty or thirty. I didn't really have any personal papers: my identity could be contained in a couple of files which would easily fit into a standard-size cardboard folder. It is wrong to pretend that human beings are unique, that they carry within them an irreplaceable individuality; as far as I was concerned, at any rate, I could not distinguish any trace of such an individuality. As often as not it is futile to wear yourself out trying to distinguish individual destinies and personalities. When all's said and done, the idea of the uniqueness of the individual is nothing more than pompous absurdity. We remember our own lives, Schopenhauer wrote somewhere, a little better than a novel we once read. That's about right: a little, no more.
Chapter 5
Valerie was again overwhelmed with work in the last two weeks of June; the problem with working with a number of countries is that with the time differences you could almost be working twenty-four hours a day. The weather became increasingly warmer, heralding a magnificent summer; until now, we had had little opportunity to take advantage of it. After work, I liked to go and wander round Tang Freres, I even made an attempt to take up Eastern cooking. But it was too complicated for me, there was a completely new balance to understand between ingredients, a special way of chopping vegetables, it was almost a different mind-set. In the end I settled for Italian, something which was much more my level. I would never have believed that some day I would take pleasure in cooking. Love sanctifies.
In his fiftieth sociology lesson, Auguste Comte tackles that 'strange metaphysical aberration' which conceives the family as the template for society. 'Founded chiefly upon attachment and gratitude, the domestic union satisfies, by its mere existence, all our sympathetic instincts quite apart from all idea of active and continuous cooperation towards any end unless it be that of its own institution. When, unhappily, the coordination of employments remains the only principle of connection, the domestic union degenerates into mere association, and in most cases will soon dissolve altogether.' At the office I continued to do the bare minimum; all the same, I had two or three important exhibitions to organise; I got through them without any difficulty. Office work isn't very difficult — you simply have to be reasonably meticulous and be decisive. I had rapidly realised that you did not necessarily have to make the right decision, it was sufficient, in most cases, to make any old decision, as long as you made it quickly - if you work in the public sector, at least. I binned some projects and green lighted others: I did this based on insufficient information. In ten years, not once had I asked for additional information and, in general, I didn't feel the slightest remorse. Deep down, I had pretty little respect for the contemporary art scene. Most of the artists I knew behaved exactly like entrepreneurs: they carefully reconnoitred emerging markets, then tried to get in fast. Just like entrepreneurs, they had been at the same few colleges, they were cast from the same mould. There were some differences, however: in the art market, innovation was at a greater premium than in most other professional sectors; moreover, artists often worked in packs or networks, in contrast to entrepreneurs who were solitary beings surrounded by enemies — shareholders ready to drop them at a moment's notice, executives always ready to betray them. But in the artists' proposals I dealt with, it was rare for me to come across a sense of genuine inner desire. At the end of June, however, there was the Bertrand Bredane exhibition, which I had passionately supported from the outset - to the great surprise of Marie-Jeanne, who had become accustomed to my meek indifference and was herself repelled by works of that nature. He was not exactly a young artist, he was already forty-three and, physically, he was knackered - he looked a little like the alcoholic poet in Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez. He was chiefly famous for leaving rotting meat in young girls' panties, or breeding flies in his own excrement and then releasing them into the galleries. He had never been really successful, he didn't have the right connections, and he stubbornly persisted in a rather dated 'trash' aesthetic. I sensed in him a certain authenticity, but maybe it was simply the authenticity of failure. He seemed a little unbalanced. His most recent project was even worse - or better, depending on one's point of view -than his earlier work. He had made a video following the fate of the bodies people donate to medical science after their death - being used for dissection practice in medical schools, for example. A number of genuine medical students were to mingle with the audience and from time to time, flash a severed hand or an eyeball that had been gouged out - to play, in fact, the kind of practical jokes of which medical students are apparently so fond. I made the mistake of taking Valerie to the opening even though she'd had an exhausting day. To my surprise, it was pretty well attended and the crowd included a number of major celebrities: could it be that Bertrand Bredane's moment had arrived? After about half an hour, Valerie had had enough and asked me if we could leave. A medical student rushed up to her holding a severed dick in his hand, the testicles still fringed with hair. She turned her head away, sickened, and led me to the exit. We sought refuge in the Cafe Beaubourg.
Half an hour later, Bertrand Bredane made his entrance, accompanied by two or three girls and some other people, among whom I recognised the director of sponsorship at a major venture capital firm. They took the table next to us; I couldn't not go and say hello to them. Bredane was visibly pleased to see me, it was true that that evening I'd given him a particularly warm handshake. The conversation dragged on, Valerie came and sat with us. I don't know who suggested we go for a drink at Bar-Bar; probably Bredane himself. I made the mistake of accepting. Most of the partner-swapping clubs which had tried to introduce an S&M night had failed. Bar-Bar, on the other hand, had specialised in sadomasochistic practices since it opened, and, though it didn't have a particularly strict dress code - except on certain nights -had been packed from the start. As far as I was aware, the S&M scene was a pretty particular milieu, made up of people who were no longer really interested in ordinary sexual practices, and consequently disliked going to regular orgy clubs.
Near the entrance, a chubby-faced woman of fifty-something, gagged and handcuffed, swung in a cage. Looking more closely, I discovered she was shackled, her heels attached to the bars of the cage with metal chains; she was wearing nothing but a leatherette corset on to which spilled her large sagging breasts. She was, as was the custom of the place, a slave whose master was going to auction her off for the evening. She didn't seem to find it terribly amusing. I noticed that she turned this way and that, trying to hide her arse, which was completely riddled with cellulite; but it was impossible - the cage was open on all four sides. Maybe she did this for a living; I knew it was possible to make between one to two thousand francs a night by renting yourself out as a slave. My impression was that she was a junior white-collar worker, maybe a switchboard operator for the Social Security, who was doing this to make ends meet.
There was only one table free, near the entrance to the first torture chamber. Immediately we sat down, a bald, pot-bellied middle-manager in a three-piece suit came by on a leash, led by a black, bare-arsed dominatrix. She stopped at our table and ordered him to strip to the waist. He obeyed. She took a pair of metal clamps from her bag; for a man, his breasts were pretty fat and flabby. She closed the clamps on his nipples, which were red and distended. He winced in pain. She tugged on his leash; he got back on all fours and followed her as best he could; the pasty folds of his belly wobbled in the dim light. I ordered a whisky, Valerie an orange juice. She stared stubbornly at the table, not watching what was going on around her, nor taking part in the conversation. In contrast, Marjorie and Geraldine, the two girls I knew from the Plastic Arts delegation, seemed to be very excited. 'It's tame tonight, very tame . . .' muttered Bredane, disappointed. He went in to explain to us that, some nights, customers had needles pushed through their balls or the heads of their cocks; once he'd even see a guy whose dominatrix had torn out a fingernail with a pair of pliers. Valerie flinched in revulsion.
'I find the whole thing completely disgusting . . .' she said, unable to contain herself any longer.
'Why disgusting?' Geraldine protested. 'As long as the participants are freely consenting, I don't see the problem. it’s a contract, that's all.'
'I don't believe you can freely consent to humiliation and buffering. And even if you can, I don't think it's reason enough.'
Valerie was really angry. For a moment I thought about moving the conversation on to the Arab-Israeli war, then I realised that I didn't give a shit what these girls thought; [if they never phoned me again, it would simply reduce my [workload. 'Yeah, I find these people a little disgusting . . .' ; I upped the ante, 'And I find you disgusting too . . .' I said more quietly.
Geraldine didn't hear, or she pretended not to hear. 'If I'm a consenting adult,' she went on, 'and my fantasy is to suffer, to explore the masochistic part of my sexuality, I don't see any reason why anyone should try and stop me. We are living in a democracy . . .' She was getting angry too, I could sense that it wouldn't be long before she mentioned human rights. At the word 'democracy', Bredane shot her a slightly contemptuous look; he turned to Valerie. 'You're quite right . . .' he said gravely, 'it's completely disgusting. When I see a man agreeing to have his nails torn out with a pair of pliers, then have someone shit on him, and eat his torturer's shit, I find that disgusting. But, it's precisely what is disgusting in the human animal that interests me.'
After a few seconds, Valerie asked in an agonised voice: 'Why?
'I don't know,' Bredane answered simply. 'I don't believe we have a dark side, because I don't believe in any form of damnation, nor in benediction for that matter. But I have a feeling that as we get closer to suffering and cruelty, to domination and servility, we hit on the essential, the intimate nature of sexuality. Don't you think so? . . .' He was talking to me now. No, actually, I didn't think so. Cruelty is a primordial part of the human, it is found in the most primitive peoples: in the earliest tribal wars, the victors were careful to spare the lives of some of their prisoners to let them die later, suffering hideous tortures. This tendency persisted, it is constant throughout history, it remains true today: as soon as a foreign or civil war begins to erase ordinary moral constraints, you find human beings - regardless of race, people, culture - eager to launch themselves into the joys of barbarism and massacre. This is attested, unchanging, indisputable, but it has nothing whatever to do with the quest for sexual pleasure - equally primordial, equally strong. So, all in all, I didn't agree; but I was aware, as always, that the discussion was pointless.
'Let's take a look round . . .' said Bredane after he'd finished his beer. I followed him, along with the others, into the first torture chamber. It was a vaulted cellar, the brickwork exposed. The atmospheric music consisted of a series of very deep chords on an organ, overlaid with the shrieks of the damned. I noticed that the bass speakers were huge; there were red spotlights all over the place, masks and torture implements hung from iron racks; the conversion must have cost them a fortune. In an alcove, a bald, almost fleshless guy was chained by all four limbs, his feet trapped in a wooden contraption which kept him about a foot off the ground, his arms were raised by a pair of handcuffs attached to the ceiling. A booted, gloved dominatrix, dressed completely in black latex, circled him armed with a whip of fine lashes encrusted with precious stones. First, and for a long time, she thrashed his buttocks with heavy strokes; the guy was facing us, completely naked; he screamed in pain. A small crowd gathered around the couple.
She must be at level two . . .' Bredane whispered to me. 'Level one is where you stop when you see first blood.' The guy's cock and balls hung down, stretched and almost contorted. The dominatrix circled round him, rummaged in a bag on her belt and took out a number of hooks which she stuck into his scrotum; a little blood beaded on the surface. Then, more gently, she began to whip his genitals. It was a very close thing: if one of the lashes caught on a hook, the skin of the scrotum could rip.
Valerie turned her head and pressed herself against me. 'Let's go . . .' she said, her voice pleading; 'let's go, I'll explain later.' We went back to the bar; the others were so fascinated by the spectacle that they didn't notice us leave. 'The girl who was whipping that guy . . .' she told me quietly, 'I recognised her. I've only ever seen her once before, but I'm sure it's her . . . It's Audrey, Jean-Yves's wife.'
We left immediately. In the taxi Valerie was silent, devastated. She remained silent in the lift and until we reached the apartment. It was only when the door closed behind us that she turned to me: