The Possibility of an Island (30 page)

This great diversity of points of view within the triumvirate of the founders certainly played a big role, as has already been emphasized, in the complementary operations that they were able to establish, and in the stunning success of Elohimism in the few years that followed Vincent’s “resurrection.” Moreover, it makes the correlation of their testimonies all the more striking.

Daniel1, 18

The complication of the world is unjustified.

—Yves Roissy, reply to Marcel Fréthrez

AFTER THE EXTREME TENSION
of the days preceding the resurrection of the prophet in the form of Vincent, after the acme of his media appearance, at the entrance of the cave, in the rays of the setting sun, I am now left with a vague, almost joyful, memory of the days that followed. Cop and Knowall rapidly defined the limits of their respective operations; I realized at once that they would keep to them, and that if no sympathy could emerge between them, they nevertheless functioned efficiently in tandem, for they needed one another, knew it, and shared the same taste for flawless organization.

After the first evening, Knowall had definitively forbidden journalists access to the grounds, and had, in Vincent’s name, refused all interviews; he had even asked for a ban on flyovers—which was immediately granted him by the chief of police, whose aim was to try and calm, as much as possible, the prevailing agitation. By proceeding in this way, Knowall had no specific intention, other than to make it known to the world media that he was in charge of information, that he was at the source of it, and that nothing could happen without his authorization. The journalists, after having camped unsuccessfully in front of the entrance to the grounds, therefore departed, in smaller and smaller groups, and, by the end of the week, we were alone again. Vincent seemed to have moved definitively into a new reality, and we had no more contact; once, however, on passing by me on the rocky slope that led to our former cells, he invited me to come and see how advanced the plans for the embassy were. I followed him into an underground, white-walled room, lined with loudspeakers and video projectors, then he activated the “slideshow” program on the computer. It wasn’t an embassy, and there weren’t really any plans. I had the impression of crossing immense curtains of light, which appeared, formed, and vanished all around me. Sometimes I found myself among small sparkling, pretty objects, which surrounded me with a friendly presence; then an immense wave of light swallowed everything, and gave birth to a new decor. We were entirely in whiteness, from the crystalline to the milky, from the dull to the dazzling; this bore no relation to any possible reality, but it was beautiful. I told myself that this was perhaps the true nature of art, to show us dreamed-of worlds, impossible worlds, and that it was a thing I had never come close to, that I had never felt myself capable of; I also understood that irony, comedy, and humor were going to have to die, for the world to come was the world of happiness, and there would no longer be any place for them there.

Vincent had nothing of the dominant male about him, he had no taste for harems, and a few days after the death of the prophet he had had a long conversation with Susan, following which he had given the other girls back their freedom. I do not know what they had been able to say to one another, I don’t know what she believed, if she saw in him the reincarnation of the prophet, if she had recognized him as Vincent, if he had confessed to her that he was the prophet’s son, or if she had fabricated any in-between conceptions; but I think that for her all this would have been of little importance. Incapable of relativism, and basically quite indifferent to the question of truth, Susan could only live by being entirely in love. Having found a new being to love, perhaps having loved him for a long time already, she had found a new reason for living, and I knew without any danger of being mistaken that they would stay together to the end, until death did them part, as they say, except that perhaps this time death would not occur, Miskiewicz would succeed in reaching his goals, they would be reborn together in renewed bodies, and perhaps, for the first time in the history of the world, they would effectively live a love without end. It’s not weariness that puts an end to love, or rather it’s a weariness that is born of impatience, of the impatience of bodies who know they are condemned and want to live, who want, in the lapse of time granted them, to not pass up any chance, to miss no possibility, who want to use to the utmost that limited, declining, and mediocre lifetime that is theirs, and who consequently cannot love
anyone,
as all others appear limited, declining, and mediocre to them.

Despite this new orientation toward monogamy—an implicit orientation, moreover, Vincent had given no directive, the choice he had made of Susan alone was a purely individual choice—the week following the “resurrection” was marked by a more intense, more liberated, and more varied sexual activity, I even heard of some genuine orgies. The couples in the center did not, however, seem to suffer from this, no break in conjugal relations was observed, nor even a fight. Perhaps the closer prospect of immortality had given some substance to that notion of
nonpossessive love
that the prophet had preached throughout his life without ever having managed to convince anyone; I think above all that the disappearance of his crushing male presence had liberated the followers, and given them a desire to experience some lighter and more ludic moments.

What awaited me back in my own life had little chance of being as much fun, I could sense it more and more clearly. It was only on the eve of my departure that I managed, at last, to speak to Esther: she explained to me that she had been very busy, that she had been given the main part in a short film, that it had been a stroke of luck, she had been taken on at the last moment, and that the filming had started just after her exams—which she had, incidentally, passed with flying colors; in short, she spoke only about herself. She was, however, aware of the events in Lanzarote and knew that I had been an eyewitness.
“Que fuerte!”
she exclaimed, which seemed a pretty thin comment; I realized then that with her, too, I would keep my silence, and that I would stick to the widely held version of a probable scam, without ever indicating I had been involved up to that point in the events, and that Vincent was the only person in the world with whom, perhaps, I might one day have the chance to speak of them. I then understood why the éminences grises, and even the simple witnesses of a historical event whose underlying causes have remained unknown to the general public, feel at some point or another the need to ease their consciences, and to put down on paper what they know.

The next day, Vincent accompanied me to the Arrecife airport, he drove the four-wheel drive himself. When we were driving again along that strange beach, its black sand scattered with little white pebbles, I tried to explain this need I felt for a written confession. He listened to me carefully, and after parking just in front of the departure hall, as we smoked, he told me he understood, and gave me permission to write down what I had seen. It was simply necessary that the story be published only after my death, or at least that I would wait before publishing it, or indeed before having it read by anyone, for formal permission from the ruling council of the Church—that is to say the triumvirate he formed with Knowall and Cop. Apart from these conditions, which I accepted easily—and I knew he trusted me—I felt he was pensive, as though my request had just thrown him into vague reflections that he was having difficulty disentangling.

We waited for my boarding call in a hall with immense bay windows, overlooking the runways. The volcanoes could be clearly seen in the distance, presences that were familiar and even reassuring under a dark blue sky. I sensed that Vincent would have liked to make his farewell warmer, from time to time he pressed my arm, or took me by the shoulders; but he couldn’t really find the right words, and didn’t really know how to make the right gestures. That very evening, a sample of my DNA had been taken, and I was, therefore, officially part of the Church. Just as an air hostess announced the boarding for the flight to Madrid, I said to myself that this island, with its temperate stable climate, where sunshine and temperature experienced only minimal variations throughout the year, was truly the ideal place to attain eternal life.

Daniel25, 7

IN FACT,
Vincent1 informs us that it was following this conversation with Daniel1 in the parking lot of the Arrecife airport that he had for the first time the idea of the
life story,
which would be introduced first as an annex, a simple palliative while the research of Slotan1 on the cabling of memory networks progressed, but which would assume such great importance following the logical conceptualizations by Pierce.

Daniel1, 19

I HAD TWO HOURS TO WAIT
in the Madrid airport for the flight to Almería; these two hours were sufficient to sweep away the state of abstract strangeness in which the time with the Elohimites had left me and plunge me back completely into misery, like venturing, step by step, into ice-cold water; as I got on the plane, in spite of the warmth, I was already literally trembling with anxiety. Esther knew I was leaving that very day, and it had taken an enormous effort not to confess to her that I had a two-hour wait at the Madrid airport—the prospect of hearing her tell me that two hours was too short for her to bother making the journey there and back in a taxi, etc., being almost unbearable. Nevertheless, during those two hours, wandering between the CD shops, which were shamelessly promoting the new disc from David Bisbal (Esther had figured, scantily clad, in one of the singer’s recent videos), the Punta de Fumadores, and the Jennyfer clothes shops, I had the increasingly unbearable sensation that I could see her young body, eroticized in a summer dress, crossing the city streets, a few kilometers away, beneath the admiring gazes of boys. I stopped at Tap Tap Tapas and ordered some disgusting sausages, swimming in an incredibly greasy sauce, which I washed down with several beers; I could feel my stomach swell, filling with shit, and the idea crossed my mind of consciously accelerating the process of destruction, of becoming old, repellent, and obese to better feel definitively unworthy of Esther’s body. Just as I started on my fourth glass of Mahou, a song began playing on the bar radio, I did not know the singer but it wasn’t David Bisbal, rather a traditional Latino, with those attempts at vibrato that the young Spaniards now found ridiculous, essentially a singer for housewives rather than a singer for babes, still the refrain was:
“Mujer es fatal,”
and I realized that I had never heard this simple and silly thing expressed so accurately, and that poetry when it achieved simplicity was a great thing, undoubtedly
the
big thing.
The word “fatal” in Spanish fitted perfectly, I could see no other that could have better described my situation, it was hell, genuine hell, I had returned to the trap myself, I had wanted to return to it but I didn’t know how to get out and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to, my soul, inasmuch as I had one, was growing more and more confused, and my body, because whatever else was true I had a body, was suffering, ravaged by desire.

Back in San José I went to bed immediately, after taking a massive dose of sleeping pills. Over the following days, I just wandered from room to room in the residence; it’s true, I was immortal but for the moment that didn’t change much, Esther still didn’t call, and that was the only thing that seemed important to me. Listening by chance to a cultural program on Spanish television (it was more than by chance; it was a miracle, for cultural programs are rare on Spanish television, the Spaniards don’t like cultural programs at all, nor culture in general, it’s an area that is fundamentally hostile to them, one occasionally has the impression when talking about culture to them that they are sort of personally insulted), I learned that the last words of Immanuel Kant, on his deathbed, had been: “That’s enough.” Immediately I had a painful fit of laughter, accompanied by stomach pangs that went on for three days, at the end of which I began to vomit bile. I called a doctor, who diagnosed poisoning, asked me what I had eaten in the last few days, and recommended that I buy some dairy products. I bought some dairy products, and that evening returned to the Diamond Nights Bar, which I had remembered as being an honest establishment, where you were not pushed to consume excessively. There were about thirty girls around the bar, but only two male customers. I opted for a Moroccan girl who could have been only seventeen; her big breasts were finely displayed by her décolleté, and I really thought that things were going to go well, but once we were in the bedroom I had to face up to the fact that I wasn’t hard enough for her to put a condom on me, under these conditions she refused to suck me off, and so what could we do? She ended up tossing me off, staring obstinately into a corner of the room, she was doing it too hard, it hurt. After a minute there was a small translucent spurt, and she immediately let go of my cock; I pulled my trousers back up before going for a piss.

The following morning, I received a fax from the producer of
Diogenes the Cynic.
He had heard that I was giving up the “Highway Swingers” project, he thought it was a real pity; he felt ready to take on the production if I agreed to write the script. He happened to be passing through Madrid the following week, he proposed we meet to talk about it.

I wasn’t really in regular contact with this guy, in fact I hadn’t seen him for more than five years. On entering the café, I realized that I had completely forgotten what he looked like; I sat at the nearest table and ordered a beer. Two minutes later a man of about forty, with curly hair, dressed in an extraordinary khaki hunting jacket with lots of pockets, stopped in front of my table, smiling widely and holding a glass. He was badly shaven, his face oozed sleaziness, and I still didn’t recognize him; despite all this, I invited him to sit down. My agent had made him read my treatment and the pre-credits sequence I had developed, he said; he found the project exceptionally interesting. I nodded mechanically while looking out of the corner of my eye at my cell phone; when I arrived at the airport, I had left a message for Esther telling her I was in Madrid. She called me back at an opportune moment, just as I was beginning to get tangled up in my contradictions, and promised to come by in ten minutes’ time. I looked up again at the producer, I still couldn’t remember his name but I realized I didn’t like him, nor did I like his view of mankind, and more generally I wanted nothing to do with this guy. He was now suggesting that we collaborate on the script; I flinched at this idea. He noticed and backpedaled, assured me I could absolutely work alone if I preferred, that he had complete trust in me. I had no desire to throw myself into that stupid script, I just wanted to live, to live again a little bit, if such a thing was possible, but I couldn’t talk to him about this openly, after all he was a spiteful gossip, the news wouldn’t take long to do the rounds in the business, and for obscure reasons—maybe simply through fatigue—it still seemed necessary for me to put people off the scent for a few months. In order to keep the conversation going I told him the story of that German who had eaten another German he had met on the Internet. First he had cut off his penis, then had fried it, with onions, and they had eaten it together. Then he had killed him before cutting him up into pieces, which he then stocked in his freezer. From time to time, he would take out a piece, defrost it, and cook it, using a different recipe for each occasion. The moment of common manducation of the penis had been an intense religious experience, of real communion between him and his victim, he had stated to the investigators. The producer listened to me with a smile that was both silly and cruel, probably imagining that I intended to integrate these elements into my work in progress, delighting already at the repellent images he would be able to extract from it. Fortunately, Esther arrived, all smiles, her pleated summer skirt twirling around her thighs, and threw herself into my arms with an enthusiasm that made me forget everything. She sat down and ordered a mint diabolo, waiting politely for our conversation to end. From time to time the producer sent her appreciative looks—she had put her feet up on the chair in front of her, parted her legs, she wasn’t wearing any panties, and all this seemed natural and logical, a simple consequence of the prevailing temperature, I expected her at any moment to wipe her pussy with one of the bar’s paper napkins. Finally he took his leave and we promised to stay in contact. Ten minutes later I was inside her, and I felt good. The miracle happened again, as strongly as on the first day, and I believed again, for the last time, that it was going to last for eternity.