Serotonin Read online

  * * *

  I easily found a space at the airport, the car park was enormous – everything in the region was enormous in fact, in preparation for a huge wave of tourists that had never arrived.

  It was months since I had slept with Yuzu, and I certainly didn’t plan on starting again, not under any circumstances (for reasons that I may explain later). I had no idea why I had organised this holiday, and I had already thought, as I waited on a plastic bench in the arrivals hall, of cutting it short – I had planned for two weeks, but one week would be quite enough. I would lie about my professional obligations, the bitch wouldn’t have an answer to that when she depended entirely on my money, and that gave me certain rights.

  The plane from Paris-Orly was on time, and the arrivals hall was pleasantly air-conditioned and almost entirely deserted – tourism rates were clearly at crisis point in the province of Almería. When the arrivals board announced that the plane had landed, I nearly got up and headed for the car park – she had no idea of the address and would be absolutely unable to find me. I reasoned quickly: one day I would have to go back to Paris, if only for professional reasons; in any case I was almost as fed up with my job at the Ministry of Agriculture as I was with my Japanese companion – I was going through a very difficult time, there are people who kill themselves for less.

  As usual she was ruthlessly made-up, almost painted: the scarlet lipstick and violet eyeshadow stressed her pale complexion – her ‘porcelain’ skin as it says in the novels of Yves Simon. I remember that at that time she never exposed herself to the sun – a bit of pallor (or porcelain skin, to use Yves Simon’s term) being viewed by Japanese women as the height of distinction – and yet what were you supposed to do at a Spanish seaside resort if you refused to expose yourself to the sun? My holiday plan was decidedly absurd, that very evening I was going to change the hotel reservations on the way back, even a week was too much – why not keep a few days in spring for the blossoming cherry trees in Kyoto?

  With the chestnut-haired girl everything would have been different; she would have stripped off at the beach without resentment and without contempt, like an obedient daughter of Israel; she wouldn’t have been troubled by the rolls of fat on the old German women (that was the fate of women, she knew, until the coming of Christ in his glory); she would have offered the sun (and the male German pensioners, who wouldn’t have missed a second of it) the glorious spectacle of her perfectly round buttocks and her frank but depilated pussy (for the Lord is bountiful); and I would have got another hard-on, I would have had a hard-on like an animal, but she wouldn’t have sucked me off right there on the beach – it was a family naturist colony after all. She would have avoided shocking the old German women doing their hatha yoga on the beach at sunrise, and yet I would have sensed her desire to do so, and my virility would have been fundamentally regenerated, but she would have waited until we were in the water, about fifty metres from the shore (the slope of the beach was very gentle) to offer her moist parts to my triumphant phallus, and later we would have dined on arroz con bogavantes in a restaurant in Garrucha, romance and pornography would not have been strangers to one another, the Creator’s munificence would have manifested itself most powerfully; in short my thoughts were going in all directions but I still managed to summon a vague expression of satisfaction when I spotted Yuzu entering the arrivals hall in the middle of a dense horde of Australian backpackers.

  We mimed a kiss – at least our cheeks brushed against each other – but that in itself was probably too much and she immediately sat down, opened her vanity case (the contents of which conformed strictly to the rules imposed on hand luggage by all airline companies) and began reapplying her powder without paying any attention to the luggage carousel – clearly it was going to be up to me to lug her bags about.

  I knew them very well, they were from a well-known brand that I’d forgotten the name of, Zadig & Voltaire maybe, or Pascal & Blaise; the concept, such as it was, had been to reproduce on the fabric one of those Renaissance maps in which the terrestrial world was represented very approximately, but with vintage inscriptions along the lines of: ‘Here be Tygers’. They were smart cases, their exclusivity reinforced by the fact that they were not equipped with wheels, unlike the vulgar Samsonite bags made for middle-management, you had to actually lug them, just like the trunks that well-to-do women owned in the Victorian age.

  Like all countries in Western Europe, Spain, engaged in a deadly process of increasing productivity, had gradually rid itself of all low-skilled jobs that had previously helped to keep life a little less unpleasant, and in doing so had condemned the majority of its population to mass unemployment. Such bags, whether they were branded Zadig & Voltaire or Pascal & Blaise, only made sense in a society where the role of porter still existed.

  That was apparently no longer the case, but on the other hand maybe it was, I said to myself, taking Yuzu’s two bags one after the other (a suitcase and a travelling bag of almost identical weight – together they must have weighed about forty kilos) off the carousel: the porter was me.

  I also fulfilled the function of chauffeur. Shortly after we reached the A7 motorway, she turned on her iPhone and plugged in her headphones before covering her eyes with a strip of fabric soaked in aloe vera exfoliating lotion. The motorway heading south, towards the airport, could be dangerous, and it was not unheard-of for a Latvian or Bulgarian lorry driver to lose control of his vehicle. In the opposite direction, the flotillas of trucks feeding Northern Europe with vegetables cultivated in greenhouses and picked by illegal Malians were setting off on their journey. The lack of sleep had not yet caught up with their drivers, and I overtook about thirty trucks without encountering a problem before approaching the 537 turn-off. The safety rail was missing for a stretch of just over five hundred metres at the start of the long curve leading to the viaduct that loomed above the Rabla del Tesoro; all I had to do to deal with it was avoid turning the wheel. The slope was very steep at that spot and taking into account the accumulated speed, one could expect a perfect trajectory: the car wouldn’t even have bounced off the rocky slope, it would have crashed directly one hundred metres further down. A moment of pure terror and then it would be over, I would give the Lord my uncertain soul.

  The weather was clear and calm again and I quickly reached the start of the bend. I closed my eyes and clamped my hands on the wheel; there were a few seconds of paradoxical balance and absolute peace, certainly less than five, during which I felt as if I had stepped out of time.

  In a convulsive and entirely involuntary movement, I swung violently to the left. It was about time, and the front nearside wheel briefly touched the stony hard shoulder. Yuzu pulled off her mask and tore out her headphones. ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ she repeated, furious but a little bit frightened too, and I began playing with her fear. ‘It’s all fine…’ I said as gently as I could, with the unctuous intonation of a civilised serial killer. Anthony Hopkins was my model, inspiring and almost unimprovable, the kind of man you need to meet at a certain stage in your life. I said again, even more gently, almost subliminally: ‘It’s all fine…’

  As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t fine at all; in fact, I had just failed in my second attempt at liberation.

  As I expected, Yuzu reacted calmly, although she struggled to hide her feeling of satisfaction at my decision to reduce our holiday to a week, and my professional explanations seemed to be immediately convincing; the truth was that she really couldn’t have given a shit.

  In any case, it had been little more than a pretext: the fact was that I’d left before delivering my report on the apricot producers of the Roussillon, revolted by the pointlessness of my task. As soon as the free-trade agreements currently under negotiation with the Mercosur countries were signed it was clear that the apricot producers of the Roussillon would no longer stand a chance; the protection offered by the AOP status ‘red Roussillon apricot’ was merely a derisory joke and the surge in Argent
inian apricots was inexorable, the apricot producers of the Roussillon were effectively all dead – there wouldn’t be any left, not a single one, not even a survivor to count the corpses.

  I was, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, employed at the Ministry of Agriculture, my essential task consisting in writing notes and reports for negotiating advisers usually within European bureaucracies, sometimes within the context of broader commercial negotiations whose role was to ‘define, sustain and represent the positions of French agriculture’. My contractual status allowed me to attain a high salary, far higher than that a civil servant would have been allowed under prevailing rules. This salary was justified in a sense: French agriculture is complex and diverse, few can master the challenges of every branch, and my reports were generally well thought-of. I was praised for my ability to get to the essentials; not to lose myself in a multitude of numbers, but rather shed light on certain key elements. On the other hand, my defence of France’s agricultural policies was nothing but a long list of failures, failures that were not down to me; they were more directly those of the negotiators: a strange, vain species whose record of defeat showed no signs of abating. I had had dealings with some of them (quite rarely, as a rule we communicated by email) and had emerged from those meetings with a sense of disgust. As a rule, they weren’t agronomic engineers but former business school students – since the outset I had felt nothing but revulsion for business and all that it involves, and the idea of ‘graduate business studies’ was in my eyes a desecration of the very idea of study, but after all it was normal to hire young business studies graduates as negotiators. A negotiation is always the same thing: whether you’re negotiating apricots, almond biscuits, mobile phones or Ariane rockets, negotiation is an autonomous universe which obeys its own laws, a universe that will always be inaccessible to non-negotiators.

  Still, I picked up my notes about the apricot producers of the Roussillon and went and sat in the top room (it was a duplex), and in the end I barely saw Yuzu for a week; for the first two days I made an effort to join her downstairs, to maintain the illusion of a conjugal bed, and then I gave up and developed the habit of eating on my own in the tapas bar, which was actually quite pleasant and where I had missed the opportunity to share a table with the chestnut-haired girl from El Alquián. As the days passed, I resigned myself to spending all my afternoons there, in that commercially toneless but socially incompressible space which, in Europe, separates lunch from dinner. The atmosphere was restful and there were people a bit like me but even worse off: they were twenty or thirty years older than me and their verdict had been delivered – they were beaten. There were a lot of widowers in this tapas bar in the afternoon – naturists know widowhood too – or, rather, there were a lot of widows, and quite a few homosexual widowers, whose frailer companions had fluttered off to gay heaven. Distinctions of sexual orientation seemed to have evaporated, in this tapas bar manifestly selected by pensioners as a place to end their lives, in favour of flat national divides: by the terrace tables you could easily tell the English corner from the German corner; I was the only Frenchman; as to the Dutch, they were really a bunch of slags and sat down anywhere at all, a race of opportunist polyglot tradespeople it can’t be said often enough. And they all sat getting pleasantly stupid on cervezas and platos combinados, the atmosphere generally very calm, the tone of the conversations measured. From time to time, however, a wave of indignados crashed down, straight from the beach, the girls’ hair still damp – and the noise level in the restaurant went up a notch. I don’t know why Yuzu gave a damn about not exposing herself to the sun; she was probably watching a Japanese TV series on the Internet; even now, I still wonder what she made of the situation. A simple gaijin like me – not even from a remarkable background, just capable of bringing in a comfortable but not stupendous salary – should normally have felt infinitely honoured to share the existence of a woman who was not only Japanese, but also young and sexy and from an eminent Japanese family, and who also mingled with the most advanced artistic circles in both hemispheres. The theory was unimpeachable: I was barely worthy to untie her sandals – that went without saying – but the problem was that I was showing an increasingly vulgar indifference to her status and mine. Once, when I was going to get some beers from the downstairs fridge, I bumped into her in the kitchen and couldn’t help saying: ‘Get out of the way you fat slut,’ before grabbing my pack of San Miguel and a half-eaten chorizo. She probably felt a bit thrown during that week: it isn’t easy pointing out the eminence of your social status when the other party threatens to belch in your face or fart by way of reply. There were certainly a lot of people she could have informed about her concerns – not her family, who would immediately have investigated the situation before concluding that it was time for her to return to Japan, but certainly girlfriends, friends or acquaintances, and I think that she used Skype a lot during those few days when I was busy resigning myself to abandoning the apricot producers of the Roussillon as they began their descent towards annihilation. Today my indifference at the time towards the apricot producers of the Roussillon seems a warning sign of the indifference that I showed towards the milk producers of Calvados and Manche at the crucial moment, and also of the more fundamental indifference that I would go on to develop towards my own fate, which at that moment made me eagerly seek out the company of pensioners, something that was not, paradoxically, all that easy; they were quick to unmask me as a fake pensioner, and in particular I suffered rebuffs from the English (which wasn’t very serious, you’re never well received by the English – they are almost as racist as the Japanese, like a lite version of them), but also from the Dutch, who obviously didn’t reject me out of xenophobia (how could a Dutch person be xenophobic? That’s an oxymoron: right there: Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best), but because they refused me access to their world of pensioners, I hadn’t sat the tests and so they couldn’t open up to me easily about their prostate problems or their heart bypasses. Surprisingly enough, I was much more warmly welcomed by the indignados; their youth went hand in hand with real naivety, and during those few days I could have changed drastically, and I would have had to change; it was my last chance and at the same time I had a lot to teach them. I was perfectly familiar with the abuses of the agro-industry; their militancy would have developed, all the more so since Spain’s policy towards GM food was more than questionable. Spain was one of the most liberal and most irresponsible European countries where GM was concerned: it was the whole of Spain, the whole of the Spanish campos, which risked turning into a genetic bomb from one day to the next. It would only have taken a girl – it only ever takes a girl – but nothing happened that could make me forget the chestnut-haired girl from El Alquián, and in retrospect I don’t even blame the indignadas who were there. I can’t even really remember their attitude towards me; I have a sense when I think about it of superficial benevolence, but I imagine that I myself was only superficially accessible. I had been destroyed by Yuzu’s return – by the obvious fact that I had to get rid of Yuzu and do it as quickly as possible – and I had become unable to really notice them, and even if I had noticed them, to believe in the reality of their charms; they were like a documentary about the waterfalls of the Bernese Oberland captured on the Internet by a Somalian refugee. My days passed, increasingly painfully, in the absence of tangible events and of reasons for living – in the end I had even completely abandoned the apricot producers of the Roussillon and had stopped going to the café often for fear of being confronted by a bare-breasted indignada. I watched the movements of the sun on the tiles, I knocked back bottles of Cardenal Mendoza brandy, and that was more or less it.

  In spite of the unbearable emptiness of the days, I dreaded the return journey, those few days I would have to sleep in the same bed as Yuzu. There was no question of us booking separate rooms, I didn’t feel I could collide so violently with the Weltanschauung of the receptionists and of the whole hotel staff, so we would be per
manently glued to one another, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, and that ordeal would last for four whole days. When I had been with Camille, that journey only took me two days, firstly because she could drive as well as me and so we took turns, but also because speed limits weren’t respected in Spain yet – they didn’t even have a system of points on licences – and the coordination of European bureaucracies was less perfectly organised in any case, hence a general laxity about minor infractions committed by foreigners. Not only did driving at 150 or 160 kilometres per hour – rather than the ridiculous limit of 120 kilometres per hour – obviously reduce how long the journey took, but it also allowed you to drive for longer, and under safer conditions. On those interminable Spanish motorways – straight lines leading all the way to infinity, almost empty; crushed by the sun and passing through an entirely boring landscape, particularly the part between Valencia and Barcelona: not that crossing the interior really helped, the stretch between Albacete and Madrid was also perfectly deadly – on those Spanish motorways, even the consumption of strong coffee, even chain-smoking one cigarette after another, didn’t help you combat sleepiness. After two or three hours of that tiresome itinerary your eyes inevitably closed, only the discharge of adrenalin induced by speed would have helped to preserve your vigilance. In fact that absurd speed limit was the direct reason why fatal accidents returned to Spanish motorways, and unless I wanted to risk a fatal accident – although I admit that might have been a solution – I was now obliged to limit myself to journeys of five or six hundred kilometres a day.