Platform (24 page)
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
3
A week after being discharged from the hospital, I took a flight back to Bangkok. I had no particular plans. If we had an ideal nature, we could satisfy ourselves with the movements of the sun. The seasons were too distinct in Paris, they were a source of agitation, of insecurity. In Bangkok, the sun rose at six o'clock and set at six o'clock: in the intervening time, it followed an unchanging course. There was, apparently, a rainy season, but I had never witnessed it. The bustle of the city existed, but I couldn't clearly grasp the rationale behind it, it was more a sort of "state of nature." Undoubtedly all of these people had a destiny, a life, inasmuch as their incomes permitted; but for all I knew, they could just as easily have been a pack of lemmings.
I took a room at the Amari Boulevard. Most of the guests in the hotel were Japanese businessmen. This was where we had stayed, Valérie, Jean-Yves, and I, on our last visit; it wasn't really a good idea. Two days later. I moved to the Grace Hotel. It was only about ten meters down the road, but the atmosphere was noticeably different. It was probably the last place in Bangkok where you could still meet Arab sex tourists. They hugged the walls, staying holed up in the hotel, which had a discothèque and its own massage parlor. You spotted them in the surrounding alleys where there were stalls selling kebabs and long distance call centers; but, further afield, nothing. I realized that without intending to, I had moved closer to the Bumrungrad Hospital.
It is certainly possible to remain alive animated simply by a desire for vengeance; many people have lived that way. Islam had wrecked my life, and Islam was certainly something that I could hate. In the days that followed, I devoted myself to trying to feel hatred for Muslims. I became quite good at it, and I started to follow the international news again. Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child or a pregnant Palestinian woman, had been gunned down in the Gaza Strip, I felt a quiver of enthusiasm at the thought of one less Muslim in the world. Yes, it was possible to live like this.
One evening, in the hotel
coffee shop
*
a Jordanian banker struck up a conversation with me. Amiably enough, he insisted on buying me a beer; perhaps his enforced seclusion in the hotel was beginning to get to him. "I understand how people feel, you know; you can't hold it against them," he told me. "It has to be said, we were asking for it. This isn't a Muslim country, there's no reason to spend hundreds of millions building mosques. To say nothing of the bomb attack, of course." Seeing that I was listening to him attentively, he ordered another beer and became bolder. The problem with Muslims, he told me, was that the paradise promised by the Prophet already existed here on earth. There were places on earth where young, available, lascivious girls danced for the pleasure of men, where one could become drunk on nectar and listen to celestial music; there were about twenty of them within five hundred meters of our hotel. These places were easily accessible. To gain admission, there was absolutely no need to fulfill the seven duties of a Muslim, nor to engage in holy war; all you had to do was pay a couple of dollars. It wasn't even necessary to travel to realize such things—all you needed was satellite TV. For him, there was no doubt, the Muslim way was doomed: capitalism would triumph. Already, young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex. They might try to pretend otherwise, but secretly, they wanted to be part of the American system.
coffee shop
*
a Jordanian banker struck up a conversation with me. Amiably enough, he insisted on buying me a beer; perhaps his enforced seclusion in the hotel was beginning to get to him. "I understand how people feel, you know; you can't hold it against them," he told me. "It has to be said, we were asking for it. This isn't a Muslim country, there's no reason to spend hundreds of millions building mosques. To say nothing of the bomb attack, of course." Seeing that I was listening to him attentively, he ordered another beer and became bolder. The problem with Muslims, he told me, was that the paradise promised by the Prophet already existed here on earth. There were places on earth where young, available, lascivious girls danced for the pleasure of men, where one could become drunk on nectar and listen to celestial music; there were about twenty of them within five hundred meters of our hotel. These places were easily accessible. To gain admission, there was absolutely no need to fulfill the seven duties of a Muslim, nor to engage in holy war; all you had to do was pay a couple of dollars. It wasn't even necessary to travel to realize such things—all you needed was satellite TV. For him, there was no doubt, the Muslim way was doomed: capitalism would triumph. Already, young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex. They might try to pretend otherwise, but secretly, they wanted to be part of the American system.
The violence of some of them was no more than a sign of impotent jealousy, and thankfully, more and more of them were turning their backs on Islam. lie himself had been unlucky. He was an old man now, and he had been forced to build his whole life on a religion he despised. I was in much the same boat—there would come a day when the world was delivered from Islam; but for me, it would come too late. I no longer really had a life. I had had a life, for a few months —that in itself was something, not everyone could say as much. The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
I saw him again the next day, just before lie left for Amman; it would be a year before he could come back. On the whole, I was glad that he was leaving, as I sensed that otherwise he would have wanted to talk to me again, and the prospect gave me a bit of a headache. I found it very difficult now to tolerate intellectual debate. I no longer had any desire to understand the world, or even to know it. Our brief conversation, however, had made a profound impression on me. In fact, he had convinced me from the outset that Islam was doomed. As soon as you thought about it, it seemed obvious. This simple thought was sufficient to dispel my hatred. Once again I ceased to have any interest in the news.
4
Bangkok was still too much like a normal city, there were too many businessmen, too many foreigners on package tours. Two weeks later, I caught a bus for Pattaya. It had been bound to end this way, I thought as I boarded the vehicle. But then I realized that I was wrong, nothing in this story had been determined. I could easily have spent the rest of my life with Valérie in Thailand, in Brittany, or indeed anywhere at all. Growing old is no joke; but growing old alone is worse than anything.
As soon as I put down my luggage on the dusty floor of the bus station, I knew I had arrived at the end of my journey. A scrawny old junkie with long gray hair, a large lizard perched on his shoulder, was begging outside the turnstiles. I gave him a hundred baht before drinking a beer at the Heidelberg Hof directly opposite. A few potbellied, mustached German pederasts minced around in their flowered shirts. Near them, three Russian teenage girls, who had attained the pinnacle of sluttishness, gyrated as they listened to their
ghetto blaster
.*
They writhed and rolled about on their chairs, the sleazy little cocksuckers. In a few minutes' walk through the streets of the town, I encountered an impressive variety of human specimens: rappers in baseball caps, Dutch dropouts, cyberpunks with red hair, Austrian dykes with piercings. Pattaya is the end of the road, it is a sort of cesspool, the ultimate sewer where the sundry waste of western neurosis winds up. Whether you're gay, straight, or both, Pattaya is the last-chance saloon, the one beyond which you might as well give up on desire. The hotels are distinguished, naturally, by different levels of comfort and price, but also by the nationality of their clientele. There are two large communities, the Germans and the Americans (among whom probably some Australians and possibly even some New Zealanders conceal themselves). You also get quite a lot of Russians, recognizable because they dress like rednecks and behave like gangsters. There is even an establishment intended for the French, called Ma Maison. The hotel has only a dozen rooms, but the restaurant is very popular. I spent a week there before I realized that I was not particularly attached to andouillettes or cuisses de grenouille; that I could live without following French sports games via satellite, and without leafing daily through the arts pages of
Le Monde
.
In any case, I needed to find long-term accommodation. A standard tourist visa in Thailand only lasts for one month, but to get an extension, all you have to do is cross the border. A lot of the travel agencies in Pattaya offer a day trip to the Cambodian border. After a three-hour trek in a minibus, you line up for an hour or two at customs, have lunch in a self-service restaurant on Cambodian soil (lunch is included in the price, as are tips for customs officials), then you start on your return journey. Most residents have been doing this every month for years. It's much easier than trying to get a long-term visa.
ghetto blaster
.*
They writhed and rolled about on their chairs, the sleazy little cocksuckers. In a few minutes' walk through the streets of the town, I encountered an impressive variety of human specimens: rappers in baseball caps, Dutch dropouts, cyberpunks with red hair, Austrian dykes with piercings. Pattaya is the end of the road, it is a sort of cesspool, the ultimate sewer where the sundry waste of western neurosis winds up. Whether you're gay, straight, or both, Pattaya is the last-chance saloon, the one beyond which you might as well give up on desire. The hotels are distinguished, naturally, by different levels of comfort and price, but also by the nationality of their clientele. There are two large communities, the Germans and the Americans (among whom probably some Australians and possibly even some New Zealanders conceal themselves). You also get quite a lot of Russians, recognizable because they dress like rednecks and behave like gangsters. There is even an establishment intended for the French, called Ma Maison. The hotel has only a dozen rooms, but the restaurant is very popular. I spent a week there before I realized that I was not particularly attached to andouillettes or cuisses de grenouille; that I could live without following French sports games via satellite, and without leafing daily through the arts pages of
Le Monde
.
In any case, I needed to find long-term accommodation. A standard tourist visa in Thailand only lasts for one month, but to get an extension, all you have to do is cross the border. A lot of the travel agencies in Pattaya offer a day trip to the Cambodian border. After a three-hour trek in a minibus, you line up for an hour or two at customs, have lunch in a self-service restaurant on Cambodian soil (lunch is included in the price, as are tips for customs officials), then you start on your return journey. Most residents have been doing this every month for years. It's much easier than trying to get a long-term visa.
You don't come to Pattaya to start your life over, but to end it in tolerable conditions. Or, if you want to put it less brutally, to take a rest, a long rest—one that may prove permanent. These were the terms used by a homosexual of about fifty I met in an Irish pub on Soi 14. He had spent the greater part of his career as a designer working for the popular press and had managed to put some money aside. Ten years earlier, he had noticed that things were going badly for him. He still went out to clubs, the same clubs as always, but more and more often he came home empty-handed. Of course, he could always pay, but if it had to come to that, he would rather pay Asians. He apologized for this remark, hoping I would not infer any racist connotation. No, no, of course, I understood.
It's less humiliating to pay for someone who looks nothing like anyone you were able to seduce in the past, who brings back no memories. If sex has to be paid for, it is best that, in a certain sense, it is undifferentiated. As everyone knows, one of the first things you feel in the presence of another race is that inability to differentiate, that feeling that, physically, everyone looks more or less alike. The effect wears off after a few months, and it's a pity, because it bears out a reality: human beings do, in fact, look very much alike. Of course, we can distinguish between males and females, we can also, if we choose, distinguish between different age categories, but any more advanced distinction comes close to pedantry, probably a result of boredom. A creature that is bored elaborates distinctions and hierarchies. According to Hutchinson and Rawlins, the development of systems of hierarchical dominance within animal societies does not correspond to any practical necessity, or to any selective advantage; it simply constitutes a means of combating the crushing boredom of life out in the open.
So, the ex-designer was quietly living out the last years of his queer life treating himself to pretty, slender, muscular, dark-skinned boys. Once a year, he went back to France to visit his family and a few friends. His sex life was less frenetic than I might imagine, he told me —he went out once or twice a week, no more. He had been settled here in Pattaya for six years now, and the profusion of varied, exciting, and inexpensive sexual opportunities brought out a paradoxical calming of his desire. Every time he went out, he was certain of being able to fuck and suck magnificent young boys who, for their part, would jerk him off sensitively and expertly in return. Confident of this fact, he spent more time getting ready to go out, and he enjoyed these encounters in moderation. I realized then that he imagined I was in the throes of the erotic frenzy of my first weeks here, that he saw in me a heterosexual counterpart to his own case. I refrained from correcting him. He proved to be friendly, insisted on buying the beers, gave me a number of addresses for longterm accommodation. He had enjoyed talking to a Frenchman. Most of the homosexual residents were English. He was on good terms with them, but from time to time, he wanted to speak his own language. He had no real contact with the little French community that gathered at Ma Maison —mostly a crowd of straight, ex-colonial, ex-army thugs. If I was going to live in Pattaya, maybe we could go out together some night, no strings attached, obviously; he gave me his cell-phone number. I wrote it down, though I knew that I would never call him. He was pleasant, friendly, interesting if you like: but I simply wasn't interested in human relationships anymore.
I rented a room on Naklua Road, a little outside the bustle of the city. It had air conditioning, a fridge, a shower, a bed, and some bits of furniture. The rent was three thousand baht a month—a little more than five hundred francs. I informed my bank of this news and wrote a letter of resignation to the Ministry of Culture.
There was nothing much left for me to do in this life. I bought a number of reams of A4 paper with the intention of putting the elements of my life in order. It's something people should do more often before they die. It's curious to think of all the human beings who live out their whole lives without feeling the need to make the slightest comment, the slightest objection, the slightest remark. Not that these comments, these objections, these remarks are addressed to anyone in particular, or intended to have any sort of meaning; but, even so, it seems to me to be better, in the end, that they be made.
5
Six months later, I am still here in my room on Naklua Road, and I think that I have more or less finished my work. I miss Valérie. If by chance it had been my intention, when I began writing these pages, to lessen the feeling of loss, or to make it more bearable, I would by now be certain of my failure: Valerie's absence has never been more painful to me.
At the beginning of my third month here, I finally decided to go back to the massage parlors and the hostess bars. The idea didn't really fill me with enthusiasm. I was afraid it would be a total fiasco. Nonetheless, I managed to get a hard-on, and even to ejaculate; but I never once experienced any pleasure. It wasn't the girls' fault, they were just as expert, just as gentle. But it was as though I was anesthetized. After that I tried going to a massage parlor once a week, to some extent on principle; then I decided to stop. It was, after all, a form of human contact—that was the drawback. Even if I didn't in the least believe that my ability to feel pleasure would return, it was possible that the girl would come, especially as the numbness in my penis meant that I could keep going for hours if I didn't bother to interrupt the proceedings. I might get to the point where I wanted her to come, it could become an issue, and I didn't wish to have anything more to do with issues. My life was an empty space, and it was better that it remain that way. If I allowed passion to penetrate my body, pain would follow quickly in its wake.
My book is reaching its end. More and more often now, I stay in bed for most of the day. Sometimes I turn on the air conditioning in the morning and turn it off at night, and between the two absolutely nothing happens. I've become accustomed to the purring of the machine, which I found irritating at first, but for that matter I've become equally accustomed to the heat. I don't really have a preference.
A long time ago now, I stopped buying French newspapers; I suppose that by this time the presidential elections have taken place. The Ministry of Culture, somehow or other, must be getting on with its work. Perhaps Marie-Jeanne still thinks about me from time to time, when she's working on the budget for an exhibition. I haven't tried to get in touch. I don't know what's become of Jean-Yves either. After he was fired from Aurore, I suppose he must have started his career again much further down, and probably in something other than tourism.
When your love life is over, life in general takes on a sort of conventional, forced quality. One retains a human form, one's habitual behavior, a sort of structure, but one's heart, as they say, isn't in it.
Mopeds are driving down Naklua Road, sending up clouds of dust. It is noon already. Coming from outlying districts, the prostitutes are arriving at work in the downtown bars. I don't think I'll go out today. Or maybe I will, late in the afternoon, to gulp down a soup at one of the stalls set up at the crossroads.
When you give up on life, the last remaining human contacts are those you have with shopkeepers. As far as I'm concerned, these are limited to a few words spoken in English. I don't speak Thai, which creates a barrier around me that is suffocating and sad. It is obvious that I will never really understand Asia, and actually it's not of great importance. It's possible to live in the world without understanding it; all you need is to be able to get food, caresses, and love. In Pattaya, food and caresses are cheap by western, and even by Asian, standards. As for love, it's difficult for me to say. I am now convinced that, for me, Valérie was simply a radiant exception. She was one of those creatures who are capable of devoting their lives to someone else's happiness, of making that alone their goal. This phenomenon is a mystery. Happiness, simplicity, and joy lie within them, but I still do not know how or why it occurs. And if I haven't understood love, what use is it to me to have understood the rest?
To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the west, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism, and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it.
It's getting dark. The multicolored fairy lights wink on at the entrances to the beer bars. The German retirees settle in, placing their thick hands on the thighs of their young companions. More than any other people, they are acquainted with worry and shame; they feel the need for tender flesh, for soft, endlessly refreshing skin. More than any other people, they are acquainted with the desire for their own annihilation. It is rare to come across the vulgar, smug pragmatism of AngloSaxon sex tourists among them, that manner of endlessly comparing goods and prices. It is equally rare for them to exercise, to look after their bodies. In general, they eat too much, drink too much beer, get fat. Most of them will die pretty soon. They are often friendly, they like to joke, to buy a round, to tell stories, but their company is soothing and sad.
I understand death now. I don't think it will do me much harm. I have known hatred, contempt, decay, and other things; I have even known brief moments of love. Nothing of me will survive, and I do not deserve for anything of me to survive. I will have been a mediocre individual in every possible sense.
I imagine, I don't know why, that I will die in the middle of the night, and I still feel a little anxious at the thought of the suffering that will accompany the severing of all corporeal ties. I find it difficult to envisage the cessation of life as completely painless and unconscious. Naturally, I know that I'm wrong. Nonetheless, I have trouble convincing myself of that fact.
The locals will find me a few days thereafter, quite quickly, in fact, since in this climate corpses quickly start to stink. They won't know what to do with me and will probably contact the French embassy. I'm far from being destitute, and the case will be easy to deal with. There will certainly be quite a lot of money left in my account. I don't know who will inherit it—the state probably, or some distant relatives.
Unlike other Asian peoples, the Thais don't believe in ghosts, and have little interest in the fate of corpses. Most of them are buried in communal graves. Since I will have left no specific instructions, that is what will become of me. A death certificate will be drawn up, a box will be ticked in a registry office, far from here, in France. A few street hawkers, accustomed to seeing me in the area, will shake their heads. My apartment will be rented out to another resident. I'll be forgotten. I'll be forgotten quickly.
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