The Possibility of an Island (17 page)

If you look at the circumstances, the beginning of our love story was extremely banal. I was forty-seven when we met, she was twenty-two. What’s more, she was an actress, and it’s well known that film producers sleep with their actresses; some films, even, appear to only have been created for that purpose. That said, could I be considered a
film producer
? As producer I only had
Two Flies Later
to my name, and I was about to give up producing
Highway Swingers
—in fact, I had already given up on it the moment I returned from Paris; when the taxi pulled up in front of my residence in San José I sensed infallibly that I no longer had the strength, and that I was not going to pursue this project, nor any other. Nonetheless, things had followed their usual course, and waiting for me were about ten faxes from European producers, who wanted to know a bit more about it. My treatment kept itself to one sentence: “To bring together the commercial advantages of pornography and ultra-violence.” This was not a treatment, at most it was a pitch, but it was good, my agent had told me, lots of young producers proceeded like that today; I was, without knowing it, a modern professional. I had also been sent three DVDs from the main Spanish artistic agents; I had begun to prospect for potential actors, indicating that the film had a “possible sexual content.”

And so, that was how the greatest love affair of my life started: in a predictable, conventional, and even, if you like, vulgar way. I put a plate of Arroz Tres Delicias in the microwave, put a DVD at random into the player. As the meal heated up, I had the time to eliminate the first three girls. After two minutes, the machine beeped, I took the meal out of the oven, and added some Suzi Weng pepper purée; at the same time, on the giant screen at the back of the living room, Esther’s trailer was beginning.

I skipped rapidly over the first two scenes, taken from some sitcom and what was undoubtedly an even more mediocre police series; however, my attention had been attracted by something, I had my finger on the remote, and at the moment of the second change of scene I pressed immediately to return to normal speed.

She was naked, standing in a room that was difficult to make out—no doubt an artist’s atelier. In the first image, she was being splattered with a jet of yellow paint—the one who was throwing the paint was out of shot. Then you found her stretched out in the middle of a dazzling pool of yellow paint. The artist—you could see only his arms—was pouring a bucket of blue paint on her, then spreading it over her belly and breasts; she looked in his direction with trusting amusement. He guided her by taking her hand, she turned over on her front, he poured some more paint on the small of her back, spread it all over her back and her ass; her ass moved, accompanying the movement of the hands. There was in her face, in each of her gestures, a deeply moving innocence and sensual grace.

I knew the work of Yves Klein, I had done research since my meeting with Vincent, I knew that there was nothing original or interesting about this happening on an artistic level; but who still thinks of art when happiness is possible? I watched the clip ten times in a row: I had a hard-on, sure, but I think I understood a lot of things, as well, from those first minutes onward. I understood that I was going to love Esther, that I was going to love her violently, without caution or hope of return. I understood that this affair would be so strong that it might kill me, that it was even probable that it
was
going to kill me, as soon as Esther ceased loving me, because ultimately there are certain limits—however much any one of us might have a certain capacity for resistance, one always ends up dying of love, or rather of the absence of love, it’s inevitably fatal. Yes, a lot of things were already determined, from these first minutes on, the process was already up and running. I could still interrupt it, I could avoid meeting Esther, destroy this DVD, go traveling, very far away, but in actuality I called her agent the following day. Naturally, he was delighted, yes it’s possible, I think she’s doing nothing at the moment, you know better than me that the current situation is not easy, I think I’m right in saying we have never worked together, it will be a pleasure—
Two Flies Later
had undoubtedly had a certain impact, everywhere other than France; he spoke decent English, and in general Spain was modernizing surprisingly quickly.

Our first meeting took place in a bar in the Calle Obispo de León, a fairly big, fairly typical bar, with dark-wood paneling and tapas—I was rather grateful to her for not choosing a Planet Hollywood. I arrived ten minutes late, and from the moment she looked up at me there was immediately no longer any question of free will, we were already in the domain of the
given.
I sat down in front of her on the bench, experiencing something like the sensation I had had a few years previously when I went under general anesthetic: the impression of an easy, approved departure, the intuition that at the end of the day death would be a very simple thing. She was wearing tight, low-cut jeans, and a clinging pink top that left her shoulders uncovered. When she stood up to go and order, I caught sight of her thong, also pink, showing above her jeans, and I began to get hard. When she came back from the counter, I had a lot of difficulty taking my eyes off her belly button. She noticed this, smiled, and sat next to me on the bench. With her light blond hair and her very white skin, she did not really look like a typical Spanish girl—I would have rather said a Russian. She had pretty, attentive brown eyes, and I no longer really remember my first words but I think I indicated almost immediately that I was going to drop my film project. She looked surprised rather than really disappointed. She asked me why.

Basically I didn’t know, and I threw myself into quite a long explanation, which went back to when I was her age—her agent had already told me that she was twenty-two. It emerged from the story that I had led quite a sad and solitary life, marked by hard labor, and intercut with frequent periods of depression. Words came easily to me, I was speaking in English, and from time to time she had me repeat a sentence. All in all I was going to drop not just this film but almost everything, in conclusion I said I no longer felt the least ambition, or rage to win or anything of that kind, it seemed to me that at this point in my life I was truly tired.

She looked at me perplexed, as if the word seemed to her to be badly chosen. Yet that was it, perhaps in my case it was not a physical tiredness, rather a nervous one, but is there actually a difference? “I’ve lost faith…,” I said finally. “Maybe it’s better…,” she said; then she put a hand on my sex. Nuzzling her head in the hollow of my shoulder, she gently pressed my cock between her fingers.

In the hotel room, she told me a little more about her life. Certainly you could describe her as an actress, she had played in sitcoms and police series—where, generally, she was raped and strangled by more or less numerous psychopaths—and a few advertisements as well. She had even taken the starring role in a Spanish feature film, but it had not yet been released, and anyway it was a terrible film; Spanish cinema, she claimed, was on its last legs.

She could go abroad, I said; in France, for example, they still made films. Yes, but she didn’t know if she was a good actress, or, besides, whether she wanted to be an actress. In Spain she managed to work from time to time, thanks to her atypical physique; she was conscious of this blessing, and of its relative nature. Basically she considered her work as an actress to be nothing more than odd-jobbing, better paid than serving pizzas or distributing flyers for a disco night, but more difficult to find. Otherwise, she studied piano and philosophy. And, above all, she wanted to live.

Rather like the studies pursued by an accomplished young lady of the nineteenth century, I told myself mechanically as I unbuttoned her jeans. I have always had trouble with jeans, with their big metal buttons, and she had to help me. However, I immediately felt good inside her, I think that I had forgotten that it was so good. Or perhaps it had never been so good, perhaps I had never felt so much pleasure. At forty-seven; life is strange.

Esther lived alone with her sister, who was forty-four and had been more like a mother to her; her real mother was half insane. She did not know her father, even by name, she had never seen a photo of him, nothing.

Her skin was very soft.

Daniel25, 1

AT THE MOMENT
when the protective fence closed, the sun pierced between two clouds, and the whole of the residence was bathed in a blinding light. The paint on the outside walls contained a small quantity of slightly radioactive radium, which gave effective protection from the magnetic clouds, but increased the reflectivity of the buildings; the wearing of protective glasses, in the first days, was recommended.

Fox came toward me, weakly wagging his tail. Canine companions rarely survive the disappearance of the neohuman with whom they have spent their lives. Of course, they recognize the genetic identity of the successor, whose body odor is identical, but in the majority of cases this is not sufficient, they stop playing and eating and die quickly, in the space of a few weeks. I thus knew that the beginning of my effective existence would be marked by mourning; I also knew that this existence would unfold in a region distinguished by a large density of savages, where the instructions on protection should be rigorously followed; what’s more, I was prepared for the basic elements of a classical life.

What I did not know, however, and which I discovered on entering the office of my predecessor, was that Daniel24 had made some handwritten notes without reporting them to the IP address of his commentary—which was rather unusual. Most of them displayed a curious, disabused bitterness—like this one, scribbled on a page taken from a spiral-bound notebook:

Insects bang between the walls,

Limited to their tedious flight

Which carries no message other

Than the repetition of the worst.

Others seemed marked by a strangely human weariness, a sensation of vacuity:

For the past months, not the slightest inscription

And nothing in the world worthy of inscription.

In both cases, he had proceeded in uncoded mode. Without being directly prepared for this eventuality, I was not totally surprised: I knew that the line of Daniels had, since its founder, been predisposed to a certain form of doubt and self-deprecation. I was, however, shocked to discover this final note, which he had left on his bedside table, and which, given the state of the paper, had to be very recent:

Reading the Bible at the swimming pool

In a down-at-heel hotel,

Daniel! Your prophecies drain me

The sky has the color of drama.

The humorous levity, the self-irony—as well as, besides, the direct allusion to human elements of life—were here so marked that such a note could easily have been attributed to Daniel1, our distant ancestor, rather than to one of his neohuman successors. The conclusion was unavoidable: by plunging into the at once ridiculous and tragic biography of Daniel1, my predecessor had let himself be gradually impregnated by certain features of his personality; in a sense, this was exactly the goal sought by the Founders; but, contrary to the teachings of the Supreme Sister, he had not been able to keep a sufficient critical distance. The danger existed, it had been noted, and I felt prepared to face it; I knew above all that there was no other way out. If we wanted to prepare for the coming of the Future Ones, we had first to follow mankind in its weaknesses, its neuroses, its doubts; we had to make them entirely ours, in order to go beyond them. The rigorous duplication of the genetic code, meditation on the life story of the predecessor, the writing of the commentary: such were the three pillars of our faith, unchanged since the time of the Founders. Before preparing myself a light meal, I joined my hands for a short prayer to the Supreme Sister and I felt lucid, balanced, and active again.

Before falling asleep, I skimmed over the commentary of Marie22; I knew that I would soon get back in contact with Marie23. Fox stretched out beside me and sighed softly. He was going to die next to me, and he knew it; he was already an old dog now; he fell asleep almost immediately.

Daniel1, 13

IT WAS ANOTHER WORLD,
separated from the ordinary world by a few centimeters of fabric—indispensable social protection, since ninety percent of men who came across Belle would be seized by the immediate desire to penetrate her. Once her jeans were off, I played for a little while with her pink thong, noting that her sex quickly became moist; it was five in the afternoon. Yes, it was another world, and I stayed there until eleven the following morning—it was the cutoff point for breakfast, and I was beginning to get seriously hungry. I had probably slept, for brief periods. For the rest, those few hours justified my life. I was not exaggerating and I was conscious of not exaggerating: we were at that moment in the absolute simplicity of things. Sexuality, or more precisely desire, was of course a theme I had touched on many a time in my sketches; that many things in this world centered around sexuality, or more precisely desire, I was as conscious of as anyone else—and probably more so than many others. In these conditions, as an aging comedian, I had occasionally let myself be overcome by a sort of skeptical doubt: sexuality was perhaps, like so many other things and perhaps everything in this world,
overrated;
perhaps it was just a banal
ruse,
dreamed up to increase competition among men and the speed at which the whole system functioned. There was maybe nothing more to sexuality than there was in lunch at Taillevent, or in a Bentley Continental GT; nothing that justifies one getting that worked up.