The Possibility of an Island (18 page)

That night would show me that I was wrong, and bring me to a more elementary view of things. The following day, back at San José, I went down to the Playa de Monsul. Observing the sea, and the sun sinking into the sea, I wrote a poem. This fact was already curious in itself: not only had I never written poetry before, but I had practically never read any, with the exception of Baudelaire. Besides, poetry, as far as I knew, was dead. I quite regularly bought a quarterly literary review, of rather esoteric tendencies—without truly being part of the literary world, I occasionally felt close to it; after all, I did write my own sketches, and even if I aimed at nothing more than a rough parody of the “spoken word” I was conscious of how difficult the simple operation of aligning words and organizing them into sentences could be without the whole lot collapsing into incoherence, or sinking into tedium. In this review, two years earlier, I had read a long article devoted to the disappearance of poetry—a disappearance that the author judged inevitable. According to him, poetry, as noncontextual language, anterior to the objects-properties distinction, had definitively deserted the world of men. It was situated in a primitive elsewhere to which we would never again have access, because it came before the true formation of object and language. Unfit to transport information more precise than simple bodily or emotional sensations, and intrinsically linked to the magical state of the human mind, it had been rendered irredeemably obsolete by the appearance of reliable procedures of objective proof. I had been convinced by all this at the time, but that morning I hadn’t washed, I was still filled with the scent of Esther, and its savors (never with us had there been a question of using a condom, the subject had simply not been touched on, and I think she had never thought of it—I too hadn’t thought of it, and that was more surprising because my first sexual experiences had taken place at the time of AIDS, an AIDS that was then inevitably fatal, and this should have left its mark on me). Well, AIDS belonged no doubt to the domain of the contextual, that’s what you could say, and in any case I wrote my first poem, that morning, while I was still bathed in the scent of Esther. Here is that poem:

At heart I have always known

That I would find love

And that this would be

On the eve of my death.

I have always been confident,

I have not given up:

Long before your presence,

You were announced to me.

So you will be the one,

My real presence,

I will be in the joy

Of your nonfictional skin

So soft to the caress,

So light and so fine,

Entity nondivine,

Animal of tenderness.

At the end of that night, the sun had returned to Madrid. I called a taxi and waited a few minutes in the hotel lobby with Esther while she replied to the many messages that had accumulated on her cell phone. She had already made numerous calls during the night, and she seemed to have a very rich social life; most of her conversations ended with the expression
un besito,
or sometimes
un beso.
I didn’t really speak Spanish, the nuance, if there was one, escaped me, but I became conscious, at the moment when the taxi stopped in front of the hotel, that in practice she did not kiss much. It was quite curious because, by contrast, she liked penetration in all its forms, she presented her ass with a lot of grace (she had pert buttocks rather like those of a boy), and she sucked without hesitation and even with enthusiasm; but every time my lips approached hers she turned away, a little annoyed.

I put my travel bag in the trunk; she offered me a cheek, there were two quick kisses, then I got into the car. While moving off down the avenue, a few meters further on, I turned around to wave good-bye; but she was already on the phone, and did not notice my gesture.

As soon as I arrived at the Almería airport I understood how my life was going to be over the following weeks. For some years already, I had left my cell phone almost systematically off: it was a question of status; I was a European star; if people wanted to contact me they had to leave a message, and wait for me to reply. This had sometimes been hard, but I had stuck to my rule, and over the years I had been proven right: producers left messages; well-known actors, newspaper editors, they all left messages; I was at the top of the pyramid, and I intended to stay there, at least for a few years, until I officially retired from the stage. This time my first action, on getting off the plane, was to switch on my cell phone; I was surprised, and almost terrified, by the violence of the disappointment that seized me when I saw that I had no message from Esther.

Your only chance of survival, if you are sincerely smitten, lies in hiding this fact from the woman you love, of feigning a casual detachment under all circumstances. What sadness there is in this simple observation! What an accusation against man! However, it had never occurred to me to contest this law, nor to imagine disobeying it: love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed, tortured, and finally killed by the other, who in his or her turn oppresses, tortures, and kills without having evil intentions, without even getting pleasure from it, with complete indifference; that’s what men, normally, call love. During the first few days I went through great moments of hesitation regarding this phone. I walked up and down the rooms, lighting cigarette after cigarette, from time to time I walked to the sea, turned back, and realized that I had not seen the sea, that I would have been incapable of confirming its presence in that minute—during these walks, I forced myself to separate myself from my phone, to leave it on my bedside table, and more generally I forced myself to respect an interval of two hours before switching it back on, and seeing once again that she hadn’t left any message. On the morning of the third day I had the idea of leaving my telephone on permanently, and of trying to forget to wait for the ring; in the middle of the night, on swallowing my fifth Mepronizine tablet, I realized that this didn’t serve any purpose, and I began to resign myself to the fact that Esther was the stronger, and that I no longer had any power over my own life.

On the evening of the fifth day, I called her. She didn’t seem at all surprised to hear from me, time seemed to her to have passed very quickly. She happily agreed to come and visit me in San José; she knew the province of Almería, having vacationed there several times as a small girl; for the last few years she had been going instead to Ibiza or Formentera. She could spend a weekend, not the next one, but in a fortnight; I took a deep breath so as not to show my disappointment.
“Un besito,”
she said just before hanging up. We had stepped up another gear.

Daniel25, 2

TWO WEEKS AFTER
my arrival, Fox died, just after sunset. I was stretched out on the bed when he approached and tried painfully to jump up; he wagged his tail nervously. Since the beginning, he hadn’t touched his bowl once; he had lost a lot of weight. I helped him to settle on my lap; for a few seconds, he looked at me, with a curious mixture of exhaustion and apology; then, calmed, he closed his eyes. Two minutes later, he gave out his last breath. I buried him inside the residence at the western extremity of the land surrounded by the protective fence, next to his predecessors. During the night, a rapid transport from the Central City dropped off an identical dog; they knew the codes and how to work the barrier, I didn’t have to get up to greet them. A small white-and-ginger mongrel came toward me wagging its tail. I gestured to him. He jumped on the bed and stretched out beside me.

Love is simple to define, but it seldom happens—in the series of beings. Through these dogs we pay homage to love, and to its possibility. What is a dog but a machine for loving? You introduce him to a human being, giving him the mission to love—and however ugly, perverse, deformed, or stupid this human being might be, the dog loves him. This characteristic was so surprising, so striking for the humans of the previous race that most of them—all testimonies agree on this point—came to love the dog back. The dog was therefore a machine for loving, which could also train others to love—its efficiency, however, remained limited to dogs, and never extended to other men.

No subject is more touched on than love, in the human life stories as well as in the literary corpus they have left us; homosexual love like heterosexual love is touched on, without us being able, up until now, to uncover any significant difference; no subject, either, is as discussed, as controversial, especially during the final period of human history, when the cyclothymic fluctuations concerning belief in love became constant and dizzying. In conclusion, no subject seems to have preoccupied man as much; even money, even the satisfaction derived from combat and glory, loses, by comparison, its dramatic power in human life stories. Love seems to have been, for humans of the final period, the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated. The life story of Daniel1, turbulent, painful, as often unreservedly sentimental as frankly cynical, and contradictory from all points of view, is in this regard characteristic.

Daniel1, 14

I ALMOST RENTED ANOTHER CAR
to go and fetch Esther from the Almería airport; I was afraid she would get an unfavorable impression from the Mercedes 600 SL coupe, but also from the swimming pool, the Jacuzzis, and more generally the display of luxury that characterized my life. I was mistaken: Esther was a realist; she knew that I had had some success and therefore expected, logically, that I would live in fine style; she knew all kinds of people, some very rich, others very poor, and found nothing remarkable in it; she accepted this inequality, like all the others, with a perfect straightforwardness. My generation was still scarred by different debates around the question of which economic regime one should wish for, debates that always concluded with agreement about the superiority of the market economy—with the sledgehammer argument that populations on which another mode of organization had been imposed had zealously and even petulantly rejected it, as soon as they had the chance to. In Esther’s generation, those debates themselves had disappeared; capitalism was for her a natural habitat, in which she moved with the grace that characterized all the actions in her life; to strike in protest of planned redundancies would have seemed to her as absurd as striking against the weather getting colder, or the invasion of North Africa by crickets. The idea of any form of collective demand was generally foreign to her; it had always seemed obvious to her that, on the financial level as for all the essential questions of life, everyone had to look after themselves, and sail their own ships without relying on help from anyone else. No doubt in order to toughen herself up, she felt compelled to exercise strict financial independence, and although her sister had quite a lot of money, she had, since the age of fifteen, insisted on earning her pocket money herself, buying her own discs and clothes, even if it meant she had to do tedious jobs like distributing brochures or delivering pizzas. She didn’t, however, go as far as offering to pay her share in restaurants, or anything like that; but I sensed from the beginning that giving her too sumptuous a gift would have unsettled her, it would have been a slight threat to her independence.

She arrived dressed in a turquoise pleated miniskirt and a Betty Boop T-shirt. In the airport parking lot, I tried to take her in my arms; she quickly moved away, looking flustered. At the moment when she put her suitcase in the trunk, a gust of wind lifted her skirt, and I got the impression that she wasn’t wearing anything beneath it. Once I was in front of the wheel, I asked her the question. She nodded with a smile, hitched her skirt up to her waist, and parted her thighs a little: the hairs of her pussy formed a small, well-trimmed blond rectangle.

As I fired the ignition; she pulled her skirt back down: I now knew that she wasn’t wearing any panties, the desired effect had been produced, it was enough. We arrived at the residence, and as I was taking her suitcase from the trunk, she went ahead of me up the few steps leading to the entrance; as I made out the lower curves of her little ass I grew dizzy and almost ejaculated in my trousers. I caught up with her, and embraced her tightly. “Open the door…,” she said, rubbing her ass distractedly against my cock. I obeyed, but we were scarcely inside when I pressed against her again; she knelt down on a little rug nearby, putting her hands on the floor. I opened my fly and penetrated her, but unfortunately the car ride had so excited me that I came almost at once; she seemed a little disappointed, but not too much. She wanted to change and have a bath.

If Stendhal’s famous saying, which was also appreciated by Nietzsche, that beauty is a promise of happiness, is in general completely false, it can, however, be applied perfectly to eroticism. Esther was ravishing, but so was Isabelle, in her youth she was probably even more beautiful; Esther, on the other hand, was more erotic, she was incredibly, deliciously erotic, and I became conscious of it again when she came back from the bathroom: immediately after slipping on a large pullover she pulled it down slightly to reveal the straps of her bra, then she readjusted her thong so that it showed above her jeans; she did all these little gestures automatically, without even thinking, with irresistible naturalness and candor.