The Possibility of an Island (39 page)

Consciousness of my heroism allowed me to while away an excellent afternoon; however, I decided to leave for Paris the following morning, probably because of the beach, and the breasts and bushes of the young girls; in Paris there were also young girls, but you saw less of their breasts and bushes. Anyway, this wasn’t the only reason, although I did need to take a step back (from breasts and bushes). My reflections the previous day had plunged me into such a state that I envisaged writing a new show: something hard and radical this time, next to which my previous provocations would look like saccharine humanist blather. I telephoned my agent, and we arranged to meet and talk about it; he was a bit surprised, I had been saying for so long that I was finished, washed-up, dead, that he had ended up believing it. That said, he was pleasantly surprised: I had caused him a few problems, but earned him quite a lot of money: on the whole he liked me.

On the plane to Paris, under the influence of a liter of Southern Comfort bought at the duty-free in Almería, my hateful heroism turned into a self-pity that was somewhat alleviated by alcohol, and I composed the following poem, which was fairly representative of my state of mind over the preceding weeks, and that I dedicated mentally to Esther:

There is no love

(Not really, not enough).

We live unaided,

We die abandoned.

 

 

The appeal for pity

Resonates in the void,

Our bodies are crippled

But our flesh is eager.

 

 

Gone are the promises

Of a teenage body,

We enter an old age

Where nothing awaits us

 

 

But the vain memory

Of our lost days,

A convulsion of hate

And naked despair.

At the Roissy airport, I drank a double espresso, which completely sobered me up, and while searching for my credit card I found the poem again. It’s impossible, I imagine, to write anything without experiencing a sort of edginess, a nervous excitement, which means that, however sinister the content of what you write might be, you do not immediately find it depressing. With hindsight things look different, and I realized at once that this poem corresponded not simply to my state of mind, but to a starkly observable reality: whatever my convulsions, protestations, and side steps might have been, I had well and truly fallen into the
camp of the elderly,
and there was no hope of return. I ruminated on this distressing thought for some time, as though chewing a meal to get used to its bitterness. It was in vain: the thought was depressing at first, and it remained, on further examination, just as depressing.

The eager welcome I received from the waiters at the Lutétia proved to me in any case that I was not forgotten, that in media terms I was still
in the race.
“Are you here for work?” the receptionist asked with a knowing smile, it was rather like he was wanting to know whether he should send a whore up to my room; I confirmed with a wink, which provoked another fit of attentiveness and a “hope you will be fine…” whispered like a prayer. It was after this first night in Paris, however, that my motivation started to waver. My convictions remained just as strong, but it appeared derisory to me to return to using an artistic mode of expression while somewhere in the world, just around the corner in fact, a
real
revolution was taking place; two days later, I took the train to Chevilly-Larue. When I explained to Vincent my conclusions about the unacceptable character of sacrifice that was now attached to procreation, I noted a sort of hesitation in him, an uneasiness that I had difficulty putting my finger on.

“You know that we are quite involved in the childfree movement…,” he replied slightly impatiently. “I must introduce you to Lucas. We have just bought a television program, or rather part of a television program, on a channel dedicated to new cults. He is head of programming, we’ve taken him on to deal with all our communications. I think you’ll like him.”

Lucas was a young man of about thirty, with a sharp and intelligent face, who wore a white shirt and a loose-fitting black suit. He, too, listened to me with some unease, before showing me the first of a series of ads they planned to broadcast, the following week, on most of the global channels. Lasting thirty seconds, it showed, in a single sequence that gave an unbearable impression of veracity, a six-year-old child throwing a tantrum in a supermarket. He was demanding an extra bag of candy, first in a whining—and already unpleasant—voice, then, when his parents refused, by beginning to scream and roll around on the ground, apparently on the verge of apoplexy but stopping from time to time to check, with cunning little looks, that his progenitors were still under his complete mental domination; the other customers flashed indignant looks as they passed by, the checkout staff themselves began to approach the source of trouble, and the parents, growing more and more flustered, ended up kneeling before the little monster and snatching all the packets of candy within reach to hold out to him, like so many offerings. The image then froze while the following message appeared on the screen in capital letters: “JUST SAY NO. USE CONDOMS.”

The other ads dwelled once again, with the same strength of conviction, on the main elements of the Elohimite choice of life—sexuality, aging, death, in short the usual human questions—but the name of the Church itself was not mentioned, except only at the end, in a very brief, almost subliminal insert that simply said: “Elohimite Church” and a contact telephone number.

“I have found positive ads to be much harder…,” Lucas told me in a hushed tone. “However, I have made one, I think you will recognize the actor…” In fact I recognized Cop in the first few seconds, wearing blue jeans, and busy, in a boat shed by a river, with a manual task that apparently consisted of repairing a canoe. The lighting was superb, shimmering, the pools of water behind him gleamed in a warm mist, it was a bit Jack Daniels–like, but fresher, more joyful, yet without excessive liveliness, like a spring that had acquired the serenity of autumn. He was working calmly, in no hurry, giving the impression of finding pleasure in it and having all the time in the world ahead of him; then he turned toward the camera and smiled broadly as the message “Eternity, Tranquilly” was superimposed on the screen.

I then understood the uneasiness they had all, to a greater or lesser extent, been displaying: my discovery about happiness being the exclusive preserve of youth, and about the sacrifice of generations, was not actually a discovery at all; everyone here already understood it perfectly; Vincent had understood it, Lucas had understood it, and so too had most of the followers. No doubt Isabelle had also been conscious of it for a long time, and she had committed suicide emotionlessly, under the influence of a rational decision, almost like someone asking to be dealt a second hand when the game of cards has started badly—in those rare games that allow it. Was I more stupid than the average person? I asked Vincent that very evening when I was having an aperitif at his place. No, he replied without emotion, on the intellectual level I was in reality slightly above average, and on the moral level I was the same as everyone else: a bit sentimental, a bit cynical, like most men. I was just very honest, and therein lay my distinction; I was, in relation to the current norms of mankind, almost unbelievably honest. I wasn’t to take offense at these remarks, he added, this could all be deduced from the huge success I had had with the public; and it was also what made my life story priceless. Whatever I said to my fellow men would be seen by them as authentic, as
true;
and wherever I went, everyone else, in exchange for a little effort, could follow. If I had converted, it meant that all men, following my example, could convert. He told me all this very calmly, looking me straight in the eye, with an expression of absolute sincerity; and what’s more I knew he liked me. It was then I understood, exactly, what he wanted to do; it was then I also understood that he was going to succeed.

“How many members do you have?”

“Seven hundred thousand,” he replied in a second, without thinking. Then I understood a third thing, which was that Vincent had become the true head of the Church, its effective leader. Knowall, as he had always wished, devoted himself exclusively to scientific research; and Cop had lined up behind Vincent, obeyed his orders, and put his practical intelligence and impressive work rate entirely at his disposal. It was Vincent, without a shadow of doubt, who had recruited Lucas; he was the one who had launched the “Give People Sex. Give Them Pleasure” campaign; similarly he was the one who had put a stop to it, once the goal had been reached; this time he had well and truly taken the place of the prophet. I then recalled my first visit to the house in Chevilly-Larue, and how he had appeared to me to be on the brink of suicide, or a nervous breakdown. “The stone that the builders had rejected…,” I said to myself. “Oh, subtle priests…,” I said to myself a little later, in an automatic parody of Nietzschean linguistic quirks that I sensed, however, was actually inappropriate—Vincent’s success owed nothing to
the Will,
in the rather silly sense that Nietzsche gives to this term by crudely reducing the ideas of Schopenhauer. I still felt neither jealous nor envious of Vincent; his was of a different essence from mine; I would have been incapable of doing what he did; he had achieved a lot, but he had also gambled a lot, he had gambled his entire being, thrown everything into the balance, and for a long time, indeed since the very beginning, he would have been incapable of proceeding otherwise, there had never been any room at all in him for strategy or calculation. I then asked him if he was still working on the embassy project. He lowered his eyes with unexpected modesty, and told me yes, that he even thought he would finish it soon, that if I stayed on another month or two he could show me; that in fact he wanted me to stay a lot longer, and that I would be the first visitor—immediately after Susan, for it concerned Susan very directly.

Naturally, I stayed; nothing was particularly pressing me to return to San José; on the beach there would probably be a bit more breast, a bit more bush, I would be obliged to cope with the situation. I had received a fax from the real estate agent, he had had an interesting offer from an Englishman, a rock singer apparently, but I couldn’t feel any sense of urgency about that, either, since the death of Fox, I might just as well die there, and be buried beside him. I was at the bar of the Lutétia, and after my third Alexandra this seemed an excellent idea: no I was not going to sell, I was going to allow the property to fall into decay, and I was even going to forbid its sale in my will, I was going to put some money aside for its upkeep, I was going to make this house into a sort of mausoleum, a mausoleum to shitty things, but a mausoleum nonetheless. “Mausoleum of shittiness…”: I repeated the phrase to myself in a low voice, feeling inside me, growing with the warmth of the alcohol, an evil jubilation. In the meantime, to sweeten my final moments, I would invite some whores over. No, not whores, I told myself after a moment’s reflection, their performances would undoubtedly be too robotic, too mediocre. I could alternatively proposition the teenage girls who sunbathed on the beach; the majority would refuse, but some might accept, I was certain in any case that they would not be shocked. Obviously, there were a few risks, they might have delinquent boyfriends; there were housemaids I could also try, some were perfectly screwable and perhaps wouldn’t say no to the idea of making some extra money. I ordered a fourth cocktail and slowly weighed the different possibilities as I turned the alcohol in my glass, before realizing that I would very probably do nothing, that I would not resort to prostitution now Esther had left me, any more than I had after Isabelle left, and I also understood, with a mixture of terror and disgust, that I would continue (in, I must say, a purely theoretical fashion, because I knew very well that in my case it was all over, that I’d blown my last chance, that I was now ready to depart, that it was necessary to put an end to things, that it was necessary to finish), but that I continued all the same, in my heart of hearts, and in the face of all the evidence, to believe in love.

Daniel25, 14

MY FIRST CONTACT WITH ESTHER
31
surprised me; probably influenced by the life story of my human predecessor, I had expected a young person. Alerted by my request for intermediation, she switched into visual mode: I found myself confronted by a woman with a calm, serious face who must have been just over fifty; she was standing in front of her screen in a tidy little room that must have served as her office, and was wearing glasses. The fact that she was number 31 was already, in itself, slightly surprising; she explained to me that the line of Esthers had inherited the renal malformation of its founder, and was consequently characterized by shortened life spans. Of course, she was aware of Marie23’s departure: it seemed almost certain to her as well that a community of evolved primates had settled in the place where Lanzarote had once been; that zone of the North Atlantic, she informed me, had suffered a tormented geological fate: after having been completely engulfed at the time of the First Decrease, the island had reemerged as a result of new volcanic eruptions; at the time of the Great Drying Up it had become an isthmus, and, according to the last surveys, a narrow strip of land still linked it to the African coast.