The Possibility of an Island (31 page)

Unrequited love is a hemorrhage. Over the months that followed, as Spain settled into summertime, I could still have pretended to myself that all was well, that we were equally in love; but unfortunately I had never been very good at lying to myself. Two weeks later she visited me in San José, and if she still gave me her body with as much abandon, as little restraint as ever, I also noticed that, more and more frequently, she would move a few meters away to speak into her cell phone. She laughed a lot during these conversations, more than she did with me, she would promise to be coming back soon, and the idea I had had of proposing that she spend the summer in my company appeared more and more plainly to be senseless; it was almost with relief that I took her back to the airport. I had avoided the breakup, we were
still together,
as they say, and the following week it was I who made the trip to Madrid.

She still went out clubbing a lot, I knew, and sometimes spent the entire night dancing; but she never asked me to accompany her. I imagined her, replying to her friends who asked her out: “No, not this evening, I’m with Daniel…” I now knew most of them, many were students or actors; often of the
groovy
type, with longish hair and comfortable clothes; some by contrast would wittily play up the
macho, Latin-lover
style; but all of them, obviously, were
young,
and how could it have been otherwise? How many of them, I sometimes wondered, could have been her lovers? She never did anything that might make me ill at ease; but nor did I ever have the feeling I was part of her group. I remember an evening, it could have been ten p.m., there were a dozen or so of us in a bar and everyone was talking with great animation about the merits of various clubs, the ones that were more house, the others more trance. For ten minutes, I was dying to say to them that I, too,
wanted
to enter this world, to have fun with them, to stay up all night; I was ready to beg them to take me. Then, by accident, I saw my reflection in a window, and I understood. I looked my fortysomething years; my face was careworn, stiff, marked by the experience of life, by responsibilities and sorrows; I didn’t look at all like someone you could imagine
having fun;
I was condemned.

During the night, after making love with Esther (and it was the only thing that still worked well, it was without doubt the only youthful, pure thing left in me), contemplating her smooth white body in the moonlight, I thought with pain of Fat Ass. If I was, following the words of the Gospel, to be measured by the measure I had used, then I was in a bad way, for there was no doubt that I had behaved
pitilessly
toward Fat Ass. Not that pity, actually, could have served any useful purpose: there are many things you can do with compassion, but get a hard-on, no, that’s not possible.

At the time I had met Fat Ass, I was about thirty, and I was beginning to have some success—not yet with the general public as such, but still a kind of critical success. I noticed immediately this fat and pallid woman who came to all my shows, sat in the front row, and each time handed me her autograph book. It took her almost six months to bring herself to speak to me—come to think of it, no, I believe that, finally, I was the one who took the initiative. She was a cultivated woman, taught philosophy in a Paris university, and I really didn’t suspect anything. She asked my permission to publish an annotated transcript of some of my sketches in the
Journal of Phenomenological Studies;
naturally, I said yes. I was a little flattered, I must admit, after all I hadn’t even sat my baccalaureate and here she was comparing me to Kierkegaard. We exchanged e-mails for a few months, gradually things began to degenerate, I accepted an invitation to dinner at her place, I should have been immediately suspicious when I saw the dress she was wearing indoors, however I managed to leave without humiliating her too much, or at least that’s what I had hoped, but the following morning the first pornographic e-mails began. “Ah, to feel you at last inside me, to feel your stem of flesh opening my flower…” It was awful, she wrote like Gérard de Villiers. She really wasn’t well preserved, she looked much older, but in reality she was only forty-seven when I met her—exactly the same age as I was when I met Esther. I jumped out of bed the second I became conscious of this, gasping with anxiety, and began running up and down the bedroom—Esther was sleeping peacefully, she had thrown off the blankets, God she was beautiful.

I had imagined then—and fifteen years later I thought of it again with shame and disgust—I had imagined that after a certain age, sexual desire
disappears
and leaves you at least relatively tranquil. How had I, the one who had pretended to himself that he had a caustic and cutting mind, been able to fashion such a ridiculous illusion? I understood life, in principle at least, I had even read some books; and if there was one simple subject, one subject on which, as they say, all the testimonies are in agreement, it was certainly this. Not only does sexual desire not disappear, but with age it becomes even crueler, more and more wrenching and insatiable—and even among those, quite rare, men whose hormonal secretions, erections, and all associated phenomena disappear, the attraction to young female bodies does not diminish, it becomes, and this is maybe even worse,
cosa mentale,
the desire for desire. This is the truth, this is the evidence, this is what, tirelessly, all serious authors have constantly repeated.

At the absolute limit, I could have performed cunnilingus on the person of Fat Ass—I imagined my face venturing between her flabby thighs, their pale rolls of fat, trying to revive her sagging clitoris. But even that, I was sure, would not have been enough—and would perhaps only have aggravated her suffering. She wanted, like all women, to be penetrated, she would not be satisfied with less, it was nonnegotiable.

I took flight; like all men put in the same circumstances, I ran away: I stopped replying to her e-mails, I forbade her access to my dressing room. She insisted for years, five, maybe seven, she insisted for a terrifying number of years; I think she insisted right up to the day after my encounter with Isabelle. I had obviously not told her anything, I no longer had any contact; maybe at the end of the day intuition does exist,
female intuition
as they say, it was in any case the moment she chose to disappear, to leave my life, and maybe life itself, as she had, several times, threatened to do.

On the day after that difficult night, I took the first plane to Paris. Esther was slightly surprised, she had thought I would spend the whole week in Madrid, and so had I as that was what I had planned. I didn’t fully understand the reason for this sudden departure, maybe I wanted to be
clever,
to show that I too had my life, my activities, and my independence—in which case I had failed, she didn’t seem upset or destabilized by the news in the slightest, she said:
“Bueno…”
and that was that. Above all, I suppose my actions didn’t really make any sense, I was beginning to behave like a fatally wounded old animal that charges in all directions, bumps into every obstacle, falls and gets up, more and more furious, more and more weakened, crazed and intoxicated by the smell of its own blood.

I had used as a pretext my desire to see Vincent again, or at least that’s what I had explained to Esther, but it was only when I landed at Roissy that I realized how much I really wanted to see him; with this, too, I didn’t know why, maybe just to verify that happiness is possible. With Susan he had moved back into his grandparents’ house—the house he had, in fact, lived in all his life. It was the end of May but the weather was overcast, and the redbrick exterior rather sinister; I was surprised by the names on the mailbox. “Susan Longfellow,” okay, but “Vincent Macaury”? Well, yes, the prophet was called Macaury, Robert Macaury; and Vincent no longer had the right to use his mother’s name; the name Macaury had been given to him by the lawyers, because he needed one, while awaiting a legal decision. “I am a mistake…,” Vincent had once told me, alluding to his relationship with the prophet. Maybe; but his grandparents had welcomed him and cherished him like a victim, they had been bitterly disappointed by the hedonistic and irresponsible selfishness of their son—indeed of an entire generation, before things turned bad, and only selfishness remained, hedonism having flown; they had welcomed him in any case, they had opened the doors of their home to him, and this was something, for example, that I would never have done for my own son, the very thought of living under the same roof as that little ass-hole would have been unbearable, we were simply, he and I, people who
should not have been born.
Unlike, say, Susan, who now lived among these old, cluttered, gloomy furnishings, so far from her native California, and who had immediately felt good there; she had thrown out nothing, I recognized the framed family photos, the grandfather’s work medals, and the souvenir mechanical bulls bought during a holiday on the Costa Brava; maybe she had let in some fresh air, bought some flowers, I haven’t a clue, I’ve always lived as though I were in a hotel, I don’t have the homemaking instinct, in the absence of women, I believe I wouldn’t even have given it a thought; in any case it was now a house in which you had the impression that people could be happy, she had the power to do that. She loved Vincent, I realized immediately, it was obvious, but above all she
loved.
It was in her nature to love, as it was for a cow to graze (or a bird to sing; or a rat to sniff about). Having lost her previous master, she had almost instantaneously found another, and the world around her had once again been filled with a positive clarity. I dined with them, and it was a pleasant and harmonious evening, with very little suffering; I did not, however, have the courage to stay the night, and I left at about eleven, having reserved a room at the Lutétia.

At the Montparnasse-Bienvenue station I thought again about poetry, probably because I had just seen Vincent, and that always brought me back to a clear consciousness of my limits: creative limitations on one hand, but also limitations in love. It must be said that I had just passed by a “Poetry on the Metro” poster, more precisely the one that reproduced “Free Love” by André Breton, and, whatever the disgust inspired by the personality of André Breton, whatever the stupidity of the title, its pitiful antinomy, which only demonstrated, in addition to a certain softening of the brain, the instinct for publicity that characterized and ultimately summed up Surrealism, you had to admit it: this idiot had, under the circumstances, written a very beautiful poem. I was not the only one, however, to have some reservations, and two days later, passing by the same poster again, I noticed that it was smeared with graffiti, which said: “Instead of your stupid poems, give us some trains at rush hour,” which was enough to put me in a good mood for the entire afternoon, and even to give me back some self-confidence: I was only a comedian, I know, but I was still a comedian.

The day after my dinner at Vincent’s, I had informed the reception desk at the Lutétia that I would be keeping the room, probably for a few days. They had welcomed the news with a conniving courtesy. After all, don’t forget, I was a
celebrity;
I could easily burn my cash by drinking Alexandras at the bar with Philippe Sollers, or Philippe Bouvard—maybe not Philippe Léotard, he was dead; but anyway, given my notoriety, I would have access to these categories of Philippes. I could spend the night with a transsexual Slovenian whore; in short, I could have a
brilliant social life,
it was probably even expected of me, people become famous as a result of one or two talented productions, no more, it’s sufficiently surprising that a human being has one or two things to say, after that they manage their decline more or less peacefully, more or less painfully, that’s the way it goes.

I did none of that, however, in the days that followed; instead, first thing that morning, I phoned Vincent again. He understood quickly that the spectacle of his conjugal bliss risked hurting me, and suggested that we meet up in the bar of the Lutétia. He really only spoke to me about his embassy project, which had become an installation whose visitors would be the men of the future. He had ordered a lemonade, but didn’t touch his drink; from time to time, some
celeb
crossed the bar, noticed me, and made me a sign of complicity; Vincent paid no attention. He spoke without looking at me, without even checking that I was listening, in a voice that was both thoughtful and distant, as though he were speaking into a tape recorder, or were testifying at an inquiry. As he explained his idea to me, I became conscious that he was moving little by little further away from his initial plan, that the project was growing more and more ambitious, that his goal was now nothing less than to bear witness to what a pompous author of the twentieth century had felt fit to call the “human condition.” There were already, he pointed out, many testimonies about mankind, which all agreed in their lamentable assessment; the subject, in short, was
covered.
Calmly, but irreversibly, he was leaving the human shores to sail toward the
absolute beyond,
where I did not feel capable of following him, and no doubt it was the only space where he felt himself able to breathe, no doubt his life had never had any other objective, but it was, of course, an objective he needed to pursue alone; that said, he had always been alone.

We were no longer the same, he insisted in a gentle voice, we had become
eternal;
granted, we would need some time to master the idea, to become familiar with it; nevertheless, fundamentally, and from now on, things had changed. Knowall had stayed on Lanzarote after the departure of all the followers, with a few technicians, and he was pursuing his research; he would succeed in the end, there was no doubt about it. Man had a large brain, disproportionate in relation to the primitive demands arising from the struggle to survive, from the elementary quest for food and sex; we were, at last, going to be able to use it. No culture of the mind, he reminded me, had ever been able to develop in societies with a high level of delinquency, simply because physical security is the condition for free thought; no reflection, no poetry nor idea of the slightest creativity has ever been engendered in an individual who has to worry about his survival, who has to be constantly
on his guard.
Once the preservation of our DNA had been ensured, once we had become potentially immortal, we were going, he went on, to find ourselves in conditions of absolute physical safety, in conditions that no human being had ever known; no one could predict what was going to be the result of this, as far as the mind was concerned.