Whatever

by Michel Houellebecq

Anyway, how was I going to say I’d lost my car? I’d pass for a practical joker, right off, a fruitcake or weirdo even; this was extremely unwise. Joking about such matters is not the done thing; this is how reputations are made, friendships formed or broken. I know life, I’ve grown accustomed to it. Saying you’ve lost your car is tantamount to being struck off the social register; let’s definitely talk theft, then.

Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth. What a contrast with the absolute, miraculous power of reading! An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me.

The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. And little by little death’s countenance appears in all its glory. The third millennium augurs well.

I eat a red bean taco and Jean-Pierre Buvet talks to me about sexuality. According to him the interest our society pretends to show in eroticism (through advertising magazines, the media in general) is completely artificial. Most people, in fact, are quickly bored by the subject, but they pretend the opposite out of a bizarre inverted hypocrisy. He gets to his main thesis. Our civilization, he says, suffers from vital exhaustion. In the century of Louis XIV, when the appetite for living was great, official culture placed the accent on the negation of pleasure and of the flesh; repeated insistently that mundane life can offer only imperfect joys, that the only true source of happiness was in God. Such a discourse, he asserts, would no longer be tolerated today. We need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvellous and exciting; and it’s abundantly clear that we rather doubt this.

The first Ministry of Agriculture representative has blue eyes. He is young, has little round glasses, he must have still been a student up till a short time ago. Despite his youth he gives a remarkable impression of seriousness. He will take notes all morning, sometimes at the most unexpected moments. Here is a leader of men, or at least a future leader.

I immediately get the feeling he doesn’t like me. How can I gain his love? I decide that on several occasions in the morning I will support his interventions with a slightly stupid expression of admiration, as if he’d suddenly opened up astonishing perspectives for me, full of wisdom and breadth. He must, in the normal course of things, conclude from this that I am a young man of goodwill, ready to engage myself under his orders in the proper direction.

‘These children belong to me, these riches belong to me.’ Thus says the foolish man, and he is full of woe. Truly, one does not belong to oneself. Wherefore the children? Wherefore the riches? — Dhammapada

The news of his death didn’t really surprise anyone in the Assemblée Nationale; he was mainly known there for the problems he was encountering in buying himself a bed. He’d decided on the purchase months before; but the realization of his project was proving impossible. The tale was usually told with a faint ironic smile; yet there was nothing to laugh about; these days the purchase of a bed does present enormous difficulties, enough to drive you to suicide. To begin with delivery has to be arranged, and then usually half a day taken off work, with all the problems that entails. Sometimes the delivery men don’t come, or maybe they don’t manage to get the bed up the stairs and you are obliged to ask for another half-day off. These problems recur for all furniture and domestic appliances, and the accumulation of difficulties resulting from this can already be enough to seriously unhinge a sensitive person.

To buy a single bed is to publicly admit you don’t have a sex life, and that you don’t envisage having one in the near or even distant future (beds last a long time these days, way beyond the guarantee date; it’s a matter of five, ten or even twenty years; this is a serious investment, which commits you in practical terms for the rest of your days; beds last on an average much longer than marriages, as is well-known). Even the purchase of a 140-centimetre bed makes you pass for a stingy and narrow petit-bourgeois; in the salesmen’s eyes the 160-centimetre bed is the only one really worth buying; in which case you have a right to their respect, to their consideration, even to a slight knowing smile; this they only grant for the 160-centimetre bed.

One evening when Véronique was out I swallowed a bottle of Largactyl. Gripped by panic, I called the emergency services straightaway. They had to take me to hospital, give me a stomach pump, etc. In fine, I only just made it. That bastard (what else can you call her?) didn’t even come and see me in hospital. On getting back ‘home’, if it can be called that, all she managed to find as words of welcome was that I was an egoist and a flake; her interpretation of the incident was that I was contriving to cause her extra worry, she ‘who already had enough on her plate with problems at work.’ The vile bitch even claimed I was indulging in ‘emotional blackmail’; when I think of it now, I regret not taking a knife to her ovaries.

You can readily imagine the ancient way of life of the Sables fishermen, with Sunday mass in the little church, communion for the faithful, while the wind howls outside and the ocean pounds against the rocky coast. It was a life without distraction and without incident, dominated by a tough and dangerous job of work. A simple and rustic life, full of nobility. An extremely stupid way of life, too.

In general I hate dentists; I take them to be exceedingly venal creatures whose only goal in life is to wrench out the most teeth possible and buy themselves a Mercedes with a sun-roof.

A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterizes the modern era. Véronique had known too many discothèques, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so one leads, obviously, a slag’s life; in ageing one becomes less seductive, and on that account bitter. One is jealous of the young, and so one hates them. Condemned to remain unavowable, this hatred festers and becomes increasingly fervent; then it dies down and fades away, just as everything fades away. All that remains is resentment and disgust, sickness and the anticipation of death.

Tisserand sat down again at my side; he was trembling in every limb. He watched the couple, hypnotized. I waited a minute or more; this slow dance, I recalled, went on forever. Then I shook him gently by the shoulder, repeating ‘Raphaël’ over and again. —What can I do? he asked. —Go and have a wank. —You reckon it’s hopeless? —Sure. It’s been hopeless for a long time, from the very beginning. You will never represent, Raphaël, a young girl’s erotic dream. You have to resign yourself to the inevitable; such things are not for you. It’s already too late, in any case. The sexual failure you’ve known since your adolescence, Raphaël, the frustration that has followed you since the age of thirteen, will leave their indelible mark. Even supposing that you might have women in the future – which in all frankness I doubt – this will not be enough; nothing will ever be enough. You will always be an orphan to those adolescent loves you never knew. In you the wound is already deep; it will get deeper and deeper. An atrocious, unremitting bitterness will end up gripping your heart. For you there will be neither redemption nor deliverance. That’s how it is.

I remember having thought of suicide, of its paradoxical usefulness. Let’s put a chimpanzee in a tiny cage fronted by concrete bars. The animal would go berserk, throw itself against the walls, rip out its hair, inflict cruel bites on itself, and in 73% of cases will actually end up killing itself. Let’s now make a breach in one of the walls, which we will place right next to a bottomless precipice. Our friendly sample quadrumane will approach the edge, he’ll look down, remain at the edge for ages, return there time and again, but generally he won’t teeter over the brink; and in all events his nervous state will be radically assuaged.

I get the impression everybody must be unhappy; we live in such a simple world, you understand. There’s a system based on domination, money and fear – a somewhat masculine system, let’s call it Mars; there’s a feminine system based on seduction and sex, Venus let’s say. And that’s it. Is it really possible to live and to believe that there’s nothing else?

The idea gradually dawned on me that all these people – men or women - were not in the least deranged; they were simply lacking in love. Their gestures, their attitudes, their dumb show betrayed an excruciating craving for physical contact and caresses; but that wasn’t possible, of course. So they sobbed, emitted cries, lacerated themselves with their nails; during my stay we had a successful attempt at castration.