Read Online The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, Gavin Bowd - Free Book Online

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