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. To meet customer expectations for that location, there had to be at least one hostess bar and one massage parlor. 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-site, a Chinese building contractor based in Phuket, who would sort out the building of 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 saw that they hadn't pulled any punches. In every photo, the local girls were topless, wearing minuscule 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 Valérie, "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 standardization 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 criminalized, even for clients to be prosecuted, as they were in Sweden. Valérie looked at him, surprised. He had been odd lately, launching increasingly frequently into aimless, unproductive ruminations. She herself coped with a punishing workload, methodically and with a sort of cold determination. She regularly made 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 stroke of luck. Most often, money was acquired through inheritance, as in my case, conferring the problem of how it had been earned on 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 but successful move. There was no great logic to it, but the possibilities were endless. By contrast, the criteria for sexual selection were unduly simple, consisting 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 that already made it possible to assure an exact equivalence between intelligence, talent, and technical competence, and that had already made it possible to assure a perfect standardization of opinions, tastes, and lifestyles. Unlike the aristocracy, the rich made no claim to being different in constitution 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, seeking 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 civilization. They had invented dreams, progress, Utopia, the future. Their sense of a mission to civilize 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 shown 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 Valérie was out consisted of watching the movement of the clouds through the bay 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.