Michel Houellebecq - Submission

I had made only very occasional forays onto escort sites, usually during the summer months as a sort of stopgap between one student and the next. A quick glance online was enough to assure me that these sites were alive and well under the new Islamic regime. I spent a few weeks going back and forth, examining the different profiles, printing out certain ones so I could reread them. (Escort sites were something like restaurant guides, whose remarkable flights of lyricism evoked pleasures decidedly superior to the dishes one actually tasted.) Eventually I decided on Nadia, a girl of Tunisian extraction. It was arousing, in a way, to pick a Muslim, given the overall political situation.

But Nadia, I learned, had been altogether untouched by her generation’s overwhelming return to Islam. The daughter of a radiologist, she’d lived in good neighbourhoods since she was a girl and had never considered wearing the veil. She was doing her master’s degree in literature — she could have been one of my old students, but no, she was at Paris-Diderot. Sexually, she was conscientious, but she assumed each new position like a robot. You could tell she wasn’t really there. She only perked up, vaguely, when we got to sodomy. She had a tight little arse, but for some reason I didn’t experience any pleasure, I felt as if I could spend hours fucking it without the slightest fatigue or joy. As she started to whimper, it seemed to me that she was afraid of enjoying herself, as if it might lead to actual feelings. She quickly turned round and finished me off in her mouth.

Before I left, we sat and talked for a few more minutes on her folding sofa, long enough to use up the hour I’d paid for. She was intelligent, but rather conventional. Whether we were discussing the election of Ben Abbes or Third World debt, her opinions were all the generally approved ones. Her studio was tasteful and impeccably furnished. I could tell she behaved sensibly, that far from spending what she made on expensive clothes, she put most of it aside. Indeed, she confirmed that in just four years — she’d started when she was eighteen — she had made enough to buy the studio where she worked. She planned to keep at it long enough to complete her studies, then she was thinking of a career in broadcasting.

A few days later I went to see Slutty Babeth, whose site was full of enthusiastic testimonials, and who described herself as ‘hot and up for anything’. Indeed, she welcomed me into her pretty, slightly old-fashioned one-bedroom wearing nothing but a cut-out bra and a crotchless thong. She had long blonde hair and an open, almost angelic face. She, too, had a taste for sodomy, but she didn’t try to hide it. After an hour, I still hadn’t come, and she remarked that I was really resistant. It was the same as before: even though I never lost my erection, I never experienced any pleasure either. She asked me to come on her breasts; I did. Spreading the semen over her chest, she told me that she loved to be covered in cum. She was a regular participant in gang bangs, usually held in swingers’ clubs, sometimes in car parks or other public places. Although she charged a nominal fee — fifty euros per person — she made a lot at these parties, since she invited as many as forty or fifty men, who took turns in all three orifices before they came on her. She promised to let me know next time she organised a gang bang. I thanked her. The truth was, I wasn’t interested, but she seemed like a nice person.

All of which is to say, these two escorts were fine . Still, that wasn’t enough to make me want to see them or have sex with them again, or to make me go on living. Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature.

As it turned out, my father was the one who died, a few weeks later. I got the news over the phone from Sylvia, his partner. She said she was sorry that we hadn’t ‘had much chance to talk’. This was a euphemism: in fact, we’d never spoken at all. I had learned of her existence only two years before, the last time my father and I had talked, when he’d happened to mention her in passing.

She came to pick me up at the Briançon railway station. The trip had been very unpleasant. The high-speed train to Grenoble still ran all right, they maintained basic service on the TGV, but the TER was falling apart. The train to Briançon broke down more than once. We ended up arriving an hour and fifteen minutes late. The toilets were stopped up, a puddle of water and shit had overflowed into the corridor and threatened to spread into the compartments.

Sylvia was behind the wheel of a Mitsubishi Pajero Instyle, and to my utter stupefaction the seats were covered in fake leopard skin. The Mitsubishi Pajero (I learned from the special issue of Auto-Journal that I bought when I got home) is ‘one of the best recreational vehicles for handling back-country roads’. The Instyle model comes with leather upholstery, electric sunroof, backup camera, and an 860-watt, twenty-two-speaker Rockford Acoustic audio system. The whole thing left me profoundly shaken, since my father had always — at least, as long as I knew anything about him — been so rigidly, almost affectedly bourgeois in his good taste. He wore the three-piece suits (grey chalk-stripe or occasionally dark blue) and the expensive English ties of a successful CFO, which is exactly what he was. With his wavy blonde hair, sky-blue eyes and handsome face, he could have appeared in one of those movies that Hollywood makes every few years about some abstruse but supposedly important issue to do with finance, subprimes and Wall Street. I hadn’t seen him for six years, and had no idea how his life might have changed, but nothing could have prepared me for his metamorphosis into a suburban adventurer.

Sylvia was fiftyish, about twenty-five years his junior. If not for me, everything would have gone to her. My existence meant that she would be deprived of my portion of the estate — 50 per cent, since I was an only child. Under the circumstances, one could hardly expect her to feel any warmth towards me, but she behaved reasonably well and addressed me without excessive hostility. I’d called several times to let her know the train was running late, and the lawyer had pushed our appointment back to six o’clock.

The reading of my father’s will held no big surprises: he had divided his estate between us equally, with no additional bequests. Still, the lawyer had done his job. He began by itemising my father’s holdings.

My father had received a generous pension from Unilever but had very little in cash: two thousand euros in his current account, some ten thousand that he’d invested in a mutual fund a long time ago and probably forgotten. His main asset was the house where he and Sylvia lived: a broker in Briançon had appraised it at 410,000 euros. His Mitsubishi, almost new, was selling for 45,000 euros online. The one surprising thing was his collection of high-priced guns, which the lawyer listed according to their value: the most expensive were a Verney-Carron Platines and a Chapuis Oural Elite. Altogether the collection was worth 87,000 euros — a good deal more than the SUV.

‘He collected guns?’ I asked Sylvia.

‘They weren’t collector’s pieces. He did a lot of hunting. It had become his great passion.’

An ex-CFO of Unilever buying an off-road SUV and discovering his inner hunter-gatherer — it was surprising, but I could see it. The lawyer had already finished; the division would be dismayingly simple. The proceedings were swift, but I still missed my train thanks to the earlier delay. It was the last train that evening. This placed Sylvia in an awkward position, as we both realised, probably at the same moment, when we got back in the car. I was quick to let her off the hook. I said the best thing for me, by far, was to find a hotel near the station. There was a very early train I had to catch, I told her, because I had an extremely important meeting in Paris. I was lying on both counts: not only did I not have a meeting the next day, but the earliest train didn’t leave until noon. The earliest I could hope to be back in Paris was six o’clock. Reassured that I was about to vanish from her life, she was almost enthusiastic in her offer of a drink at ‘our house’, as she persisted in calling it. Not only was it no longer ‘their’ house, now that my father was dead, but soon it wouldn’t be hers either. Given the state of her finances, as I understood them, there was no way she could give me my share of the inheritance without selling the place.