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It was then that I decided to marry Isabelle; we had known each other for three years, which placed us precisely in the average of premarital association. The ceremony was discreet, and a little sad; she had just turned forty. It seems obvious to me today that the two events were linked; that I wanted, as a proof of affection, to minimize her shock at turning forty. Not that it manifested itself in complaints, or a visible anguish, or anything clearly definable; it was both more fleeting and more poignant. Occasionally—especially in Spain, when we were preparing to go to the beach, and she was putting on her swimsuit—I could feel her, at the moment when I glanced at her, wincing slightly, as if she had felt a punch between the shoulder blades. A quickly stifled grimace of pain distorted her magnificent features—the beauty of her fine, sensitive face was of the kind that resists time; but her body, despite the swimming, despite the classical dance, was beginning to suffer the first blows of age—blows which, she knew all too well, were going to multiply rapidly, leading to total degradation. I didn’t fully know what it was that happened to my facial expression in those moments that made her suffer so much; I would have given a great deal to avoid it, for, I repeat, I loved her; but manifestly that wasn’t possible. Nor could I reiterate that she was still as desirable, still as beautiful; I never felt, in the slightest way, capable of lying to her. I recognized the look she wore afterward: it was that humble, sad look of the sick animal that steps away from the pack, puts its head on its paws, and sighs softly, because it feels itself wounded and knows that it can expect no pity from its fellow creatures.
What was worse, however, was that this ideal of plastic beauty, to which she could never again have access, was going to destroy Isabelle before my very eyes. First of all, there were her breasts, which she could no longer stand (and it’s true they were beginning to droop a bit); then her buttocks, which were following the same course. More and more often, it became necessary to turn off the light; then sexuality itself disappeared. She could no longer stand herself; and, consequently, she could no longer stand love, which seemed to her to be false. I could, however, at the beginning, still get a hard-on, at least a little bit; that too disappeared, and from that moment on, it was over; all that remained was a memory of the deceptively ironical words of the Andalusian poet:
Oh, the life men try to live!
Oh, the life they lead
In the world they live in!
The poor souls, the poor souls…
They don’t know how to love.
When sexuality disappears, it’s the body of the other that appears, as a vaguely hostile presence; the sounds, movements, and smells; even the presence of this body that you can no longer touch, nor sanctify through touch, becomes gradually oppressive; all this, unfortunately, is well known. The disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism. There is no refined relationship, no higher union of souls, nor anything that might resemble it, or even evoke it allusively. When physical love disappears, everything disappears; a dreary, depthless irritation fills the passing days. And, with regard to physical love, I hardly had any illusions. Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism. In short, I was in the shit.
[...] At that time, the judicial arsenal aimed at repressing sexual relations with minors was getting tougher; crusades for chemical castration were multiplying. To increase desires to an unbearable level while making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based. I knew all this, I knew it inside out, in fact I had used it as material for many a sketch; this did not stop me from succumbing to the same process. I woke up in the middle of the night, and downed three glasses of water. I imagined the humiliations I would have to endure to seduce any teenage girl; the painfully extracted consent, the girl’s shame as we went out together in the street, her hesitation to introduce me to her friends, the carefree way in which she would ditch me for a boy of her age. I imagined all this, over and over again, and I understood that I could not survive it. In no way did I pretend to escape from the laws of nature: the inevitable decrease of the erectile capacities of the penis, the necessity of finding young bodies to jam that mechanism…I opened a packet of salami and a bottle of wine. Oh well, I told myself, I will pay; when I reach that point, when I need tight little asses to keep up my erection, then I’ll pay. I’ll pay the market price. Five hundred euros for a blow job, who did that Slav girl think she was? It was worth fifty, no more. In the vegetable drawer, I discovered an opened chestnut mousse. What seemed shocking to me, at this stage in my reflection, was not that there were young girls available for money, but that there were some who are not available, or only at prohibitive prices; in short, I wanted a regulation of the market.
Its failure with the critics, on the other hand, was real; to this day I still think it was undeserved. “An undistinguished knockabout farce,” was the headline in Le Monde, differentiating itself from its more moralistic peers, who raised, especially in their editorials, the question of banning it. It was certainly a comedy, and most of the gags were very obvious, if not vulgar; but there were certain passages of dialogue, in certain scenes, which seem to me, with hindsight, to be the best thing I ever produced. In particular in Corsica, in the long sequence filmed on the slopes of Bavella, where the hero (played by me) shows the little Aurore (nine years old), whom he has just conquered over a Disney tea at Marineland in Bonifacio, around his second home.
“There’s no point in living in Corsica,” she hurled insolently, “if it means living on a bend in the road.”
“To see cars pass,” he (I) replied, “is already to live a little.”
No one had laughed; neither during the screen test, nor at the comic film festival in Montbazon. And yet, and yet, I told myself, never had I reached such heights. Could Shakespeare himself have produced such dialogue? Could he have even imagined it, the sad fool?
lol
This figure was the result of a long evolution, scarcely begun at the time of Daniel1, when the average age at death was much higher, and suicide by old people was still infrequent. The now-ugly, deteriorated bodies of the elderly were, however, already the object of unanimous disgust, and it was undoubtedly the heat wave of summer 2003, which was particularly deadly in France, that provoked the first consciousness of the phenomenon. “The Death March of the Elderly” was the headline in Libération on the day after the first figures became known—more than ten thousand people, in the space of two weeks, had died in the country; some had died alone in their apartments, others in the hospital or in retirement homes, but all had essentially died because of a lack of care. In the weeks that followed, that same newspaper published a series of atrocious reports, illustrated with photos that were reminiscent of concentration camps, relating the agony of old people crammed into communal rooms, naked on their beds, in diapers, moaning all day without anyone coming to rehydrate them or even to give them a glass of water; describing the rounds made by nurses unable to contact the families who were on vacation, regularly gathering up the corpses to make space for new arrivals. “Scenes unworthy of a modern country,” wrote the journalist, without realizing that they were in fact the proof that France was becoming a modern country, that only an authentically modern country was capable of treating old people purely as rubbish, and that such contempt for one’s ancestors would have been inconceivable in Africa, or in a traditional Asian country.
On the practical level, there was no immediate problem: we had seventeen bedrooms. I moved into one of those overlooking the cliffs and the sea; Isabelle, apparently, preferred to contemplate inland. Fox went from room to room, it amused him a lot; he suffered no more from it than a child from the divorce of his parents, rather less, I’d say.
Could things continue in this way for a long time? Well, unfortunately, yes. During my absence, I had received 732 faxes (and I must acknowledge, there too, that Isabelle had regularly changed the paper tray); I could spend the rest of my days running from one festival invitation to the next. From time to time, I’d stop by: a little caress for Fox, a little bit of Tranxene, and Bob’s your uncle. For the moment, however, I was in need of a complete rest. I therefore went to the beach, on my own, obviously—I wanked a little on the terrace while ogling naked teenage girls (I too had bought a telescope, but it wasn’t for looking at the stars, ha ha ha); in short, I was muddling through. I muddled more or less well; although, all the same, I almost threw myself off the cliff three times in two weeks.
weirdly funny
It was only after Isabelle left that I truly discovered the world of men, in the course of pathetic wanderings along the virtually deserted highways of central and southern Spain. Except for the weekends and the start of the holidays, when you encounter families and couples, the highways are an almost exclusively male universe, populated by salesmen and truck drivers, a sad and violent world where the only publications available are porn mags and magazines for car maintenance, where the plastic revolving stand presenting a choice of DVDs under the title Tus mejores películas generally only enables you to complete your collection of Dirty Debutantes. This universe is not much talked about, and it’s true that there’s not much to say about it; no new form of behavior is experimented with in it, it can’t provide any valuable fodder for color supplements, in short it is a little-known world, and it gains nothing from being so. I formed no virile friendship, and more generally I felt close to no one during those few weeks, but that wasn’t a problem; in this universe no one is close to anyone, and even the smutty complicity of the tired waitresses who had pressed their sagging breasts into a “Naughty Girl” T-shirt could, I knew, only lead to copulation that came at a price, and was always too brief. I could, if push came to shove, start a fight with a heavy-goods truck driver and get my teeth smashed in in a parking lot, amid the gasoline fumes; that was basically the only possibility of adventure on offer in this universe. I lived in this way for a little more than two months, I burned thousands of euros on glasses of French champagne for mindless Romanian girls who, after all that, would still refuse, ten minutes later, to suck me off without a condom. [...]
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.