I rented a room on Naklua Road, a little outside the bustle of the city. It had air conditioning, a fridge, a shower, a bed, and some bits of furniture. The rent was three thousand baht a month—a little more than five hundred francs. I informed my bank of this news and wrote a letter of resignation to the Ministry of Culture. There was nothing much left for me to do in this life. I bought a number of reams of A4 paper with the intention of putting the elements of my life in order. It's something people should do more often before they die. It's curious to think of all the human beings who live out their whole lives without feeling the need to make the slightest comment, the slightest objection, the slightest remark. Not that these comments, these objections, these remarks are addressed to anyone in particular, or intended to have any sort of meaning; but, even so, it seems to me to be better, in the end, that they be made.
5
Six months later, I am still here in my room on Naklua Road, and I think that I have more or less finished my work. I miss Valérie. If by chance it had been my intention, when I began writing these pages, to lessen the feeling of loss, or to make it more bearable, I would by now be certain of my failure: Valerie's absence has never been more painful to me. At the beginning of my third month here, I finally decided to go back to the massage parlors and the hostess bars. The idea didn't really fill me with enthusiasm. I was afraid it would be a total fiasco. Nonetheless, I managed to get a hard-on, and even to ejaculate; but I never once experienced any pleasure. It wasn't the girls' fault, they were just as expert, just as gentle. But it was as though I was anesthetized. After that I tried going to a massage parlor once a week, to some extent on principle; then I decided to stop. It was, after all, a form of human contact—that was the drawback. Even if I didn't in the least believe that my ability to feel pleasure would return, it was possible that the girl would come, especially as the numbness in my penis meant that I could keep going for hours if I didn't bother to interrupt the proceedings. I might get to the point where I wanted her to come, it could become an issue, and I didn't wish to have anything more to do with issues. My life was an empty space, and it was better that it remain that way. If I allowed passion to penetrate my body, pain would follow quickly in its wake.
My book is reaching its end. More and more often now, I stay in bed for most of the day. Sometimes I turn on the air conditioning in the morning and turn it off at night, and between the two absolutely nothing happens. I've become accustomed to the purring of the machine, which I found irritating at first, but for that matter I've become equally accustomed to the heat. I don't really have a preference. A long time ago now, I stopped buying French newspapers; I suppose that by this time the presidential elections have taken place. The Ministry of Culture, somehow or other, must be getting on with its work. Perhaps Marie-Jeanne still thinks about me from time to time, when she's working on the budget for an exhibition. I haven't tried to get in touch. I don't know what's become of Jean-Yves either. After he was fired from Aurore, I suppose he must have started his career again much further down, and probably in something other than tourism. When your love life is over, life in general takes on a sort of conventional, forced quality. One retains a human form, one's habitual behavior, a sort of structure, but one's heart, as they say, isn't in it. Mopeds are driving down Naklua Road, sending up clouds of dust. It is noon already. Coming from outlying districts, the prostitutes are arriving at work in the downtown bars. I don't think I'll go out today. Or maybe I will, late in the afternoon, to gulp down a soup at one of the stalls set up at the crossroads. When you give up on life, the last remaining human contacts are those you have with shopkeepers. As far as I'm concerned, these are limited to a few words spoken in English. I don't speak Thai, which creates a barrier around me that is suffocating and sad. It is obvious that I will never really understand Asia, and actually it's not of great importance. It's possible to live in the world without understanding it; all you need is to be able to get food, caresses, and love. In Pattaya, food and caresses are cheap by western, and even by Asian, standards. As for love, it's difficult for me to say. I am now convinced that, for me, Valérie was simply a radiant exception. She was one of those creatures who are capable of devoting their lives to someone else's happiness, of making that alone their goal. This phenomenon is a mystery. Happiness, simplicity, and joy lie within them, but I still do not know how or why it occurs. And if I haven't understood love, what use is it to me to have understood the rest? To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the west, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism, and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it. It's getting dark. The multicolored fairy lights wink on at the entrances to the beer bars. The German retirees settle in, placing their thick hands on the thighs of their young companions. More than any other people, they are acquainted with worry and shame; they feel the need for tender flesh, for soft, endlessly refreshing skin. More than any other people, they are acquainted with the desire for their own annihilation. It is rare to come across the vulgar, smug pragmatism of AngloSaxon sex tourists among them, that manner of endlessly comparing goods and prices. It is equally rare for them to exercise, to look after their bodies. In general, they eat too much, drink too much beer, get fat. Most of them will die pretty soon. They are often friendly, they like to joke, to buy a round, to tell stories, but their company is soothing and sad. I understand death now. I don't think it will do me much harm. I have known hatred, contempt, decay, and other things; I have even known brief moments of love. Nothing of me will survive, and I do not deserve for anything of me to survive. I will have been a mediocre individual in every possible sense. I imagine, I don't know why, that I will die in the middle of the night, and I still feel a little anxious at the thought of the suffering that will accompany the severing of all corporeal ties. I find it difficult to envisage the cessation of life as completely painless and unconscious. Naturally, I know that I'm wrong. Nonetheless, I have trouble convincing myself of that fact. The locals will find me a few days thereafter, quite quickly, in fact, since in this climate corpses quickly start to stink. They won't know what to do with me and will probably contact the French embassy. I'm far from being destitute, and the case will be easy to deal with. There will certainly be quite a lot of money left in my account. I don't know who will inherit it—the state probably, or some distant relatives. Unlike other Asian peoples, the Thais don't believe in ghosts, and have little interest in the fate of corpses. Most of them are buried in communal graves. Since I will have left no specific instructions, that is what will become of me. A death certificate will be drawn up, a box will be ticked in a registry office, far from here, in France. A few street hawkers, accustomed to seeing me in the area, will shake their heads. My apartment will be rented out to another resident. I'll be forgotten. I'll be forgotten quickly.
ALSO BY MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
"Fearless, vivid and astringently honest. . . surprisingly funny. . . . Can permanently change how we view things that happened in our own lives. Not many novels can do that."—Los Angeles Times
THE ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel—part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis—that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence. Bruno and Michel are half brothers who were abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out, free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older brother, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist wholly immersed in the solitude of his work. Each is ultimately offered a final chance at genuine love, and what unfolds is a brilliantly caustic and unpredictable tale.
Fiction/Literature/0-375-72701-9
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