The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, Gavin Bowd Read Free Book Online Page B

doubt she liked them even less in herself. Everything coincided: each time I had seen her marvel at the plastic expression of beauty, it was over painters like Raphael, and especially Botticelli: something occasionally tender, but often cold, and always very calm; she had never understood the absolute admiration I had for El Greco, she had never appreciated ecstasy, and I cried profusely because this animal side, this limitless surrender to pleasure and ecstasy, was what I liked best in myself, while I had only contempt for my intelligence, sagacity, and humor. We would never know that infinitely mysterious double look of the couple united in happiness, humbly accepting the presence of organs, and limited joy; we would never truly be lovers.
     
     
    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.
    One solution presented itself, on a link road of the A2 highway, between Saragossa and Tarragona, a few dozen meters from a service station where Isabelle and I had stopped to have lunch. The existence of pets is relatively recent in Spain. A country with a traditionally Catholic, macho, and violent culture, Spain, until only a little while ago, treated animals with indifference, and occasionally with a dark cruelty. But standardization was doing its work, on this level as on others, and Spain was approaching European, and especially English, norms. Homosexuality was more and more widespread and accepted; vegetarian food was becoming increasingly available, as were New Age baubles; and pets, here given the pretty name of
mascotas,
were gradually replacing children in the family. However, the process had only just begun, and there were many failures: often a puppy, given as a toy at Christmas, was abandoned by the roadside a few months later. Thus, on the central plains, packs of stray dogs formed. Their existence was brief and miserable. Infested with scabies and other parasites, they found their food in the dustbins of service stations, and generally ended their days under the wheels of a truck. They suffered terribly, and above all, from the absence of human contact. Having abandoned the pack millennia before, and chosen the company of men, the dog has never been able to readapt to the wild. No stable hierarchy established itself in the packs—fights were constant,