Michel Houellebecq - Submission

Their chalet, which overlooked the Freissinières Valley, was enormous. The underground garage could have held ten cars. Crossing the hallway into the living room, I paused in front of a cluster of stuffed trophies, chamois or mouflons — at any fate, that kind of mammal. There was also a wild boar. That one I recognised.

‘Take off your coat, if you like,’ Sylvia said. ‘Hunting is nice, you know — I hadn’t known anything about it, either. They’d go hunting every Sunday, all day, then we’d have dinner together with the other hunters and their wives, all twenty of us. We’d have everyone over for a drink, and often, afterwards, we’d go to a little restaurant with a private room, in the next village.’

So my father’s last years had been nice . This, too, was a surprise. When I was growing up, I’d never met anyone he worked with, and I don’t think he ever saw anyone — outside of work, that is. Had my parents had any friends? If so, none that I remembered. We had a big house in Maisons-Lafitte — not as big as this one, certainly, but big. I didn’t remember anyone ever coming to dinner or spending the weekend, or doing any of the things people do with their friends . What’s worse, I don’t think my father ever had what you’d call a mistress , either. I couldn’t be sure, of course, I didn’t have any proof, but I just couldn’t connect the idea of a mistress with the man I remembered. In other words, he had led two entirely separate lives, one having nothing to do with the other.

The living room was vast. It must have taken up the entire floor, if you included the open-plan kitchen (on the right, as you walked in) and the farmhouse table beside it. The rest of the space was filled with coffee tables and deep white leather sofas, with more hunting trophies on the wall and a rack for my father’s guns. They were beautiful objects, and their elaborate metal inlays shone with a gentle glow. The floor was strewn with various animal skins — mainly sheep, I’d guess. It was kind of like being in a German porn flick from the seventies, set in a Tyrolean hunting lodge. I went over to the picture window. It took up the whole back wall and looked out on the mountains. ‘Across from us,’ Sylvia said, ‘you can see the top of La Meije. And to the north there’s the Barre des Écrins. Can I offer you a drink?’

I’d never seen such a well-stocked bar. There were ten different kinds of brandy, plus certain liqueurs I had never even heard of, but I asked for a martini. Sylvia turned on a lamp. Nightfall cast a bluish tinge over the snow-covered mountains, and sadness settled over the room. Even without my inheritance, I couldn’t imagine that she would want to live alone in a house like this. She still worked, she did something in Briançon, I didn’t know what. She’d told me on our way to the lawyer’s office, but I’d forgotten. Obviously, even if she moved into a nice apartment in the centre of Briançon, her life was going to be much less pleasant than before. I sat down somewhat reluctantly on a sofa and accepted another martini, but I’d already decided that it would be my last. When I finished this one I’d ask her to drive me to the hotel. It was becoming more and more obvious to me that I would never understand women. Here was a normal — almost cartoonishly normal — woman, and yet she’d seen something in my father, something my mother and I never saw. And I don’t think it was only, or even mainly, a question of money. She made plenty herself; that much was clear from her clothes, her hair, the way she talked. In that ordinary old man she, and she alone, had found something to love.

When I got back to Paris there was the email I’d been dreading for the last few weeks. Or no, that’s not quite true, I think I was already resigned to it. What I really wanted to know was whether Myriam, too, would tell me that she had met someone — whether she’d use the expression.

She used the expression. In the next paragraph she said she was deeply sorry, and that she’d never think of me without a certain sadness. I believed that was true — and also true that she wouldn’t think of me very often. Then she changed the subject, pretending to be consumed with worry over the political situation in France. That was nice, her acting as if somehow we’d been torn apart by the whirlwind of history. It wasn’t entirely honest, of course, but it was nice.

I turned away from the computer screen and went over to the window. A single lenticular cloud, its edges tinted orange by the setting sun, hovered high above the Charléty stadium, as immobile and indifferent as an intergalactic spaceship. I felt a dull, numb pain, that’s all, but it was enough to keep me from thinking clearly. All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations. Quitting the university had been extremely simple, whereas dealing with my social security and health insurer turned out to be a huge bureaucratic undertaking, one that I didn’t have the courage to face. And yet I had to. Even my very comfortable pension wouldn’t be enough to see me through a serious illness. On the other hand, it did allow me to sign up for more escorts. I felt no real desire, only an obscure Kantian notion of ‘duty towards the self’, as I surfed my usual sites. In the end I settled on an ad posted by two girls: a twenty-two-year-old Moroccan named Rachida and a twenty-four-year-old Spaniard named Luisa promised ‘the enchantments of a wild and mischievous duo’. They were expensive, obviously, but I thought I was entitled to a little extravagance, all things considered. We made a date for that same evening.

At first everything went the way it usually did, which is to say, fine. They had a nice studio near Place Monge. They’d lit incense and put on soft music, whale songs or something. I penetrated them and fucked them in the arse, one after the other, without fatigue or pleasure. It was only after half an hour, when I was taking Luisa from behind, that I felt the stirrings of something new. Rachida kissed me on the cheek, then with a little smile she slipped behind me. She rested one hand on my arse, then leaned in and started licking my balls. Little by little, with growing amazement, I felt shivers of forgotten pleasure. Maybe Myriam’s email, and the fact that she’d, as it were, officially left me, freed me up in some way. I don’t know. Wild with gratitude, I turned round, tore off the condom, and offered myself up to Rachida’s mouth. Two minutes later, I came between her lips. She meticulously licked up the last drops as I stroked her hair.

Before I left, I insisted on tipping them a hundred euros each. Maybe it was too soon to give up after all — witness these two girls, and my father’s surprising late-life transformation. And maybe, if I kept seeing Rachida on a regular basis, we’d end up having feelings for each other. At least, there was no reason to absolutely rule it out.

This brief surge of hope came during the most optimistic moment that France had known since the Thirty Glorious Years half a century before. The first days of Ben Abbes’s national unity coalition had been a unanimous success. All the pundits agreed that no newly elected president had ever enjoyed such a ‘state of grace’. I thought often of what Tanneur had told me about the new president’s international ambitions, and although it went practically unnoticed, I was intrigued to see that Morocco had re-entered negotiations to join the EU. There was already a timetable in place for Turkey. The rebuilding of the Roman Empire was well under way, and in his domestic policies Ben Abbes had gone from strength to strength. His first achievement was a dramatic drop in crime: in the most troubled neighbourhoods it was down 90 per cent. He’d had another instant success with unemployment, which had plummeted. This was clearly due to women leaving the workforce en masse — due, in turn, to the highly symbolic first measure passed by the new government: a large new subsidy for families. At first there had been some squirming on the left, since the subsidy was reserved for women who gave up working. The new unemployment figures put an end to that. The subsidy hadn’t even added to the deficit, since it was completely offset by drastic cuts in education — until now, far and away the largest item in the national budget. Under the new system, mandatory education ended with junior school, around the age of twelve. For most children, the school certificate would be their last degree. From then on, vocational training was encouraged. Secondary and higher education had been completely privatised. All of these reforms were meant to ‘restore the centrality, the dignity, of the family as the building block of society’: so the new president and his prime minister declared in a strange joint speech during which Ben Abbes reached nearly mystical heights, while François Bayrou, his face wreathed in a beatific smile, more or less played the role of John Sausage, the Hanswurst of old German folk plays, who repeated — in an exaggerated, slightly grotesque way — everything the main character said. Muslim schools were doing fine, obviously. When it came to education, the Gulf States still had plenty to spend. More surprisingly, some Catholic and Jewish schools seemed to have made the best of a bad situation by appealing to various CEOs. In any case, they announced that they had covered their costs and would open as usual in the autumn.