The Possibility of an Island, Page 2

  I would never contemplate coupling with a female of their species. While the interspecies barrier is often territorial among invertebrates and plants, among the higher vertebrates it is more a question of behavior.

  A being is fashioned, somewhere in the Central City, that is similar to me; at least he has my features, and my internal organs. When my life ceases, the absence of a signal will be registered in a few nanoseconds; the manufacture of my successor will begin immediately. The next day, or the day after at the latest, the protective fence will be reopened; my successor will settle within these walls. This book will be addressed to him.

  Pierce’s first law identifies personality with memory. Nothing exists, in the personality, outside what is memorizable (be this memory cognitive, procedural, or emotional); it is thanks to memory, for example, that the sense of identity does not dissolve during sleep.

  According to Pierce’s second law, language is a suitable carrier for cognitive memory.

  Pierce’s third law defines the conditions for an unbiased language.

  Pierce’s three laws were going to put an end to the hazardous attempts at memory downloading through the intermediary of a data carrier, in favor of, on the one hand, direct molecular transfer, and, on the other, what today we call life story, initially conceived as a simple complement, a provisional solution, but which was, following the work by Pierce, to become considerably more important. Thus, curiously, this major logical advance resulted in the rehabilitation of an ancient form that was basically quite close to what was once called autobiography.

  Concerning the life story, there are no precise instructions. The beginning can start at any point in time, just as a first glance can alight on any point within a painting; what matters is that, gradually, the whole picture reemerges.

  Daniel1, 2

  When you see the success of the car-free Sundays in Paris, and the walkway along the banks of the Seine, then you can easily imagine what comes next.

  —Gérard, TAXI DRIVER

  TODAY IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE for me to remember why I married my first wife; if I was to come across her in the street, I don’t even think I’d be able to recognize her. You forget certain things, you forget them totally; it is wrong to suppose that all things are stored in the sanctuary of memory; certain events, the majority of them even, are well and truly erased, there remains no trace of them, and it is absolutely as if they had never happened. To return to my wife, or rather my first wife, we undoubtedly lived together for two or three years; when she became pregnant, I ditched her almost immediately. I was having no success at the time, and she received only a miserable alimony.

  On the day of my son’s suicide, I made a tomato omelet. “A living dog is worth more than a dead lion,” as Ecclesiastes rightly says. I had never loved that child: he was as stupid as his mother, and as nasty as his father. His death was far from a catastrophe; you can live without such human beings.

  After my first show, ten years passed, punctuated by short and unsatisfying affairs, before I met Isabelle. I was then thirty-nine and she thirty-seven; I was already something of a celebrity. When I earned my first million euros (I mean, when I had really earned them, after tax, and placed them in a safe haven), I realized that I was not a Balzacian character. A Balzacian character who has just earned his first million euros would, in most cases, figure out a way to reach the second—with the exception of those few people who will immediately begin to dream of the moment when they can count them in tens. For my part, I wondered above all whether I could bring my career to a halt—before concluding no.

  During the first phases of my rise to fortune and glory, I had occasionally tasted the joys of consumption, by which our epoch shows itself so superior to those that preceded it. You could quibble forever over whether men were more or less happy in past centuries. You could comment on the disappearance of religions, the difficulty of feeling love, discuss the disadvantages and advantages of both; you could mention the appearance of democracy, the loss of our sense of the sacred, the crumbling of social ties. I myself had done such things, in a lot of sketches, though in a humorous way. You could even question scientific and technological progress, and be under the impression, for example, that the improvement of medical techniques had been at the cost of increasing social control and an overall decrease in joie de vivre. But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing, in any other civilization, in any other epoch, could compare itself to the mobile perfection of a contemporary shopping center functioning at full tilt. I had thus consumed, with joy, shoes most notably; then, gradually, I had grown weary, and I had understood that my life, without this daily input of basic, renewable pleasures, was going to stop being simple.

  When I met Isabelle, I must have been worth six million euros. A Balzacian character, at this stage, buys a sumptuous apartment, which he fills with artworks, and then ruins himself for a dancer. I lived in a banal three-room flat, in the fourteenth arrondissement, and I had never slept with a top model—I hadn’t even felt the desire to. At one point it had seemed the right thing to do to copulate with a B-list model; I did not keep an imperishable memory of it. The girl was all right, with rather big breasts, but no bigger than those of others; I was, when you think of it, less overrated than her.

  The interview took place in my dressing room, after a show that must be described as a triumph. Isabelle was then the editor-in-chief of Lolita, after a long spell working at 20 Ans. At first, I wasn’t really up for this interview; while flicking through the magazine, I had, however, been surprised by the level of sluttishness that publications for young girls had stooped to: T-shirts cut to fit ten-year-olds, skintight white shorts, thongs showing everywhere, the knowing use of Chupa Chups, it was all there. “Yes, but they have a bizarre product positioning…” the press officer had insisted. “And then the fact that the editor-in-chief moves around a lot herself, I think that’s a sign…”

  There are, it seems, people who do not believe in love at first sight; without giving the expression its literal sense, it is obvious that mutual attraction is, in all cases, very quick; from the first minutes of my encounter with Isabelle I knew that we were going to share a love story, and that this love story would be long; and I knew that she herself was aware of this. After a few opening questions, on my methods of preparation, etc., she fell silent. I flicked again through the magazine pages.

  “These are not really Lolitas…,” I observed, finally. “They are sixteen, seventeen years old.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Nabokov was five years off. What most men like is not the moment that precedes puberty, but the one immediately after. Anyway, he wasn’t a very good writer…”

  I too had never been able to bear that mediocre and mannered pseudo-poet, that clumsy imitator of Joyce, who had never been lucky enough to possess the energy that sometimes enabled the insane Irishman to rise above his ponderous prose.

  A collapsed pastry, that was what Nabokov’s style had always made me think of.

  “But exactly,” she continued. “If a book that is so badly written, and, what’s more, is handicapped by a gross mistake concerning the age of the heroine, manages despite everything to be a very good book, to such an extent that it constitutes a lasting myth, and enters everyday speech, then the author has stumbled upon something essential.”

  If we agreed on everything, the interview risked being rather flat. “We could continue over dinner…,” she proposed. “I know a Tibetan restaurant in the rue des Abbesses.”

  Naturally, as in all serious love stories, we slept together on the first night. At the moment when she undressed, she seemed slightly uneasy, then proud: her body was incredibly firm and supple. It was much later that I learned she was thirty-seven; at that moment, I would have said thirty at most.

  “What do you do to keep yourself fit?” I asked her.

  “Classical dance.”

  “No stretching or aerobics
, none of that stuff?”

  “No, that’s all nonsense; believe me, I’ve been working in women’s magazines for ten years. The only thing that really works is classical dance. Only it’s hard, it demands real discipline; but that suits me. I’m rather psychorigid.”

  “You, psychorigid?”

  “Yes, yes…You’ll see.”

  As time goes on, what strikes me, when I remember Isabelle, is the incredible frankness of our relations, from the very first moment, even in regard to subjects about which women usually prefer to retain a certain mystery, in the mistaken belief that mystery adds a touch of eroticism to the relationship, when on the contrary, most men are violently excited by a direct sexual approach.

  “It’s not very difficult to make a man come…,” she had told me, wryly, during our first dinner in the Tibetan restaurant. “That’s to say, I’ve always managed to.” She was speaking the truth. She was also speaking the truth when she said that there was nothing extraordinary or strange about the secret. “You need only remember,” she continued with a sigh, “that men have balls. Women are aware that men have a cock, arguably they are all too aware, because ever since men were reduced to the status of a sexual object, women have been literally obsessed with their cocks; but when they make love they forget, nine times out of ten, that the balls are a sensitive zone. Whether it’s for masturbation, penetration, or a blow job, you must, from time to time, put your hand on the man’s balls, either to lightly caress them, or to apply greater pressure, and soon you’ll realize that they are more or less hard. There you go. That’s all.”

  It must have been five in the morning, and I had just come inside her, and things were good, really good, everything was comforting and tender, and I was feeling as though I was on the threshold of a happy phase in my life, when I noticed, for no particular reason, the bedroom’s decor—I remember that at that moment the moonlight was falling on an engraving of a rhinoceros, an old engraving, of the kind you find in animal encyclopedias of the nineteenth century.

  “Do you like my place?”

  “Yes. You’ve got taste.”

  “Are you surprised I’ve got taste, since I work for a shitty magazine?”

  I could tell it was going to be hard to hide my thoughts from her. This remark, curiously, filled me with a certain joy; I suppose that is one of the signs of true love.

  “I’m well paid…You know, often, that’s enough reason to take a job.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty thousand euros a month.”

  “That’s a lot; but at the moment I earn more.”

  “That’s to be expected. You’re a gladiator, in the middle of the arena. It’s no surprise you’re well paid: you risk your neck, you can fall at any moment.”

  “Ah…”

  There, I wasn’t completely in agreement; I remember feeling joy again. It’s good to be in perfect harmony, to agree on every subject, in the first instance it is even indispensable; but it is also good to have small differences of opinion, if only to be able to resolve them through gentle discussion.

  “I suppose you must have slept with a lot of girls who came to your shows…,” she continued.

  “A few, yes.”

  Not as many as that, in reality: there had perhaps been fifty, or a hundred at the absolute maximum; but I refrained from articulating that the night we had just spent together was far and away the best; I felt that she knew it. Not through boastfulness, or exaggerated vanity: simply through intuition, through an understanding of human relations; through an accurate appreciation, also, of her own erotic value.

  “If girls are sexually attracted to guys who get up on stage,” she continued, “it’s not simply that they are seeking fame; it’s also that they feel an individual who gets up on stage risks his neck, because the public is a big dangerous animal that can annihilate its creation, hunt it down, and force it to flee, booed off in shame. The reward these girls can offer to the guy who risks his neck by going on stage is their body; it’s exactly the same thing with a gladiator, or a matador. It would be stupid to imagine that these primitive mechanisms have disappeared; I know them, I use them, I earn my living from them. I understand exactly the erotic attraction of the rugby player, the rock star, the theater actor, or the racing driver: all this follows ancient patterns, with small variations according to fashion or epoch. A good magazine for young girls is one that knows how to anticipate—subtly—these variations.”

  I thought for well over a minute; I had to make her understand my point of view. It was important, or maybe not—let’s just say I wanted to make her understand.

  “You’re completely right…,” I said. “Except that, in my case, I’m not risking anything.”

  “Why?”

  She had sat up in bed and was looking at me with surprise.

  “Because, even if the public suddenly felt like getting rid of me, it couldn’t; there is no one to put in my place. I am, very precisely, irreplaceable.”

  She frowned and looked at me; dawn had now broken, and I saw her breasts moving to the rhythm of her breath. I felt like taking one of them in my mouth, sucking it, and emptying my mind; but I told myself I should let her reflect a bit. That didn’t take her more than thirty seconds; she really was an intelligent girl.

  “It’s true,” she said. “There’s a completely abnormal frankness about you. I don’t know if it’s owing to a particular event in your life, a consequence of your education, or what; but there is no chance that the phenomenon could reproduce itself in the same generation. In fact, people need you more than you need them—people of my age, at least. In a few years’ time, that’ll all change. You know the magazine I work for: all we’re trying to do is create an artificial mankind, a frivolous one that will no longer be open to seriousness or to humor, which, until it dies, will engage in an increasingly desperate quest for fun and sex; a generation of definitive kids. We are going to succeed, of course; and, in that world, you will no longer have your place. But I suppose it’s not too bad, you must have had time to put some money away.”

  “Six million euros.”

  I had replied, automatically, without even thinking; there was another question that had been pestering me for several minutes. “Your magazine…Actually, I don’t resemble your readership at all. I am cynical, bitter, I can only interest people who are a bit inclined toward doubt, people who already feel that they’ve reached the end of the line; this interview can’t fit in with your editorial policy.”

  “That’s true,” she said calmly, with an astonishing calm when I thought about it later—she was so transparent and so frank, with no talent for lying. “There won’t be any interview; it was just a pretext for meeting you.”

  She was looking me straight in the eye, and I was in such a state that her words alone were enough to give me a hard-on. I think that she was moved by such a sentimental, such a human erection; she stretched out beside me, placed her head upon my shoulder, and began to jerk me off slowly, squeezing my sex and my balls. I relaxed, and gave myself to her caress. She lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, at the top of Passy; in the distance an aboveground metro was crossing the Seine. Day was beginning, the murmur of traffic was becoming louder; sperm spurted on her breasts. I took her in my arms.

  “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.