Serotonin Read online

  Leaving Rue Bobillot and turning into Rue de la Butte-aux-Cailles (they join up again at Place Verlaine) meant leaving the universe of ordinary consumers and entering a world of militant creperies and alternative bars (the ‘Temps des cerises’ and the ‘Merle moqueur’ were practically opposite one another), with a scattering of fair-trade organic shops and boutiques offering piercings or afro cuts; I had always had a sense that the 1970s hadn’t disappeared in France, they had just made a temporary retreat. Some of the graffiti wasn’t too bad, and I followed the street to the end, missing the turn-off into Rue des Cinq Diamants, where Dr Lelièvre had his practice.

  * * *

  He had something of the tree-hugger about him, I said to myself at first glance, with his shoulder-length curly hair starting to be invaded by threads of white; but his bow-tie didn’t fit with that initial impression, and neither did the luxurious furniture in his office, so I reconsidered my point of view: he was a sympathiser at most.

  When I had finished summing up my recent life to him, he agreed, in fact, that I genuinely needed a course of treatment, and asked me if I had had thoughts of suicide. No, I replied, death doesn’t interest me. He suppressed a grimace of discontent and replied in a cutting voice – he clearly didn’t find me sympathetic – that there was a new-generation antidepressant (it was the first time I had heard the name Captorix, which would later play such an important part in my life), which might prove useful in my case; you had to allow one or two weeks for the effects to kick in, but it was a medication that required rigorous medical surveillance, so it was imperative that we meet up again in a month.

  I hurriedly agreed, struggling not to grab the prescription too avidly; I had decided never to see this idiot again.

  * * *

  Back at home, or rather in my hotel room, I carefully studied the instructions, which informed me that I would probably become impotent, and that my libido would disappear. Captorix worked by increasing the secretion of serotonin, but the information I was able to find on the Internet about the effect of hormones on the workings of the psyche left an impression of confusion and incoherence. There were certain common-sense observations, along the lines of: ‘A mammal doesn’t decide, when it wakes up every morning, whether it is going to stay with the group or move away to live its life,’ or again: ‘A reptile has no sense of attachment to other reptiles; lizards don’t trust lizards.’ More specifically, serotonin was linked to self-esteem, to the sense of recognition obtained from the group. But in any case, it was essentially produced within the intestine, and it had been found to exist in a great variety of living creatures, including amoebas. What feeling of self-esteem could exist among amoebas? What sense of recognition from the group? I gradually reached the conclusion that medical art remained confused and imprecise about these matters, and that antidepressants were among the many medications that work (or don’t) without anyone knowing exactly why.

  In my case it seemed to work – the shower was still a bit too violent but I gradually managed to take a tepid bath and to vaguely soap myself. And my libido didn’t change much; in any case I hadn’t felt anything resembling sexual desire since seeing the chestnut-haired girl in El Alquián, that unforgettable chestnut-haired girl.

  So it certainly wasn’t a lustful impulse that drove me, a few days later, in the middle of the afternoon, to call Claire. What was it that drove me, then? I had absolutely no idea. It had been over ten years since we’d been in touch; to tell the truth I expected her to have changed her telephone number. But no, she hadn’t. She hadn’t changed her address either, but that I suppose is normal. She seemed a bit surprised to hear from me – but basically nothing more than that, and she suggested that we have dinner together that very evening in a restaurant near where she lived.

  * * *

  I was twenty-seven when I first met Claire, my years as a student were behind me and there had already been a fair number of girls – foreigners, essentially. You have to realise that Erasmus scholarships, which would later facilitate sexual exchanges between European students, didn’t exist at the time, and one of the only places to pick up foreign students was the International University City on Boulevard Jourdan, where by some miracle Agro had a building which held concerts and parties. So I had carnal knowledge of girls from different countries, and had come to the conclusion that love can only develop on the basis of a certain level of difference, that like never falls in love with like, and in practice many differences may come into play: an extreme difference in age, as we know, can give rise to unimaginably violent passions; racial difference remains effective; and even mere national and linguistic difference should not be scorned. It is bad for those who love each other to speak the same language, it is bad for them to truly understand one another, to be able to communicate through words, because the vocation of the word is not to create love but to engender division and hatred, the word separates as it produces, while a formless, semi-linguistic babble – talking to your lover as you might talk to your dog – creates the basis for unconditional and enduring love. If we could also restrict ourselves to immediate and concrete topics – where are the keys to the garage? What time is the electrician coming? – everything might still be fine, but beyond that begins the realm of disunity, division and divorce.

  So there were different women, mainly Spanish and German, a few South Americans, and a Dutch one too, plump and appetising, who really looked like an advertisement for Gouda. Then there was Kate, the last of my youthful loves, the last and the most serious; after her you could say that my youth ended, never again did I know those mental states habitually associated with the word ‘youth’ – that charming insouciance (or, if you prefer, that disgusting irresponsibility), that sense of an undefined and open world – after her reality closed over me once and for all.

  * * *

  Kate was Danish, and she was probably the most intelligent person I have ever met; well, not that it has any real importance, intelligence barely has any importance in a friendship let alone in a romantic relationship, it has less weight than a good heart; I mention it particularly because her incredible intellectual agility and her unusual capacity for assimilation were truly a curiosity, a phenomenon. She was twenty-seven when we met – so five years older than me – and she had a much greater experience of life, I felt like a little boy beside her. After completing her legal studies in record time, she had become a corporate lawyer in a London office. ‘So, you must have met some kind of yuppies…’ I remember saying to her on the morning after our first night of love. ‘Florent, I was a yuppie,’ she replied gently; I remember that answer, and I remember her firm little breasts in the morning light – every time I think about it I have a very powerful desire to die, but let’s move on. After two years, it had become clear to her: yuppiedom did not correspond in any respect to her aspirations, her tastes, her general way of imagining life. So she had decided to resume her studies, this time in medicine. I don’t remember very clearly what she was doing in Paris, I think she was at a Paris hospital that enjoyed a great international reputation in some tropical illness, I can’t remember which. To give you an idea of her abilities: on the evening that we met – she had happened on me, or rather I had offered to help her carry her luggage to her room on the third floor of the Danish building, where we had one beer, then two, etc. – she had arrived in Paris that morning and didn’t speak a word of French; two weeks later she had almost perfectly mastered the language.

  * * *

  The last photograph I have of Kate must be somewhere on my computer, but I don’t need to turn it on to remember it, I only need to close my eyes. We had spent Christmas at her place – or rather at her parents’ house, which wasn’t in Copenhagen, the name of the town escapes me – either way I wanted to come back to France slowly, by train; the journey started strangely, the train sped along the surface of the Baltic Sea, with only two metres separating us from the grey surface of the water and sometimes a wave stronger than the others struck the
window of our carriage; we were alone in our compartment between two vast abstractions, the sky and the sea, and I had never been so happy in my life – my life should probably have stopped there, a groundswell, the Baltic Sea, our bodies merged once and for all; but that didn’t happen and the train reached its destination (was it Rostock or Stralsund?) where Kate had decided to come with me for a few days, her university course began again the following day, but she could look after herself.

  The last photograph I took of Kate was in the gardens of the castle in Schwerin, a small German town, capital of the region of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, and the gardens’ avenues are covered with thick snow, and you can see the turrets of the castle in the distance. Kate is turning towards me and smiling, I must have called to her to turn round so that I could take a picture; she is looking at me and her face is full of love, but also of indulgence and sadness because she has probably already realised that I’m going to betray her, and that our affair will come to an end.

  That same evening, we had dinner in a pub in Schwerin, and I remember the waiter: a thin man in his forties, nervous and unhappy, probably touched by our youth and by the love emanating from us and, to tell the truth, especially from her; he even paused, once the plates had been set down, and turned towards me (or in fact towards both of us, but particularly towards me as he must have sensed I was the weak link), to tell me, in French (he must have been French, but how could a Frenchman have ended up serving in a pub in Schwerin? People’s lives are a mystery), and say to me with unfamiliar, sacred gravity: ‘Stay like this, both of you. Please stay like this.’

  We could have saved the world, and we would have saved the world in the blink of an eye, in einem Augenblick, but we didn’t, or I didn’t, and love didn’t triumph; I betrayed love, and often when I can’t sleep, which is to say almost every night, I hear in my head the message on her answering machine, ‘Hello, this is Kate, leave me a message,’ and her voice was so fresh, like diving into a waterfall at the end of a dusty summer afternoon: you immediately felt washed of all dirt, all discomfort and all evil.

  * * *

  Our last seconds together took place in Frankfurt, in the central station, Frankfurter Hauptbahnhof, this time she really had to go back to Copenhagen even though she had played down her obligations at university – well, at any rate she couldn’t come back to Paris with me – and I see myself standing by the door of the train, she was on the platform; we had fucked all night until eleven o’clock in the morning when it was really time to go to the station – she had fucked and sucked me with all her might and her might was great at the time and I too got hard quickly – well, in fact that’s not the question, it isn’t essentially that, it’s mostly that Kate, standing on the platform, started crying, not really crying, some tears ran down her face; she was looking at me, she looked at me for over a minute until the train departed, her eyes didn’t leave mine for a second and at a particular moment, in spite of herself, tears started flowing, and I didn’t move, didn’t jump on to the platform, I waited for the doors to close again.

  For that I deserve death, and even more serious punishments; I can’t hide the truth: I will end my life unhappy, cantankerous and alone, and I will have deserved it. How could a man who had known Kate turn away from her? It’s incomprehensible. In the end I called her after leaving I don’t know how many of her messages unanswered – all for an awful Brazilian girl who would forget me the day after she got back to São Paulo – I called Kate and I called her just too late; she was leaving for Uganda the next day where she had joined a humanitarian mission, and she was disappointed in Westerners, but most of all in me.

  It always boils down to paying service charges. Claire had had her share of melodrama, she had had her troubled years, without really getting anywhere close to happiness – but who can? she thought. No one in the West will ever be happy again, she also thought, never again; happiness today is nothing but an old dream, the past conditions for its existence are simply no longer being fulfilled.

  Dissatisfied and with her personal life in a state of despair, Claire had none the less known intense joys when it came to property. When her mother had yielded her little soul to God – or more probably to the void – the third millennium had just begun, and for the West, which had previously been known as Judaeo-Christian, it was one millennium too many in the way that boxers have one fight too many; at any rate the idea was quite widespread in the West previously known as Judaeo-Christian – well, I’m just calling it that to provide a context – but none of that concerned Claire in the slightest, she had other things on her mind, most of all her career as an actress; and then, gradually, paying the service charges had assumed a prominent place in her life, but let’s not jump ahead.

  * * *

  I first met her on New Year’s Eve in 1999, which I spent with a specialist in crisis management whom I had met at work – I was employed by Monsanto at the time, and Monsanto was more or less permanently in a state of crisis management. I don’t know how the specialist knew Claire, in fact I think he didn’t know her at all but was sleeping with one of her friends – well, maybe ‘friend’ isn’t the right word, let’s say another actress who had a part in the same play.

  At the time, Claire was just starting her first great theatrical success – which would also be her last. Until then she had had to settle for small parts in low- or medium-budget French films and a few radio dramas on France Culture. But this time she had the main female role in a play by Georges Bataille – although it wasn’t exactly or indeed at all a play by Georges Bataille, the director had adapted different texts by Georges Bataille, some fictional, others theoretical. From what he said in several interviews, his plan was to re-envision Bataille in the light of new virtual sexualities. He declared himself particularly concerned with masturbation, and he wasn’t trying to conceal the difference, indeed the opposition, between the positions of Bataille and Genet. The whole affair was put on in a subsidised theatre in the east of Paris. In short, major media attention was on the cards this time.

  I went to the premiere. I had been sleeping with Claire for just over two months, but she had already moved in with me, I would have to admit that the room where she had lived was frankly pathetic; the shower on the landing, which she shared with about twenty other tenants, was so filthy that she had ended up joining the Club Med Gym just to wash. I wasn’t all that impressed by the play – but I was impressed by Claire, who emanated a kind of icy eroticism throughout the whole performance; the costume and lighting designers had done a good job; it wasn’t so much that you wanted to fuck her but you wanted to be fucked by her, you had a sense that she was a woman who could, from one moment to the next, be gripped by an irresistible impulse to fuck you, and besides, that was what happened in our daily life; her face was expressionless one minute and then suddenly she would put her hand on my cock, open the fly in a few seconds and kneel down to suck me off; or she would take off her panties and start frigging herself, and I remember that happening pretty much anywhere, including once in the waiting room at the tax office, where a black woman with two children had seemed a bit shocked; in short, she was in a state of permanent sexual arousal. The critics were unanimously complimentary, and the play was given a whole page in the cultural section of Le Monde and two in Libération. Claire received more than her share of this chorus of praise; Libération in particular compared her to those Hitchcock heroines: blonde and cold but really boiling inside, well, those Norwegian-omelette-style comparisons that I had already read dozens of times, so much so that I knew immediately what they were talking about even though I’d never seen a Hitchcock film – I was more of the Mad Max generation – but either way in the end it was quite accurate when it came to Claire.

  In the second-last scene of the play, which the director clearly saw as key, Claire pulled up her skirt and, legs spread facing the audience, masturbated while another actress read a long piece by Georges Bataille primarily concerned, it seemed to me, with the anus.
The reviewer in Le Monde particularly relished that scene, and praised the ‘hieratic character’ of her interpretation. ‘Hieratic’ struck me as a bit strong, but let’s say that she was calm and didn’t seem at all aroused – and hadn’t been at all, as she confirmed to me on the evening of the premiere.

  All in all her career had been launched, and that first joy was complemented by a second one when Air France flight AF232 for Rio de Janeiro crashed into the middle of the South Atlantic one Sunday in March. There were no survivors, and Claire’s mother was among the passengers. A psychological support group was immediately set up for the families of the victims. ‘That was where I discovered that I was a good actress…’ Claire told me on the evening of her first encounter with the psychologists. ‘I played the crushed and devastated daughter, I think I really managed to conceal my joy.’

  In fact, in spite of the hatred they felt for one another, her mother, she sensed, was too egocentric to have gone to the trouble of writing a will, to devote a single minute to reflecting about what might happen after her death, and in any case it is difficult to disinherit your own children, so as an only daughter Claire had a legal and inalienable right to 50 per cent of the inheritance; in short, she didn’t have much to fear, and a month after that miraculous plane crash she found herself in possession of her inheritance, which essentially consisted of a magnificent apartment on Passage du Ruisseau-de-Ménilmontant, in the twentieth arrondissement. We moved in two weeks later, giving us enough time to get rid of the old woman’s things – though she wasn’t as old as all that, she was forty-nine, when the plane crash that cost her her life happened while she was setting off on holiday in Brazil with a twenty-six-year-old, exactly my age then too.