The Khmer kingdom was at its apogee in the twelfth century, the era in which Angkor Wat was built. After that, everything went pretty much clown the tubes. Thailand's principal enemy was the Burmese. In 1351, King Ramathibodi I founded the village of Ayutthaya. In 1402, his son Ramathibodi II invaded the declining Angkor empire. Thirty-two successive sovereigns of Ayutthaya marked their reigns by building Buddhist temples and palaces. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, according to tire accounts of French and Portuguese travelers, Ayutthaya was the most magnificent city in all of Asia. The wars with the Burmese continued and Ayutthaya fell in 1767, after a siege lasting fifteen months. The Burmese looted the city, melted down the gold statues, and left nothing but ruins in their wake. Now, it was very peaceful. A light breeze stirred up dust between the temples. Not much remained of King Ramathibodi, apart from a couple of lines in the Michelin Guide. The image of the Buddha, on the other hand, was very much in evidence and had retained all of its significance. The Burmese had shipped in Thai craftsmen so that they could construct identical temples several hundred kilometers away. The will to power exists, and it manifests itself in the form of history, while it is, in itself, radically unproductive. The smile of the Buddha continued to float above the ruins. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. According to the Michelin Guide, you needed to set aside three days for a complete visit, one clay for a quick tour. We had three hours; it was time to get out the camcorders. I imagined Chateaubriand with a Panasonic camcorder at the Colosseum, smoking cigarettes the whole time—Benson & Hedges probably, rather than Gauloises Lights. Faced with a religion this radical, I expect his views would have been slightly different; he would have had a lot less respect for Napoleon. I was sure that he would have been capable of writing an excellent edition of Genie du bouddhisme. Josette and René were a bit bored during the visit; I got the impression pretty quickly that they were just going around in circles. Babette and Léa were the same. The ecologists from the Jura, on the other hand, seemed to be in their element, as did the naturopaths; an impressive array of photographic equipment was being deployed. Valérie was lost in thought, walking down the alleys, across the flagstones, through the grass. That's culture for you, I thought: it's a bit of a pain in the butt, which is fine, and ultimately everyone is returned to his original nothingness. That said, how did the sculptors of the Ayutthaya period do it? How did they manage to give their statues of the Buddha such a luminous expression of understanding?
After the fall of Ayutthaya, the Thai kingdom entered a period of great stability. Bangkok became the capital, and the Rama dynasty began. For two centuries (in fact, up to the present day) the kingdom knew no serious foreign wars, or any civil or religious wars for that matter. It also succeeded in avoiding any form of colonization. There had been no famines, either, or great epidemics. In such circumstances, when lands are fertile and bring forth abundant harvests, when sickness seems to relax its grip, when a peaceable religion extends its laws over hearts and minds, human beings grow and multiply; in general, they live happily. Now, things were different. Thailand had become part of the "free world," meaning the market economy. For five years now it had been suffering a terrible economic crisis, which had reduced the currency to less than half its previous value and brought the most successful businesses to the brink of ruin. This was the first real tragedy to strike the country for more than two centuries. One after another, in a silence that was pretty striking, we went back to the bus. We left at sunset, due to take the night train from Bangkok, destination Surat Thani.
9
Surat Thani — population 42,000—is distinguished, according to the guidebooks, by the fact that it is of no interest whatever. It is, and this is the only thing you can say about it, an obligatory stop on the way to the Koh Samui ferry. Nonetheless, people live here, and the Michelin Guide informed us that for a long time the city has been an important center of metallurgical industries—and that, more recently, it has gained a significant role in metal-based construction and assembly. And where would we be without metal construction? Iron ore is mined in obscure regions of the country and transported here by freighter. Machine tools are then produced, mostly under the supervision of Japanese companies. Further assembly takes place in cities like Surat Thani, resulting in buses, train carriages, ferries, all produced under license from NEC, General Motors, or Mitsubishi. The products serve in part to transport western tourists, such as Babette and Léa. I was entitled to speak to them, I was a member of the same tour. I couldn't possibly pretend to be a potential lover, which limited conversation options, but I had, nevertheless, purchased the same "outbound ticket." I was therefore at liberty, to some extent, to make contact. Babette and Léa, it turned out, worked for the same PR agency; for the most part, they organized events. Events? Yes. For institutions or private companies keen to develop their corporate sponsorship programs. There was certainly money to be made there, I thought. Yes and no. Nowadays, companies were more "human rights"—focused, so there had been a slowdown in investment. But it was still pretty okay. I inquired about their salaries: pretty good. They could have been better, but still pretty good. About twenty-five times the salary of a metalworker in Surat Thani. Economics is a mystery.
After we arrived at the hotel, the group broke up, or at least t suppose it did. I didn't feel much like eating with the others. I was a bit fed up with the others. I drew the curtains and lay down. Curiously, I fell asleep immediately and dreamed of an Arab girl dancing in a subway car. She didn't look anything like Aïcha, or at least I don't think so. She was standing against the pole in the middle of the car like the girls in go-go bars. Her breasts were covered by a minuscule strip of cotton, which she was slowly lifting. With a smile, she freed her breasts completely; they were swollen, round, copper-colored, magnificent. She licked her fingers and stroked her nipples. Then she put her hand on my trousers, eased down my fly, took out my penis, and began to jerk me off. People crowded past us, got off at their stations. She got on all fours on the floor and lifted up her miniskirt. She wasn't wearing anything underneath. Her vulva was welcoming, surrounded by black hair, like a gift. I started to penetrate her. The car was half-full, but no one paid any attention to us. Such things could never happen under any normal circumstances. It was the dream of a starving man, the ludicrous dream of man already grown old. I woke up at about five o'clock and saw that the sheets were completely covered in semen. A nocturnal emission . . . very touching. I noticed, too, to my great surprise, that I still had a hard-on. Must be the weather. A cockroach lay on its back in the middle of the bedside table, and you could easily make out the detail of its legs. This one didn't have to worry anymore, as my father would have said. My father, for his part, had died late in the year 2000, which was appropriate enough, since this enclosed his existence entirely within the twentieth century, of which he was a hideously representative element. I myself had survived in middling condition. I was in my forties—well, in my early forties; after all, I was only forty. So I was about halfway there. My father's death gave me a certain freedom; I hadn't had my last word yet,
Situated on the east coast of Ko Samui, the hotel perfectly evoked the sort of "tropical paradise" you see in travel agents' brochures. The hills surrounding it were covered by thick jungle. The low-rise buildings, bordered by greenery, sloped down to an immense oval swimming pool with a Jacuzzi at each end. You could swim up to the bar, which was on an island in the middle of the pool. A few yards further on was a beach of white sand, then the sea. I looked around warily at my surroundings. From where I was, I recognized Lionel in the distance, splashing in the waves like a handicapped dolphin. Then I turned back and headed for the bar along a narrow bridge overlooking the pool. With studied casualness, I familiarized myself with the cocktail menu; happy hour* had just begun. I had just ordered a Singapore Sling when Babette made her appearance. "Well, well," I said. She was wearing a generously cut two-piece bathing suit, figure-hugging shorts, and a wide wraparound top in a symph
ony of light and dark blue. The fabric seemed to be exceptionally sheer; it was a swimsuit that clearly only came into its own when wet. "Are you not going to swim?" she asked. "Urn .. .," I said. Léa appeared in turn, more classically sexy in a bright red vinyl one-piece, with black zippers open to reveal her skin (one of them ran across her left breast, giving a glimpse of nipple) and cut very high on the thighs. She nodded to me before joining Babette at the water's edge, and when she turned around, I was in a position to observe that she had perfect buttocks. The girls had been suspicious of me at the beginning, but since I had spoken to them on the ferry they had come to the conclusion that I was a harmless human being and moderately amusing. They were right: that was about it. They dived in together. I turned around to ogle a bit. The guy at the next table was the spitting image of the Communist politician Robert Hue. When wet, Babette's swimsuit really was spectacular—you could easily make out her nipples and the crack of her butt. You could even see the slight swelling of her pubic hair, even though she had opted to cut it quite short. Meanwhile, people were working, making useful commodities, or sometimes useless commodities. They were productive. What had I produced in the forty years of my existence? To tell the truth, not very much. I had managed information, facilitated access to it, and disseminated it. Sometimes, too, I had carried out bank transfers (on a modest scale; I was generally happy to pay the smaller invoices). In a word, I had worked in the service sector. It would be easy to get by without people like me. Still, my ineffectuality was less flamboyant than that of Babette and Léa; a moderate parasite, I had never been a star in my field, and had never felt the need to pretend to be one.
After dark, I went back to the hotel lobby, where I ran into Lionel. He was sunburned from head to toe and delighted with his day. He had done a lot of swimming; he'd never dared dream of somewhere like this. "I had to save pretty hard to pay for the trip," he said, "but I don't regret it." He sat on the edge of a sofa: he was thinking about his daily life. He worked for the gas company in the southeastern suburbs of Paris and lived in Juvisy. He often had to call on people who were very poor, elderly people whose systems weren't up to standard. If they didn't have the money to pay for the necessary modifications, he was forced to cut off their gas. "There are people who live in conditions," he said, "you can't imagine. "You see the craziest things sometimes," he went on, shaking his head. As for himself, things were okay. The area he lived in wasn't great; actually it was downright dangerous. "There are spots that are best avoided," he said. Rut in general, things weren't too bad. "We're on vacation," he concluded before heading off to the dining room. I picked up a couple of brochures and went off to my room to read them. I still didn't feel like eating with the others. It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable. I'd found out from Léa that Ko Samui wasn't just a tropical paradise, it was also pretty dope. Every night at the full moon there was a massive rave on the tiny neighboring island of Ko Pha-Ngan; people came from Australia and Germany to attend. "A bit like Goa," I said. "Much better than Goa," she interrupted. Goa was completely over; if you were looking for a decent rave now, you had to go to Ko Samui or to Lombok. I didn't require as much. All I wanted right now was a decent body massage* followed by a blow job and a good fuck. Nothing too complicated on the face of it, but looking through the brochures I realized, with a feeling of profound melancholy, that this didn't at all seem to be the specialty of the place. There was a lot of stuff like acupuncture, massage with essential oils, vegetarian food, or tai-chi; but of body massages or go-go bars* nada. On top of everything, the place had a painfully American, even Californian, feel about it, focused on "healthy living" and "meditation activities." I glanced through a letter to What's On Samui from a Guy Hopkins, a self-confessed "health addict" who had been coming to the island regularly for twenty years. "The aura that backpackers spread on the island is unlikely to be erased quickly by upmarket tourists," he concluded. It was depressing. I couldn't even set off in search of adventure since the hotel was miles from anywhere. In fact, everything was miles from anywhere, since there was nothing here. The map of the island indicated no identifiable town center; rather, a number of cottage resorts like ours, set on tranquil beaches. It was then that I remembered with horror that the island had had a very good writeup in the Guide du Routard, which listed it as a place that had managed to avoid a certain moral slide. I was caught like a rat in a trap. Even so, I felt a vague satisfaction, however theoretical, at the notion that I actually felt up to fucking. Halfheartedly, I picked up The Firm again, skipped forward two hundred pages,skipped back fifty. By chance I happened on a sex scene. The plot had developed a fair bit. Tom Cruise was now in the Cayman Islands, in the process of setting up some kind of money-laundering scheme, or in the process of unmasking it, it wasn't too clear. Whatever the deal was, he was getting to know a stunning mixed-race girl, Eilene, who wasn't exactly backward in coming forward: "She unsnapped something and removed her skirt, leaving nothing but a string around her waist and a string running between her legs." I unzipped my trousers. This was followed by a weird passage that was difficult to grasp psychologically: "Something said run. Throw the beer bottle in the ocean. Throw the skirt in the sand. And run like hell. Run to the condo. Lock the door. Lock the windows. Run. Run. Run." Thankfully, Eilene didn't see things quite that way: "In slow motion, she reached behind her neck. She unhooked her bikini top, and it fell off, very slowly. Her breasts, much larger now, lay on his left forearm. She handed it to him. Hold this for me.' It was soft and white and weighed less than a millionth of an ounce." I was jerking off in earnest now, trying to visualize mixed-race girls wearing tiny swimsuits in the dark. I ejaculated between two pages with a groan of satisfaction. They were going to stick together; didn't matter, it wasn't the kind of book you read twice.
In the morning, the beach was deserted. I went for a swim just after breakfast. The air was warm. The sun would soon begin its ascent across the sky, increasing the risk of skin cancer in individuals of Caucasian descent. I intended to stay long enough for the maids to make up my room, then I would head back, lie beneath the sheets, and put the air conditioning on full blast; with the greatest serenity I contemplated this "free day." Tom Cruise, on the other hand, was still plagued with worries about his affair with the mixed-race girl. He even considered telling his wife (who, and this was the problem, was not content simply to be loved, she wanted to be the sexiest, most desirable woman in the world). The idiot behaved as though the future of his marriage was at stake. "If she was cool and showed a trace of compassion, he would tell her he was sorry, so very sorry, and that it would never happen again. If she fell all to pieces, he would beg, literally beg for forgiveness and swear on the Bible that it was a mistake and would never happen again." Obviously, either course of action came to much the same thing. Eventually, the hero's unremitting remorse, though it was of no interest whatsoever, began to interfere with the plot—which was thickening by the page: we had a bunch of extremely nasty Mafiosi, the FBI, maybe even the Russians. It was enough to make you angry, and it wound up making you sick. I had a go with another American best-seller, Total Control, by David Baldacci, but that was even worse. This time, the hero wasn't a lawyer but a young computer genius who worked 110 hours a week. His wife, on the other hand, was a lawyer and worked 90 hours a week. They had a kid. This time the bad guys were a "European" company that had resorted to fraudulent practices in order to corner a market. Said market should have been the territory of the American company for which our hero was working. During a conversation with the bad guys from the European company, said bad guys —"without the least compunction" — had the audacity to smoke several cigarettes. The atmosphere literally stank of them, but the hero managed to survive. I made a small hole in the sand to bury the two books. The problem now was that I had to find something to read. Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life
itself, and that can lead you to take risks. At the age of fourteen, one afternoon when the fog was particularly dense, I got lost while skiing, and I had to make my way across some avalanche corridors. What I remember most were the leaden clouds, hanging very low, the utter silence on the mountain. I knew the drifts of snow could shear away at any moment if I made a sudden movement, or even for no apparent reason, some slight rise in temperature, a breath of wind. If they did I would be carried with them, dragged hundreds of meters onto the rocky ridges below, and I would die, probably on impact. Despite this, I wasn't in the least afraid. I was annoyed that things had turned out this way, annoyed for myself and for everyone else. I would have preferred a more conventional death, more official in a way, with an illness, a funeral, tears. Most of all, I regretted never having known a wife's body. During the winter months, my father rented out the first floor of his house, and that year, the tenants were a couple of architects. Their daughter, Sylvie, was also fourteen. She seemed to be attracted to me, or at least she did her best to have me around. She was slender, graceful, her hair was black and curly. Was her pubic hair black and curly too? These were the thoughts that flitted through my mind as I plodded across the mountainside. I've often wondered about that, since. Faced with danger, even death, I don't feel anything in particular, no rush of adrenaline. I had searched in vain for the sensations that attract "extreme sports" fanatics. I am not remotely brave —I run away from danger if at all possible—but if push comes to shove, I greet it with the placidity of a cow. There's probably no point in searching for meaning in this, it's just a technical matter, a question of hormone levels; other human beings, apparently similar to me, seem to feel nothing in the presence of a woman's body, something that—at fourteen and still now —plunges me into a state of agitation I can't control. In most circumstances in my life, I have had about as much freedom as has a vacuum cleaner.