Authors: Michel Houellebecq
Three weeks after their first time, Eucharistie announced that she had met a boy. Under the circumstances it was best for them to end it; at any rate, it complicated matters. He seemed so desolate at the news that, the next time she came round, she offered to continue giving him blowjobs. In all honesty, he couldn't really see how that was less serious; but in any case he had more or less forgotten how he had felt when he was fifteen. When he got home he would talk for a long time about one thing and another; it was always she who decided on the moment. She would strip to the waist, allow him to caress her breasts; then he would lean back against the wall and she would kneel in front of him. From his moans she could tell precisely when he was going to come. She would then take her mouth away; with small, precise movements she would direct his ejaculation, sometimes towards her breasts, sometimes towards her mouth. In those moments she had a playful, almost childlike, expression; thinking back on it, he realised gloomily that her love life was just beginning, that she would make many lovers happy; their paths had crossed, that was all, and that in itself was a happy accident.
The second Saturday, at the moment when Eucharistie, eyes half-closed, mouth wide open, was beginning to jerk him off vigorously, he suddenly noticed his son popping his head round the door. He started, turned his head away; when he looked up again the child had disappeared. Eucharistie hadn't noticed anything; she slid her hand between his thighs, delicately squeezed his balls. At that moment, he had a strange sensation of immobility. Suddenly, it occurred to him, like, a revelation, an impasse. There was too much overlap between the generations, fatherhood no longer had any meaning. He drew Eucharistie's mouth towards his penis; without quite understanding completely, he sensed that this would be the last time, he needed her mouth. As soon as her lips closed over him, he spurted several times, shoving his cock deep into her throat as shudders coursed through his body. Then she looked up at him; he kept his hands on the girl's head. She kept his penis in a mouth for two or three minutes, her eyes closed, running her tongue slowly over the head. Shortly before she left, he told her that they wouldn't do it again. He didn't really know why; if his son said anything it would surely do him a lot of harm when the divorce settlement was decided, but there was something else that he wasn't able to identify. He told me all of this a week later, in an irritating tone of self-reproach, begging me not to say anything to Valerie. I found him a little annoying, to tell the truth; I really couldn't see what the problem was. However, purely out of friendship I pretended to take an interest, to weigh up the pros and cons, but I couldn't take the situation seriously, I felt a little as if I was on Mireille Dumas' TV show.
From a professional point of view, on the other hand, everything was going well, he informed me with satisfaction. There had almost been a problem with the Thailand club a couple of weeks earlier: there had to be at least one hostess bar and one massage parlour to cater for customer expectations. This would be a little difficult to justify in the budget for the hotel. He telephoned Gottfried Rembke. The boss of TUI rapidly found a solution; he had an associate on the ground, a Chinese building contractor based in Phuket, who could sort out the building a leisure complex just beside the hotel. The German tour operator seemed to be in a great mood, apparently things were looking good. At the beginning of November, Jean-Yves received a copy of the catalogue destined for the German market; he immediately noticed that they hadn't pulled any punches. In every photo the local girls were topless, wearing miniscule G-strings or see-through skirts; photographed on the beach or right in the hotel rooms, they smiled teasingly, ran their tongues over their lips: it was almost impossible to misunderstand. In France, he remarked to Valerie, you would never get away with something like this. It was curious to note, he mused, that as Europe became ever closer, and the idea of a federation of states was ever more current, there was no noticeable standardisation of moral legislation. Although prostitution was accepted in Holland and Germany and was governed by statute, many people in France were calling for it to be criminalised, even for punters to be:; prosecuted as they were in Sweden. Valerie looked at him, surprised: he had been odd lately, he launched increasingly frequency into aimless, unproductive ruminations. She herself coped with a punishing workload, methodically and with a sort of cold determination; she regularly took decisions without consulting him. It was something she was not really used to, and at times I sensed She felt lost, uncertain; the board of directors would not get involved, affording them complete freedom. 'They're waiting, that's all, they're waiting to see whether we fall flat on our faces,' she confided one day, with suppressed rage. She was right, it was obvious, I couldn't disagree with her; that was the way the game worked.
For my part, I had no objection to sex being subject to market forces. There were many ways of acquiring money, honest and dishonest, cerebral or, by contrast, brutally physical. It was possible to make money using one's intellect, talent, strength or courage, even one's beauty; it was also possible to acquire money through a banal stoke of luck. Most often, money was acquired through inheritance, as in my case; the problem of how it had been earned fell to the previous generation. Many very different people had acquired money on this earth: former top athletes, gangsters, artists, models, actors; a great number of entrepreneurs and talented financiers; a number of engineers, too, more rarely a few inventors. Money was sometimes acquired mechanically, by simple accumulation; or, on the other hand, by some audacious coup crowned with success. There was no great logic to it, but the possibilities were endless. By contrast, the criteria for sexual selection were unduly simple: they consisted merely of youth and physical beauty. These features had a price, certainly, but not an infinite price.
The situation, of course, had been very different in earlier centuries, at a time when sex was essentially linked to reproduction. To maintain the genetic value of the species, humanity was compelled seriously to take into account criteria like health, strength, youth and physical prowess - of which beauty was merely a handy indicator. Nowadays, the order of things had changed: beauty had retained all of its value, but that value was now something marketable, narcissistic. If sex was really to come into the category of tradable commodities, the best solution was probably to involve money, that universal mediator which already made it possible to assure an exact equivalence between intelligence, talent and technical competence; which had already made it possible to assure a perfect standardisation of opinions, tastes and lifestyles. Unlike the aristocracy, the rich made no claim to being different in kind from the rest of the population; they simply claimed to be richer. Essentially abstract, money was a concept in which neither race, physical appearance, age, intelligence nor distinction played any part, nothing in fact, but money. My European ancestors had worked hard for several centuries; they had sought to dominate, then to transform the world, and, to a certain extent they had succeeded. They had done so out of economic self-interest, out of a taste for work, but also because they believed in the superiority of their civilisation: they had invented dreams, progress, Utopia, the future. Their sense of a mission to civilise had disappeared in the course of the twentieth century. Europeans, at least some of them, continued to work, and sometimes to work hard, but they did so for money, or from a neurotic attachment to their work; the innocent sense of their natural right to dominate the world and direct the path of history had disappeared. As a consequence of their accumulated efforts, Europe remained a wealthy continent; those qualities of intelligence and determination manifested by my ancestors I had manifestly lost. As a wealthy European, I could obtain food and the services of women more cheaply in other countries; as a decadent European, conscious of my approaching death, and given over entirely to selfishness, I could see no reason to deprive myself of such things. I was aware, however, that such a situation was barely tenable, that people like me were incapable of ensuring the survival of a society, perhaps more simply we were unworthy of life. Mutations would occur, were already occurring, but I found it difficult to feel truly concerned; my only genuine motivation was to get the hell out of this shithole as quickly as possible. November was cold, bleak; I hadn't been reading Auguste Comte that much recently. My great diversion when Valerie was out consisted of watching the movement of the clouds through the picture window. Immense flocks of starlings formed over Gentilly in the late afternoon, describing inclined planes and spirals in the sky; I was quite tempted to ascribe meaning to them, to interpret them as the heralds of an apocalypse.
Chapter 13
One evening, I met Lionel as I was leaving work; I hadn't1 seen him since the 'Thai Tropic' trip almost a year earlier. Curiously, however, I recognised him at once. I was a little surprised that he had made such a strong impression on me; I couldn't remember having said a word to him at the time.
Things were going well, he told me. A large cotton disc covered his right eye. He'd had an accident at work, something had exploded; but it was okay, they'd managed to treat him in time, he would recover 50 per cent of the sight in his eye. I invited him for a drink in a cafe near the Palais-Royal. I wondered whether I would recognise Robert or Josiane or the other members of the group as easily - yes, probably. It was a slightly distressing thought; my memory was constantly fining up with information that was almost completely useless. As a human being, I was particularly proficient in the recognition and storage
of images of other humans. Nothing is more useful to man than man himself. The reason why I had invited Lionel was not particularly clear to me; the conversation would obviously drag. To keep it going, I asked whether he'd had the opportunity to go back to Thailand. No, and it wasn't for lack of wanting, but unfortunately the trip was rather expensive. Had he seen any of the other members of the group again? No, none of them. Then I told him I had seen Valerie, whom he might perhaps remember, and that we were now living together. He seemed happy at this news; we had clearly made a good impression on him. He didn't get the chance to travel much, he told me; and that holiday in Thailand in particular was one of his fondest memories. I started to feel moved by his simplicity, his naive longing for happiness. It was at that point that I did something which, thinking back on it even today, I'm tempted to describe as good. On the whole, I am not good, it is not one of my characteristics. Humanitarians disgust me, the fate of others is generally a matter of indifference to me, nor have I any memory of ever having felt any sense of solidarity with other human beings. The fact remains that, that evening, I explained to Lionel that Valerie worked in the tourist industry, that her company was about to open a new club in Krabi and that I could easily get him a week-long stay at 50 per cent discount. Obviously, this was pure invention; but I had decided to pay the difference. Maybe, to a degree, I was trying to show off, but it seems to me that I also felt a genuine desire for him to be able, even if only for a week, to once again feel pleasure at the expert hands of young Thai prostitutes.
When I told her about the meeting, Valerie looked at me somewhat perplexed; she herself had no memory of Lionel. That really was the problem with the boy, he wasn't a bad guy, but he had no personality: he was too reserved, too humble, it was difficult to remember anything at all about him. 'Okay . . .' she said, 'I mean, if it makes you happy; in fact he doesn't even have to pay the 50 per cent, I was going to talk to you about this, I'm going to get invitations for the week of the opening. It will be on January 1st.' I called Lionel the following day to tell him that his trip would be free; this was too much, he couldn't believe me, I even had a bit of trouble getting him to accept.
The same day, I received a visit from a young artist who had come to show me her work. Her name was Sandra Heksjtovoian, something like that, in any case some name that I was never going to remember; if I'd been her agent, I would have advised her to call herself Sandra Hallyday. She was a very young girl, wearing trousers and a tee-shirt, fairly unremarkable, with a roundish face and short, curly hair; she had graduated from the Beaux Arts in Caen. She worked entirely on her body, she explained to me; I looked at her anxiously as she opened her portfolio. I was hoping she wasn't going to show me photos of plastic surgery on her toes or anything like that - I'd had it up to here with things like that. But no, she simply handed me some postcards which she had had made, with the imprint of her pussy dipped in different coloured paints. I chose a turquoise and a mauve; I was a little sorry I hadn't brought photos of my prick to return the favour. It was all very pleasant, but, well, as far as I could remember, Yves Klein had already done something similar more than forty years ago; I was going to have trouble championing her cause. Of course, of course, she agreed, you had to take it as an exercice de style. She then took a more complex piece out of its cardboard packaging: it consisted of two wheels of unequal sizes linked by a thin strip of rubber; a handle made it possible to operate the contraption. The strip of rubber was covered with small plastic protuberances which were more or less pyramid-shaped. I turned the handle and ran my finger along the moving ribbon; it produced a sort of friction which was not unpleasant.
'They're casts of my clitoris,' the girl explained; I immediately removed my finger.
'I took photos using an endoscope, while it was erect, and put it all on a computer. Using 3-D software I reproduced the volume, I modelled the piece using ray-tracing, then I sent the co-ordinates to the factory.' I got the feeling she was allowing herself to be dominated a bit too much by technical considerations. I turned the handle again, more or less unconsciously. 'It cries out to be touched, doesn't it?' she went on with satisfaction. 'I had thought of connecting it to a resistor so it could power a bulb. What do you think?' To be honest, I wasn't in favour of the idea, it seemed to detract from the simplicity of the object. She was quite sweet, this girl, for a