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

Mercedes—they weren’t snobs, the Spanish, they showed off in a conventional way; and also a cabriolet is better for the babes—known locally as
chicas,
a word I liked. The classified ads in
Voz de Almería
were explicit:
piel dorada, culito melocotón, guapísima, boca supersensual, labios expertos, muy simpática, complaciente.
A very beautiful and expressive language, naturally suited to poetry—you can rhyme almost everything. There were brothel bars, as well, for those who had difficulty visualizing the descriptions. Physically, the girls were in good shape, they corresponded to the wording of the ad, and they kept to the advertised price; as for the rest, well…They turned the television or CD player up too loud, turned the light down to a minimum, in other words they tried to cut themselves off; they hadn’t the vocation for it, that was clear. Obviously, you could
oblige
them to turn the volume down and turn the lights up; after all, they expected a tip, and every little thing counts. There are certainly people who get off on this kind of intercourse, and I could easily imagine the type; but I was quite simply not one of them. What’s more, most of the girls were Romanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian, in other words from one of those absurd countries that emerged from the implosion of the Eastern bloc; and one cannot say that Communism has particularly fostered sentimentality in human relations; it is, on the whole,
brutality
that is predominant among the ex-Communists—in comparison, Balzacian society, which emerged from the decomposition of royalty, seems a miracle of charity and gentleness. It is good to distrust doctrines preaching fraternity.
    It was only after Isabelle left that I truly discovered the
world of men,
in the course of pathetic wanderings along the virtually deserted highways of central and southern Spain. Except for the weekends and the start of the holidays, when you encounter families and couples, the highways are an almost exclusively male universe, populated by salesmen and truck drivers, a sad and violent world where the only publications available are porn mags and magazines for car maintenance, where the plastic revolving stand presenting a choice of DVDs under the title
Tus mejores películas
generally only enables you to complete your collection of
Dirty Debutantes.
This universe is not much talked about, and it’s true that there’s not much to say about it; no new form of behavior is experimented with in it, it can’t provide any valuable fodder for color supplements, in short it is a little-known world, and it gains nothing from being so. I formed no virile friendship, and more generally I felt close to no one during those few weeks, but that wasn’t a problem; in this universe no one is close to anyone, and even the smutty complicity of the tired waitresses who had pressed their sagging breasts into a “Naughty Girl” T-shirt could, I knew, only lead to copulation that came at a price, and was always too brief. I could, if push came to shove, start a fight with a heavy-goods truck driver and get my teeth smashed in in a parking lot, amid the gasoline fumes; that was basically the only possibility of adventure on offer in this universe. I lived in this way for a little more than two months, I burned thousands of euros on glasses of French champagne for mindless Romanian girls who, after all that, would still refuse, ten minutes later, to suck me off without a condom. It was on the Autovía Mediterráneo, precisely at the exit for Totana Sur, that I decided to put an end to this dismal ride. I had parked my car in the last available space in the parking lot of the hotel and restaurant Los Camioneros, where I went in to have a beer; the atmosphere inside was exactly what I’d come to expect over the previous weeks, and I stayed for ten minutes without really fixing my attention on anything, only conscious of a general, muffled weariness that made my movements more uncertain