Authors: Michel Houellebecq
This time, he smiled broadly. 'You should have been in business . . .' he said half-seriously. 'You're an ideas man . . .'
'Ideas, yeah . . .' My head was spinning a little, I could no longer make out the dancers, I finished my cocktail in one gulp. 'I might have ideas, but I wouldn't be able to throw myself into balance sheet or budget forecasts. So, yeah, I'm an ideas man . . .'
I don't remember much about the rest of the evening, I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, I was lying on my bed; Valerie lay naked beside me, breathing gently. I woke her as I moved to reach for a pack of cigarettes.
'You were pretty drunk back there . . .'
'Yes, but I was serious about what I was saying to Jean-Yves.'
'I think he took it seriously . . .' She stroked my belly with her fingertips. 'And actually, I think you're right. Sexual liberation in the West is over.'
'You know why?'
'No . . .' she hesitated, then went on: 'No, actually, not really.'
I lit a cigarette, propped myself up on the pillows and said: 'Suck me.' She looked at me, surprised, but placed her hand on my balls and brought her mouth towards me. 'There!' I exclaimed triumphantly. She stopped what she was doing and looked at me in surprise. 'You see, I say "Suck me" and you suck me. When actually, you didn't feel the desire to do so.'
'No, I hadn't thought of it; but I enjoy doing it.'
'That's precisely what's so extraordinary about you, you enjoy giving pleasure. Offering your body as an object of pleasure, giving pleasure unselfishly: that's what Westerners don't know how to do any more. They've completely lost the sense of giving. Try as they might, they no longer feel sex as something natural. Not only are they ashamed of their own bodies, which aren't up to porn standards, but for the same reasons they no longer feel truly attracted to the body of the other. It's impossible to make love without a certain abandon, without accepting, at least temporarily, the state of being in a state of dependency, of weakness. Sentimental adulation and sexual obsession have the same roots, both proceed from some degree of selflessness; it's not a domain in which you can find fulfilment without losing yourself. We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything, we want to avoid alienation and dependence; on top of that we're obsessed with health and hygiene: these are hardly ideal conditions in which to make love. The way things stand, the commercialisation of sexuality in the East has become inevitable. Obviously, there's S&M too. It's a purely cerebral world with clear-cut rules and a prior contract. Masochists are just interested in their own sensations, they try to see how far they can plunge into pain, a bit like people who do extreme sports. Sadists are something else, they will take things as far as they possibly can regardless -it's a very ancient human propensity: if they can mutilate or kill, they will do so.'
'I really don't want to think about it again,' she said shivering; 'It really disgusts me.'
'That's because you've remained sexual, animal. You're normal, in fact, you're not much like Westerners. Organised S&M with its rules could only exist among cultured, cerebral people for whom sex has lost all attraction. For everyone else, there's only one possible solution: pornography featuring professionals; and if you want to have real sex, third-world countries.'
'Okay . . .' She smiled. 'Is it okay if I go back to sucking you off?'
I leaned back on the pillows and let it happen. I was vaguely conscious at that moment of being at the beginning of something: from an economic point of view, I knew I was right; I estimated that potential clients might run to 80 per cent of Western adults. But I knew that people sometimes find it difficult, strangely, to accept simple ideas.
Chapter 10
We had breakfast on the terrace, by the swimming pool. As I was finishing my coffee, I saw Jean-Yves emerge from his room accompanied by a girl I recognised as one of the dancers from the previous evening. She was black and slender, with long, graceful legs, she couldn't have been more than twenty. For a fleeting moment, he looked embarrassed, then came over to our table 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 Valerie.
'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; 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 Valerie.
'"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 towards Guardalavaca. A couple of metres from the minibus, Jean-Yves said his goodbyes to the jinetera; he seemed a little sad. When he got back on to 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 moustache. His coffin, bedecked with flowers, lay at the foot of a circular pit on the walls of which were engraved his most notable pensees - 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 be ironic about his rather narrow and earnest humanist; but it hardly seemed likely, he seemed to be well and truly stuck in the past. Could he rise up once more and galvanise his homeland to greater heights of the human spirit? One didn't really imagine so. All in all, it was a disappointment letdown, as indeed all republican cemeteries are. It was irritating, all the same, to realise 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, shepherds, tits and arse, 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 Evry shopping centre, a pair of rival gangs faced each other with Stanley knives, baseball bats and containers of sulphuric 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 which 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 felt a bit crazy all afternoon, but Jean-Yves listened to me attentively. He was convinced, he told Valerie later, that if I was given free rein I was likely to have a brainwave. In short, I brought 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 making too much of a loss. That left two destinations 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 colourful 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 notional, 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 moustache. A biochemist by training, he had emigrated to England as soon as he had 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 towards the Nile valley. 'Architecture, astronomy, mathematics, agriculture, medicine' (he was exaggerating a little, but he was an Oriental and needed to persuade 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 Bedouins 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 characterised 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 which typifies the work:
"There is no other God but God alone", 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 towards monotheism is nothing more than a shift towards mindlessness. Note that Catholicism, a subtle religion, and one which I respect, which 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, little by little it reconstituted an authentic polytheism; it was only by doing so that it succeeded in covering the earth with numberless artistic splendours. 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! . . .' (his face became bloated as he pulled a face like de Funes). '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, like that ludicrous colonel Lawrence, a decadent homosexual and a pathetic poseur. Like your despicable Henry de Monfreid, an unscrupulous trafficker, always ready to compromise his principles. Nothing great or noble, nothing generous or wholesome; nothing which has contributed to the progress of humanity or raised it above itself