reading

Crossing a city offering nothing any more

Amongst human beings endlessly renewed

I know it by heart, this overground metro;

Days pass by without me saying a word.

Oh! these afternoons, coming home from unemployment

Thinking again of the rent, morose meditation

We may not live, but we get old all the same

And nothing changes nothing, neither summer, nor things.

After a few months you run out of benefits

And autumn returns, slow as gangrene;

Money becomes the only thought, the only law,

You’re truly alone. And you drag on, and you drag on …

Others continue their existential dance,

You’re protected by a transparent wall,

Winter has returned; their life seems real.

Maybe, somewhere, the future awaits you.

The sun rises and grows, falls back on the city,

We have passed through the night without deliverance

I hear the buses and the subtle murmur

Of social exchanges. I reach presence.

Today will take place. The invisible surface

Marking the air with our suffering beings

Forms and hardens at a terrible speed;

The body, the body however, grants belonging.

We have passed through weariness and desires

Without finding the taste of childhood dreams,

There is nothing left behind our smiles,

We are prisoners of our transparency.

DISTRIBUTION – CONSUMPTION

I. I could hear stumps rubbing,

The amputated man next door

The concierge had allies

Who cleaned after the rain

The blood of disembowelled neighbours,

It had to come to pass

Discussions about truth,

Words of love leaving traces.

The woman next door left the building,

The cook arrived;

I should have bought some furniture,

All this could have been avoided.

Since everything had to happen

Jean has burst the eyes of the cat

Isolated monads drifting,

Distribution and entrechats.

II. Amidst microwave ovens,

The fate of consumers

Is decided every second;

There is no room for error.

On my list for tomorrow,

I’d put: ‘Washing up liquid’;

Yet I’m a human being:

Bin-bag promotion!

At any moment my life changes

In the Continent hypermarket

I rush forward then retreat,

Seduced by packagings.

The butcher had a moustache

And a carnivorous smile,

His face was covered in spots …

I threw myself at his feet!

III. I came across an alley cat,

Its eyes paralysed me

The cat lay in the dust,

Legions of insects crawled from it.

Your young sea-lion knee

Sheathed in a fishnet stocking

Bent without the slightest sound;

In the night, the absent burn bright.

I met an old proletariat,

Who sought his missing son

In the Tour GAN, at the cemetery

Of disappointed revolutionaries.

Your eyes swivelled between the tables

Like the turret of a tank;

Perhaps you were desirable,

But I was completely fed up.

LOVE, LOVE.

In a porn cinema, wheezing pensioners

Contemplated, incredulous,

The badly filmed frolics of lusty couples;

There was no story line.

And that, I thought, is the face of love,

The genuine face;

Some are seductive; they always seduce,

And others struggle on.

There is neither destiny nor fidelity,

Just bodies that attract;

With no attachment and especially no pity,

We play and tear apart.

Some are seductive and therefore much loved;

They will know orgasms.

But so many others are weary, with nothing to hide,

Not even phantasms;

Just a solitude aggravated by the immodest

Joy of women;

Just a certainty: ‘That’s not for me’,

An obscure little drama.

They will certainly die slightly disappointed,

Without lyrical illusions;

They will practise fully the art of self-hate,

It will be mechanical.

I address all those who have never been loved,

Who have never pleased;

I address those absent from liberated sex,

From ordinary pleasure.

Fear nothing, my friends, your loss is slim:

Nowhere does love exist;

It’s just a cruel game where you are the victims,

A game for specialists.

MIDDAY

The Rue Surcouf stretches out, wet with rain;

In the distance, a delicatessen.

An American in love

Writes to her sweetheart.

Life passes in little drops;

Humans under their umbrellas

Seek a way out

Between panic and boredom

(Cigarettes crushed in the mud).

Existence at low altitude,

Slow movements of a bulldozer;

I have lived a brief interlude

In the suddenly empty café.

Like a weekend on a bus,

Like a tumour in the uterus,

The sequence of events

Always follows a plan.

Yet, the damp towels,

Beside the insipid pools

Destroy complaisance

The brain goes into action

It sees the consequences

Of certain holiday romances,

It would like to detach itself

From the stained cranium.

You can clean your kitchen,

Sleep on Mepronizine,

Night is never dark enough

To put an end to it all.

JIM

For as long as you’re not there, I wait, I hope for you;

It’s a white journey, without oxygen.

The lost passers-by are strangely green;

At the back of the bus I feel my veins burst.

An old friend points me towards the Ségur stop.

He’s a great boy, he knows my problems;

I get off I see Jim, he gets out of the car,

He wears on his jacket an unknown emblem.

Sometimes Jim is cruel, he waits for me to feel pain;

I bleed effortlessly; the car radio hums,

Then Jim takes out his tools; there’s no one left,

The boulevard is deserted. No need for a hospital.

I love hospitals, asylums of suffering

Where the forgotten old turn into organs

Beneath the mocking and utterly indifferent eyes

Of interns who scratch themselves, eating bananas.

In their hygienic yet sordid bedrooms

You see clearly the nothingness awaiting them

Especially in the morning when they rise, pale,

And moan for their first cigarette.

The old know how to cry with minimum noise,

They forget their thoughts and forget their gestures

They no longer laugh much, and all they have left

After a few months, before the final phase,

Are a few words, almost always the same:

Thanks but I’m not hungry, my son will come on Sunday,

I smell of my intestines, my son will come all the same.

And the son is not there, and their hands almost white.

So many hearts have beaten, already, on this Earth

And the little objects tucked in their wardrobes

Tell the sinister and lamentable story

Of those who have never known love on this Earth.

The modest crockery of old bachelors

The nicked cutlery of the war widow

My God! And the handkerchiefs of old spinsters

The insides of wardrobes, how cruel life is!

Objects well-arranged and life completely empty

The evening shopping, leftover groceries,

TV without watching, meals without appetite

Finally illness, making it all the more sordid,

And the tired body mixing with the earth,

The unloved body dying without mystery.

Death is difficult for old ladies who are too rich

Surrounded by daughters-in-law who call them ‘my dear’,

They press a linen handkerchief to their magnificent eyes,

Assess the paintings and antique furniture.

I prefer the deaths of the council-flat old

Who imagine till the end that they are loved,

Awaiting the visit of hypothetical sons

Who would pay for a coffin in authentic pine.

The too-rich old ladies end up in the cemetery

Surrounded by cypresses and plastic shrubs

It’s a nice walk for sixtysomethings,

The cypresses smell good and repel mosquitos.

The council-flat old end up at the crematorium

In a little cabinet with a white label.

The building is calm: nobody, not even on Sundays,

Disturbs the sleep of the old black caretaker.

My dad was a solitary and barbarous cunt;

Drunk with disappointment, alone in front of the TV,

He chewed over fragile and very bizarre plans,

Finding great joy in seeing them collapse.

He always treated me like a rat you hunt;

The mere idea of a son, I think, revolted him,

He could not bear that one day I’d overtake him

Just by staying alive while he croaked.

He died in April, moaning and perplexed;

His eyes revealed an infinite anger;

Every three minutes he insulted my mother,

Criticised spring, sniggered about sex.

At the end, just before the last agony,

A brief calm passed through his chest;

He smiled, saying: ‘I bathe in my urine’,

Then expired with a faint groan.

POSSIBLE JOURNEY’S END

Why be anxious? I’ll have lived all the same,

And observed clouds and people

I’ve participated little, I’ve known everything all the same

Especially in the afternoon, there have been moments.

The configuration of garden furniture

I’ve known very well, for want of innocence;

Supermarkets and urban routes,

The immobile boredom of holidays.

I’ll have lived here, at this century’s end,

And my journey hasn’t always been painful

(Sun on the skin and the burns of being);

I want to rest on the impassive grass.

Like the grass I am old and of this time,

Spring fills me with insects and illusions

I too will have lived, tortured and serene,

The last years of a civilisation.

EVENING’S END

At evening’s end, the rise of nausea is an inevitable phenomenon. There is a sort of schedule of horror. Well, I don’t know; I’m thinking.

The expansion of an internal void. That’s it. Detachment from any possible event. As if you were suspended in the void, equidistant from any real action, by monstrously powerful magnetic forces.

Thus suspended, unable to have any concrete grasp on the world, the night might seem long to you. It will be, in fact.

It will, however, be a protected night; but you will not appreciate this protection. You will only appreciate it later, once you have returned to the city, returned to the daytime, returned to the world.

Around nine o’clock, the world will already have reached its full level of activity. It will turn smoothly, with a faint purr. You will have to take part in it, leap – a bit like when you jump onto the step of a train moving out of the station.

You will not succeed. Once again, you will wait for the night – once again, however, it will bring you exhaustion, uncertainty and horror. And that will begin again, every day, until the end of the world.

My right earlobe is swollen with pus and blood. Sitting in front of a red plastic squirrel symbolising humanitarian action in favour of the blind, I think of the imminent rotting of my body. Another form of suffering I know very little about and that remains, practically in its entirety, for me to discover. I think equally and symmetrically, albeit in a more imprecise fashion, of the rotting and decline of Europe.

Attacked by illness, the body no longer believes in any possibility of appeasement. Feminine hands, now useless. Still desired, all the same.

At the corner of the FNAC seethed

A very dense and very cruel crowd,

A fat dog chewed a white pigeon’s body.

Further along, in the alleyway,

An old bag-lady curled up in a ball

Received in silence the children’s spit.

I was alone in the Rue de Rennes. The electric signs

Coaxed me down vaguely erotic paths:

Hello it’s Amandine.

It did nothing for my prick and balls.

A few chavs threw menacing looks

At the loaded babes and the dirty mags;

Some executives were consuming; their only function.

And you weren’t there. I love you, Véronique.

Afternoon of false joy,

And bodies that split

You no longer desire me much,

Our eyes no longer complicit.

Oh! the separation, the death

In our intertwined eyes

The slow divorce of bodies

On this lovely summer afternoon.

The little washed objects

Express a state of non-being.

In the kitchen, my heart crushed,

I wait for you to want to reappear.

Partner crouching in the bed,

Worst half of myself,

We spend bad nights;

You scare me. Yet, I love you.

On a Saturday afternoon,

Alone in the boulevard’s noise.

I speak to myself. What do I say?

Life is rare, life is rare.

This evening, while walking in Venice,

I thought again of you, my Lise;

I would have liked to marry you

In the gilded basilica.

People go away, people leave one another

They want to live a little too quickly

I feel old, my body is heavy

There is nothing left but love.

Tres Calle de Sant’Engracia,

Back home to emptiness

I will give my avid body

To she whom love reprieved.

At the time of the first acacias

A cold, almost livid, sun

Shone weakly on Madrid

When my life fell apart.

A COLD SENSATION

The morning was clear and utterly beautiful;

You wanted to keep your independence.

I waited for you while watching the birds:

Whatever I did, someone would suffer.

DIFFERENTIATION IN THE RUE D’AVRON

The debris of your life is laid out on the table:

A half-empty box of tissues,

A bit of despair and a spare set of keys;

I remember you were very desirable.

Sunday spread its slightly sticky veil

On the chip shops and the dive bars;

For a few minutes we walked, almost buoyant,

Then went home to avoid other people

And to look at each other for hours on end;

You undressed your body in front of the sink,

Your face had wrinkles but your body stayed beautiful,

You said to me: ‘Look at me. I am whole,

My arms are attached to my torso, and death

Will not take my eyes like my brother’s,

You made me discover the meaning of prayer,

Look at me. Look. Lay your eyes on my body.’

To live without a fulcrum, surrounded by the void,

Like a bird of prey on a white mesa;

But the bird has wings, its prey and its revenge;

I have none of that. The horizon remains fluid.

I have known those nights which returned me to the world,

Where I woke up full of new life;

My arteries throbbed, I felt the seconds

Chime out powerfully, so soft and so real;

That’s over. Now, I prefer the evening,

Every morning I feel the weariness rise,

I enter the region of great solitudes,

I desire nothing more than peace without victory.

To live without a fulcrum, surrounded by the void,

Night descends on me like a blanket

My desire dissolves in this dark contact;

I pass through the night, watchful and lucid.

The light gleamed on the waters

Like in the first days of the world,

Our existence is a burden:

To think the Earth is round!

On the beach there was an entire family,

Around a barbecue they spoke of their meat,

Laughed moderately and opened a few beers;

To reach the beach, I had followed the moor.

Evening descends on the kelp,

The sea murmurs like an animal;

Our heart is far too dry,

We have lost all taste for evil.

I believe these people know each other,

For modulated sounds emanate from their group.

I would like to feel part of their species;

Increased interference, then contact is lost.

Gentle rolling of the hills;

Far away, a tractor’s purr.

A fire has been lit in the ruins;

Perhaps life is an error.

More and more badly I survive

Amidst these organisms

Who laugh and wear sandals,

They are small mechanisms.

How life is organised

In these provincial families!

A reduced existence,

Shrivelled and slender joys.

A well-cleaned kitchen;

Ah! This obsession with kitchens!

Hollow, decayed discourse;

The opinions of the woman next door.

On the direct train to Dourdan

A girl does a crossword

I can’t stop her,

It helps pass the time.

Like blocks in outer space

Workers move rapidly

Like independent blocks,

They pierce the air without a trace

Then the train slips between the rails,

Goes past the first suburbs

There’s no longer time nor space;

The workers quit their work.

Also by Michel Houellebecq

First I stumbled into a freezer

I am in a tunnel made of compact rocks

HYPERMARKET – NOVEMBER

AFTERNOON ON THE BOULEVARD PASTEUR

UNEMPLOYMENT