Platform (19 page)

'Michel . . . you don't think I'm too conventional?'

'No, I hate that stuff too.'

'I can understand that torturers exist: I find it disgusting, but I know there are people who take pleasure in torturing others; what I don't understand is that victims exist. It's beyond me that a human being could come to prefer pain to pleasure. I don't know - they need to be re-educated, to be loved, to be taught what pleasure is.'

I shrugged my shoulders as if to suggest that the subject was beyond me — something which now happened in almost every aspect of my life. The things people do, the things they are prepared to endure . . . there was nothing to be made of all this, no overall conclusion, no meaning.

I undressed in silence. Valerie sat on the bed beside me. I sensed that she was still tense, preoccupied by the subject. 'What scares me about it all,' she said, 'is that there's no physical contact. Everyone wears gloves, uses equipment, kin never touches skin, there's never a kiss, a touch or a caress. For me, it's the very antithesis of sexuality.'

She was right, but I suppose that S&M enthusiasts would have seen their practices as the apotheosis of sexuality, its ultimate form. Each person remains trapped in his skin, completely given over to his feelings of individuality; it was one way of looking at things. What was certain, in any case, was that that kind of place was increasingly fashionable. I could easily imagine girls like Marjorie and Geraldine going to them, for example; although I had trouble imagining them being able to abandon themselves sufficiently for penetration, or indeed any kind of sexual scenario.

'It's more straightforward than you might think . . .' I said at length. 'There's the sexuality of those who love each other, and the sexuality of those who don't love each other. When there's no longer any possibility of identifying with the other, the only thing left is suffering - and cruelty.'

Valerie pressed against me. 'We live in a strange world . . .' she said. In a sense, she was still innocent, protected from human reality by her insane working hours, which left her barely enough time to do the shopping, sleep, start again. She added: 'I don't like the world we live in.'

Chapter 6

It became apparent from our research that consumers have three major expectations: the desire to be safe, the desire for affection and the desire for beauty.

Bernard Guilbaud

On June 30, the reservation figures from the travel agencies arrived. They were excellent. Eldorador Discovery was a success, it had immediately achieved better results than Eldorador Standard - which continued to slide. Valerie decided to take a week's holiday: we went to her parents at Saint-Quay-Portrieux. I felt rather old to be: playing the role of the fiancé brought to meet the parents; after all, I was thirteen years older than she was, and this was the first time I had ever been in such a situation. The train stopped at Saint-Brieuc, her father was waiting for us at the station. He kissed his daughter warmly and hugged her to him for a long time; you could see that he missed her. 'You've lost a bit of weight. . .' he told her. Then he turned to me and offered me his hand, without really looking at me. I think he was intimidated too: he knew I worked for the Ministry of Culture, while he was just a farmer. Her mother was much more talkative; she grilled me at length about my life, my work, my hobbies. In the event, it wasn't so difficult. Valerie was at my side; from time to time she answered for me and we would exchange looks. I couldn't imagine how I might behave in a situation like this if one day I had children; I couldn't really imagine much about the future.

The evening meal was a real feast: lobster, saddle of lamb, several cheeses, a strawberry tart and coffee. For my part, I was tempted to see this as evidence of acceptance, although obviously I knew that the menu had been planned in advance. Valerie took the brunt of the conversation, mostly talking about her new job - about which I knew just about everything. I let my gaze wander over the curtain material, the ornaments, the family photos in their frames; it was touching and a little frightening.

Valerie insisted on sleeping in the room she had had as a teenager. 'You'd be better off in the guest room,' her mother insisted; 'two of you will be pushed for space.' It was true the bed was a little narrow, but I was very moved, as I pushed Valerie's panties down and stroked her pussy, to think that this was where she slept when she was only thirteen or fourteen. Wasted years, I thought. I knelt at the foot of the bed, took off her pants completely and turned her towards me. Her vagina closed over the tip of my penis. I pretended to penetrate her, going in a couple of inches and pulling back in quick, short thrusts, squeezing her breasts between my hands. She came with a muffled cry, then burst out laughing. 'My parents . . .' she whispered, 'they're not asleep yet.' I penetrated her again, harder this time so that I could come. She watched me, her eyes shining, and placed a hand over my mouth just as I came inside her with a hoarse moan.

Later, I studied the furniture in the room curiously. On a shelf, just above the Bibliotheque Rose series, there were several little exercise books, carefully bound. 'Oh, those,' she said; 'I used to do them when I was about ten, twelve. Have a look if you like. They're Famous Five stories.'

'How do you mean?'

'Unpublished Famous Five stories, I used to write them myself, using the same characters.'

I took them down: there was Five in Outer Space, Five on a Canadian Adventure. I suddenly had an image of a little girl full of imagination, a rather lonely girl, whom I would never know.

In the days that followed, we didn't do much beyond going to the beach. The weather was beautiful, but the water was too cold to swim in for long. Valerie lay in the sun for hours at a time; she was recovering gradually: the last three months had been the hardest of her working life. One evening, three days after our arrival, I talked to her about it. It was at the Oceanic Bar; we'd just ordered cocktails.

'You won't have so much work now, I suppose, now that you've launched the package?'

'In the short term, no,' she smiled cynically. 'But we'll have to come up with something else pretty quickly.'

'Why? Why not just stop at that?'

'Because that's how the game goes. If Jean-Yves were here he'd tell you that that's the capitalist principle: if you don't move forward, you're dead. Unless you have a decisive competitive advantage which you can bank on for a couple of years; but we're not there yet. The principle of Eldorador Discovery is good - it's clever, canny if you like, but it's not really innovative, it's just a good mix of other concepts. The competition will see that it works and before you know it, they'll be doing the same thing. It's not that difficult to do; the hard part was setting it up in so little time. But I'm sure that Nouvelles Frontieres, for example, would be able to offer a similar package by next summer. If we want to keep our advantage, we have to innovate again.'

'And it never ends?'

'I don't think so, Michel. I'm well paid, I work in an industry I understand; I accept the rules of the game.'

I must have looked serious; she put her hand on my neck. 'Let's go and eat . . .' she said. 'My parents will be waiting for us.'

We went back to Paris on Sunday evening. Valerie and Jean-Yves had a meeting with Eric Leguen on Monday morning. He made a point of personally expressing the group's satisfaction with the first results of their recovery plan. As a bonus, the board of directors had unanimously decided to allocate shares to each of them, exceptional for executives who had been with the company less than a year.

That evening, the three of us had dinner in a Moroccan restaurant on the Rue des Ecoles. Jean-Yves was unshaven, his head was nodding and he looked a little puffy. 'I think he's started drinking,' Valerie said to me in the taxi. 'He had a dreadful holiday with his wife and kids on the lie de Re. They were supposed to be there for two weeks, but he left after a week. He told me he couldn't bear his wife's friends any more.'

It was true he didn't look at all well: he didn't touch his tagine, he constantly poured himself more wine. 'Here we go!' he said sarcastically, 'Here we go! We're getting into serious money now!' He shook his head, drained his wineglass, 'Sorry . . .' he said pitifully, 'sorry, I shouldn't talk like that.' He placed his hands, trembling slightly, on the table, waited; slowly he stopped trembling. Then he looked Valerie straight in the eye.

'You know what happened to Marylise?'

'Marylise Le Francois? No, I haven't seen her. Is she sick?'

'Not sick, no. She spent three days in hospital on tranquillisers, but she's not sick. Actually, she was attacked, raped on the train to Paris, on her way home from work last Wednesday.'

Marylise returned to work the following Monday. It was obvious she had been badly shaken; her movements were slow, almost mechanical. She told her story easily, too easily, it didn't seem natural: her voice was neutral, her face expressionless, rigid, it was as if she was unthinkingly repeating her police statement. Leaving work at 10.15 p.m., she had decided to take the 10.21 p.m. train, thinking it would be quicker than waiting for a taxi. The carriage was three-quarters empty. Four guys came up to her and immediately started insulting her. As far as she could tell, they were West Indian. She tried to talk to them, make a joke; for her trouble she got a couple of slaps which knocked her half-unconscious. At that point, they jumped her, two of them holding her down on the floor. Violently, brutally, they penetrated her every orifice. Every time she tried to make a sound, she was punched or slapped. It had gone on for a long time, the train had stopped at several stations; passengers got off, warily changed carriages. As the guys took turns raping her, they continued to taunt and insult her, calling her a slut and a douche-bag. By the end there was no one in the compartment. They ended up in a circle around her, spitting and pissing on her, then they shoved her with their feet, until she was half-hidden under one of the seats, then they calmly got off the train at the Gare de Lyon. Two minutes later, the first passengers to board called the police, who arrived almost immediately. The superintendent wasn't really surprised; according to him she'd been relatively lucky. Quite often when they had used the girl, these guys would end up shoving a piece of wood studded with nails into her vagina or her anus. The line was classed as dangerous.

An internal memo reminded employees of the usual safety measures, repeated that taxis were at their disposal should they need to work late and that fares would be entirely covered by the company. The number of security guards patrolling the grounds and the car park was increased.

That evening, as her car was being repaired, Jean-Yves drove Valerie home. As he was stepping out of his office, he looked out over the chaotic landscape of houses, shopping centres, tower-blocks and motorway interchanges. Far away, on the horizon, a layer of pollution lent the sunset strange tints of mauve and green. 'It's strange,' he said to her, 'here we are inside the company like well-fed beasts of burden. And outside are the predators, the savage world. I was in Sao Paulo once, that's where evolution has really been pushed to its limits. It's not even a city any more, it's a sort of urban territory which extends as far as the eye can see, with its favelas, its huge office blocks, its luxury housing surrounded by guards armed to the teeth. It has a population of more than twenty million, many of whom are born, live and die without ever stepping outside the limits of its terrain. The streets are dangerous there: even in a car someone might pull a gun on you at a traffic light, or you might wind up being tailed by a gang; the really well-equipped gangs have machine-guns and rocket launchers. Businessmen and rich people use helicopters to get around almost all the time; there are helipads pretty much everywhere, on the roofs of banks and apartment blocks. At ground level the street is left to the poor - and the gangs.'

As he turned on to the motorway heading south, he added in a low voice: 'I've been having doubts lately. More and more now I have doubts about the sort of world we're creating.'

A couple of days later, they returned to the subject. After he had parked on the avenue de Choisy, Jean-Yves lit a cigarette; he was silent for a moment, then he turned to Valerie: 'I feel really terrible about Marylise . . . the doctors said she could go back to work, and it's true that in a sense, she's back to normal, she's not having panic attacks. But she never takes the initiative, it's as if she's paralysed. Every time there's a decision to be made, she comes and asks me; and if I'm not there, she's capable of waiting for hours without lifting a finger. For a marketing manager, it's not good enough; it can't go on like this.' 'You're not going to fire her?'

Jean-Yves stubbed out his cigarette, stared out of the car for a long time; he gripped the steering wheel. He seemed to be more and more tense, unsettled; Valerie noticed that even his suit was sometimes stained nowadays.

'I don't know,' he whispered at last, with difficulty. 'I've never had to do anything like this. I couldn't fire her, that would be really shitty; but I'll have to find her another job where she has fewer decisions to make, fewer dealings with people. To make matters worse, ever since it happened, she's become more and more racist in her reactions. It's understandable, it's not hard to understand, but in the tourist industry it's just not acceptable. In our advertising, our catalogues, all our marketing material, we portray the locals as warm, welcoming, friendly people. That's the way it is: it really is a professional obligation.'

The following day, Jean-Yves broached the subject with Leguen, who had fewer qualms, and, a week later, Marylise was transferred to the accounts department to replace an employee who had just retired. Another marketing manager needed to be found for Eldorador. Jean-Yves and Valerie handled the job interviews together. After they had seen about ten candidates, they had lunch in the company cafeteria to discuss the appointment.