The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, Gavin Bowd Page B

illusion common to all left-wing Christians, or rather centrist Christians, let’s say to Christians contaminated by progressive thought since the Revolution, based on the belief that concupiscence is a venal thing, scarcely important, unfit to turn man away from the path to salvation—that the only true sin is the sin of pride. Where, in me, was concupiscence? Or pride? And was I a long way from salvation? The answers to these questions, it seems to me, were not very difficult; Pascal would never, for example, have stooped to such absurdities: you felt when you read him that the temptations of the flesh were not foreign to him, that libertinage was something that he could have felt; and that if he chose Christ over fornication or cards it was neither through distraction nor incompetence, but because Christ seemed to be definitively more
acid;
in short, he was a
serious
author. If
erotica
had been found on Teilhard de Chardin, I believe that would have reassured me, in a sense; but I didn’t believe it for a second. What had he ever experienced, with whom had he ever associated, this pathetic Teilhard, in order to have such a benign and naive understanding of mankind—while at the same time, in the same country, bastards as considerable as Céline, Sartre, or Genet were running wild? Through his dedications, the addresses on his correspondence, one could manage little by little to divine who they were: posh Catholics, those who were more or less aristocratic, and, frequently, Jesuits. Innocents.
     
     
    “What are you muttering about?” interrupted Isabelle. I then became conscious that we had left the Germans’ house, that in fact we were going along the coast, and that we were about to arrive home. She informed me that for two minutes I had been talking to myself, and she had understood almost nothing. I made a summary of the main elements of the problem.
    “It’s easy to be an optimist…,” I concluded bitterly, “it’s easy to be optimistic when you are content to have a dog, and haven’t had children.”
    “You are in the same situation, and, frankly, that hasn’t made you optimistic…,” she remarked. “What it is, is that they are old…,” she continued indulgently. “When you grow old you need to think of reassuring and gentle things. You need to imagine that something beautiful awaits us in heaven. In fact we train ourselves for death, a little. When we’re not too stupid, or too rich.”
    I stopped and considered the ocean and the stars. Those stars to which Harry devoted his waking nights, while Hildegarde gave herself up to free classical improvisations on Mozart themes. The music of the spheres, the starry sky; the moral law in my heart. I considered the trip, and what separated me from it; the night was so mild, however, that I placed a hand on Isabelle’s backside—I could feel its shape easily, through the light fabric of her summer dress. She stretched out on the dune, took off her panties, and opened her legs. I penetrated her—face to face, for the first time. She looked straight into my eyes. I remember clearly the movements of her pussy, her little cries at the end. I remember it all the better as it was the last time we made love.
     

     
    A few months passed. Summer returned, then autumn; Isabelle didn’t seem unhappy. She played with Fox, and tended the azaleas; I devoted myself to swimming and rereading Balzac. One evening, while the sun fell behind the residence, she looked me straight in the eye and told me softly: “You are going to ditch me for someone younger…”
    I protested that I had never been unfaithful.
    “I know…,” she replied. “At one moment, I thought you were going to be: that you’d bang one of the sluts who hung around the magazine, then come back to me, bang another slut, and so on. I would have suffered greatly, but perhaps it would have been better like that, at the end of the day.”
    “I tried once; the girl turned me down.” I remembered