The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, Gavin Bowd

tourism…,” I proposed. “In Cuba, there are some very nice men.”
    She smiled and nodded. “They prefer Soviet queers…,” she said lightheartedly, furtively imitating the style of my glory days. Then she became serious again and looked me straight in the eye (it was a very still morning; the sea was blue and slack).
    “Have you still not fucked any whores?” she asked.
    “No.”
    “Well, me neither. So,” she continued, “you haven’t fucked for two years?”
    “No.”
    “Well, me neither.”
    Oh, we were little darlings, sentimental little darlings; and it was going to kill us.
     

     
    There was still the last morning, and the last walk; the sea was as blue as always, the cliffs just as black, and Fox trotting along beside us. “I’m taking him,” Isabelle had said abruptly. “It’s to be expected, he’s been with me longer; but you can have him when you want.” As civilized as you could get.
    Everything was already packed, the moving van was going to pass by the following day to transport her things to Biarritz—although a retired schoolteacher, her mother had bizarrely chosen to end her days in this region full of ultrarich bourgeois women who had nothing but contempt for her.
    We waited together another fifteen minutes for the taxi that would take her to the airport. “Oh, life will pass quickly…,” she said. It seemed to me that she was speaking mostly to herself; I said nothing in reply. Once she was in the taxi, she gave me a last wave with her hand. Yes; now, things were going to be very calm.

 
     
    Daniel24, 8
     
    IT IS NOT GENERAL PRACTICE to shorten human life stories, whatever the repugnance or boredom they may inspire in us. It is precisely this repugnance and boredom that we must cultivate, in order to distinguish ourselves from the species. It is on this condition, the Supreme Sister warns us, that the coming of the Future Ones will be made possible.
    If I am deviating here from this rule, in accordance with tradition uninterrupted since Daniel17, it is because the following ninety pages of the manuscript of Daniel1 have been made completely obsolete by scientific development. * At the time when Daniel1 was alive, male impotence was often attributed to psychological causes; we know today that it was essentially a hormonal phenomenon, in which psychological causes played only a small, and always reversible, part.
    A tormented meditation on the decline of virility, intercut with the at once pornographic and depressing description of failed attempts with various Andalusian prostitutes, these ninety pages contain, however, a lesson perfectly summed up for us by Daniel17 in the following lines, which I have extracted from his commentary:
     
The aging of the human female encompassed, in fact, the degradation of such a large number of characteristics, as aesthetic as they were functional, that it is very difficult to determine which was the most painful, and it is almost impossible, in the majority of cases, to cite a single cause behind the choice of suicide.
    The situation seems to be very different in the case of the human male. Subject to aesthetic and functional degradations as much as, if not more than, the female, he nevertheless managed to overcome them for as long as the erectile capacities of the penis were maintained. When these disappeared forever, suicide generally followed within two weeks.
    It is no doubt this difference that explains a curious statistical observation, already made by Daniel3: while in the last generations of the human species, the average age for departure was 54.1 years among women, it rose to 63.2 years among men.

 
     
    Daniel1, 9
     
What you call dreaming is very real for the warrior.
    —André Bercoff
     
    I SOLD THE BENTLEY —it reminded me too much of Isabelle, and its ostentation was beginning to annoy me—in order to buy a Mercedes 600 SL, a car that in reality was just as expensive, but more discreet. All the rich Spaniards drove