She was right, but I suppose that S&M enthusiasts would have seen their practices as the apotheosis of sexuality, its ultimate form. Each person remains trapped in his skin, completely given over to his feelings of individuality. It was one way of looking at things. What was certain, in any case, was that that kind of place was increasingly fashionable. I could easily imagine girls like Marjorie and Géraldine going to them, for example. Although I had trouble imagining them being able to abandon themselves sufficiently for penetration, or indeed any kind of sexual scenario. "It's more straightforward than you might think," I said finally. "There's the sexuality of those who love each other, and the sexuality of those who don't love each other. When there's no longer any possibility of identifying with the other, the only thing left is suffering—and cruelty." Valérie snuggled up to me. "We live in a strange world," she said. In a sense, she was still innocent, protected from human reality by her insane working hours, which left her barely enough time to do the shopping, sleep, start again. She added: "I don't like the world we live in."
6
It is apparent from our research that consumers have three major expectations:
the desire to be safe, the desire for affection, and the desire for beauty.
— BERNARD GUILBAUD
On June 30, the reservations figures from the travel agencies arrived. They were excellent. Eldorador Discovery was a success. It had immediately achieved better results than Eldorador Standard—which continued to slide. Valérie decided to take a week's holiday. We went to her parents' at Saint-Quay-Portrieux. I felt rather old to be playing the role of the fiancé brought to meet the parents; after all, I was thirteen years older than she was, and this was the first time I had ever been in such a situation. The train stopped at Saint-Brieuc, where her father was waiting for us at the station. He kissed his daughter warmly and hugged her to him for a long time; you could see that he missed her. "You've lost a bit of weight," he told her. Then he turned to me and offered me his hand, without really looking at me. I think he was intimidated too —he knew I worked for the Ministry of Culture, while he was just a farmer. Her mother was much more talkative, grilling me at length about my life, my work, my hobbies. In any event, it wasn't so difficult. Valérie stayed at my side; from time to time she answered for me, and we would exchange looks. I couldn't imagine how I might behave in a situation like this if one day I had children. I couldn't really imagine much about the future. The evening meal was a real feast: lobster, saddle of lamb, several cheeses, a strawberry pie, and coffee. For my part, I was tempted to see this as evidence of acceptance, although obviously I knew that the menu had been planned in advance. Valérie handled the bulk of the conversation, mostly talking about her new job—about which I knew just about everything. I let my gaze wander over the curtain material, the ornaments, the family photos in their frames. I was in the midst of a real family, and it was at once touching and a little frightening. Valérie insisted on sleeping in the room she had had as a teenager. "You'd be better off in the guest room," her mother insisted. "The two of you will be pressed for space.'' It was true that the bed was a little narrow, but I was very moved, as I pushed Valerie's panties down and stroked her pussy, to think that this was where she slept when she was only thirteen or fourteen. Wasted years, I thought. I knelt at the foot of the bed, took off her pants completely, and turned her toward me. Her vagina closed over the tip of my penis. I pretended to penetrate her, going in a couple of centimeters and pulling back in quick, short thrusts, squeezing her breasts between my hands. She came with a muffled cry, then burst out laughing. "My parents," she whispered, "they're not asleep yet." I penetrated her again, harder this time so that I could come. She watched me, her eyes shining, and placed a hand over my mouth just as I came inside her with a hoarse moan. Later, I studied the furniture in the room curiously. On a shelf, just above the Bibliotheque Rose series, there were several little exercise books, carefully bound. "Oh, those," she said. "I used to do them when I was about ten, twelve. Have a look if you like. They're Famous Five stories." "How do you mean?" "Unpublished Famous Five stories. I used to write them myself, using the same characters." I took them down: there was Five in Outer Space, Five on a Canadian Adventure. I suddenly had an image of a little girl full of imagination, a rather lonely girl, whom I would never know.
In the days that followed, we didn't do much beyond going to the beach. The weather was beautiful, though the water was too cold to swim in for long. Valérie lay in the sun for hours at a time. She was recovering gradually: the last three months had been the hardest of her working life. One evening, three days after our arrival, I talked to her about it. It was at the Oceanic Bar, where we'd just ordered cocktails. "You won't have so much work now, I suppose, now that you've launched the package?" "For the time being, no." She smiled cynically. "But we'll have to come up with something else pretty quickly." "Why? Why not just stop at that?" "Because that's how the game goes. If Jean-Yves were here he'd tell you that that's the capitalist principle: if you don't move forward, you're dead. If you at least have acquired a decisive competitive advantage, you can bank on it for a couple of years; but we're not there yet. The principle of Eldorador Discovery is good —it's clever, canny if you like, but it's not really innovative, it's just a good mix of other concepts. The competition will see that it works and before you know it, they'll be doing the same thing. It's not that difficult to do; the hard part was setting it up in so little time. But I'm sure that Nouvelles Frontières, for example, would be able to offer a similar package by next summer. If we want to keep our advantage, we have to innovate again." "And it never ends?" "I don't think so, Michel. I'm well paid, I work in an industry I understand. I accept the rules of the game." I must have looked gloomy; she put her hand on my neck. "Let's go and eat," she said. "My parents will be waiting for us."
We went back to Paris on Sunday evening. Valérie and Jean-Yves had a meeting with Éric Leguen on Monday morning. He made a point of personally expressing the group's satisfaction with the first results of their recovery plan. As a bonus, the board of directors had unanimously decided to allocate shares to each of them, exceptional for executives who had been with the company less than a year. That evening, the three of us had dinner in a Moroccan restaurant on the Rue des Ecoles. Jean-Yves was unshaven; his head was nodding and he looked a little puffy. "I think he's started drinking," Valérie said to me in the taxi. "He had a dreadful holiday with his wife and kids on the lie de Re. They were supposed to be there for two weeks, but he left after a week. He told me he couldn't bear his wife's friends anymore." It was true he didn't look at all well. He didn't touch his tagine and continually poured himself more wine. "We've made it!" he said sarcastically. "Here we go! We're getting into serious money now!" He shook his head, drained his wineglass. "Sorry," he said pitifully, "sorry, I shouldn't talk like that." He placed his hands, trembling slightly, on the table, and waited. Slowly he stopped trembling. Then he looked Valérie straight in the eye. "You know what happened to Marylise?" "Marylise Le Francois? No, I haven't seen her. Is she sick?" "Not sick, no. She spent three days in the hospital on tranquilizers, but she's not sick. Actually, she was attacked, raped on the train to Paris, on her way home from work last Wednesday." Marylise returned to work the following Monday. It was obvious she had been badly shaken. Her movements were slow, almost mechanical. She told her story easily, too easily, it didn't seem natural: her voice was neutral, her face expressionless, rigid, it was as if she were reciting her police statement. Leaving work at 10:15 p.m., she had decided to take the 10:21 p.m. train, thinking it would be quicker than waiting for a taxi. The carriage was three-quarters empty. Four guys came up to her and immediately started insulting her. As far as she could tell, they were West Indian. She tried to talk to them, make pleasantries. For her trouble she got a couple of slaps that knocked her half-unconscious. At that point, they jumped her, two of them holding her down on the floor. Violently, brutally, they penetrated her every orifice. Every
time she tried to make a sound, she was punched or slapped. It had gone on for a long time, the train had stopped at several stations; passengers got off, warily changed carriages. As the guys took turns raping her, they continued to taunt and insult her, calling her a slut and a douche bag. By the end there was no one in the car. They ended up in a circle around her, spitting and pissing on her, then they shoved her with their feet, until she was half-hidden under one of the seats, then they calmly got off the train at the Gare de Lyon. Two minutes later, the first passengers to board called the police, who arrived almost immediately. The superintendent wasn't really surprised. According to him, she'd been relatively lucky. Quite often, after they had used the girl, these guys would end up shoving a piece of wood studded with nails into her vagina or her anus. The line was classed as "dangerous." An internal memo reminded employees of the usual safety measures, repeating that taxis were at their disposal should they need to work late and that the fares would be entirely covered by the company. The number of security guards patrolling the grounds and the parking lot was increased. That evening, since her car was being repaired, Jean-Yves drove Valérie home. As he was stepping out of his office, he looked out over the chaotic landscape of houses, shopping centers, high-rises, and highway interchanges. Far away, on the horizon, a layer of pollution lent the sunset strange tints of mauve and green. "It's strange," he said to her. "Here we are inside the company like well-fed beasts of burden. And outside are the predators, the savage world. I was in Sao Paulo once, now there's where evolution has really been pushed to its limits. It's not even a city anymore, it's a sort of urban territory that extends as far as the eye can see, with its favelas, its huge office blocks, its luxury housing surrounded by guards armed to the teeth. It has a population of more than twenty million, many of whom are born, live, and die without ever stepping outside the limits of its terrain. The streets are dangerous there: even in a car, you could easily be held up at gunpoint at a traffic light, or you might wind up being tailed by a gang. The most advanced gangs have machine guns and rocket launchers. Businessmen and rich people use helicopters to get around almost all the time, and there are helipads pretty much everywhere, on the roofs of banks and apartment buildings. At ground level the street is left to the poor—and the gangs." As he turned onto the highway heading south, he added in a low voice: "I've been having doubts lately. More and more now, I have doubts about the sort of world we're creating."
A couple of days later, they returned to the subject. After he had parked on the Avenue de Choisy, Jean-Yves lit a cigarette. He was silent for a moment, then he turned to Valérie. "I feel really terrible about Marylise. The doctors said she could go back to work, and it's true that in a sense, she's back to normal, she's not having panic attacks. But she never takes the initiative, it's as if she's paralyzed. Every time there's a decision to be made, she comes and asks me, and if I'm not there, she's capable of waiting for hours without lifting a finger. For a marketing manager, it's not good enough. It can't go on like this." "You're not going to fire her?" Jean-Yves stubbed out his cigarette and stared out of the car for a long time. He gripped the steering wheel. He seemed to be more and more tense, unsettled; Valérie noticed that even his suit was sometimes stained nowadays. "I don't know," he whispered at last, with difficulty. "I've never had to do anything like this. I couldn't fire her, that would be really shitty. But I'll have to find her another job where she has fewer decisions to make, fewer dealings with people. To make matters worse, ever since it happened, she's become more and more racist in her reactions. It's understandable, it's not hard to understand, but in the tourist industry it's just not acceptable. In our advertising, our catalogues, all our marketing material, we portray the locals as warm, welcoming, friendly people. That's the way it is: it really is a professional obligation."
The following day, Jean-Yves broached the subject with Leguen, who had fewer qualms, and, a week later, Marylise was transferred to the accounts department to replace an employee who had just retired. Another marketing manager needed to be found for Eldorador. Jean-Yves and Valérie handled the job interviews together. After they had seen about ten candidates, they had lunch in the company cafeteria to discuss the appointment. "I'd be quite tempted to go with Noureddine," said Valérie. "He's incredibly talented, and he's already worked on quite a variety of projects." "Yes, he is the best of the bunch; but I wonder if he might be a bit overqualified for the job. I can't really see him doing marketing for a travel company, I see him in something more prestigious, more arty.* He'll get bored here, he won't stay. Our target market really is middle-of-the-road. And his parents being beurs, that could cause problems. To appeal to people, we have to use a lot of cliches about Arab countries: the hospitality, the mint tea, the festivals, the Bedouin . . . I've found that kind of thing doesn't really go clown too well with Arabs here; in fact, a lot of them don't really like Arab countries." "That's racial discrimination," Valérie said, teasingly. "Don't be stupid!" Jean-Yves was getting angry. Since he had come back from holiday, he was clearly overstressed, and he was beginning to lose his sense of humor. "Everyone does it!" he said, too loudly, earning them sidelong glances from the neighboring tables. "People's origins are part of their personalities, you have to take them into consideration, it's obvious. For example, I'd happily take a Moroccan or Tunisian immigrant—even one much more recent than Noureddine—to handle the negotiations with local suppliers. They have a foot in both camps, which is a real advantage, since the people they deal with are always the outsiders. On top of that, they come across as someone who's made it in France, so the guys respect them immediately and don't think they're going to be ripped off. The best negotiators I've ever had have always been people of dual origin. But here, for this job, I'd be more tempted to take Brigit." "The Danish girl?" "Yes. Purely as a designer; she's also very talented. She's really antiracist —I think she lives with a Jamaican guy—she's a bit stupidly enthusiastic about anything exotic, on principle. She has no intention of having children just yet. All in all, I think she's the right fit." There was perhaps another reason, too, Valérie realized some days later when she surprised Brigit putting her hand on Jean-Yves's shoulder. "Yeah, you're right,'' he admitted as they had coffee by the vending machine. "My rap sheet is getting worse, now I'm getting into sexual harassment. Look, it's only happened once or twice, and it won't go any further than that—in any case, she's got a boyfriend.'' Valérie looked at him quickly. He needed a haircut—he was really letting himself go. "I wasn't blaming you," she said. Intellectually, he hadn't slipped at all — he was still capable of flawless assessments of situations and people, had an excellent eye for a financial setup —but he seemed increasingly like a man who was unhappy, adrift.