Authors: Michel Houellebecq
She came up to see me at about six; I'd fallen asleep with my book. She took off her swimsuit, showered and came to me, a towel wrapped around her waist; her hair was slightly damp.
'You're going to think I'm obsessed with this, but I asked the German girl what black guys have that white guys don't. It's true, though: white women clearly prefer to sleep with Africans and white men with Asians. It's pretty obvious after a while. I need to know why, it's very important for my work.'
'There are white men who like black women . . .' I observed.
'It's not as common; sexual tourism is much rarer in
Africa than it is in Asia. Of course, tourism in general is rarer, to be honest.'
'What was her answer?'
'Standard stuff: black guys are laid-back, virile, they have a sense of fun; they know how to enjoy themselves, they're not hung up, you never have any trouble with them.'
The German girl's reply was banal, true, but it provided the basis for a workable theory: all things considered, white men were repressed Negroes searching for some lost sexual innocence. Obviously it in no way explained the mysterious attraction which Asian women seemed to wield; nor the sexual prestige which, by all accounts, white men enjoyed in black Africa. I sketched out the basis of a more complex, more questionable theory: generally speaking, white people want to be tanned and to dance like Negroes; Negroes want to lighten their skin and straighten their hair. All humanity instinctively tends towards miscegenation, a generalised undifferentiated state, and it does so first and foremost through the elementary means of sexuality. The only person, however, to have pushed the process to its logical conclusion is Michael Jackson: he's neither black nor white any more, neither young nor old and, in a sense, neither man nor woman. Nobody could really imagine his private life; having grasped the categories of everyday humanity, he had done his utmost to go beyond them. This was why he could be considered a star, possibly the greatest - and, in fact, the first - in the history of the world. All the others
- Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart - could at best be considered talented artists; they had done no more than imitate the human condition, had aesthetically transposed it. Michael Jackson was the first to have tried to go a little further.
It was an appealing theory, and Valerie listened attentively as I explained it; I, on the other hand, was not entirely convinced. Did this mean that the first cyborg, the first individual to accept having elements of artificial, extra-human intelligence implanted into his brain, would immediately become a star? Probably, yes: but that actually had very little bearing on the subject. Michael Jackson might well be a star, but he was certainly not a sex symbol; if you wanted to encourage the sort of mass tourism that would warrant heavy investment, you had to turn to more basic forces of attraction.
A little later, Jean-Yves and the others returned from their tour of the city. The local history museum was chiefly devoted to the customs of the Tainos, the first inhabitants of the region. It appeared that they had led a peaceable existence, dedicated to agriculture and fishing; conflicts between neighbouring tribes were practically nonexistent; the Spanish had had no difficulty in exterminating these creatures, who were ill-prepared for combat. Today, nothing of them remains apart from some minimal genetic traces in the physiognomy of a handful of individuals; their culture has completely disappeared, it might just as well have never existed. In a number of drawings made by the missionaries, who had attempted -more often than not in vain - to sensitise them to the message of the Gospel, they can be seen ploughing, or busying themselves cooking at the fire; bare-breasted women suckle their children: All of this gave the impression, if not of Eden, then at least of a slow pace of history; the arrival of the Spanish had speeded things up significantly. After the classic conflicts between the colonial powers who led the field at the time, Cuba gained its independence in 1898, only to fall immediately under American control. Early in 1959, after a civil war lasting many years, the revolutionary forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew the regular army, forcing Batista to flee. Considering that the whole world was forcibly divided into two camps at the time, Cuba had been quickly compelled to make overtures to the Soviet block and establish a Marxist-style regime. Deprived of logistical support after the collapse of the Soviet Union, now that regime was drawing to a close. Valerie slipped on a short skirt slit up one side and a little black lace top; we had time for a cocktail before dinner.
Everyone was gathered around the swimming pool, watching as the sun set over the bay. Near the shore, the wreck of a freighter slowly rusted. Other, smaller, boats floated, almost motionless, on the waters; it all exuded a powerful sense of decline. Not a sound drifted up from the streets of the city down below; a few streetlights flickered hesitantly into life. At Jean-Yves's table sat a man of about sixty, his face gaunt and exhausted, his expression gloomy; and another much younger man - no more than thirty - whom I recognised as the hotel manager. I had seen him several times during that afternoon moving nervously between the tables to make sure that everyone was happy; his face seemed to be ravaged by constant, needless worry. Seeing us approach, he got up quickly, brought two chairs over, called a waiter, ensured that the latter arrived without delay; then hurried to the kitchens. The old man at his side shot a cynical look at the swimming pool, the couples sitting at tables and, apparently, at the world at large. 'The poor people of Cuba . . .' he said after a long silence. 'They've nothing left to sell except their bodies.' Jean-Yves explained that this man lived nearby; he was the hotel manager's father. More than forty years before, he had fought in the revolution, he had been a member of one of the first companies to rally to the Castro uprising. After the war, he had worked in the nickel works at Moa, at first as a worker, then as a foreman, eventually - after he had gone back to university - as an engineer. His status as a revolutionary hero had made it possible for his son to obtain an important position in the tourist industry.
'We have failed . . .' he said in a dull voice; 'and we deserved to fail. We had great leaders — exceptional, idealistic men who put the good of the country before their own personal gain. I remember comandante Che Guevara, the day he came to open the cocoa-processing plant in our village; I can still remember his noble, honest face. No one could ever say that the comandante had lined his pockets, that he tried to get favours for himself or his family. Nor could it be said of Camilo Cienfuegos, or any of the revolutionary leaders, not even of Fidel. It's true Fidel likes power, he wants to keep an eye on everything; but he is disinterested, he has no magnificent properties, no Swiss bank accounts. So, Che was there, he inaugurated the factory, he made a speech in which he urged the people of Cuba to win the peace through production, after the war for independence; it was just before he went to the Congo. We could easily win such a battle. The land here is fertile, the earth is rich and well irrigated, everything grows in abundance: coffee, cocoa, sugar cane, tropical fruit of every kind. The subsoil is rich in nickel ore. We had an ultra-modern factory, built with help from the Russians. In less than six months, production had fallen to half its normal level: all the factory workers stole chocolate, raw or in bars, gave it to their families, sold it to strangers. It was the same in all the factories, all over the country. If the workers couldn't find anything to steal, they worked badly, they were lazy, they were always sick, they were absent for the slightest reason. I spent years trying to talk to them, to persuade them to try a little harder for the sake of their country: I met with nothing but disappointment and failure.'
He fell silent; the last of the day floated above the Yunque, a mountain peak mysteriously truncated in the form of a table, which towered over the hills and which long ago had made a considerable impression on Christopher Columbus. What could possibly incite human beings to undertake tedious, tiresome tasks? This seemed to me the only political question worth posing. The old factory worker's evidence was damning: in his opinion, only the need for money; in any case, the revolution had obviously failed to create the new man, driven by more altruistic motives. And so, like all societies, Cuba was nothing more than a system painstakingly rigged so as to allow some people to avoid tedious and tiresome tasks. Except that the system had failed, no one was fooled any longer, no one was sustained any more by the hope of one day rejoicing in communal labour. The result was that nothing functioned, no one worked or produced the slightest thing any longer, and Cuban society had become incapable of ensuring the survival of its own members.
The other members of the tour got up and headed towards the tables. I racked my brain desperately for something optimistic to say to the old man, some vague message of hope; but no, there was nothing. As he so bitterly foresaw, Cuba would soon become a capitalist country again, and nothing would remain of the revolutionary hopes he had nurtured - only a sense of failure, futility and shame. No one would respect or follow his example, his life would in fact become an object of revulsion to future generations. He would have fought, and afterwards worked his whole life, completely in vain.
During the meal, I drank quite a bit and, by the end, I found I was completely smashed; Valerie looked at me a little anxiously. The salsa dancers were getting ready for their show; they were wearing pleated skirts and multicoloured sheathes. We took our seats on the terrace. I knew more or less what I wanted to say to Jean-Yves; had I chosen an opportune moment? I felt that he was a little distraught, but relaxed. I ordered one last cocktail, lit a cigar before turning to him.
'You really want to find a new formula that would save your holiday clubs?'
'Of course I do, that's why I'm here.'
'Offer a club where the people get to fuck. That's what they're missing more than anything. If they haven't had their little holiday romance, they go home unsatisfied. They wouldn't dare admit it, they might not even realise it, but the next time they go on holiday, they go with a different company.'
'They can fuck all they like, everything has been set up to encourage them to; that's the basic principle of holiday clubs; why they don't actually fuck, I haven't the faintest idea.'
I swept the objection aside with a wave of my hand. 'I don't know either, but that's not the problem; there's no point trying to find out the causes of this phenomenon, always supposing the phrase actually means something. Something must be happening to make Westerners stop sleeping with each other; maybe it's something to do with narcissism, or individualism, the cult of success, it doesn't matter. The fact is that from about the age of twenty-five or thirty, people find it very difficult to meet new sexual partners; although they still feel the need to do so, it's a need which fades very slowly. So they end up spending thirty years of their lives, almost the entirety of their adult lives, suffering permanent withdrawal.'
Halfway along the path to inebriation, just before mindlessness ensues, one sometimes experiences moments of heightened lucidity. The decline of western sexuality was undoubtedly a major sociological phenomenon which it would be futile to attempt to explain by such and such a specific psychological factor; glancing at Jean-Yves, I realised however that he perfectly illustrated my thesis, so much so that it was almost embarrassing. Not only did he not fuck any more and didn't have the time to go looking, but he no longer really wanted to, and, worse still, he felt this decay written on his flesh - he was beginning to smell of the stench of death. 'But . . .'he objected after a long moment of hesitation, 'I've heard wife-swapping clubs are quite successful.'
'No, actually, they're doing less and less well. There are a lot of clubs opening up, but they close almost immediately because they haven't got the customers. As a matter of fact, there are only two clubs making a go of it in Paris, Chris et Manu and 2 + 2, and even they are only full on Saturday night: for a city often million people, it's not much, it's a lot less than at the beginning of the 1990s. Wife-swapping clubs are a nice formula, but they're seen as more and more passé, because people don't want to swap anything any more, it doesn't suit modern sensibilities. In my opinion, wife-swapping has as much chance of surviving today as hitch-hiking did in the 1970s. The only thing that is doing any business at the moment is S&M . . .' At that point, Valerie shot me a panicked look, she even gave me a kick in the shins. I looked at her, surprised. It took me a few seconds to work it out: no, of course I wasn't going to mention Audrey; I gave her a little reassuring nod. Jean-Yves hadn't noticed the interruption.
'Therefore,' I went on, 'you have several hundred million Westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction: they spend their lives looking, but they don't find it and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality. It's simple, really simple to understand: it's an ideal trading opportunity. The money you could make is almost unimaginable: vastly more than from computing or biotechnology, more than the media industry; there isn't a single economic sector that is comparable.'
Jean-Yves didn't say anything; at that moment, the band began the first number. The dancers were pretty and smiling, their pleated skirts whirled, amply revealing their tanned thighs; they illustrated my point perfectly. For a moment, I thought he wouldn't say anything, that he would simply digest the idea. However, after about five minutes, he said:
'It doesn't really work for Muslim countries, your idea . . .'
'No problem, you just leave them with their Eldorador Discovery. You could even steer them towards something much tougher, with trekking and environmental activities, a survivor kind of thing maybe, which you could call Eldorador Adventure: it would sell really well in France and in Anglo-Saxon countries. On the other hand, the sex-oriented clubs could do well in Germany and the Mediterranean countries.'