The Possibility of an Island (4 page)

“Isabelle,” I said into her ear. “I would like you to tell me how you came to work for this magazine.”

“It’s been hardly a year,
Lolita
is only at issue fourteen. I stayed a very long time at
20 Ans,
I occupied all the posts; Evelyne, the editor-in-chief, relied completely upon me. At the end, just before the magazine was bought up, she made me assistant editor-in-chief; it was the least she could do; for ten years I had been doing all the work in her place. That didn’t stop her hating me; I remember the hatred in her eyes when she handed me Lajoinie’s invitation. You know who Lajoinie is, does that ring any bells?”

“Vaguely something…”

“Yes, he’s not that well known to the general public. He was a shareholder of
20 Ans,
a minority shareholder, but he is the one who pushed for the sale; an Italian group bought it. Obviously, Evelyne was fired; the Italians were prepared to keep me, but Lajoinie inviting me to brunch at his house on a Sunday morning could only mean he had something else in mind for me; Evelyne could sense this, of course, and that’s what made her mad with rage. He was living in Le Marais, just by the Place des Vosges. Still, when I arrived, I was shocked: there was Karl Lagerfeld, Naomi Campbell, Tom Cruise, Jade Jagger, Björk…in other words, not the type of people I was used to meeting.”

“Wasn’t he the one who created that gay magazine that’s doing very well?”

“Not exactly. At the beginning,
GQ
was not targeted at gays, rather it was
ironically macho:
bimbos, motors, a bit of military news; it’s true that after six months they noticed that loads of gays were buying it, but it was a surprise, I don’t think they’ve ever really understood the phenomenon. Anyway, shortly afterward he sold up, and it’s that which greatly impressed those in the trade: he sold
GQ
when it was at the top, and when many had thought it could go even higher, and he launched
21.
Since then,
GQ
has collapsed, I think they’ve lost forty percent in terms of national sales, and
21
has become the first monthly for men—they’ve just overtaken
Le Chasseur Français.
Their formula is very simple: strictly metrosexual. Fitness, beauty care, trends. Not a hint of culture, not an ounce of current affairs, no humor. In short, I had no idea what he was going to propose to me. He greeted me very nicely, introduced me to everyone, and sat me down in front of him. ‘I have a lot of respect for Evelyne…,’ he began. I tried not to lose my cool: no one could have respect for Evelyne—that old alcoholic could inspire contempt, compassion, disgust, and all sorts of other things, but never respect. Later I would become aware of his methods for managing personnel: speak ill of no one, under no circumstances, ever; on the contrary, always shower other people with praise, however undeserved—without, obviously, omitting to fire them at the appropriate moment. All the same, I was a bit annoyed, and I tried to divert the conversation to
21.

“‘We mu-st’—he spoke bizarrely, detaching each syllable, almost like he was speaking in a foreign language—‘my coll-eagues are, it is my im-pre-ssion, much too pre-occ-u-pied by the Am-er-i-can press. We re-main Eur-o-pe-ans…Our ref-er-ence point, is what happ-ens in En-gland…’

“All right,
21
was obviously copied from an English format, but so was
GQ;
that did not explain why he’d felt he had to move from one to the other. Had there been studies done in England, a shift in readership?

“‘Not to my know-ledge…You are very pretty…,’ he continued, without any apparent connection to what he’d said before. ‘You could be more me-di-a friend-ly…’

“I was sitting right next to Karl Lagerfeld, who was eating constantly: he used his bare hands to serve himself from a plate of salmon, dipped the pieces in the cream-and-dill sauce, and stuffed them down. From time to time, Tom Cruise threw him distraught looks. Björk, on the other hand, seemed absolutely fascinated—it has to be said that, although she always tried to play with the poetry of the sagas, Icelandic energy, etc., she was in fact conventional and mannered to the extreme; she must have been fascinated to find herself in the presence of a real savage. I suddenly realized that you needed only to take off the couturier’s frilly shirt, his tie and silk-lined smoking jacket, and cover him with animal skins: he would have been perfect in the role of a primitive Teuton. He speared a boiled potato and smothered it with caviar, before saying to me: ‘You must be media friendly, even if it’s just a little bit. I, for example, am
very
media friendly. I am a big cheese in the media.’ I think he must have just given up on his second diet—in any case, he had already written a book on the first one.

“Someone put on some music, the crowd stirred slightly, and I think Naomi Campbell began to dance. I continued to stare at Lajoinie, waiting for his proposal. In despair, I started a conversation with Jade Jagger, we must have talked about Formentera or something of that kind, an easy subject, but she made a good impression on me, she was an intelligent girl, without airs and graces; Lajoinie’s eyes were half-closed, he seemed to have dozed off, but I think now that he was observing how I behaved with the others—that too was part of his method of personnel management. At one point he grumbled something, but I couldn’t hear what, the music was too loud; then he threw an irritated look to his left: in a corner of the room, Karl Lagerfeld had begun to walk on his hands; Björk stared at him, laughing her head off. Then the couturier came and sat down again, giving me a big slap on the shoulders, screaming: ‘You all right? Everything all right?’ before swallowing three eels one after the other. ‘You’re the most beautiful woman here! You wipe the floor with them!’ then he seized the cheese board; I believe that he had really taken a shine to me. Lajoinie watched with incredulity as he devoured the Livarot. ‘You really are a big cheese, Karl,’ he said in one breath; then he turned to me and pronounced: ‘Fifty thousand euros.’ And that’s all; that’s all he said to me that day.

“The following morning, I passed by his office, and he explained a little bit more. The magazine was to be called
Lolita.
‘It’s a question of agap in the market…,’ he said. I understood more or less what he meant:
20 Ans,
for example, was bought mainly by fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girls, who wanted to be emancipated in all things, sex in particular; with
Lolita,
he wanted to find the opposite gap in the market. ‘Our target readership starts at ten years old…,’ he said, ‘but there is no upper limit.’ His bet was that, more and more, mothers would tend to copy their daughters. Obviously there’s something ridiculous about a thirty-year-old woman buying a magazine called
Lolita;
but no more so than her buying a clinging top, or hot pants. His bet was that the feeling of ridiculousness, which had been so strong among women, and Frenchwomen in particular, was going to gradually disappear and be replaced by pure fascination with limitless youth.

“The least you can say is that his gamble paid off. The average age of our readers is twenty-eight—and that increases a little every month. For the advertisers, we are becoming
the
women’s magazine—I am telling you what I’ve been told, and I’ve some difficulty believing it. I am steering, I am trying to steer, or rather I’m pretending to steer, but basically I don’t understand anything anymore. I am a good professional, that’s true, I told you I was a bit psychorigid—it stems from that: there are never any typos in the magazine, the photos are well laid out, we always publish on the scheduled date; but the content…It’s understandable that people are afraid of getting old, especially women, that’s always been true, but in this case…It’s gone beyond anything you could imagine; I think women have gone completely mad.”

Daniel24, 2

NOW THAT EVERYTHING
is appearing, in the clarity of emptiness, I am free to watch the snow. My distant predecessor, the unfortunate comedian, chose to live here, in the residence that once stood—excavations prove it, as do photographs—on the site of the unit Proyecciones XXI, 13. Back then it was—it is strange to say, and also a little sad—a seaside residence.

The sea has disappeared, and with it the memory of waves. We possess audio and visual documents; none of them enable us to truly experience the tenacious fascination that gripped man, revealed in so many poems, in the face of the apparently repetitive spectacle of the ocean crashing upon the sand. Nor are we able to understand the thrill of the chase, the pursuit of prey; nor religious feeling, nor that kind of immobile, objectless frenzy that man called
mystical ecstasy.

Before, when humans lived together, they gave each other mutual satisfaction through physical contact; we understand that, for we have received the message of the Supreme Sister. Here is the message of the Supreme Sister, in its intermediary formulation:

Admit that men have neither dignity nor rights; that good and evil are simple notions, scarcely theorized forms of pleasure and pain.

Treat all men as animals—deserving understanding and pity, for their souls and their bodies.

Remain on this noble and excellent path.

By turning from the path of pleasure, without managing to find an alternative, we have only prolonged the latter tendencies of mankind. When prostitution was definitively outlawed, and the ban effectively applied across the entire surface of the planet, men entered the
gray age.
They were never to leave it, at least not before the sovereignty of the species had disappeared. No truly convincing theory has been formulated to explain what bears all the hallmarks of mass suicide.

Android robots appeared on the market, equipped with a versatile artificial vagina. A high-tech system analyzed in real time the configuration of male sexual organs, arranged temperatures and pressures; a radiometric sensor allowed the prediction of ejaculation, the consequent modification of stimulation, and the prolonging of intercourse for as long as was wished. It had a curiosity value for a few weeks, then sales collapsed completely: the robotics companies, some of whom had invested hundreds of millions of euros, went bankrupt one by one. The event was commented on by some as a desire to return to the natural, to the truth of human relationships; of course, nothing could be further from the truth, as subsequent events would clearly demonstrate: the truth is that men were simply giving up the ghost.

Daniel1, 3

A drinks machine dispensed an excellent hot chocolate. We swallowed it in one go, with unconcealed pleasure.

—Patrick Lefebvre,
AMBULANCE DRIVER FOR ANIMALS

THE SHOW
We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts
was undoubtedly the pinnacle of my career—from a media point of view, I mean. I briefly migrated from the “Theater” pages to “Home Affairs.” There were complaints from Muslim associations, bomb threats; in other words, a bit of action. I was taking a risk, it’s true, but a calculated one; the Islamic fundamentalists, who had appeared in the 2000s, had suffered more or less the same fate as the punks. At first they had been made obsolete by the appearance of polite, gentle, and pious Muslims from the Tabligh movement—a kind of equivalent of New Wave, to continue the analogy; the girls at this time still wore the veil, but it was pretty, decorated, with lace and see-through material, rather like an erotic accessory, in fact. And of course, subsequently, the phenomenon had progressively died out: the expensively built mosques were deserted, and the Arab immigrant girls were once again available in the sexual marketplace, like everyone else. It was something of a done deal; when you bear in mind the society we lived in, it could hardly have been otherwise; nevertheless, in the space of one or two seasons, I had found myself cast in the role of a
hero of free speech.
Personally, as regards freedom, I was
rather against;
it’s amusing to observe that it’s always the enemies of freedom who find themselves, at one moment or another, most in need of it.

Isabelle was at my side, and she gave me acute advice.

“What you must do,” she said from the outset, “is have the rabble on your side. With the rabble on your side, no one can get at you.”

“They
are
on my side,” I protested; “they come to my shows.”

“That’s not enough; you’ve got to go further. What they respect is money. You’ve got money, but you don’t show it off enough. You’ve got to blow it a bit more.”

On her advice, I therefore bought a Bentley Continental GT, a “magnificent and racy” coupe which, according to
L’Auto-Journal,
“symbolized the return of Bentley to its original vocation: offering sports cars of very high standing.” A month later, I was on the cover of
Radikal Hip-Hop
—or, rather, my car was. Most of the rappers bought Ferraris, some of the more original ones bought Porsches; but a Bentley completely trounced them. They had no culture, those little cunts, even when it came to cars. Keith Richards, for example, had a Bentley, like all serious musicians. I could have chosen an Aston Martin, but it was dearer, and anyway the Bentley was better, the hood was longer, you could have lined up three sluts on it with no problem. For 160,000 euros, it was almost a bargain; in any case, as far as credibility among the rabble goes, I think I made a good profit from the investment.