The Map and the Territory (36 page)

A laconic message from Franz had informed him that
Michel Houellebecq, Writer
had just been sold—to a Hindu cell-phone magnate. Six million extra euros had therefore just been added to his bank account. Obviously the wealth of strangers—who paid for the acquisition of a property sums that they themselves could never have imagined getting together—was one of the main motives for the natives’ resentment. In Jed’s case, the fact that he was
an artist
further aggravated the situation; his wealth had been acquired, in the eyes of a farmer in the Creuse, by dubious means, on the verge of swindlery. On the other hand, he hadn’t bought his property, but
inherited
it—and some remembered him from the times he had stayed, for several summers, in the house of his grandmother. He was then already a wild, unsociable child; and he did nothing, on his arrival, to make himself appreciated—on the contrary.

The back of his grandparents’ house looked onto a very big garden, of almost one hectare. At the time when they both lived there, it was entirely laid out as a vegetable garden—then, gradually, as the strength
of his widowed grandmother declined, and she began a firstly resigned, then impatient wait for death, the cultivated areas had shrunk, more and more vegetable patches had been abandoned, surrendered to the weeds. The back, which was unfenced, opened directly onto the wood of Grandmont—Jed remembered that once a doe pursued by hunters had found refuge in the garden. A few weeks after his arrival, he learned that a plot of fifty hectares, adjoining his own, and almost entirely forested, was for sale; he bought it without hesitation.

Rapidly, word went around that a rather crazy Parisian was buying land at any price, and at the end of the year Jed found himself the owner of seven hundred hectares, all to himself. Undulating and uneven in places, his estate was almost completely covered with beeches, chestnut trees, and oak; a pond fifty meters in diameter stretched out in the middle of it. He let the cold snaps pass, then had a three-meter-high metal lattice fence built, which closed it off entirely. On top of the barrier ran an electric wire powered by a low-tension generator. The voltage was insufficient to kill, but able to repel anyone who considered climbing it—it was the same, in fact, as the electric barriers used to dissuade herds of cows from leaving their meadows. In that way, it was perfectly within the limits of legality, as he pointed out to the gendarmes who came to visit him, twice, to express concern about the changes to the face of the canton. The mayor also came, and pointed out to him that by forbidding any right of passage to the hunters who had pursued deer and wild boar in these forests for generations, he was going to arouse considerable animosity. Jed listened to him intently, agreed that it was regrettable up to a point, but argued again that he was within the strict limits of the law. Soon after this conversation, he instructed a civil engineering business to build a road that crossed his domain, ending at a radio-controlled gate that opened directly onto the D50. From there, he was only three kilometers from the entrance to the A20 motorway. He developed the habit of doing his shopping at the Carrefour in Limoges, where he was almost sure not to meet anyone from the village. He generally went there first thing on Tuesday mornings, having noticed that this was when there were the fewest customers. He sometimes had the supermarket all to himself—which seemed to him to be quite a good approximation of happiness.

The civil engineering company also laid down, around the house,
a band of gray tarmac ten meters wide. In the house itself, however, he changed nothing.

All these improvements had cost him a little more than eight million euros. He did the calculation, and concluded that he had easily enough left to live on until the end of his days—even supposing he lived that long. His main expenditure, by far, would be the wealth tax. There would be no income tax. He had no income, and in no way intended producing artworks intended for sale again.

The years, as they say, passed.

One morning, listening by chance to the radio—he hadn’t done so for at least three years—Jed learned of the death of Frédéric Beigbeder, at the age of seventy-one. He’d passed away in his residence on the Basque coast, surrounded, according to the station, by “the affection of his loved ones.” Jed had no trouble believing it. There was truly in Beigbeder, as far as he could remember, something which could arouse affection and, already, the existence of “loved ones”; something that did not exist in Houellebecq, nor in him: a sort of familiarity with life.

It was in this indirect manner, in some ways by cross-checking, that he realized that he himself had just turned sixty. This was surprising: he wasn’t aware of having aged to this point. It’s through relations with others, and through their eyes, that you become aware of your own aging; you always have the tendency to see yourself as somehow eternal. Certainly, his hair had gone white, his face had become lined; but all of this had happened imperceptibly, without anything coming to confront him directly with images of his youth. Jed was then struck by this incongruity: he who had made, in the course of his artistic life, thousands of pictures did not own a single photograph of himself. Nor had he ever thought of making a self-portrait; never had he regarded himself, even remotely, worthwhile as an artistic subject.

For over ten years, the southern gate of his estate, the one opening out onto the village, had not been activated; it opened, however, without difficulty, and Jed again congratulated himself on having called on the services of that company in Lyons which a former colleague of his father’s had recommended.

He had only a vague memory of Châtelus-le-Marcheix. It was, as far as he could remember, a decrepit, ordinary little village in rural France, and nothing more. But after his first steps in the streets of the small town, he was filled with amazement. First of all, the village had grown a lot: there were at least twice, perhaps three times, as many houses. And these houses were attractive, decorated with flowers, and built with a maniacal respect for the traditional Limousin habitat. Everywhere on the main street, shop windows were selling regional products and arts and crafts; over one hundred meters he counted three cafés offering low-price Internet connections. You would have thought you were in Ko Phi Phi, or Saint-Paul-de-Vence, much more than in a rural village of the Creuse.

Slightly dazed, he stopped in the main square, and recognized the café facing the church. Or rather, recognized the
site
of the café. The interior, with its art nouveau lamps, its dark wood tables with forged iron bases, and its leather seats, manifestly wanted to conjure up the atmosphere of a Parisian café of the Belle Époque. Each table was, however, equipped with a docking station for laptops with 21-inch screens, plugs conforming to European and American norms, and a leaflet explaining how to connect to the network Creuse-Sat; the departmental council had financed the launch of a geostationary satellite in order to improve the speed of Internet connections in the department, Jed learned on reading the leaflet. He ordered a Menetou-Salon rosé, which he drank pensively while thinking about these transformations. At this early hour, there were few people in the café. A Chinese family was finishing their
full Limousin breakfast
, offered at twenty-three euros a head, Jed noticed on looking at the menu. Closer to him, a hefty bearded man, his hair tied up in a ponytail, was absentmindedly consulting his e-mails; he sent an intrigued look to Jed, frowned, hesitated about addressing him, then plunged back into his computer. Jed finished his glass of wine, went out, and stayed for a few minutes pensively at the wheel of his Audi electric
SUV—he’d changed cars three times over the last twenty years, but had remained faithful to the brand that had given him his first real joy as a driver.

During the weeks that followed, he gently explored, in small stages, without really leaving Limousin—apart from a brief passage through the Dordogne, and another even briefer one in the mountains of Rodez—this country, France, which was irrefutably his own. Obviously, France had changed a lot. He connected to the Internet, many times, had a few conversations with hoteliers, restaurant owners, and other service providers (a garage owner in Périgueux, an escort girl from Limoges), and everything confirmed the first, astounding impression he had had on walking through Châtelus-le-Marcheix: yes, the country had changed, and changed profoundly. The traditional inhabitants of rural areas had almost completely disappeared. Incomers, from urban areas, had replaced them, motivated by a real appetite for business and, occasionally, by moderate and marketable ecological convictions. They had set about repopulating the
hinterland
—and this attempt, after many other fruitless attempts, based this time on a precise knowledge of the laws of the market, and on their lucid acceptance, had been a total success.

The first question Jed asked himself—displaying, in this way, typical artistic egocentrism—was whether his Series of Simple Professions, almost twenty years after he had conceived it, had kept its relevance. In fact, not entirely.
Maya Dubois, Assistant in Remote Maintenance
no longer had any raison d’être: remote maintenance was now a hundred percent outsourced—essentially to Indonesia and Brazil.
Aimée, Escort Girl
, however, kept all its relevance. Prostitution had even enjoyed, on the economic level, a genuine upturn, due to the persistence, in particular in South America and Russia, of a fantasy image of the
Parisienne
, as well as the tireless activities of immigrant women from West Africa. For the first time since the 1900s or 1910s, France had once again become a favorite destination for
sex tourism
. New professions too had appeared—or rather, old professions had come back into favor, such as wrought-ironwork and brassmaking; market gardens had also made a reappearance. In Jabreilles-les-Bordes, a village three kilometers from
Jed’s, a blacksmith had moved back in—the Creuse, with its network of well-tended paths, its forests and clearings, was admirably suited for horse riding.

More generally, France, on the economic level, was in good shape. Having become a mainly agricultural and tourist country, she had displayed remarkable robustness during the various crises which followed one another, almost without interruption, in the preceding twenty years. These crises had been increasingly violent and burlesquely unpredictable—burlesque at least from the point of view of a mocking God, who might draw infinite amusement from financial convulsions that suddenly plunged into opulence, then famine, entities the size of Indonesia, Russia, or Brazil: populations of hundreds of millions of people. Having scarcely anything to sell except
hôtels de charme
, perfumes, and
rillettes
—what is called an
art de vivre
—France had had no difficulty confronting these vagaries. From one year to the next, the nationality of the clients changed, and that was all.

Back in Châtelus-le-Marcheix, Jed took up the habit of a daily walk, just before midday, through the streets of the village. He generally took an aperitif at the café on the square (which had, curiously, kept its old name of Bar des Sports) before returning home for lunch. He quickly realized that many of the newcomers seemed to know him—or, at least, had heard of him—and looked upon him with no particular animosity. In fact, the new inhabitants of the rural areas in no way resembled their predecessors. It was not fate that had led them to do traditional basket weaving, renovation of rural cottages, or cheesemaking, but a business plan, a carefully weighed, rational economic choice. Educated, tolerant, and affable, they cohabited easily with the foreigners present in their region—besides, they had reason to, since the latter constituted the core of their clientele. Most of the houses that their former owners from northern Europe no longer had the means to maintain had, in fact, been bought up. The Chinese certainly formed a rather closed community, but, truth be told, no more, and even rather less so, than the English had done in the past—and at least they didn’t impose the use of their own language. They displayed an excessive respect, almost a veneration, for
local customs
—that the newcomers at first knew little about, but
which they’d striven, by a sort of adaptive mimicry, to reproduce; thus there was seen a more or less decisive return to regional recipes, dances, and even costumes. That said, it was certainly the Russians who formed the most appreciated clientele. Never would they have haggled over the price of an aperitif, or the rental of a four-by-four. They spent with munificence, with largesse, faithful to an economics of the
potlatch
that had easily survived successive political regimes.

This new generation turned out to be more conservative and more respectful of money and social hierarchies than all those preceding it. More surprisingly, the birth rate had by this time actually risen in France, even without taking into account immigration, which, anyway, had fallen to almost zero since the disappearance of the last industrial jobs and the drastic reduction of social security coverage imposed at the beginning of the 2020s. Making their way to the newly industrialized countries, African migrants now exposed themselves to a very perilous journey. Crossing the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, their boats were frequently attacked by pirates, who stripped them of their last savings, when they didn’t, purely and simply, throw them into the sea.