The Possibility of an Island (32 page)

This peaceful, almost disengaged, conversation did me an immense amount of good, and for the first time I began to think of my own immortality, to look at things in a slightly more open manner; but back in my room I found a message on my cell phone from Esther, which simply said: “I miss you,” and I felt all over again, encrusted in my flesh, my need for her. Joy is such a rare thing. The following morning, I took the plane back to Madrid.

Daniel25, 8

THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE
accorded to sexual matters among humans has always plunged their neohuman commentators into horrified amazement. It was nonetheless painful to see Daniel1 gradually come closer to the
Evil Secret,
as the Supreme Sister calls it; it was painful to feel him gradually overcome by the consciousness of a truth that, once revealed, could only annihilate him. Throughout history, most men have deemed it correct, at a certain point in life, to allude to sexual problems as though they were just trivial childish games, and to assume that the real subjects, the subjects worthy of a man’s attention, were politics, business, or war, etc. The truth, in Daniel1’s time, began to be unearthed; it became more and more clear, and more and more difficult to hide, that the true goals of men, the only ones they would have pursued spontaneously if it were still possible for them to do so, were of an exclusively sexual nature. For us neohumans it is a genuine stumbling block. We can never, the Supreme Sister warns us, get a clear enough idea of it; we will only ever be able to approach an understanding of it by constantly keeping in mind certain regulatory ideas, the most important of which is that in the human species, as in all the animal species that preceded it, individual survival counted for absolutely nothing. The Darwinian fiction of the “struggle for life” had long hidden this elementary fact that the genetic value of an individual, his power to pass on his characteristics to his descendants, could be summed up, very brutally, by a single parameter: the number of descendants that he was, in the end, capable of procreating. Thus it was completely unsurprising that an animal, any animal, was prepared to sacrifice its happiness, its physical well-being, and even its life, in the hope of sexual intercourse alone: the will of the species (to speak in finalist terms), a powerfully regulated hormonal system (if you hold to a determinist approach), led them almost inevitably to this choice. The marvelous finery and plumage, the noisy and spectacular parades could easily result in the male animals being spotted and devoured by their predators; such a solution was no less systematically favored, in genetic terms, as long as it permitted more effective reproduction. This subordination of the individual to the species, based on immutable biochemical mechanisms, was just as strong in the human animal, with the added aggravation that their sexual drives, not limited to the rutting period, could operate permanently—human life stories show us, for example, evidence that maintaining a physical appearance capable of seducing representatives of the opposite sex was the only reason for staying healthy, and that the meticulous care of their bodies, to which Daniel1’s contemporaries devoted an increasing proportion of their free time, had no other aim.

The sexual biochemistry of the neohumans—and this was undoubtedly the real reason for the sensation of suffocation and malaise that overcame me as I advanced through Daniel1’s story, as I followed the stations of his calvary—had remained almost identical.

Daniel1, 20

Nothingness turns to nothing.

—Martin Heidegger

A ZONE OF HIGH PRESSURE
had settled, since the start of August, on the central plain, and from the moment of my arrival at the Barajas airport I sensed that things were going to turn out badly. The heat was almost unbearable and Esther was late; she arrived half an hour later, naked under her summer dress.

I had left my coitus cream at the Lutétia, and this was my first mistake; I came much too quickly, and, for the first time, I sensed she was a little disappointed. She continued to move, a little, on my sex, which was becoming irredeemably soft, then moved aside with a resigned grimace. I would have given a great deal to get another hard-on; from the moment they are born, men live in a difficult world, a world where the stakes are simplistic and pitiless, and without the understanding of women there are very few who manage to survive. It seemed to me that I understood, from that moment onward, that she had slept with someone else in my absence.

We took the Metro to have a drink with two of her friends; sweat made the fabric cling to her body, it was easy to make out the areolas of her breasts, the outline of her ass; all the boys in the compartment, obviously, stared at her; some even smiled at her.

I found it very difficult to take part in the conversation, from time to time I managed to catch a sentence, to offer a few replies, but very soon I was out of my depth and, besides, I was thinking of something else, I felt like I was on a slippery, a very slippery slope. On our return to the hotel, I asked her the question; she acknowledged it without making any excuses. “It was an ex-boyfriend…,” she said, in English, as if to convey that it wasn’t very important. “And a friend of his,” she added after a few seconds’ hesitation.

So two boys; oh yes, two boys, after all it wasn’t the first time. She had met her ex by chance in a bar, he was with one of his friends, one thing led to another, and so, in short, the three of them ended up in the same bed. I asked her how it had been, I couldn’t stop myself. “Good…good…,” she told me, slightly worried by the direction the conversation was taking. “It was…comfortable,” she added, without being able to repress a smile. Yes, comfortable; I could imagine. It took a terrible effort to ask her if she had sucked him off, him, his friend, both of them, if she had been sodomized. I felt the images flood my brain, this must have been obvious because she stopped talking and her forehead became more and more creased with concern. Very quickly she made the only decision possible, to take care of my sex, and she did it with such tenderness, such skill, with her fingers and her mouth, that against all expectation I began to get hard again, and a minute later I was inside her, and it was good, it was good again, I was completely in the moment and so was she, I even believe that she hadn’t felt such pleasure in a long time—with me at least, I told myself a couple of minutes later, but this time I managed to chase the thought from my mind, and I held her very tenderly in my arms, with all the tenderness I was capable of, and I concentrated with all my strength on her body, on the actual, warm, living presence of her body.

This little scene, so sweet, so unobtrusive and implicit, had, I now think, a decisive influence on Esther, and her behavior in the following weeks was guided by only one thought: to avoid hurting me; to try, even, with all the means at her disposal, to make me happy. The means available to her for making a man happy were considerable, and I have the memory of a period of immense joy, irradiated at every moment by a carnal felicity, a felicity I would not have believed could be bearable, nor believed myself capable of surviving. I also retain the memory of her kindness, her intelligence, her compassionate insight, and her grace, but, basically, I don’t really have what you’d call a memory, or any clear image, I only know that I lived for at least a few days and doubtless a few weeks in a certain
state,
a state of perfection that was sufficient and complete, yet human, of which some men have occasionally sensed the possibility, even though none until now have been able to provide a plausible description of it.

For a long time she had been planning a party for her birthday on August 17, and she began over the following days to occupy herself with its preparations. She wanted to invite quite a lot of people, about a hundred, and decided to call upon the help of a friend who lived in the Calle San Isidor. He had a big loft on the top floor, with a terrace and a swimming pool; he invited us to talk about it over a drink. He was a big guy called Pablo, with long curly black hair, rather cool; he had slipped on a light dressing gown to let us in, but took it off once he was on the terrace; his naked body was muscled and tanned. He offered us orange juice. Had he slept with Esther? And was I going to ask myself this question, from now on, of all the men I happened to come across? She was attentive, on her guard since the evening of my return; probably spotting a glimmer of concern in my eyes, she turned down the proposition of a little sunbathing by the pool and tried to limit the conversation to the party preparations. There was no question of buying enough cocaine and Ecstasy for everyone; she offered to cover the purchase of a first bag to start the evening, and to ask the dealers to stop by later. Pablo could look after that, he had excellent dealers at the time; he even proposed, in a burst of generosity, to take care of the purchase of some poppers.

On August 15, the day of the Virgin, Esther made love to me with even more lasciviousness than usual. We were in the Hotel Sanz, the bed faced a big mirror, and it was so hot that each movement made us sweat profusely; I had my arms and legs crossed, I no longer felt I had the strength to move, all my senses were concentrated in my sex. For more than an hour she straddled me, going up and down my cock, around which she contracted and relaxed her just-waxed little pussy. Throughout all this time she caressed her breasts (which gleamed with sweat) with one hand, while looking me in the eye, smiling and deep in concentration, attentive to all the variations of my pleasure. Her free hand was closed around my balls, which she sometimes pressed gently, sometimes hard, to the rhythm of the movement of her pussy. When she felt me coming she suddenly stopped and pressed sharply with two fingers to stop the ejaculation at its source; then, when the danger had passed, she began to move back and forth again. Thus I spent an hour, perhaps two, on the brink of exploding, at the heart of the greatest joy a man can know, and in the end it was me who asked for mercy, who wished to come in her mouth. She got up, placed a pillow under my backside, and asked if I could see the mirror okay; no, it was better to move a little. I moved to the edge of the bed. She knelt between my thighs, her face level with my sex, which she began to lick methodically, centimeter by centimeter, before closing her lips around my glans; then her hands went into action and she jerked me off slowly, forcefully, as if extracting each drop of sperm from the depths of me, while her tongue made rapid movements to and fro. My vision clouded by sweat, having lost all clear notion of space and time, I nevertheless managed to prolong this moment a little, and her tongue had enough time to effect three complete rotations before I came, and it was then as if my whole body, irradiated by pleasure, vanished, sucked in by nothingness, in a release of blessed energy. She kept me in her mouth, almost immobile, sucking my sex slowly, closing her eyes as if to hear more clearly my screams of happiness.

Then she lay down and snuggled in my arms, as night fell rapidly on Madrid, and it was only after half an hour of tender immobility that she told me she had had, for a few weeks now, something to tell me—no one knew about it yet except her sister, she intended to announce it to her friends at the birthday party. She had been accepted by a prestigious piano academy in New York and intended to spend at least the academic year there. At the same time, she had been chosen for a small role in a big Hollywood production about the death of Socrates; she would play a servant of Aphrodite, the part of Socrates would be taken by Robert De Niro. It was only a small part, not more than a week’s filming, but it was Hollywood, and the fee was enough to pay for a year’s study and maintenance. She would leave at the beginning of September.

It seems to me that I stayed totally silent. I was turned to stone, unable to react, I felt that if I uttered a word I would burst into sobs. “
Bueno
…It’s a big chance in my life…,” she concluded by saying plaintively, pressing her head against my shoulder. I almost suggested I go to the United States, to settle there with her, but the words died in me before I could utter them, I fully realized that she had not even imagined this possibility. Nor did she suggest that I visit her: this was a new period in her life, a new departure. I switched on the bedside lamp, and looked at her closely to see if I could make out any trace of fascination with America, with Hollywood, in her; no, there was none, she seemed lucid and calm, she was simply making the best, most rational decision given the circumstances. Surprised by my lengthy silence she turned to look at me, her long blond hair fell down on each side of her face, my eyes settled involuntarily on her breasts, I stretched out, switched off the lamp, breathed deeply, I didn’t want to make things more difficult, I didn’t want her to see me cry.