[...] Father, father, I said to myself, how great was your vanity! To the left of my field of vision I could make out a weightlifting bench, barbells. I quickly visualised a moron in shorts —his face wrinkled, but otherwise very like mine— building up his pectorals with hopeless vigour. Father, I said to myself, Father, you have built your house upon sand. I was still pedalling but I was starting to feel breathless, my thighs ached a little, though I was only on level one. [...]

I spent the last day of my compassionate leave in various travel agencies. I liked holiday brochures, their abstraction, their way of condensing the places of the world into a limited sequence of possible pleasures and fares; I was particularly fond of the star-ratings system, which indicated the intensity of the pleasure one was entitled to hope for. I wasn't happy, but I valued happiness and continued to aspire to it. According to the Marshall model, the buyer is a rational individual seeking to maximise his satisfaction while taking price into consideration; Veblen's model, on the other hand, analyses the effect of peer pressure on the buying process (depending on whether the buyer wishes to be identified with a defined group or to set himself apart from it). Copeland demonstrates that the buying process varies, depending on the category of product/service (impulse purchase, considered purchase, specialised purchase); but the Baudrillard and Becker model posits that a purchase necessarily implies a series of signals. Overall, I felt myself closer to the Marshall model. [...]

[...] her passion for contemporary art is real. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not actively hostile to it: I am not an advocate of craft, nor of a return to figurative painting; I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager. Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my thing; it's not up to me to invent or adopt new attitudes, new affinities with the world - I gave up all that at the same time I developed a stoop and my face started to tend towards melancholy. I've attended many exhibitions, private views, many performances that remain unforgettable. My conclusion, henceforth, is that art cannot change lives. At least not mine.

In the years that followed, pork prices continued to plummet. There were farmers' protests, marked by a desperate violence; tons of slurry were dumped on the Esplanade des Invalides, a number of pigs were gutted in front of the Palais Bourbon. At the end of 1986, the government announced emergency relief followed by a recovery plan for pig-breeders. In April 1987, Valerie's father sold his farm —for a little more than four million francs. With the money from the sale, he bought a large apartment in Saint-Quay-Portrieux, where he planned to live, and three studio flats in Torremolinos. He had a million francs left over which he invested in unit trusts and was even able —it was his childhood dream— to buy a small yacht. Sadly, and with some disgust, he signed the farm bill of sale. The new owner was a young guy, about twenty-three, single, from Lannion, just out of agricultural college; he still believed in the plans to revive the industry. Valerie's father was forty-eight, his wife, forty-seven; they had dedicated the best years of their lives to a hopeless task. They lived in a country where, compared to speculative investment, investment in production brought little return; he understood that now. In their first year, the rents from the studio flats brought in more money than all his years of work. He took up crosswords, took the yacht out into the bay, sometimes fishing. His wife found it easier to adapt to their new life and was a great support to him; she started to want to read again, to go to the cinema, to go out.

[...] 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 Lea; a moderate parasite I had never; been a high-flyer in my job, and had never felt the need to pretend to be.

[...] Half-heartedly, 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, and the girl 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 into the ocean. Throw the skirt on to 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 the top 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 visualise 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.

I had a go with another American bestseller, Total Control, by David G Baldacci; but that was even worse. This time, the hero wasn't a lawyer but a young computer genius who worked a hundred and ten hours a week. His wife, on the other hand, was a lawyer and worked ninety hours a week: they had a kid. This time the bad guys were a 'European' company which 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, the bad guys —without the least compunction— smoked 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. Life without anything to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life and that can lead you to take risks. [...]

The sea was calm; the view stretched out to the east. Cambodia was probably on the other side, or maybe Vietnam. There was a yacht, midway to the horizon; perhaps there are millionaires who spend their time sailing back and forth across the oceans of the world; a life at once monotonous and romantic.

After dinner, there was a show where audience participation was once again called for. A woman of about fifty launched into a karaoke version of 'Bang-Bang' by Sheila. It was pretty brave of her; there was a smattering of applause. For the most part, however, the show was run by the reps. Jean-Yves looked as though he was ready to fall asleep; Valerie calmly sipped on her cocktail. I looked at the next table: the people gave the impression that they were a little bored but they applauded politely at the end of each song. Customer dissatisfaction with holiday clubs didn't seem to me too difficult to understand; it appeared to be staring us in the face. The clientele was made up of OAPs or people 'of a certain age' and the reps seemed to be trying to doing their utmost to take them to heights of pleasure they could no longer attain, at least not that way. Valerie and Jean-Yves, even I myself, in some sense, still had professional responsibilities in the real world; we were sober, respectable employees, each exhausted by routine worries, and suchlike. Most of the people sitting at these tables were in the same position: they were managers, teachers, doctors, engineers, accountants; or retired people who had once been employed in those professions. I couldn't understand how the reps could possibly expect us to launch ourselves enthusiastically into icebreakers or singing contests. I couldn't work out how at our age, in our position, we were supposed to have kept alive our sense of fun. At best, the entertainment had been designed to amuse the under-fourteens.

I lay down on the sand to think. The bronzed men and women weaving between the tourists thought of us purely as wallets on legs, there was no point in deluding oneself; but it was just the same in every third-world country. What was particular about Cuba was this glaring problem with industrial production. I myself was completely incompetent in matters of industrial production. I was perfectly adapted to the information age, that is to say good for nothing. Like me, Valerie and Jean-Yves knew only how to manage information and capital; they used their knowledge intelligently, competitively, while I used mine in more mundane, bureaucratic ways. But if, for example, a foreign power were to impose a blockade, not one of the three of us, nor anyone I knew, would have been capable of getting industrial production up and running again. We had not the least idea about casting metal, manufacturing parts, thermoforming plastics. Not to mention more complex objects like fibre optics or microprocessors. We lived in a world made up of objects whose manufacture, possible uses and functions were completely alien to us. I glanced around me, panic-stricken by this realisation: there was a towel, a pair of sunglasses, sun screen, a paperback by Milan Kundera. Paper, cotton, glass; complex machines, sophisticated manufacturing processes. Valerie's swimsuit, for example, I was incapable of grasping the manufacturing process which had gone into making it: it was made of 80 per cent latex, 20 per cent polyurethane. [...]