Basically I had worked hard, I told myself, I had spent my life working endlessly. The actors I knew at the age of twenty had had no success, it’s true, most had even completely given up the trade, but it must also be said that they had done fuck-all, they had spent their time drinking in bars or trendy clubs. During this time I was rehearsing, alone in my bedroom, I spent hours on each intonation and each gesture; and I wrote my sketches as well, I really wrote them, it took me years before that became easy. If I worked so hard, it was probably because I wouldn’t actually have been capable of enjoying myself; I wouldn’t have been very at ease in the bars and trendy clubs, at the parties organized by couturiers, in the VIP sections: with my ordinary physique and my introverted temperament, I had, from the outset, very little chance of being the life of the party. So I worked, for want of anything else; and I have had my revenge. In my youth, basically, I was in the same state of mind as Ophélie Winter when she ruminated, thinking about her entourage: “Have a good laugh, my little cunts. Later I’ll be the one on the podium and I’ll give you all the finger.” She had declared that in an interview with 20 Ans.

“There is a famous phrase that divides artists into two categories: revolutionaries and decorators. Well, I didn’t have much of a choice, the world decided for me. I remember my first exhibition in New York, at the Saatchi gallery, for the happening ‘Feed the People. Organize Them.’ I was quite impressed, it was the first time in a long time that a French artist was exhibiting in an important New York gallery. I was also a revolutionary then, and convinced of the revolutionary value of my work. It was a very cold winter in New York, and every morning you found tramps in the streets who had frozen to death; I was convinced that people were going to change their attitude as soon as they saw my work: that they were going to go out into the street and follow exactly the instruction on the television screen. Of course, none of that happened: people came, nodded, exchanged intelligent words, then left.

“I suppose that the revolutionaries are those who are capable of coming to terms with the brutality of the world, and of responding to it with increased brutality. I simply did not have that kind of courage. I was ambitious, however, and it is possible that the decorators are fundamentally more ambitious than the revolutionaries. Before Duchamp, the artist had as his ultimate goal a worldview that was at once personal and accurate, that is to say moving; it was already a huge ambition. Since Duchamp, the artist no longer contents himself with putting forward a worldview, he seeks to create his own world; he is very precisely the rival of God. I am God in my basement. I have chosen to create a small, easy world where you only encounter happiness. I am perfectly conscious of the regressive nature of my work; I know that it can be compared to the attitude of adolescents who, instead of confronting the problems of adolescence, dive headfirst into their stamp collection, their herbarium, or whatever other glittering, limited, multicolored little world they choose. No one will dare say it to my face, I get good reviews in Art Press, as in the majority of the European media; but I could read the contempt in the eyes of the girl who came from the Delegation for Plastic Arts. She was thin, dressed in white leather, with an almost swarthy complexion, very sexual; I understood at once that she considered me to be a little invalid child, and very sick. She was right: I am a tiny little invalid child, very sick, who cannot live. I can’t come to terms with the brutality of this world; I just can’t do it.”

[...] I felt myself worn down, diminished beyond redemption; my mutterings and murmurs were those of an old man. I was now forty-seven, it was thirty years since I had started making my peers laugh; now I was finished, washed out, inert. The spark of curiosity that remained in my vision of the world was soon going to be extinguished, and then I would be as dead as the stones, only with some vague suffering on top of that. My career had not been a failure, at least not on the commercial level: if you attack the world with sufficient violence, it ends up spitting its filthy lucre back at you; but never, never will it give you back joy.

[...] I knew that the majority of people are born, grow old, and die without having known love. Not long after the epidemic of “mad cow disease,” new measures had been introduced to ensure that people knew where their beef had come from. In the meat section of supermarkets, in fast-food establishments, small labels appeared, generally worded thus: “Born and raised in France. Slaughtered in France.” A simple life, in fact.

I ALMOST RENTED ANOTHER CAR to go and fetch Esther from the Almería airport; I was afraid she would get an unfavorable impression from the Mercedes 600 SL coupe, but also from the swimming pool, the Jacuzzis, and more generally the display of luxury that characterized my life. I was mistaken: Esther was a realist; she knew that I had had some success and therefore expected, logically, that I would live in fine style; she knew all kinds of people, some very rich, others very poor, and found nothing remarkable in it; she accepted this inequality, like all the others, with a perfect straightforwardness. My generation was still scarred by different debates around the question of which economic regime one should wish for, debates that always concluded with agreement about the superiority of the market economy—with the sledgehammer argument that populations on which another mode of organization had been imposed had zealously and even petulantly rejected it, as soon as they had the chance to. In Esther’s generation, those debates themselves had disappeared; capitalism was for her a natural habitat, in which she moved with the grace that characterized all the actions in her life; to strike in protest of planned redundancies would have seemed to her as absurd as striking against the weather getting colder, or the invasion of North Africa by crickets. The idea of any form of collective demand was generally foreign to her; it had always seemed obvious to her that, on the financial level as for all the essential questions of life, everyone had to look after themselves, and sail their own ships without relying on help from anyone else. No doubt in order to toughen herself up, she felt compelled to exercise strict financial independence, and although her sister had quite a lot of money, she had, since the age of fifteen, insisted on earning her pocket money herself, buying her own discs and clothes, even if it meant she had to do tedious jobs like distributing brochures or delivering pizzas. She didn’t, however, go as far as offering to pay her share in restaurants, or anything like that; but I sensed from the beginning that giving her too sumptuous a gift would have unsettled her, it would have been a slight threat to her independence.

[...] most actors accept being loved for their celebrity without any problem, and why not? After all it’s part of themselves, of their most authentic personality, or in any case the one they have chosen for themselves. By contrast, men who can accept that they are loved for their money are rare, in the West at least; the same cannot be said for Chinese shopkeepers. In the simplicity of their souls, Chinese shopkeepers consider that their S-Class Mercedes, their bathrooms with hydromassage showers, and more generally their money are part of themselves, and therefore they have no objection to arousing the enthusiasm of young girls through these material attributes, they have the same immediate, direct relationship with them that a Westerner can have with the beauty of his face—and in fact theirs makes even more sense, since, in a sufficiently stable politico-economic system, if it’s often the case that a man is stripped of his physical beauty by illness, if aging will in any case inevitably strip him of it, it is far less likely that he will be stripped of his villas on the Côte d’Azur, or of his S-Class Mercedes. It’s true, however, that I was a Western neurotic, and not a Chinese shopkeeper, and that in the complexity of my soul I far preferred to be appreciated for my humor than for my money, or even for my celebrity—for I was in no way certain, during an otherwise long and active career, that I had given the best of me, that I had explored all the facets of my personality, I was not an authentic artist in the sense that Vincent, for example, could be, because I knew all too well in my heart of hearts that there was nothing funny about life, but I had refused to take this into account, I had been a bit of a whore, in fact, I had adapted to the tastes of the public, I had never been really sincere, supposing that is possible, but I knew that you had to suppose it, and that if sincerity, in itself, is nothing, it is nevertheless the condition for everything else. Deep down, I knew that not one of my miserable sketches, not one of my lamentable scripts, mechanically stitched together, with the skill of a wily professional, to entertain an audience of bastards and monkeys, deserved to survive me. [...]

If I was acrimonious, she was sweet; and if I took, unreservedly, the side of the old, she did not take, to the same extent, the side of the young. A long conversation ensued, becoming more and more emotional and tender, first in the bar, then at a restaurant, then in another bar, and finally in the hotel bedroom; we even forgot, for one evening, to make love. It was our first real conversation, and it seemed to me to be the first real conversation I’d had with anyone for years, the last probably took place at some point at the start of my life with Isabelle, I had probably never had a real conversation with anyone other than a woman I loved, and essentially it seemed unsurprising to me that the exchange of ideas with someone who doesn’t know your body, is not in a position to secure its unhappiness or on the other hand to bring it joy, was a false and ultimately impossible exercise, for we are bodies, we are, above all, principally and almost uniquely bodies, and the state of our bodies constitutes the true explanation of the majority of our intellectual and moral conceptions. It was only now I learned that Esther had had a very serious kidney illness, at the age of thirteen, which had necessitated a long operation, and that one of her kidneys had remained definitively atrophied, which obliged her to drink at least two liters of water a day, while the second one, saved for the time being, could at any moment show signs of weakness; it seemed obvious to me that this was an essential detail, that it was even no doubt for this reason that she had not calmed down on the sexual level: she knew the price of life, and how short it was. I also learned, and this seemed even more important, that she had had a dog, found in the streets of Madrid, and that she had looked after it since the age of ten; it had died the previous year. A very pretty young girl, treated with constant regard and paid enormous attention by the whole of the male population, including those—the huge majority—who no longer have any hope of obtaining sexual favors from her, frankly especially by them, with an abject emulation that with some fifty-somethings borders on senility pure and simple, a very pretty young girl before whom all faces open, all difficulties are ironed out, greeted everywhere as if she were the queen of the world, naturally becomes a sort of monster of egoism and self-satisfied vanity. Physical beauty plays here exactly the same role as nobility of blood in the Ancien Régime, and the brief consciousness that they might have at adolescence of the purely accidental nature of their rank rapidly gives way among very pretty young girls to a sensation of innate, natural, and instinctive superiority, which places them completely outside, and far above, the rest of mankind. Everyone around her having as their objective to spare her all difficulties, and to satisfy the least of her desires, a very pretty young girl effortlessly comes to consider the rest of the world as made up of so many servants, herself having the sole task of maintaining her own erotic value—in the expectation of meeting a boy worthy of receiving her homage. The only thing that could save her on the moral level, is having a concrete responsibility for a weaker being, to be directly and personally responsible for the satisfaction of its physical needs, for its health and survival—this being could be a brother or a younger sister, a pet, whatever.

I had left my coitus cream at the Lutétia, and this was my first mistake; I came much too quickly, and, for the first time, I sensed she was a little disappointed. She continued to move, a little, on my sex, which was becoming irredeemably soft, then moved aside with a resigned grimace. I would have given a great deal to get another hard-on; from the moment they are born, men live in a difficult world, a world where the stakes are simplistic and pitiless, and without the understanding of women there are very few who manage to survive. It seemed to me that I understood, from that moment onward, that she had slept with someone else in my absence.

If the zone where I found myself was inhabited, it could in any case only be by neohumans; the organism of a savage could never have stood up to the journey I had made. I now anticipated without joy, and even with a certain annoyance, an encounter with one of my fellow creatures. The death of Fox, then the crossing of the Great Gray Space, had desiccated me inside; I no longer felt any desire, and certainly not the one, described by Spinoza, of persevering in my being; I regretted, however, that the world would survive me. The inanity of the world, evident in the life story of Daniel, had ceased to appear acceptable to me; I saw in it only a dull place, devoid of potentialities, from which light was absent.