The Possibility of an Island (8 page)

“It’s easy to be an optimist…,” I concluded bitterly, “it’s easy to be optimistic when you are content to have a dog, and haven’t had children.”

“You are in the same situation, and, frankly, that hasn’t made you optimistic…,” she remarked. “What it is, is that they are old…,” she continued indulgently. “When you grow old you need to think of reassuring and gentle things. You need to imagine that something beautiful awaits us in heaven. In fact we train ourselves for death, a little. When we’re not too stupid, or too rich.”

I stopped and considered the ocean and the stars. Those stars to which Harry devoted his waking nights, while Hildegarde gave herself up to free classical improvisations on Mozart themes. The music of the spheres, the starry sky; the moral law in my heart. I considered the trip, and what separated me from it; the night was so mild, however, that I placed a hand on Isabelle’s backside—I could feel its shape easily, through the light fabric of her summer dress. She stretched out on the dune, took off her panties, and opened her legs. I penetrated her—face to face, for the first time. She looked straight into my eyes. I remember clearly the movements of her pussy, her little cries at the end. I remember it all the better as it was the last time we made love.

A few months passed. Summer returned, then autumn; Isabelle didn’t seem unhappy. She played with Fox, and tended the azaleas; I devoted myself to swimming and rereading Balzac. One evening, while the sun fell behind the residence, she looked me straight in the eye and told me softly: “You are going to ditch me for someone younger…”

I protested that I had never been unfaithful.

“I know…,” she replied. “At one moment, I thought you were going to be: that you’d bang one of the sluts who hung around the magazine, then come back to me, bang another slut, and so on. I would have suffered greatly, but perhaps it would have been better like that, at the end of the day.”

“I tried once; the girl turned me down.” I remembered passing the morning in front of the Lycée Fénelon. It was between classes, the girls were fourteen, fifteen, and all of them more beautiful and desirable than Isabelle, simply because they were younger. No doubt they were themselves engaged in a ferocious narcissistic competition—between those considered cute by boys their age, and those considered insignificant or, frankly, ugly; all the same, for any one of those young bodies a fiftysomething would have been ready to risk his reputation, his freedom, and even his life. How simple, indeed, existence was! And how devoid it was of any way out! Once, on passing by the magazine’s offices to pick up Isabelle, I had chatted up a sort of Belorussian, who was waiting to pose on page eight. The girl had accepted my invitation for a drink, but had asked for five hundred euros for a blow job; I had declined. At that time, the judicial arsenal aimed at repressing sexual relations with minors was getting tougher; crusades for chemical castration were multiplying. To increase desires to an unbearable level while making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based. I knew all this, I knew it inside out, in fact I had used it as material for many a sketch; this did not stop me from succumbing to the same process. I woke up in the middle of the night, and downed three glasses of water. I imagined the humiliations I would have to endure to seduce any teenage girl; the painfully extracted consent, the girl’s shame as we went out together in the street, her hesitation to introduce me to her friends, the carefree way in which she would ditch me for a boy of her age. I imagined all this, over and over again, and I understood that I could not survive it. In no way did I pretend to escape from the laws of nature: the inevitable decrease of the erectile capacities of the penis, the necessity of finding young bodies to jam that mechanism…I opened a packet of salami and a bottle of wine. Oh well, I told myself, I will pay; when I reach that point, when I need tight little asses to keep up my erection, then I’ll pay. I’ll pay the market price. Five hundred euros for a blow job, who did that Slav girl think she was? It was worth fifty, no more. In the vegetable drawer, I discovered an opened chestnut mousse. What seemed shocking to me, at this stage in my reflection, was not that there were young girls available for money, but that there were some who
are not
available, or only at prohibitive prices; in short, I wanted a regulation of the market.

“That said, you did not pay…,” Isabelle pointed out. “And, five years later, you still haven’t made your mind up about doing it. No, what’s going to happen is that you’ll meet a young girl—not a Lolita, rather a girl aged twenty, twenty-five—and you will fall in love with her. She’ll be intelligent, a nice girl, no doubt very pretty. A girl who could have been a friend…” Night had fallen, and I could no longer make out the features of her face. “Who could have been me…” She spoke calmly, but I did not know how to interpret this calm, there was something rather unusual in the tone of her voice and I had, after all, no experience of the situation, I had never been in love before Isabelle and no woman had been in love with me either, with the exception of Fat Ass—but that was another issue, she was at least fifty-five years old when I met her, at least that’s what I believed at the time, she could have been my mother, it was not a question of love on my part, the idea hadn’t even crossed my mind. And love without hope is something else, something painful certainly, but something that never generates the same sense of closeness, the same sensitivity to the intonations of the other, even in the one who loves without hope, they are too lost in vain and frenetic expectation to retain even the smallest amount of lucidity, to be able to interpret any signal correctly; in short I was in a situation that had, in my life, no precedent.

“No one can see above himself,” writes Schopenhauer to make us understand the impossibility of an exchange of ideas between two individuals of too different an intellectual level. At that moment, obviously, Isabelle could see
above me;
I had the prudence to stay quiet. After all, she told me, I might just as easily not meet the girl; given the thinness of my social relations, this was the most likely scenario.

She continued to buy French newspapers, although not that often, not more than once a week, and from time to time she would hand me an article with a sniff of contempt. It was around this time that the French media began a big campaign to promote friendship, probably launched by
Le Nouvel Observateur.
“Love can break your heart, friendship never will,” that was more or less the theme of the articles. I didn’t understand why they were interested in spouting such absurdities; Isabelle explained that it was an old chestnut, that we were simply dealing with an annual variation on the theme: “How to break up and remain good friends.” According to her, this would last another four or five years before we could admit that the passage from love to friendship, i.e., from a strong feeling to a weak one, was patently the prelude to the disappearance of all feeling—on the historical level, I mean, for on the individual one, indifference was by far the most favorable situation: once love had broken down, it was generally not transformed into indifference, and even less frequently into friendship. On the basis of this remark, I laid the foundations of a script entitled
Two Flies Later,
which was to constitute the apex—and end—of my cinematic career. My agent was delighted to learn that I was getting back to work—two and a half years’ absence was a long time. He was less delighted when he held the finished product in his hands. I had not hidden from him the fact that it was a film script, which I aimed to produce and act in myself; that wasn’t the problem—on the contrary, he said, people have been waiting for a long time, it’s good they’re going to be surprised, it could have cult status. The content, however…Frankly, was I not going a bit too far?

The film related the life of a man whose favorite pastime was killing flies with an elastic band (hence the title); in general, he missed them—you were, however, talking about a three-hour-long feature. The second-favorite pastime of this cultivated man, a great reader of Pierre Louÿs, was having his cock sucked by little prepubescent girls—well, fourteen at the oldest; he had more success with this than with the flies.

Contrary to what has since been repeated by media hirelings, this film was not a monumental flop; it was even a triumph in certain foreign countries, and made a considerable profit in France, without, however, reaching the numbers that one could have expected, given the until then vertiginous rise of my career; that’s all.

Its failure with the critics, on the other hand, was real; to this day I still think it was undeserved. “An undistinguished knockabout farce,” was the headline in
Le Monde,
differentiating itself from its more moralistic peers, who raised, especially in their editorials, the question of banning it. It was certainly a comedy, and most of the gags were very obvious, if not vulgar; but there were certain passages of dialogue, in certain scenes, which seem to me, with hindsight, to be the best thing I ever produced. In particular in Corsica, in the long sequence filmed on the slopes of Bavella, where the hero (played by me) shows the little Aurore (nine years old), whom he has just conquered over a Disney tea at Marineland in Bonifacio, around his second home.

“There’s no point in living in Corsica,” she hurled insolently, “if it means living on a bend in the road.”

“To see cars pass,” he (I) replied, “is already to live a little.”

No one had laughed; neither during the screen test, nor at the comic film festival in Montbazon. And yet, and yet, I told myself, never had I reached such heights. Could Shakespeare himself have produced such dialogue? Could he have even imagined it, the sad fool?

Beyond the hackneyed subject of pedophilia, this film strove to be a vigorous plea against
friendship,
and more generally against all
nonsexual
relationships. What in fact could two men
talk about,
beyond a certain age? What reason could two men find for being together, except, of course, in the case of a conflict of interests, or of some common project (overthrowing a government, building a motorway, writing a script for a cartoon, exterminating the Jews)? After a certain age (I am talking about men of a certain level of intelligence, not aged brutes), it’s quite obvious that
everything has been said and done.
How could a project as intrinsically empty as two men
spending some time together
lead to anything other than boredom, annoyance, and, at the end of the day, outright hostility? While between a man and a woman there still remained, despite everything, something: a little bit of attraction, a little bit of hope, a little bit of a dream. Speech, which was basically designed for controversy and disagreement, was still scarred by its warlike origins. Speech destroys, separates, and when it is all that remains between a man and a woman, then you can consider the relationship over. When, however, it is accompanied, softened, and in some way sanctified by caresses, speech itself can take on a completely different meaning, one that is less dramatic but more profound, that of a detached intellectual counterpoint, free and uninvolved in immediate issues.

Launching an attack not only on friendship but on all social relationships as soon as they are unaccompanied by physical contact, this film thus constituted—only the magazine
Slut Zone
had the perspicacity to notice this—an indirect eulogy to bisexuality, if not hermaphroditism. All in all, I was harking back to the ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the ancient Greeks.

Daniel24, 7

THE NUMBER OF HUMAN LIFE STORIES
is 6174, which corresponds to Kapreker’s first constant. Whether they come from men or women, from Europe or Asia, America or Africa, whether they are complete or not, all agree on one point, and one point only: the unbearable nature of the mental suffering caused by old age.

It is no doubt Bruno1, with his brutal succinctness, who gives us its most striking image when he describes himself as “full of a young man’s desires, with the body of an old man”; but I repeat, all the testimonies concur, whether it is that of Daniel1, my distant predecessor, or of Rachid1, Paul1, John1, Felicity1, or that particularly poignant one of Esperanza1. At no moment in human history does growing old seem to have been a pleasure cruise; but, in the years preceding the disappearance of the species, it had manifestly become atrocious to the point where the level of voluntary deaths, prudishly renamed
departures
by the public-health bodies, was nearing 100 percent, and the average age of departure, estimated at sixty across the entire globe, was falling toward fifty in the most developed countries.