You have just been appointed marketing manager of the international arm of the South America group. The company has recently purchased a hotel-restaurant in the West Indies, a four-star establishment with no rooms on the seafront in Guadeloupe. Opened in 1988 and renovated in 1996. it is currently experiencing serious problems. The occupancy rate is only 45 percent, far below the anticipated breakeven point.
Her answer was marked 18/20, which seemed to be a good sign. At the time, she remembered, it all seemed like a fairy tale to her. and not a very plausible one. She couldn't imagine herself as marketing director of the South America group, or of anything else for that matter. It was a game, an intellectual game that was neither very interesting nor very difficult. Now, it was no longer a game; or perhaps it was, but their careers were the stakes. She would come back from work so exhausted that she hadn't the energy to make love, barely enough energy to suck me off. She would be half-asleep with my penis still in her mouth. I usually penetrated her in the morning when we woke. Her orgasms were more muted, more restrained, as though muffled by a curtain of fatigue; I think I loved her more and more. At the end of April the catalogues were printed and distributed to five thousand travel agents —almost the entirety of the French network. Now, they needed to deal with the infrastructure of the tours, so that everything would be ready for July 1. Word-of-mouth was very important in launching a new product of this kind: a tour canceled or poorly organized could mean a lot of lost customers. They had decided not to invest in a major advertising campaign. Curiously, although Jean-Yves had specialized in marketing, he hadn't much faith in advertising. "It can be useful for refining your image," he said, "but we're not at that point just yet. For the moment, the most important thing is for us to get good distribution and ensure that the product has a reputation for reliability.'' On the other hand, they invested hugely in information for the travel agents; it was crucial that they offer the product quickly and spontaneously. Valérie took most of the responsibility for this. It was familiar ground. She remembered the sales-pitch mnemonic SURE—Strategic planning, Understanding, Response management, Execution excellence; she remembered, too, the reality, which was infinitely more simple. But most of the salesgirls were very young—most of them had barely passed their BTS diploma, and it was easier to speak to them in their own language. Talking to some of the girls, she realized that Jean-Louis Barma's typology was still being taught in colleges. (The "technician consumer": product-centered, sensitive to quantitative aspects, attaches great importance to technical aspects of the product. The "devout consumer": trusts the salesperson blindly because he does not understand the product. The "complicit consumer": happy to focus on points he has in common with the salesperson if the latter knows how to establish a good interpersonal relationship. The "manipulative consumer": a manipulator whose strategy is to deal directly with the supplier and thus get the best deal. The "developing consumer": attentive to the salesperson, whom he respects, to the product offered, aware of his needs, he communicates easily.) Valérie had five or six years on these girls. She had long since risen above their current level and had achieved a degree of professional success that most of them hardly dared dream of. They looked at her with a sort of childlike admiration. I had the key to her apartment now; in general, while I was waiting for her in the evenings, I read Auguste Comte's Course in Positive Philosophy. I liked this tedious, dense book, so much so that I would often reread a page three or four times. It took me almost three weeks to finish lesson 50: "Preliminary Considerations on Social Statics, or the General Theory of the Spontaneous Order of Human Society." I certainly needed some sort of theory to help me take stock of my social status.
"You work far too much, Valérie," I told her one evening in May as she was lying, huddled up with exhaustion, on the living-room sofa. "You have to get something out of it. You should put some money aside, otherwise one way or the other you'll just end up spending it." She agreed that I was right. The following morning, she took two hours off and we went to the Porte d'Orleans branch of the Credit Agricole to open a joint account. She gave me power of attorney, and the following day I went back to talk to a financial adviser. I decided to put aside twenty thousand francs a month from her salary, half of it in a life insurance policy, the other half in a savings account. I was at her place pretty much all the time now; it made no sense to hang on to my apartment. It was she who made the suggestion at the beginning of June. We had made love most of the afternoon, taking long breaks curled up together between the sheets. Then she would jerk me or suck me off and I would penetrate her again; neither of us had come. Each time she touched me I quickly got a hard-on, and her pussy was constantly wet. She was feeling good, I could see calm flooding her face. At about nine o'clock, she suggested we have dinner in an Italian restaurant near the Parc Montsouris. It wasn't quite dark yet; it was a warm evening. I had to go to my place afterwards, if I intended to go to work in a shirt and tie as I usually did. The waiter brought us two house cocktails. "You know, Michel," she said as soon as he had gone, "you could just move into my place. I don't really think we need to go on playing at being independent. Or, if you prefer, we can get a flat together."
In point of fact, yes, I would prefer that. Let's say it gave me a greater sense of this as a new beginning. A first beginning in my case, truth be told, and in her case too, I suppose. It becomes habit, being alone, being independent, and this is not always a good habit. If I wanted to live something that resembled the conjugal experience, now, evidently, was the time. Of course I knew the drawbacks of the setup. I knew that desire becomes dulled more quickly when couples live together. But it becomes dulled anyhow, that's one of the laws of life. Only then does it become possible for the union to move on to a different level —or so many people have believed. But that evening, my desire for Valérie was far from dulled. Before we parted ways on the street, I kissed her on the mouth; she opened her lips wide, abandoning herself completely to the kiss. I slipped my hands into her tracksuit bottoms, into her panties, put my palms on her buttocks. She leaned her head back, looked left and right; the street was completely quiet. She knelt down on the pavement, opened my fly, and took my penis into her mouth. I leaned against the park railings. Just before I came, she moved her mouth away and continued to masturbate me with two fingers, slipping her other hand into my trousers to stroke my balls. She closed her eyes; I ejaculated over her face. At that moment I thought she was going to burst into tears; but she didn't, she simply licked at the semen trickling down her cheeks. The very next morning, I started going through the smaller ads. Somewhere in the southern arrondissements would be best for Valerie's work. A week later, I found something: a large two-bedroom on the thirtieth floor of the Opale tower near the Porte de Choisy. I had never had a beautiful view of Paris before; I had never really looked for one, to be honest. Preparing to move in, I realized that I didn't feel the least attachment to anything in my apartment. I could have felt a certain joy, something like intoxication, at this freedom. On the contrary, I felt slightly scared. I had managed, it seemed, to live for forty years without forming the most tenuous of attachments to a single object. All told, I had two suits, which I wore alternately. Books, sure, I had books, but I could easily have bought them again —not one of them was in any way precious or rare. Several women had crossed my path; I didn't have a photograph or a letter from any of them. Nor did I have any photos of myself: I had no reminder of what I might have been like when I was fifteen, or twenty, or thirty. I didn't really have any personal papers: my identity could be contained in a couple of files that would easily fit into a standard-size cardboard folder. It is wrong to pretend that human beings are unique, that they carry within them an irreplaceable individuality. As far as I was concerned, at any rate, I could not distinguish any trace of such an individuality. As often as not, it is futile to wear yourself out trying to distinguish individual destinies and personalities. When all's said and done, the idea of the uniqueness of the individual is nothing
more than pompous absurdity. We remember our own lives, Schopenhauer wrote somewhere, a little better than we do a novel we once read. That's about right: a little, no more.
5
Valérie was again overwhelmed with work in the last two weeks of June; the problem with working with a number of countries is that with the time differences you could almost be working twenty-four hours a day. The weather became warmer, heralding a magnificent summer, though for the moment, we had had little opportunity to take advantage of it. After work, I liked to go and wander around the Tang Frères Asian-food warehouse. I even made an attempt to take up eastern cooking. But it was too complicated for me; there was a completely new balance to understand among the ingredients, a special way of chopping vegetables, it was practically a different mind-set. In the end I settled for Italian, something that was much more my level. I would never have believed that one clay I would lake pleasure in cooking. Love sanctifies. In his fiftieth sociology lesson, Auguste Comte tackles that "strange metaphysical aberration" that conceives of the family as the template for society. "Founded chiefly upon attachment and gratitude, the domestic union satisfies, by its mere existence, all our sympathetic instincts quite apart from all idea of active and continuous cooperation toward any end unless it be that of its own institution. When, unhappily, the coordination of employments remains the only principle of connection, the domestic union degenerates into mere association, and in most cases will soon dissolve altogether." At the office I continued to do the bare minimum. Nevertheless, I organized two or three important exhibitions without any difficulty. Office work isn't very difficult—you simply have to be reasonably meticulous, then decisive. I had rapidly realized that you did not necessarily have to make the right decision, it was sufficient, in most cases, to make any old decision, as long as you made it quickly—if you work in the public sector, at least. I dumped some projects and green-lighted others, and I did all of this based on insufficient information. In ten years, not once had I asked for additional information when I needed it, and, in general, I didn't feel the slightest remorse. Deep clown, I had little respect for the contemporary art scene. Most of the artists I knew behaved exactly like entrepreneurs: they carefully reconnoitered emerging markets, then tried to get in fast. Just like entrepreneurs, they had been at the same few colleges, they were cast from the same mold. There were some differences, however: in the art market, innovation was at a greater premium than in most other professional sectors. Moreover, artists often worked in packs or networks, in contrast to entrepreneurs, who were solitary beings surrounded by enemies—shareholders ready to drop them at a moment's notice, executives always ready to betray them. But in the artists' proposals I dealt with, it was rare for me to come across a sense of genuine inner desire. At the end of June, however, there was the Bertrand Bredane exhibition, which I had passionately supported from the outset —to the great surprise of Marie-Jeanne, who had become accustomed to my meek indifference and was herself deeply repulsed by works of this nature. Bredane was not exactly a young artist; he was already forty-three and, physically, he was a wreck —he looked a little like the alcoholic poet in Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez. He was chiefly famous for leaving rotting meat in young girls' panties, or breeding flies in his own excrement and then releasing them into the galleries. He had never been really successful, as he didn't have the right connections, and he stubbornly persisted in a rather dated "trash" aesthetic. I sensed in him a certain authenticity, but maybe it was simply the authenticity of failure. He seemed a little unbalanced. His most recent project was even worse —or better, depending on one's point of view—than his earlier work. He had made a video following the fate of the bodies people donate to medical science after their death —being used for dissection practice in medical schools, for example. A number of genuine medical students, dressed in normal clothing, were to mingle with the viewing audience and, from time to time, flash severed hands or eyeballs that had been gouged out —to play, in fact, the kind of practical jokes of which medical students are apparently quite fond. I made the mistake of taking Valérie to the opening, even though she'd had an exhausting day. To my surprise, it was pretty well attended, and the crowd included a number of major celebrities: could it be that Bertrand Bredane's moment had arrived? After about half an hour, Valérie had had enough and asked me if we could leave. A medical student rushed up to her holding a severed dick in his hand, the testicles still fringed with hair. She turned her head away, sickened, and led me to the exit. We sought refuge in the Café Beaubourg. Half an hour later, Bertrand Bredane made his entrance, accompanied by two or three girls and some other people, among whom I recognized the director of sponsorship at a major venture capital firm. They took the table next to us. I couldn't not go and say hello to them. Bredane was visibly pleased to see me, and it was true that that evening I'd given him a particularly warm handshake. The conversation dragged on, and Valérie came and sat with us. I don't know who suggested we go for a drink at Bar-Bar—probably Bredane himself. I made the mistake of accepting., Most of the partner-swapping clubs that had tried to introduce an S&M night had failed. Bar-Bar, on the other hand, had specialized in sadomasochistic practices since it opened, and, though it didn't have a particularly strict dress code* — except on certain nights —had been packed from the start. As far as I was aware, the S&M scene was a pretty particular milieu, made up of people who were no longer really interested in ordinary sexual practices and consequently disliked going to regular orgy clubs. Near the entrance, a chubby-faced woman of fifty-something, gagged and handcuffed, swung in a cage. Looking more closely, I discovered she was shackled, her heels attached to the bars of the cage with metal chains; she was wearing nothing but a leatherette corset onto which spilled her large sagging breasts. She was, as was the custom of the place, a slave whose master was going to auction her off for the evening. She didn't seem to find it terribly amusing. I noticed that she turned this way and that, trying to hide her ass, which was completely riddled with cellulite; but it was impossible —the cage was open on all four sides. Maybe she did this for a living; I knew it was possible to make between one and two thousand francs a night by renting yourself out as a slave. My impression was that she was a lower-level white-collar worker, maybe a switchboard operator for the National Health Service, who was doing this to make ends meet. There was only one table free, near the entrance to the first torture chamber. Immediately after we sat down, a bald, potbellied middle manager in a three-piece suit came by on a leash, led by a black, bare-assed dominatrix. She stopped at our table and ordered him to strip to the waist. He obeyed. She took a pair of metal clamps from her bag. For a man, his breasts were pretty fat and flabby. She closed the clamps on his red and distended nipples. He winced in pain. She tugged on his leash. He returned to all fours and followed her as best he could. The pasty folds of his belly wobbled in the dim light. I ordered a whiskey, Valérie an orange juice. She stared stubbornly at the table, not watching what was going on around her, or taking part in the conversation. In contrast, Marjorie and Géraldine, the two girls I knew from the Plastic Arts Delegation, seemed to be very excited. "It's tame tonight, very tame," muttered Bredane, disappointed. He went on to explain to us that, some nights, customers had needles pushed through their balls or the heads of their cocks; once he'd even seen a guy whose dominatrix had torn out a fingernail with a pair of pliers. Valérie flinched in revulsion. "I find the whole thing completely disgusting," she said, unable to contain herself any longer. "Why 'disgusting'?" Géraldine protested. "As long as the participants are freely consenting, I don't see the problem. It's a contract, that's all." "I don't believe you can 'freely consent' to humiliation and suffering. And even if you can, I don't think it's reason enough." Valérie was really angry. For a moment I thought about moving the conversation on to the Arab-Israeli war, then I realized that I didn't give a shit what these girls thought—if they never phoned me again, it would simply reduce my workload. "Yeah, I find these people a little disgust
ing..."I upped the ante:"And I find you disgusting too,"I said more quietly. Géraldine didn't hear, or she pretended not to hear. "If I'm a consenting adult," she went on, "and my fantasy is to suffer, to explore the masochistic part of my sexuality, I don't see any reason why anyone should try and stop me. We are living in a democracy . . ." She was getting angry too; I could sense that it wouldn't be long before she mentioned human rights. At the word "democracy," Bredane shot her a slightly contemptuous look; he turned to Valérie. "You're quite right," he said gravely. "It's completely disgusting. When I see a man agree to have his nails torn out with a pair of pliers, then have someone shit on him, and eat his torturer's shit, I find that disgusting. But it's precisely what is disgusting in the human animal that interests me." After a few seconds, Valérie asked in an agonized voice: "Why?" "I don't know," Bredane answered simply. "I don't believe we have a 'dark side,' because I don't believe in any form of damnation, or in benediction for that matter. But I have a feeling that as we get closer to suffering and cruelty, to domination and servility, we hit on the essential, the most intimate nature of sexuality. Don't you think so?" He was talking to me now. No, actually, I didn't think so. Cruelty is a primordial part of the human, and it is found in the most primitive peoples. In the earliest tribal wars, the victors were careful to spare the lives of some of their prisoners in order to let them die later, suffering hideous tortures. This tendency persisted, it is constant throughout history, it remains true today: as soon as a foreign or civil war begins to erase ordinary moral constraints, you find human beings—regardless of race, people, culture —eager to launch themselves into the joys of barbarism and massacre. This is attested, unchanging, indisputable, but it has nothing whatever to do with the quest for sexual pleasure —equally primordial, equally strong. So, all in all, I didn't agree, though I was aware, as always, that the discussion was pointless. "Let's take a look around," said Bredane after he'd finished his beer. I followed him, along with the others, into the first torture chamber. It was a vaulted cellar, the brickwork exposed. The atmospheric music consisted of a series of very deep chords on an organ, overlaid with the shrieks of the damned. I noticed that the bass speakers were huge; there were red spotlights all over the place, masks and torture implements hung from iron racks; the renovations must have cost them a fortune. In an alcove, a bald, almost fleshless guy was chained by all four limbs, his feet trapped in a wooden contraption that kept him about a foot off the ground, his arms were raised by a pair of handcuffs attached to the ceiling. A booted, gloved dominatrix, dressed completely in black latex, circled him armed with a whip of fine lashes encrusted with precious stones. First, and for a long time, she thrashed his buttocks with heavy strokes. The guy was facing us, completely naked. He screamed in pain. A small crowd gathered around the couple. "She must be at level 2," Bredane whispered to me. "Level 1 is where you stop when you see first blood." The guy's cock and balls hung down, stretched and almost contorted. The dominatrix circled around him, rummaged in a bag on her belt, and took out a number of hooks that she stuck into his scrotum; a little blood beaded on the surface. Then, more gently, she began to whip his genitals. It was a very close thing: if one of the lashes caught on a hook, the skin of the scrotum could rip. Valérie turned her head and pressed herself against me. "Let's go,' she said, her voice pleading; "let's go, I'll explain later." We went back to the bar. The others were so fascinated by the spectacle that they didn't notice us leave. "The girl who was whipping that guy," she told me quietly, "I recognized her. I've only ever seen her once before, but I'm sure it's her. It's Audrey, Jean-Yves's wife." We left immediately. In the taxi Valérie was silent, devastated. She remained silent in the elevator and until we reached the apartment. It was only when the door closed behind us that she turned to me. "Michel, you don't think I'm too conventional?" "No, I hate that stuff too." "I can understand that torturers exist: I find it disgusting, but I know there are people who take pleasure in torturing others; what I don't understand is that victims exist. It's beyond me that a human being could come to prefer pain to pleasure. I don't know —they need to be reeducated, to be loved, to be taught what pleasure is." I shrugged my shoulders as if to suggest that the subject was beyond me —something that now happened in almost every aspect of my life. The things people do, the things they are prepared to endure . . . there was nothing to be made of all this, no overall conclusion, no meaning. I undressed in silence. Valérie sat on the bed beside me. I sensed that she was still tense, preoccupied by the subject. "What scares me about it all," she said, "is that there's no physical contact. Everyone wears gloves, uses equipment. Skin never touches skin, there's never a kiss, a touch, or a caress. For me, it's the very antithesis of sexuality."