The Possibility of an Island (12 page)

“Any questions?” No, there were no questions. His presentation, which had lasted more than two hours, had been remarkably clear. As I went into the dining hall I saw Patrick coming toward me, all smiles, stretching out his hand. Had I had a good journey, was I settled in, etc.? While we conversed pleasantly, a woman embraced me from behind, rubbing her pubis against my backside, placing her hands on my belly. I turned around: Fadiah had taken off her white tunic and put on a sort of vinyl leopard-patterned bodysuit; she looked in rude health. While continuing to rub her pubis against me she too asked me about my first impressions. Patrick regarded the scene good-naturedly. “Oh, she does this with everyone…,” he told me as we made for a table where a man of about fifty, strongly built, with thick gray hair in a crew cut, was already sitting. He stood up to greet me and shook my hand, observing me closely. During the meal, he didn’t say much, contenting himself from time to time with adding a point of detail on the logistics of the course, but I could sense that he was studying me. He was called Jérôme Prieur, but immediately I baptized him Cop. He was in fact the right-hand man of the prophet, the Number 2 of the organization (although they used a different phrase, and had a whole load of titles along the lines of “archbishop of the seventh rank,” but that was what they really meant). You progressed according to seniority and merit, as in all organizations, he told me without smiling; according to seniority and merit. Knowall, for example, although he had only been an Elohimite for five years, was Number 3. As for Number 4, I absolutely had to be introduced to him, insisted Patrick, he really appreciated what I did, he himself had a great sense of humor. “Oh, humor…,” I stopped myself from replying.

The afternoon lecture was given by Odile, a woman of around fifty who had had the same kind of sex life as Catherine Millet, and who incidentally looked a bit like her. She seemed a sympathetic woman, without problems—again like Catherine Millet—but her presentation was a bit woolly. I knew that there were women like Catherine Millet, who shared the same kind of tastes—I estimated the number at around one in a hundred thousand; this didn’t seem to me to have varied throughout history, and was unlikely to evolve. She became somewhat animated when outlining the probability of contamination by the AIDS virus in relation to the various orifices—this was obviously her hobbyhorse, she had gathered a whole heap of figures. She was in fact vice president of the association Couples Against AIDS, which tried to provide intelligent information on this subject—that is to say, enabling people to only use a condom when it was strictly necessary. For my part, I had never used a condom, and with the development of tritherapies, I wasn’t going to start now—supposing I ever had chance to fuck again; for me, at that point, even the prospect of fucking, and of fucking with pleasure, seemed to be more than sufficient motivation for putting an end to it all.

The main objective of the lecture was to set out the restrictions and constraints that the Elohimites imposed on sexuality. It was quite simple: there were none—between
consenting adults,
as they say.

This time, there were questions. Most of them dealt with pedophilia, a subject on which Elohimites had had legal disputes—come to think of it, who hasn’t gone on trial for pedophilia nowadays? The position of the prophet, as Odile reminded us here, was crystal clear: there exists a moment in human life called
puberty,
when sexual desire appears—the age, varying according to the individual and the environment, was somewhere between eleven and fourteen. To make love with someone who was unwilling, or who was not able to formulate a clear consent, ergo a prepubescent, is
evil;
as for what might happen after puberty, that was evidently situated outside any moral judgment, and there was almost nothing else to say. The end of the afternoon became mired in common sense, and I was beginning to feel the need for an aperitif; they were, it must be said, a bit of a pain in the ass when it came to that. Fortunately, I had supplies in my suitcase, and as a VIP I had a single room, of course. Sinking after the meal into a mildly drunken state, alone between the immaculate sheets of my king-size bed, I drew up a sort of balance sheet for this first day. Surprisingly, many of the adherents had forgotten to be twats; and, even more surprisingly, many women had forgotten to be ugly. It’s true, also, that they didn’t miss any opportunity to do themselves up. On this subject, the teachings of the prophet were consistent: if man was to make an effort to repress his masculine side (machismo had shed too much blood in the world, he exclaimed with emotion in the different interviews I had seen on his Web site), woman could on the contrary give free rein to her femininity and the exhibitionism that is consubstantial with her, through all kinds of sparkling, transparent, or skintight clothing that the imagination of various couturiers and creators had put at her disposal: nothing could be more pleasant and excellent, in the eyes of the Elohim.

That’s what the women did, then, and at the evening meal there was a certain erotic tension: it was light, but constant. I sensed that this was only going to grow stronger, as the week wore on; I also sensed that I was not really going to suffer from it, and that I would content myself with getting peacefully plastered while watching the banks of mist drift in the moonlight. The freshness of the pastures, the Milka cows, the snow on the summits: a very beautiful place for forgetting, or for dying.

The next morning, the prophet himself made an appearance for the first lecture: dressed all in white, he leaped onto the stage, under the light of the projectors, amid enormous applause—immediately there was a standing ovation. Seen from afar, it struck me that he looked a bit like a monkey—undoubtedly owing to the relationship between the length of his front and back limbs, or his general posture, I don’t know, it was very difficult to pin down. That said, he didn’t look like an
evil
monkey: a monkey with a flat skull, a sensualist, nothing more.

He also resembled, indisputably, a Frenchman: the ironic look, sparkling with malice and mocking, you could absolutely have imagined him in a Feydeau farce.

He didn’t look his sixty-five years at all.

“What will be the number of the Elect?” the prophet asked right away. “Will it be 1,729, the smallest number that can be broken down in two different ways to the sum of two cubes? Will it be 9,240, which possesses 64 dividers? Will it be 40,755, simultaneously triangular, pentagonal, and hexagonal? Will it be 144,000, as our friends the Jehovah’s Witnesses desire—a truly dangerous sect, I might add in passing?”

As a professional, I have to admit it: he was very good onstage. I wasn’t completely awake, and the hotel coffee was awful; but he had grabbed me.

“Will it be 698,896, a palindromic square?” he continued. “Will it be 12,960,000, the second geometrical number of Plato? Will it be 33,550,336, the fifth perfect number, written by an anonymous scribe in a medieval manuscript?”

He held himself still exactly in the center of the spotlight, and took a long pause before speaking again: “The Elect will be whoever wishes for it in his or her heart”—a shorter pause—“and has behaved accordingly.”

He went on, fairly logically, about the conditions for election, before turning to the building of the embassy—a subject which was, visibly, close to his heart. The lecture lasted a little over two hours, and frankly it was well done, a good job, and I was not the last to applaud. I was sitting next to Patrick, who whispered in my ear: “He’s truly in very good form this year…,”

As we left the lecture hall to go to lunch, we were intercepted by Cop. “You are invited to the table of the prophet,” he told me gravely. “You too, Patrick…,” he added; Patrick blushed with pleasure, while I did a bit of hyperventilating to relax. Whatever Cop did, even when he was conveying good news, he did it in such a way that it made you shit your pants.

An entire wing of the hotel was reserved for the prophet, where he had his own dining room. While waiting in front of the entrance, where a young girl was exchanging messages over her walkie-talkie, we were joined by Vincent, the Plastic Arts VIP, led by one of Cop’s subordinates.

The prophet painted, and the whole of the wing was decorated with his works, which he had had brought over from California for the duration of the course. They represented exclusively women, nude or dressed in suggestive clothing, in the middle of various landscapes, from the Tyrol to the Bahamas; I understood then where all the Web site and brochure illustrations had come from. As I crossed the corridor I noticed that Vincent was averting his gaze from the canvases, and that he had difficulty repressing a spasm of disgust. I approached them in my turn before recoiling, nauseated: the word
kitsch
would have been too weak to describe these productions; close up, I think I had never seen anything quite as ugly.

The highlight of the exhibition was situated in the dining room, an immense space lit by windows looking out onto the mountains: behind the prophet’s chair, a painting, eight meters by four, showed him surrounded by twelve young women dressed in see-through tunics, who stretched out toward him, some with expressions of adoration, others with clearly more suggestive ones. There were whites, blacks, an Oriental, and two Indians; at least the prophet wasn’t racist. He was, however, manifestly obsessed with big breasts, and he liked pretty thick pubic hair; in short, this man had simple tastes.

While we waited for the prophet, Patrick introduced me to Gérard, the joker, and Number 4 in the organization. He owed this privilege to the fact that he was one of the first of the prophet’s companions. He had already been at his side when the sect was created, thirty-seven years before, and he had remained faithful to him, despite the latter’s sometimes surprising about-faces. Of the four “companions of the first hour,” one was dead, another an Adventist, and the third had left a few years earlier when the prophet had called on them to vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen against Jacques Chirac in the second round of the presidential elections, with the aim of “accelerating the decomposition of France’s pseudo-democracy”—a little like the Maoists, in their heyday, calling for a vote for Giscard against Mitterrand in order to aggravate the contradictions of capitalism. So there remained only Gérard, and this seniority gave him certain privileges, like having lunch every day at the table of the prophet—which was not the case with Knowall or even Cop—or occasionally to make funny remarks about his physical characteristics—to talk, for example, about his “fat ass” or his “eyes like cock-slits.” It emerged in the course of the conversation that Gérard knew me well, that he had seen all my shows, that he had in fact been following me since the beginning of my career. Living in California, totally indifferent moreover to any production of a cultural order (the only actors he knew by name were Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis), the prophet had never heard of me; it was therefore to Gérard, and Gérard alone, that I owed my VIP status. It was also he who dealt with the press, and with media relations.

Finally the prophet appeared, bouncing, freshly showered, dressed in jeans and a “Lick my balls” T-shirt, and carrying a shoulder bag. Everyone stood up; I copied them. He came to me, holding out his hand, all smiles: “Well? How did you find me?” I was stunned for a few seconds before I realized that the question was not designed to trap me: he was addressing me exactly like one of the
brothers.
“Er…good. Frankly, very good…,” I replied. “I particularly appreciated the opening material about the number of the Elect, with all the figures.” “Ah, ha ha ha…” He took a book out of his bag,
Funny Mathematics,
by Jostein Gaarder. “It’s all in there!” He sat down rubbing his hands, and dug into his grated carrots first thing; we copied him.

Probably in my honor, the conversation turned quickly to comedians. Joker knew a lot about the subject, but the prophet, too, had a few notions, he had even known Coluche in his early days. “We were in the lineup for the same show, one evening, in Clermont-Ferrand…,” he told me nostalgically. In fact, in the period when the record companies, traumatized by the arrival of rock music in France, had recorded anything, the prophet (he was not yet a prophet) had cut a 45 under the stage name of Travis Davis; he had toured a little in the central region, and things had been left at that. A little later, he had tried to break into racing cars—without much success there either. All in all, he had taken some time to find himself; the encounter with the Elohim had come at the right moment: without it, we might have had a second Bernard Tapie on our hands. Today, he hardly sang at all, but he had retained a real taste for fast cars, which had enabled the media to allege that he maintained, on his property in Beverly Hills, a veritable race-car stable at the expense of his followers. This was completely untrue, he told me. First, he didn’t live in Beverly Hills, but in Santa Monica; second, he possessed only a Ferrari Modena Stradale (a slightly souped-up version of the ordinary Modena, and made lighter by the use of carbon, titanium, and aluminum) and a Porsche 911 GT2; in short, rather fewer than a middling Hollywood actor. It’s true he planned to replace his Stradale with an Enzo, and his 911 GT2 with a Carrera GT; but he wasn’t sure he’d have the means.

I was tempted to believe him: he gave me the impression of being a womanizer rather than a money man, and the two are compatible only up to a certain point—from a certain age, two passions are too much: happy are those, nevertheless, who manage to keep hold of one of them; I was twenty years younger than he, and it was evident that I was already close to zero. To feed the conversation, I mentioned the Bentley Continental GT that I had just traded in for a Mercedes 600 SL—which, I was conscious, could be read as a sign of gentrification. If there weren’t any cars, you have to really ask yourself what men could possibly talk about.