The Map and the Territory (12 page)

“Do you like charcuterie?” the writer asked.

“Yes … Let’s say I have nothing against it.”

“I’ll go make some coffee.”

He got up swiftly and returned about ten minutes later carrying two cups and an Italian cafetière.

“I’ve neither milk nor sugar,” he said.

“No problem. I don’t take any.”

The coffee was good. The silence continued, absolute, for two or three minutes.

“I used to like charcuterie a lot,” Houellebecq finally said, “but I’ve decided to do without it. You understand, I don’t think it should be allowed for man to kill pigs. I’ve told you how much I don’t like sheep, and I persist in my view. The cow itself, and on this point I am in disagreement with my friend Benoît Duteurtre, seems to me overrated. But the pig is an admirable animal, intelligent, sensitive, and capable of sincere and exclusive affection for its master. And its intelligence is really surprising—its limits aren’t precisely known. Did you know they’ve been taught to master simple operations? Well, at least addition, and I believe subtraction among some very gifted specimens. Does man have the right to sacrifice an animal capable of rising to the basics of arithmetic? Frankly, I don’t think so.”

Without waiting for a reply, he examined Jed’s first portfolio closely. After rapidly observing the photos of nuts and bolts, he lingered, for what seemed to Jed an eternity, over the photos of road maps; from time to time, unpredictably, he turned a page. Jed looked discreetly at his watch: a bit more than an hour had passed since his arrival. The silence was total; then, in the distance, the cavernous purring of a refrigerator compressor could be heard.

“They’re just old works,” Jed finally ventured. “I just brought them to situate my work. The exhibition, well, it’s uniquely about the content of the second folder.”

Houellebecq lifted a blank look toward Jed. He seemed to have forgotten what Jed was doing there, the reason for his presence. However, obediently, he opened the second folder. Half an hour passed again before he snapped it shut and lit a cigarette. Jed noticed then that he hadn’t smoked all the time he was looking at his photographs.

“I’m going to accept,” he said. “You know, I’ve never done this before, but I knew it would happen, at one moment or other in my life. Many writers, if you look closely, have written about painters, going back centuries. It’s funny. There’s one thing I ask myself while looking at your work: Why did you give up photography? Why did you return to painting?”

Jed thought for a long time before replying. “I’m not sure I know,” he finally confessed. “But the problem of the visual arts, it seems to me,” he continued hesitantly, “is the abundance of subjects. For example, I could readily consider this radiator as a valid subject for a picture.” Houellebecq turned round quickly to look suspiciously at the radiator, as if it were going to jump with joy at the idea of being painted; nothing of the sort happened.

“I don’t know if you could do anything, on the literary level, with the radiator,” Jed insisted. “Well, I guess you could. There’s Robbe-Grillet, who simply would have described the radiator. But, I don’t know, I don’t find that particularly interesting …” He was getting bogged down, he had the feeling he was confused and maybe clumsy, he didn’t know if Houellebecq liked Robbe-Grillet or not, but above all he asked himself, with a sort of anguish, why he had turned to painting, which still, several years later, posed him insurmountable technical problems, while he had totally mastered the principles and the equipment of photography.

“Let’s forget Robbe-Grillet,” Houellebecq interjected to Jed’s great relief. “If, sometime, with this radiator, something could be done … For example, I think I read on the Internet that your father was an architect.”

“Yes, it’s true. I portrayed him in one of my paintings, the day he left his business.”

“People rarely buy this kind of radiator individually. Clients are generally construction companies, like the one your father ran, and they buy radiators by the dozen, even hundreds of them. You could easily imagine a thriller involving a big market for thousands of radiators—to equip, for example, all the classrooms of a country—and all the bribes, political interventions, the very sexy sales rep of a Romanian radiator firm. In this context, there could very well be a long description, over several pages, of this radiator and competing models.”

He was speaking quickly now, lighting cigarette after cigarette; he gave the impression of smoking to calm himself, to slow down the functioning
of his brain. Jed thought fleetingly that given his firm’s activities, his father had probably been in a position to make massive purchases of air conditioners; no doubt he had.

“These radiators are made of cast iron,” Houellebecq went on excitedly, “probably in gray cast iron, with a high level of carbon, whose dangerousness has often been underlined in experts’ reports. You might consider it scandalous that this recently built house has been equipped with such old radiators, low-cost radiators in a way, and in the case of an accident—for example, the explosion of the radiators—I could conceivably turn against the manufacturers; I suppose that in a case of this kind, the responsibility of your father would have been invoked?”

“Yes, undoubtedly.”

“That’s a magnificent subject, fucking fascinating even, a
genuine human drama
!” the author of
Platform
enthused. “
A priori
cast iron has a small nineteenth-century workers’-aristocracy-of-the-furnaces side to it, absolutely outmoded in other words, and yet cast iron is still manufactured, not in France obviously, but rather in countries like Poland and Malaysia. Today, you could very easily retrace in a novel the journey of the iron ore, the reductive fusion of iron and metallurgical coke, the machining of the material, and finally its marketing—all that could come at the beginning of the book, like a genealogy of the radiator.”

“In any case, it seems you’d need characters …”

“Yes, that’s true. Even if my real subject was industrial processes, without characters I could do nothing.”

“I think that’s where the fundamental difference lies. As long as I was just portraying objects, photography suited me perfectly. But when I decided to take as my subject human beings, I felt I had to return to painting; I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Conversely, I can never manage to get interested in still lifes; since the invention of photography, I find it no longer makes sense. Well, that’s my personal point of view,” he concluded apologetically.

Evening was coming. Through the window, looking southward, could be made out meadows descending to the Shannon estuary; in the distance, a bank of mist floated on the water, faintly refracting the rays of the setting sun.

“For example, this landscape,” Jed continued. “Okay, I know very well that there were very beautiful impressionist watercolors in the nineteenth
century; however, if I had to depict this landscape today, I would simply take a photo. If, however, there’s a human being in the scene, even if it was just a peasant repairing his fences in the distance, then I would be tempted to have recourse to painting. I know that can sound absurd; some will tell you that the subject has no importance, that it’s even ridiculous to want to make the treatment depend on the subject being treated, that the only thing that counts is the manner in which the painting or the photograph breaks down into figures, lines, and colors.”

“Yes, the formalist point of view. That exists among writers too; but it’s even more widespread in the visual arts, it seems.”

Houellebecq fell silent, dropped his head, then lifted his eyes to Jed; he suddenly seemed filled with sad thoughts. He got up and left for the kitchen. He came back a few minutes later, carrying a bottle of Argentinian red and two glasses.

“We’ll have dinner together, if you like. The restaurant at the Oakwood Arms isn’t bad. There are traditional Irish dishes—smoked salmon, Irish stew, pretty insipid and basic things, in fact—but there are also kebabs and tandooris; their chef’s Pakistani.”

“It’s not even six o’clock,” Jed said, astonished.

“Yes, I think it opens at half past six. You know, they eat early in this country; but it’s never early enough for me. What I prefer, now, is the end of December; night falls at four o’clock. Then I can put on my pajamas, take some sleeping pills, and go to bed with a bottle of wine and a book. That’s how I’ve been living for years. The sun rises at nine; well, with the time it takes to wash and have some coffee, it’s almost midday, so there are four hours left for me to hold out, and most of the time I manage without too much pain. But in spring it’s unbearable. The sunsets are endless and magnificent, it’s like some kind of fucking opera, there are constantly new colors, new flashes of light. I once tried to stay here the whole spring and summer and thought I would die. Every evening, I was on the brink of suicide, with this night that never fell. Since then, at the beginning of April, I go to Thailand and stay there until the end of August. Day starts at six and ends at six, it’s simpler, equatorial and administrative. It’s unbearably hot, but the air conditioning works well and it’s the dead season for tourists. The brothels are empty, but they’re still open and that suits me fine; the service remains excellent or very good.”

“Now I have the slight impression you’re playing your own role …”

“Yes, that’s true,” Houellebecq agreed with surprising spontaneity, “these are things that don’t interest me much anymore. I’m soon going to stop anyway, I’m going to return to the Loiret; I spent my childhood in the Loiret, I made huts in the forest, so I think I can find some activity along the same lines. Coypu hunting?”

He drove his Lexus fast and smoothly, with obvious pleasure. “All the same, they suck without a condom, and that, that’s nice …” the author of
The Elementary Particles
murmured vaguely, as if in the memory of a dead dream, before stopping in the hotel parking lot. Then they entered the dining room, which was vast and well lit. As a starter he ordered the prawn cocktail, and Jed opted for smoked salmon. The Polish waiter put a bottle of lukewarm Chablis in front of them.

“They don’t manage,” the novelist complained. “They don’t manage to serve white wine at the right temperature.”

“Are you interested in wine?”

“That gives me a certain distinction; it’s very French. And you do have to be interested in something in life. I find it helps.”

“I’m a bit surprised,” Jed confessed. “On meeting you, I expected something … well, let’s say, more difficult. You have the reputation for being very depressed. I thought, for example, that you drank much more.”

“Yes,” the novelist replied, studying the wine list closely. “If you take the gigot of lamb as a main course, we’ll have to choose something: perhaps an Argentinian wine again? You know, it’s the journalists who’ve given me the reputation for being a drunk; what’s curious is that none of them ever realized that if I was drinking a lot in their presence, it was simply in order to put up with them. How could you bear to have a conversation with a twat like Jean-Paul Marsouin without being almost shit-faced? How could you meet someone who works for
Marianne
or
Le Parisien libéré
without wanting to throw up on the spot? Anyway, the press is unbearably stupid and conformist, don’t you find?” he insisted.

“I don’t know, really, I don’t read it.”

“You’ve never opened a newspaper?”

“Yes, probably,” Jed said good-naturedly, but in fact he had no memory
of ever doing so. He managed to visualize piles of
Le Figaro Magazine
on a coffee table, in his dentist’s waiting room; but his dental problems had been solved a long time ago. In any case, he had never
felt the need
to buy a newspaper. In Paris the atmosphere is saturated with information. Whether you like it or not, you see the headlines in the kiosks, you hear conversations in the supermarket lines. When he went to the Creuse for his grandmother’s funeral, he’d realized that the atmospheric density of information diminished considerably the farther you got away from the capital; and that, more generally, human affairs lost their importance, and gradually everything disappeared, except plants.

“I’m going to write the catalogue for your exhibition,” Houellebecq went on. “But are you sure it’s a good idea for you? I’m really hated by the French media, you know, to an incredible degree; a week doesn’t pass without someone talking shit about me in some kind of publication.”

“I know, I looked on the Internet before coming here.”

“By associating yourself with me, aren’t you afraid you’ll crash and burn?”

“I talked about it with my gallerist; he thinks it’s not important. We’re not really aiming at the French market with this exhibition. Anyway, there are almost no French buyers of contemporary art at the moment.”

“Who buys?”

“The Americans. It’s been the novelty of the past two or three years; the Americans are starting to buy again, and the English a little bit as well. But above all it’s the Chinese and the Russians.”

Houellebecq looked at him as if he was weighing up the pros and cons. “So it’s the Chinese and Russians who count, you’re maybe right …” he concluded. “Excuse me,” he added, getting up quickly, “I need a cigarette, I can’t think without tobacco.”