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  I had planned my departure for Monday 1 August. On the evening of 31 July, I sat down in the sitting room and waited for Yuzu to come home. I wondered how long it would take her to grasp reality, to realise that I had left for good and would never be coming back. Her stay in France, whatever else it was, would be directly determined by the two months’ rental notice on the apartment. I didn’t know exactly what her salary at the Japanese House of Culture was, but it certainly wouldn’t be enough to cover the rent, and I couldn’t imagine her agreeing to move to a miserable studio flat, since at the very least it would mean getting rid of three quarters of her clothes and beauty products; while the dressing room and bathroom in the master suite were enormous, she’d still managed to fill all the shelves to the brim – the number of things that she needed to maintain her status as a woman was actually startling, and though women don’t generally know this, it’s a thing that men don’t like, that even disgusts them, and gives them a sense of having acquired a tainted product whose beauty can only be maintained by infinite artifice, artifice which one quickly comes to see as immoral (despite the initial indulgence an alpha male might display towards the repertoire of feminine faults), and the truth is that Yuzu spent an incredible amount of time in the bathroom, which I had realised when we went on holiday together: between getting ready in the morning (at around midday), a slightly more basic touch-up mid-afternoon, and the interminable and exasperating ceremony of her evening bath (she had once told me she used eighteen different creams and lotions), I had calculated that she spent six hours on it every day, and it was all the more unpleasant in that not all women were like that, there were counter-examples, and I felt a wave of heartbreaking sadness as I thought of the chestnut-haired girl from El Alquián, with her tiny suitcase; some women give the impression of being more natural and more naturally in tune with the world, sometimes they even manage to seem indifferent to their own beauty – of course this is an additional lie, but in practice the result is there – and for example Camille spent half an hour at most in our bathroom, and I’m sure the same was true of the chestnut-haired girl from El Alquián.

  Unable to pay her rent, Yuzu would therefore be condemned to return to Japan, unless she decided to turn to prostitution; she had some of the necessary abilities, her sexual skills were of a very high level, particularly the crucial area of the blow-job; she licked the glans with great determination without ever forgetting the existence of the balls; she fell short only when it came to deep-throating, due to her small mouth, but in my opinion only a small number of maniacs are obsessed with deep-throating – if you want your cock to be entirely surrounded by flesh, well, that’s what the pussy is for – the advantage of the mouth, which is the tongue, is useless in the closed universe of the deep throat, where the tongue is ipso facto deprived of any possibility of action. And let’s not now descend into controversy, but the truth is that Yuzu was good for a hand-job, and she liked giving them under any circumstance (how many of my flights were improved by little surprising wanks!), and she was also exceptionally gifted at anal: her arse was receptive and easy to access, and she offered it with perfect goodwill; and yet anal always commands a supplementary fee with escorts, so she would even be able to earn much more than a simple prostitute. I estimated her probable rate as around seven hundred euros an hour and five thousand euros a night: her genuine elegance, her limited but adequate level of culture could allow her to become an escort, a woman who could be taken to dinner without any difficulty – even to an important business dinner, or to artistic functions – and prove to be a source of significant conversation, as we know businessmen are very fond of artistic conversations, and I knew that some of my colleagues suspected me of being with Yuzu precisely for those reasons: Japanese girls in any case are always quite classy, almost by definition, but she was, and I may say this without false modesty, a particularly classy Japanese girl. I knew I was admired for that, but I still maintain – and believe me, now that I am close to the end the desire to lie has deserted me once and for all – it wasn’t her qualities as a ‘top-of-the-range’ escort that made me fall for Yuzu, but rather quite simply her skills as an ordinary whore.

  Essentially, however, I couldn’t really see Yuzu as a prostitute. I’d been with prostitutes a lot, sometimes on my own, sometimes with the women who had shared my life, and Yuzu lacked the essential quality of that marvellous profession: generosity. A whore doesn’t choose her customers – that’s the point, that’s the axiom – she gives pleasure to everyone, without distinction, and that’s how she attains greatness.

  Yuzu had certainly been at the centre of gang-bangs, but that is a special situation where the multiplicity of cocks placed at her service plunges the woman into a state of narcissistic rapture – the most exciting probably being the one where she is surrounded by men wanking as they wait their turn; well, I’m referring to Catherine Millet’s books, which are quite clear on this point – and the fact remains that Yuzu, apart from gang-bangs, chose her lovers and chose them carefully. I had met some of them, generally speaking they were artists (but not bad-boy artists so much, rather the reverse in fact) and sometimes cultural taste-makers, but in any case always quite young men, rather handsome, rather elegant and rather rich, which leaves quite a large number of people in a city like Paris – there are always several thousand men who match that profile, I would say fifteen thousand to name a number – but she had had less than that, probably a few hundred, and a few dozen of those during our relationship, you might even say that she had shone in France, but now it was finished and the party was over.

  Never, during the entirety of our relationship, had she gone back to Japan or even planned to do so, and I had overheard some of her telephone conversations with her parents which had struck me as formal and cold, short in any case, I couldn’t hold that expense against her. I suspected (not that she opened up to me about it, but the truth had emerged over the course of dinner parties that we had organised at the start of our relationship, at a time when we still imagined that we would have friends, that we would become part of a refined, warm and demanding social network. The truth had emerged thanks to other women, whom she considered as belonging to the same milieu as herself: fashion designers for example, or talent scouts, were present, and the presence of those women was probably necessary for her confessional outbursts), that her parents, back in that vague Japan of theirs, had marriage plans for her, extremely precise marriage plans (there were apparently only two possible suitors, and perhaps even only one), and that as soon as she found herself under their wing once more it would be extremely hard for her to escape – indeed it would be frankly impossible, apart from the chance of creating a kanjei and finding oneself in a situation of hiroku (I’m making these words up a bit, well, not entirely, I do remember some combinations of sounds during her phone conversations), in short her fate would be sealed as soon as she set foot in Tokyo Narita International Airport.

  * * *

  That’s life.

  * * *

  At this stage it might be necessary to provide some clarification about love, intended more for women as women have difficulty understanding what love is for men, and they are constantly disconcerted by their attitudes and behaviour, and sometimes reach the erroneous conclusion that men are incapable of love; they rarely perceive that the very word ‘love’ signifies two radically different realities for men and for women.

  For women, love is power: a generative, tectonic power; love when it manifests itself in women is one of the most imposing natural phenomena and it should be treated with awe; it is a creative power of the same order as an earthquake or a climatic disturbance, its origin lies in a different ecosystem, a different environment, a different universe. Through love, women create a new world; small isolated creatures were bobbing about in an uncertain existence and here comes a woman to create the conditions for life as a couple, a new social, sentimental and genetic entity whose vocation is quite simply to eliminate all traces of the p
re-existing individuals of which it is formed; this new entity is already essentially perfect, as Plato had perceived. It may sometimes become more complex with a family but that is almost a detail, contrary to what Schopenhauer thought; in any case women are entirely devoted to this task, they plunge into it, they devote body and soul to it as they say, though they don’t differentiate between the two very much, the difference between body and soul is merely masculine hair-splitting. To this task, which as the pure manifestation of a vital instinct is hardly a task, they would sacrifice their lives without hesitation.

  Men are initially reserved, they admire and respect this emotional release without fully understanding it; it seems quite strange to them to make such a fuss about it. But gradually they are transformed, they are slowly sucked into the vortex of passion and pleasure that a woman creates: more precisely, they recognise her will, her pure and unconditional will, and they understand that that will is in essence absolutely good, even though she requires frequent and preferably daily vaginal penetration as the normal condition of its manifestation, in which the phallus, the core of men’s being, alters its status by becoming the condition under which the manifestation of love is made possible – men having hardly any other means of showing it – and by this strange detour the happiness of the phallus becomes a goal in itself for the woman, a goal that justifies any means employed. Gradually, the immense pleasure given by the woman changes the man: he feels gratitude and admiration; his vision of the world is transformed; and in an unexpected way he attains the Kantian dimension of respect and gradually imagines the world in a different way; life without a woman (and, specifically, without this woman who gives him so much pleasure) becomes truly impossible, almost the caricature of a life; in that moment, the man really begins to love. Love for men is therefore an end, an accomplishment, and not, as for women, a beginning, a birth; that’s what you need to bear in mind.

  Sometimes, however rarely, among the most sensitive and imaginative men, love arrives in the first moment, therefore love at first sight is absolutely not a myth; but rather when a man, by a prodigious psychological movement of anticipation, has already imagined all the pleasures which this woman could provide over the years (and, as they say, until death does them part), so the man has already (always already, as Heidegger would have said on one of his good days) anticipated the glorious ending; and it was that infinity, that glorious infinity of shared pleasures, that I had glimpsed in Camille’s eyes (but I will return to Camille), and also less randomly (and a little more powerfully, but I was ten years older, and at the time of our meeting sex had completely disappeared from my life; there was no longer any room for it, I was already resigned and already I wasn’t entirely a man) in the eyes of the chestnut-haired girl from El Alquián, the eternally heartbreaking chestnut-haired girl from El Alquián – the most recent and probably the last possibility of happiness that life had placed in my path.

  I had felt nothing like that with Yuzu; she had conquered me only gradually, and she had done it by secondary means – resorting to what is usually called perversion – with her immodesty above all, with her way of wanking me off (and masturbating herself) in all kinds of circumstances; other than that I didn’t know how she’d done it: I’d known prettier pussies, hers was a bit too complicated, too many folds of skin (from certain angles one might even have called it pendulous, in spite of her youth); the best thing about her when I think about it again was her arsehole, the permanent availability of her arsehole, apparently tight but in fact so manageable – I found myself constantly in a situation of free choice between three holes and how many women can you say that about? And at the same time how can you consider them women, those women who don’t offer that?

  Perhaps I will be rebuked for placing too much importance on sex; I don’t think so. Even though I remain aware that other joys can gradually replace it, in the normal course of a lifetime sex remains the only time when we personally and directly engage our organs, so the passage through sex, and through intense sex, remains necessary for the loving fusion to occur; nothing can happen without it, and all the rest, normally, flows gently from it. There is also another thing, which is that sex remains dangerous, the moment par excellence when the game becomes interesting. I’m not talking about AIDS specifically, even though the threat of death may add a spicy note, but rather procreation, a much more serious danger in itself; for my own part I gave up using condoms as soon as possible in each of my relationships, to tell the truth not using a condom had become a necessary condition for my desire, in which the fear of multiplying played a notable part, and I knew that if by some misfortune Western civilisation effectively managed to separate procreation from sex (as it has sometimes planned to do), it would thereby condemn not only procreation but also sex, and would therefore condemn itself; Catholics knew that – although their position also involved some strange ethical aberrations, such as their reticence towards such innocent practices as threesomes or sodomy – but I was gradually getting lost by dint of drinking glasses of cognac as I waited for Yuzu, who was in any case not Catholic in any way, let alone a hard-line Catholic. It was already ten o’clock in the evening, I wasn’t going to spend the night there, but the idea of leaving without seeing her again still annoyed me a little; I made myself a tuna sandwich while waiting, I had finished the cognac but I still had a bottle of calvados.

  * * *

  My reflections gradually deepened, thanks to the calvados, a powerful and profound spirit, and unfairly ignored. Certainly Yuzu’s infidelities (to be diplomatic) had hurt me, my manly vanity had suffered, and above all I had been filled by doubt: did she love all cocks as much as mine? That is the question that men typically ask themselves at such moments, and I too had asked it of myself before concluding, alas, in the affirmative; it’s true that our love had been sullied by it, and I now saw in a different light the compliments about my cock that had been such a source of pride at the start of our relationship (a comfortable size without being excessive, exceptional endurance), I saw them as the manifestation of a coldly objective judgement, the result of regular encounters with multiple cocks rather than the lyrical illusion emanating from the excited mind of a woman in love, which I confess I would humbly have preferred, I had no particular ambition for my cock so it was enough that it should be liked, and then I would like it too, that was where I stood with regard to my cock.

  * * *

  It was not then, however, that my love for her had faded once and for all, but, in an apparently more anodyne and briefer circumstance – conversation had lasted no longer than a minute, and it had immediately followed one of those fortnightly phone calls that Yuzu had with her parents. In it, and it couldn’t have been in my imagination, she mentioned going back to Japan, and of course I asked her about it, but her answer was supposed to have been reassuring, that she wouldn’t be going back for a long time, and in any case I shouldn’t worry about it; it was then that, in a fraction of a second, I understood. A kind of huge white flash obliterated all clear consciousness in me, and I returned to a normal state and engaged Yuzu in a brief interrogation, which immediately confirmed my essential suspicion: she had already planned, in an ideal life, her return to Japan, but it would be in about twenty or thirty years, or, to be precise, immediately after my death; she had already factored my death into her future life, she had taken it into account.

  My reaction was probably irrational, Yuzu was twenty years younger than me, everything suggested that she would survive me – and by a considerable length of time – but that is something that unconditional love seeks to ignore and frankly deny, unconditional love is built on that impossibility, that denial, and whether it is validated by faith in Christ or by belief in Google’s plan of immortality it makes very little difference for someone who is in love, the loved one cannot die, they are by definition immortal. Yuzu’s realism was therefore an absence of love, and that deficiency, that absence, had a definite character, and in a fraction of a second it stopped bei
ng romantic, unconditional love and became part of an arrangement, and from that moment I knew it was over, our relationship was over, and it would be even better for me if it ended as quickly as possible, because never again would I have a sense of having a woman beside me, but rather view her as a kind of spider, a spider feeding on my vital fluids which maintained the appearance of a woman: she had breasts, she had an arse (which I have already had the opportunity to praise) and even a pussy (about which I have expressed certain reservations), but none of that counted for anything any more, because in my eyes she had become a spider, a stinging and poisonous spider who was injecting me day after day with a deadly paralysing fluid; it was important for her to leave my life as soon as possible.

  * * *

  It was after eleven and the bottle of calvados was almost finished too, leaving without seeing her again was perhaps the best solution after all. I walked to the bay window: a bateau-mouche, probably the last of the day, was turning round the tip of the Île des Cygnes; it was then that I realised I would forget Yuzu very quickly.

  I had a bad night, filled with unpleasant dreams in which I risked missing my plane, which led me to undertake different dangerous actions like flying off the top floor of the Totem Tower to try and get to Roissy by air – sometimes I had to flap my arms, sometimes I just had to glide – but I couldn’t quite manage, and the slightest lapse in concentration would have made me crash; I had an especially difficult moment above the Jardin des Plantes, where my altitude dropped to only a few metres and I could barely fly over the big cat enclosure. The interpretation of that pathetic but spectacular dream was probably quite clear: I was afraid that I wouldn’t succeed in escaping.