From a professional point of view, on the other hand, everything was going well, he informed me with satisfaction. There had almost been a problem with the Thailand club a couple of weeks earlier. To meet customer expectations for that location, there had to be at least one hostess bar and one massage parlor. This would be a little difficult to justify in the budget for the hotel. He telephoned Gottfried Rembke. The boss of TUI rapidly found a solution. He had an associate on-site, a Chinese building contractor based in Phuket, who would sort out the building of a leisure complex just beside the hotel. The German tour operator seemed to be in a great mood; apparently things were looking good. At the beginning of November, Jean-Yves received a copy of the catalogue destined for the German market. He immediately saw that they hadn't pulled any punches. In every photo, the local girls were topless, wearing minuscule G-strings or see-through skirts. Photographed on the beach or right in the hotel rooms, they smiled teasingly, ran their tongues over their lips: it was almost impossible to misunderstand. "In France," he remarked to Valérie, "you would never get away with something like this." It was curious to note, he mused, that as Europe became ever closer, and the idea of a federation of states was ever more current, there was no noticeable standardization of moral legislation. Although prostitution was accepted in Holland and Germany and was governed by statute, many people in France were calling for it to be criminalized, even for clients to be prosecuted, as they were in Sweden. Valérie looked at him, surprised. He had been odd lately, launching increasingly frequently into aimless, unproductive ruminations. She herself coped with a punishing workload, methodically and with a sort of cold determination. She regularly made decisions without consulting him. It was something she was not really used to, and at times I sensed she felt lost, uncertain. The board of directors would not get involved, affording them complete freedom. "They're waiting, that's all, they're waiting to see whether we fall flat on our faces," she confided one day, with suppressed rage. She was right, it was obvious, I couldn't disagree with her. That was the way the game worked. For my part, I had no objection to sex being subject to market forces. There were many ways of acquiring money, honest and dishonest, cerebral or, by contrast, brutally physical. It was possible to make money using one's intellect, talent, strength, or courage, even one's beauty; it was also possible to acquire money through a banal stroke of luck. Most often, money was acquired through inheritance, as in my case, conferring the problem of how it had been earned on the previous generation. Many very different people had acquired money on this earth: former top athletes, gangsters, artists, models, actors; a great number of entrepreneurs and talented financiers; a number of engineers, too, more rarely a few inventors. Money was sometimes acquired mechanically, by simple accumulation; or, on the other hand, by some audacious but successful move. There was no great logic to it, but the possibilities were endless. By contrast, the criteria for sexual selection were unduly simple, consisting merely of youth and physical beauty. These features had a price, certainly, but not an infinite price. The situation, of course, had been very different in earlier centuries, at a time when sex was essentially linked to reproduction. To maintain the genetic value of the species, humanity was compelled seriously to take into account criteria like health, strength, youth, and physical prowess —of which beauty was merely a handy indicator. Nowadays, the order of things had changed: beauty had retained all of its value, but that value was now something marketable, narcissistic. If sex was really to come into the category of tradable commodities, the best solution was probably to involve money, that universal mediator that already made it possible to assure an exact equivalence between intelligence, talent, and technical competence, and that had already made it possible to assure a perfect standardization of opinions, tastes, and lifestyles. Unlike the aristocracy, the rich made no claim to being different in constitution from the rest of the population: they simply claimed to be richer. Essentially abstract, money was a concept in which neither race, physical appearance, age, intelligence, nor distinction played any part, nothing, in fact, but money. My European ancestors had worked hard for several centuries, seeking to dominate, then to transform the world, and to a certain extent they had succeeded. They had done so out of economic self-interest, out of a taste for work, but also because they believed in the superiority of their civilization. They had invented dreams, progress, Utopia, the future. Their sense of a mission to civilize had disappeared in the course of the twentieth century. Europeans, at least some of them, continued to work, and sometimes to work hard, but they did so for money, or from a neurotic attachment to their work. The innocent sense of their natural right to dominate the world and direct the path of history had disappeared. As a consequence of their accumulated efforts, Europe remained a wealthy continent. Those qualities of intelligence and determination shown by my ancestors, I had manifestly lost. As a wealthy European, I could obtain food and the services of women more cheaply in other countries; as a decadent European, conscious of my approaching death, and given over entirely to selfishness, I could see no reason to deprive myself of such things. I was aware, however, that such a situation was barely tenable, that people like me were incapable of ensuring the survival of a society. Perhaps, more simply, we were unworthy of life. Mutations would occur, were already occurring, but I found it difficult to feel truly concerned. My only genuine motivation was to get the hell out of this shithole as quickly as possible. November was cold, bleak; I hadn't been reading Auguste Comte that much recently. My great diversion when Valérie was out consisted of watching the movement of the clouds through the bay window. Immense flocks of starlings formed over Gentilly in the late afternoon, describing inclined planes and spirals in the sky. I was quite tempted to ascribe meaning to them, to interpret them as the heralds of an apocalypse.
13
One evening, I ran into Lionel as I was leaving work. I hadn't seen him since the Thai Tropic trip almost a year earlier, yet, curiously enough, I recognized him at once. I was a little surprised that he had made such a strong impression on me; I couldn't remember having said a word to him at the time. Things were going well, he told me. A large cotton disk covered his right eye. He'd had an accident at work, something had exploded; but it was okay, they'd managed to treat him in time, he would recover 50 percent of the sight in his eye. I invited him for a drink in a cafe near the Palais-Royal. I wondered whether I would recognize Robert or Josiane or the other members of the group as easily—yes, probably. It was a slightly distressing thought, that my memory was constantly filling up with information that was almost completely useless. As a human being, I was particularly proficient in the recognition and storage of images of other humans. Nothing is more useful to man than man himself. The reason I had invited Lionel was not particularly clear to me; there was every indication that the conversation would drag. To keep it going, I asked whether he'd had the opportunity to go back to Thailand. No, and it wasn't for lack of wanting, but unfortunately the trip was rather expensive. Had he seen any of the other members of the group again? No, none of them. Then I told him I had seen Valérie, whom he might perhaps remember, and that we were now living together. He seemed happy at this news; we had clearly made a good impression on him. He didn't get the chance to travel much, he told me, and that holiday in Thailand in particular was one of his fondest memories. I started to feel moved by his simplicity, his naive longing for happiness. It was at that point that I did something that, thinking back on it even today, I'm tempted to describe as "good." On the whole, I am not good, it is not one of my character traits. Humanitarians disgust me, the fate of others is generally a matter of indifference to me, nor have I any memory of ever having felt any sense of "solidarity" with other human beings. The fact remains that, that evening, I explained to Lionel that Valérie worked in the tourist industry, that her company was about to open a new club in Krabi, and that I could easily get him a weeklong stay at a 50 percent discount. Obviously, this was pure invention, but I had decided to pay the
difference. Maybe, to a degree, I was trying to show off; but it seems to me that I also felt a genuine desire for him to be able, even if only for a week of his life, to once again feel pleasure at the expert hands of young Thai prostitutes. When I told her about the meeting, Valérie looked at me, somewhat perplexed; she herself had no memory of Lionel. That really was the problem with the boy; he wasn't a bad guy, but he had no personality. He was too shy, too humble, it was difficult to remember anything at all about him. "But it's fine," she said. "I mean, if it makes you happy. In fact, he doesn't even have to pay the 50 percent. I was going to talk to you about this. I'm going to get invitations for the week of the opening, which will be on January 1." I called Lionel the following day to tell him that his trip would be free. This was too much, he couldn't believe me. I even had a bit of trouble getting him to accept. The same day, I received a visit from a young artist who had come to show me her work. Her name was Sandra Heksjtovoian, something like that, in any case some name that I was never going to remember. If I'd been her agent, I would have advised her to call herself Sandra Hallyday. She was a very young girl, wearing trousers and a T-shirt, fairly unremarkable, with a roundish face and short, curly hair; she had graduated from the Beaux Arts in Caen. She worked entirely on her body, she explained to me. As she opened her portfolio I looked at her anxiously, hoping she wasn't going to show me photos of plastic surgery on her toes or anything like that— I'd had it up to here with things like that. But no, she simply handed me some postcards that she had had made, with the imprint of her pussy dipped in different colors of paint. I chose a turquoise and a mauve, a little sorry I hadn't brought photos of my prick to return the favor. It was all very pleasant, but, well, as far as I could remember, Yves Klein had already done something similar more than forty years ago. I was going to have trouble championing her cause. Of course, of course, she agreed, you had to take it as an exercice de style. She then took a more complex piece out of its cardboard packaging: it consisted of two wheels of unequal sizes linked by a thin strip of rubber, with a handle to operate the contraption. The strip of rubber was covered with small plastic protuberances that were more or less pyramid-shaped. I turned the handle and ran my finger along the moving ribbon. It produced a sort of friction that was not unpleasant to the touch. "They're casts of my clitoris," the girl explained. I immediately removed my finger. "While it was erect, I took photos using an endoscope, and put it all on a computer. Using 3-D software I reproduced the volume, modeling everything with 'ray tracing,' then I sent the coordinates to the factory." I got the feeling she was obsessing a little over the technical considerations. I turned the handle again, more or less unconsciously. "It cries out to be touched, doesn't it?" she went on with satisfaction. "I had thought of connecting it to a resistor so it could power a bulb. What do you think?" To be honest, I wasn't in favor of the idea. It seemed to detract from the simplicity of the object. She was quite sweet, this girl, for a contemporary artist. I almost felt like asking her to come to an orgy some night, I was sure she'd get along well with Valérie. I realized just in lime that, in my position, such a thing risked being construed as sexual harassment. I considered the contraption despondently. "You know," I said, "I'm really more involved in the financial aspects of the projects. For anything to do with the aesthetics, you'd be better off making an appointment to see Mlle. Durry." On a business card, I wrote down Marie-Jeanne's phone number and extension; after all, she must know a thing or two about this whole clitoris business. The girl looked a little disconcerted, but even so. she handed me a small bag filled with plastic pyramids. "I'll give you these casts," she said. "The factory made a lot of them." I thanked her and walked her back to the service entrance. Before saying goodbye, I asked her if the casts were life-size. Of course, she told me, it was all part of her artistic methodology.
That same evening, I examined Valerie's clitoris carefully. I had never really paid it any serious attention; whenever I had stroked or licked it, it was as part of a more overall plan, I had memorized the position, the angles, the rhythmic movement to adopt. But now I examined the tiny organ at length as it pulsed before my eyes. "What are you doing?" she asked, surprised, after five minutes spent with her legs apart. "It's an artistic methodology," I said, giving a little lick to soothe her impatience. The girl's cast lacked the taste and the smell, naturally, but otherwise there was an undeniable resemblance. My examination complete, I parted Valerie's pussy with both hands and licked her clitoris with short, precise thrusts of my tongue. Was it the waiting that had stimulated her desire? More precise, more attentive movements on my part? The fact remains that she came almost immediately. Actually, I decided, Sandra was a pretty talented artist; her work encouraged one to see the world in a new light.
14
As early as the beginning of December, it was clear that the Aphrodite clubs were going to be a huge success, and probably a success on a historic scale. November is traditionally the most difficult month for the tourist industry. In October, there are still a number of late-season departures; in December, the Christmas period takes over; but rare, extremely rare, are those who consider taking a holiday in November, apart from some particularly hard-nosed and savvy senior citizens. Yet, the first results to come back from the clubs were excellent. The formula had been an immediate success, people were going so far as to talk about a deluge. I had dinner with Jean-Yves and Valérie the night the initial figures came in. He stared at me, almost bizarrely, the results had so exceeded his expectations: taken as a whole, the occupancy for the month was 95 percent, regardless of destination. "Ah yes, sex," I said, embarrassed. "People need sex, that's all, it's just that they don't dare admit it." All of this made us inclined to be contemplative, almost silent; the waiter brought the antipasti. "The Krabi opening is going to be unbelievable," Jean-Yves went on. "Rembke phoned me, everything is entirely booked up for three weeks. What's even better is that there's been nothing in the press, not a line. A discreet success, as massive as it is confidential; exactly what we were aiming for." He had finally decided to rent a studio flat and leave his wife. He would not get the keys until January 1, but he was a lot better, I sensed he was already more relaxed. He was relatively young, handsome, and extremely rich—all things, I realized, a little alarmed, that do not necessarily make life easier; but they help, at least, in awakening desire in others. I still could not understand his ambition, the furious energy he invested in making a success of his career. It wasn't for the money, I don't think: he paid high taxes and didn't have expensive tastes. Nor was it out of commitment to the company, or from a more general altruism, as it would be difficult to imagine the development of global tourism as a noble cause. His ambition existed in its own right, it couldn't be pinned down to one specific source: it was probably more like the desire to build something, rather than a taste for power or a competitive nature —I had never heard him talk about the careers of his former friends at the HEC business school, and I don't think he gave them a second thought. All in all, it was a respectable motive, not unlike the one that explains the very advance of human civilization. The social reward bestowed on him was a large salary; under other regimes it might have taken the form of an aristocratic title, or of privileges like those accorded to the members of the nomenklatura; I didn't get the impression that it would have made much difference. In reality, Jean-Yves worked because he had a taste for work; it was something both mysterious and clear.
On December 15, two weeks before the opening, he received an anxious phone call from TUI. A German tourist had just been kidnapped with a Thai girl. The kidnapping had taken place in Hat Yai, in the extreme south of the country. The local police had received a confused message, written in bad English, that expressed no demands but indicated that the two young people would be executed for behavior in contravention of Islamic law. For some months there had indeed been an increase in the activities of Islamic movements, supported by Libya, in the border area with Malaysia; but this was the first time that they had
attacked people. On December 18, the naked, mutilated bodies of the young people were thrown from a van, right in the middle of the main square of the town. The young girl had been stoned to death, she had been beaten with extraordinary violence; everywhere her skin was ripped open, her body was little more than a giant blister, barely recognizable. The German's throat had been cut and he had been castrated. His penis and testicles had been stuffed into his mouth. This time, the entire German press picked up the story, and there were even some brief articles in France. The papers had decided not to publish photographs of the victims, but they quickly became available on the usual Internet sites. Jean-Yves telephoned TUI every day, though so far, the situation was not alarming —there had been few cancellations, people stuck to their holiday plans. The prime minister of Thailand made repeated reassurances: it was undoubtedly an isolated incident, all known terrorist groups condemned the kidnapping and the executions. As soon as we arrived in Bangkok, however, I felt a certain tension, especially around the Sukhumvit area, where most of the Middle Eastern tourists stayed. They came mainly from Turkey or Egypt, but sometimes also from more hard-line Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. When they walked through the crowds, I could feel the hostile stares directed toward them. At the entrances to most of the hostess bars, I saw signs: No Muslims Here;* the owner of a bar in Patpong had even clarified his line of reasoning, writing in a decorative hand the following message: We respect your Muslim faith: we don't want you to drink whiskey and enjoy Thai girls. The poor things were hardly to blame, since it was obvious that in the event of a terrorist attack, they would be the first to be targeted. On my first visit to Thailand, I had been surprised by the presence of people from Arab countries. In fact, they came for exactly the same reasons as westerners, with one slight difference: they threw themselves into debauchery with much more enthusiasm. Often, in the hotel bars you'd find them around a bottle of whiskey at ten in the morning, and they were first to arrive as soon as the massage parlors opened. In clear breach of Islamic law and probably feeling guilty about it, they were, for the most part, courteous and charming. Bangkok was as polluted, noisy, and stifling as always, but I was just happy to be back. Jean-Yves had two or three meetings with bankers, or at some ministry; anyway, I only vaguely followed what was going on. After two days, he informed us that his meetings had been very conclusive: the local authorities were as obliging as possible and were prepared to do anything to attract the smallest amount of western investment. For a number of years, Thailand had been unable to alleviate its economic crisis. The stock exchange and the currency were at historic lows, government debt had reached 70 percent of the gross domestic product. "They're so deep in shit that they're not even corrupt anymore," Jean-Yves told us. "I had to grease a few palms, but not many, nothing at all compared to what was going on five years ago." On the morning of December 31, we took the plane to Krabi. As we got out of the minibus, I ran into Lionel, who had arrived the previous evening. He was delighted, he told me, absolutely delighted. I had a bit of trouble stemming his torrent of gratitude. But, as I arrived at my chalet, I too was struck by the beauty of the landscape. The beach was immense, immaculate, the sand as fine as powder. Over a distance of thirty meters, the ocean veered from azure to turquoise, from turquoise to emerald. Vast chalk crags covered with lush green forests rose out of the water as far as the horizon, losing themselves in the light and the distance, giving the bay a depth that seemed unreal, cosmic. "Isn't this the place where they filmed The Beach?" Valérie asked me. "No, I think that was at Ko Phi Phi; but I haven't seen the film." According to her, I hadn't missed much; apart from the landscapes, it had nothing to recommend it. I vaguely remembered the book, which tells the story of a bunch of backpackers in search of an unspoiled island. The only clue they have is a map drawn for them by an old traveler in a shitty hotel on Khao San Road, just before he commits suicide. First, they go to Ko Samui—much too touristy; from there they go to a neighboring island, but there are still too many people for their liking. In the end, by bribing a sailor, they finally arrive on their island, situated in a nature reserve and therefore, in theory, inaccessible. It's at this point that things start to go wrong. The early chapters of the book perfectly illustrate the curse of the tourist, caught up in a frenetic search for places that are "not touristy," which his very presence undermines, forever forced to move on, following a plan whose very fulfillment, little by little, renders it futile. This hopeless situation, comparable to a man trying to escape his own shadow, was common knowledge in the tourist industry, Valérie informed me: in sociological terms it was known as the "double-bind paradox." The vacationers who had chosen the Krabi Eldorador Aphrodite, at any rate, did not look ready to succumb to the double-bind paradox: although the beach was huge, they had all chosen more or less the same area. As far as I had been able to make out, they seemed to conform to the expected breakdown of clientele: lots of Germans, usually senior executives or people in liberal professions. Valérie had the precise figures: 80 percent Germans, 10 percent Italians, 5 percent Spaniards, and 5 percent French. The surprise was that there were a lot of couples. They looked pretty much like the sort of swinging couples that you might have run into on the Cap d'Agde. Most of the women had silicone-enhanced breasts; a lot of them wore a gold chain around their waists or ankles. I also noticed that almost everyone swam in the nude. All of this made me fairly confident; you never have any trouble from people like that. In contrast to a "backpackers' paradise," a resort dedicated to wife-swapping, which only comes into its own when visitor numbers are high, is not paradoxical by definition. In a world where the greatest of luxuries is acquiring the wherewithal to avoid other people, the good-natured sociability of middle-class German wife-swappers constitutes a form of particularly subtle subversion, I said to Valérie, just as she was taking off her bra and panties. Immediately after undressing, I was a little embarrassed to discover that I had a hard-on, and I lay down on my stomach beside her. She parted her thighs, serenely baring her sex to the sun. A few meters to our right was a group of German women who seemed to be discussing an article from Der Spiegel. One of them had shaved her pubic hair, so that you could easily make out her slender, delicate slit. "I really go for that type of pussy," Valérie said in a low voice. "It makes you feel like slipping a finger inside." I agreed, but to our left was a Spanish couple where the woman, by contrast, had a really thick, black, curly pubic bush; I could really go for that too. As she lay down, I could make out the thick, plump lips of her pussy. She was a young woman, no more than twenty-five, but her breasts were heavy, with large, prominent areolas. "Come on, turn over onto your back," Valérie whispered into my ear. I did as I was told, keeping my eyes closed, as though somehow the fact that I could see nothing diminished the enormity of what we were doing. I felt my cock stand up, the glans emerging from its sheath of protective skin. By the end of about a minute I had stopped thinking entirely, concentrating purely on the sensation, and the warmth of the sun on the mucous membranes was immensely pleasurable. I did not open my eyes when I felt a thread of suntan lotion trickle onto my torso, then onto my stomach. Valerie's fingers moved in short, light touches. The fragrance of coconut filled the air. At the point when she began to rub oil into my penis. I opened my eyes suddenly: she was kneeling by my side, facing the Spanish woman, who had propped herself up on her elbows to watch. I threw my head back, staring at the blue of the sky. Valérie placed the palm of one hand on my balls and slipped her index finger into my anus; with her other hand she continued to jerk me off steadily. Turning my head to the left, I saw that the Spaniard was busying herself with her own guy's penis. I turned back to stare at the azure. At the point when I heard footsteps approaching across the sand, I closed my eyes again. First there was the sound of a kiss, then I heard whispering. After a time I no longer knew how many hands or fingers stroked and wrapped around my prick; the sound of the surf was very gentle.