Platform (34 page)

One evening, in the hotel coffee-shop, a Jordanian banker struck up a conversation with me. A man of amiable disposition, he insisted on buying me a beer; perhaps his enforced seclusion in the hotel was beginning to get to him. 'I understand how people feel, you know; you can't hold it against them . . .' he told me. 'It has to be said, we were asking for it. This isn't a Muslim country, there's no reason to spend hundreds of millions building mosques. To say nothing of the bomb attack, of course . . .' Seeing that I was listening to him attentively, he ordered another beer and become bolder. The problem with Muslims, he told me, was that the paradise promised by the prophet already existed here on earth: there were places on earth where young, available, lascivious girls danced for the pleasure of men, where one could become drunk on nectar and listen to celestial music; there were about twenty of them within five hundred metres of our hotel. These places were easily accessible. To gain admission, there was absolutely no need to fulfil the seven duties of a Muslim, nor to engage in holy war; all you had to do was pay a couple of dollars. It wasn't even necessary to travel to realise such things; all you needed was satellite TV. For him, there was no doubt, the Muslim way was doomed: capitalism would triumph. Already, young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex. They might try to pretend otherwise, but secretly, they wanted to be part of the American system: the violence of some of them was no more than a sign of impotent jealousy; thankfully, more and more of them were turning their backs on Islam. He himself had been unlucky: he was an old man now, and he had been forced to spend his whole life compromising with a religion he despised. I was in much the same boat: there would come a day when the world was delivered from Islam; but for me, it would come too late. I no longer really had a life; I had had a life, for a few months - that in itself was something, not everyone could say as much. The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

I saw him again the next day, just before he left for Amman; it would be a year before he could come back. On the whole, I was glad that he was leaving; I sensed that otherwise he would have wanted to talk to me again. The prospect gave me a bit of a headache: I found it very difficult now to tolerate intellectual debate; I no longer had any desire to understand the world, nor even to know it. Our brief conversation, however, had made a profound impression on me; in fact, he had convinced me from the outset, Islam was doomed. As soon as you thought about it, it seemed obvious. This simple thought was sufficient to dispel my hatred. Once again I ceased to have any interest in the news.

Chapter 4

Bangkok was still too much like a normal city, there were too many businessmen, too many tourists on package holidays. Two weeks later, I caught a bus for Pattaya. It had been bound to end this way I thought, as I boarded the vehicle; it was then that I realised that I was wrong, nothing in this story had been determined. I could easily have spent the rest of my life with Valerie in Thailand, in Brittany, or indeed anywhere at all. Growing old is no joke; but growing old alone is worse than anything.

As soon as I had put down my luggage on the dusty floor of the bus station, I knew I had arrived at the end of my journey. A scrawny old junkie with long grey hair, a large lizard perched on his shoulder, was begging outside the turnstiles. I gave him a hundred baht before drinking a beer at the Heidelberg Hof directly opposite. A few potbellied, moustachioed German pederasts minced around in their flowery shirts. Near them, three Russian teenage girls, who had attained a pinnacle of sluttishness, squirmed as they listened to their ghetto-blaster. They writhed and rolled about on their chairs, the sleazy little cocksuckers. In a few minutes' walk through the streets of the town, I encountered an impressive variety of human specimens: rappers in baseball caps, Dutch dropouts, cyberpunks with red hair, Austrian dykes with piercings. There is nothing lower than Pattaya, it is a sort of cesspit, the ultimate sewer where the sundry waste of western neurosis winds up. Whether you're homosexual, heterosexual, or both, Pattaya is the last-chance saloon, the one beyond which you might as well give up on desire. The hotels are distinguished, naturally, by different levels of comfort and price, but also by the nationality of their clientele. There are two large communities, the Germans and the Americans (among whom probably some Australians and possibly even some New Zealanders conceal themselves). You also get quite a lot of Russians, recognisable because they dress like rednecks and behave like gangsters. There is even an establishment intended for the French, called Ma Maison. The hotel has only a dozen rooms, but the restaurant is very popular. I spent a week there before I realised that I was not particularly attached to andouillettes or cuisses de grenouille; that I could live without following the French championship via satellite, and without leafing daily through the arts pages of Le Monde. In any case, I needed to find long-term accommodation. A standard tourist visa in Thailand only lasts for one month; but to get an extension, all you have to do is cross the border. A lot of the travel agencies in Pattaya offer a day return to the Cambodian border. After a three-hour trek in a minibus, you queue for an hour or two at customs, have lunch in a self-service restaurant on Cambodian soil (lunch is included in the price, as are tips for customs officials), then you start on your return journey. Most residents have been doing this every month for years; it's much easier than trying to get a long-term visa.

You don't come to Pattaya to start your life over, but to end it in tolerable conditions. Or, if you want to put it less brutally, to take a rest, a long rest - one which may prove permanent. These were the terms used by a homosexual of about fifty I met in an Irish pub on Soi 14; he had spent the greater part of his career as a designer working for the popular press and had managed to put some money aside. Ten years earlier, he had noticed that things were going badly for him: he still went out to clubs, the same clubs as always, but more and more often he came home empty-handed. Of course, he could always pay; but if it had to come to that, he would rather pay Asians. He apologised for this remark, hoped I would not infer any racist connotation. No, no, of course, I understood: it's less humiliating to pay for someone who looks nothing like any of those you have seduced in the past, who brings back no memories. If sex has to be paid for, it is best that, in a certain sense, it is undifferentiated. As everyone knows, one of the first things you feel in the presence of another race is that inability to differentiate, that feeling that physically, everyone looks more or less alike. The effect wears off after a few months, and it's a pity, because it bears out a reality, human beings do, in fact, look very much alike. Of course, we can distinguish between males and females; we can also, if we choose, distinguish between different age categories; but any more advanced distinction comes close to pedantry, probably a result of boredom. A creature that is bored elaborates distinctions and hierarchies. According to Hutchinson and Rawlins, the development of systems of hierarchical dominance within animal societies does not correspond to any practical necessity, nor to any selective advantage; it simply constitutes a means of combating the crushing boredom of life in the heart of nature.

So, the former designer was quietly living out the last years of his queer life treating himself to pretty, slender, muscular, dark-skinned boys. Once a year, he went back to France to visit his family and a few friends. His sex life was less frenetic than I might imagine, he told me: he went out once or twice a week, no more. He had been settled here in Pattaya for six years now; the profusion of varied, exciting and inexpensive sexual opportunities provoked a paradoxical calming of desire. Every time he went out, he was certain of being able to fuck and suck magnificent young boys who, for their part, would jerk him off sensitively and expertly in return. Confident of this fact, he spent more time getting ready to go out and he enjoyed these encounters in moderation. I realised then that he imagined I was in the throes of the erotic frenzy of my first weeks here, that he saw in me a heterosexual counterpart to his own case. I refrained from correcting him. He proved to be friendly, insisted on buying the beers, gave me a number of addresses for long-term accommodation. He had enjoyed talking to a Frenchman. Most of the homosexual residents were English; he was on good terms with them, but from time to time, he wanted to speak his own language. He had no real contact with the little French community which gathered at Ma Maison - mostly a crowd of straight, ex-colonial, ex-army thugs. If I was going to live in Pattaya, maybe we could go out together some night, no strings, obviously; he gave me his mobile number. I wrote it down, though I knew that I would never call him. He was pleasant, friendly, interesting if you like; but I simply wasn't interested in human relationships any more.

I rented a room on Naklua Road, a little outside the bustle of the city. It had air-conditioning, a fridge, a shower, a bed and some bits of furniture; the rent was three thousand baht a month - a little more than five hundred francs. I informed my bank of this news, wrote a letter of resignation to the Ministry of Culture.

There was nothing much left for me to do in this life. I bought a number of reams of A4 paper with the intention of putting the elements of my life in order. It's something people should do more often before they die. It's curious to think of all these human beings who live out their whole lives without feeling the need to make the slightest comment, the slightest objection, the slightest remark.

Not that these comments, these objections, these remarks are addressed to anyone in particular, nor intended to have any sort of meaning; but, even so, it seems to me to be better, in the end, that they be made.

Chapter 5

Six months later, I am still here in my room on Naklua Road, and I think that I have more or less finished my work. I miss Valerie. If by chance it was my intention, when I began writing these pages, to lessen the feeling of loss, or to make it more bearable, I would by now be certain of my failure: Valerie's absence has never been more painful to me.

At the beginning of my third month here, I decided in the end to go back to the massage parlours and the hostess bars again. In principle, the idea didn't really fill me with enthusiasm; I was afraid it would be a total fiasco. Nonetheless, I managed to get a hard-on, and even to ejaculate; but I never once experienced any pleasure. It wasn't the girls' fault, they were just as expert, just as gentle; but it was as though I was anaesthetised. I continued to go to a massage parlour once a week, to some extent on principle; then I decided to stop. It was, after all, a form of human contact that was the drawback. Even if I didn't in the least believe that my ability to feel pleasure would return, it was possible that the girl would come, especially as the numbness in my penis meant that I could keep going for hours if I didn't make a little effort to interrupt the proceedings. I might get to the point where I wanted her to come, it could become an issue; and I didn't wish to have anything more to do with issues. My life was an empty space, and it was better that it remain that way. If I allowed passion to penetrate my body, pain would follow quickly in its wake.

My book is almost at an end. More and more often now, I stay in bed for most of the day. Sometimes I turn on the air-conditioning in the morning and turn it off at night and between the two absolutely nothing happens. I've become accustomed to the purring of the machine, which I found irritating at first; but I've also become accustomed to the heat; I don't really have a preference.

For a long time now, I've stopped buying French newspapers; I suppose that by this time the presidential elections have taken place. The Ministry of Culture, somehow or other, must be getting on with its work. Perhaps Marie-Jeanne still thinks about me from time to time, when she's working on the budget for an exhibition; I haven't tried to get in touch. I don't know what's become of Jean-Yves either; after he was fired from Aurore, I suppose he must have started his career again much further down, and probably in something other than tourism.

When your love life is over, life in general takes on a sort of conventional, forced quality. One retains a human form, one's habitual behaviour, a sort of structure; but one's heart, as they say, isn't in it.

Mopeds drive down Naklua Road, sending up clouds of dust. It is noon already. Coming from outlying districts, the prostitutes arrive for work in the downtown bars. I don't think I'll go out today. Or maybe I will, late in the afternoon, to gulp down a soup at one of the stalls set up at the crossroads.

When one gives up on life, the last remaining human contacts are those you have with shopkeepers. As far as I'm concerned, these are limited to a few words spoken in English. I don't speak Thai, which creates a barrier around me that is suffocating and sad. It is obvious that I will never really understand Asia, and actually it's of not great importance. It's possible to live in the world without understanding it: all you need is to be able to get food, caresses and love. In Pattaya, food and caresses are cheap by Western, and even by Asian, standards. As for love, it's difficult for me to say. I am now convinced that, for me, Valerie was simply a radiant exception. She was one of those creatures who are capable of devoting their lives to someone else's happiness, of making that alone their goal. This phenomenon is a mystery. Happiness, simplicity and joy lies within them; but I still do not know how or why it occurs. And if I haven't understood love, what use is it to me to have understood the rest?

To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame; I have no message of hope to deliver. For the West, I do not feel hatred; at most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what's more, we continue to export it.