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

woolly. I knew that there were women like Catherine Millet, who shared the same kind of tastes—I estimated the number at around one in a hundred thousand; this didn’t seem to me to have varied throughout history, and was unlikely to evolve. She became somewhat animated when outlining the probability of contamination by the AIDS virus in relation to the various orifices—this was obviously her hobbyhorse, she had gathered a whole heap of figures. She was in fact vice president of the association Couples Against AIDS, which tried to provide intelligent information on this subject—that is to say, enabling people to only use a condom when it was strictly necessary. For my part, I had never used a condom, and with the development of tritherapies, I wasn’t going to start now—supposing I ever had chance to fuck again; for me, at that point, even the prospect of fucking, and of fucking with pleasure, seemed to be more than sufficient motivation for putting an end to it all.
    The main objective of the lecture was to set out the restrictions and constraints that the Elohimites imposed on sexuality. It was quite simple: there were none—between
consenting adults,
as they say.
    This time, there were questions. Most of them dealt with pedophilia, a subject on which Elohimites had had legal disputes—come to think of it, who hasn’t gone on trial for pedophilia nowadays? The position of the prophet, as Odile reminded us here, was crystal clear: there exists a moment in human life called
puberty,
when sexual desire appears—the age, varying according to the individual and the environment, was somewhere between eleven and fourteen. To make love with someone who was unwilling, or who was not able to formulate a clear consent, ergo a prepubescent, is
evil;
as for what might happen after puberty, that was evidently situated outside any moral judgment, and there was almost nothing else to say. The end of the afternoon became mired in common sense, and I was beginning to feel the need for an aperitif; they were, it must be said, a bit of a pain in the ass when it came to that. Fortunately, I had supplies in my suitcase, and as a VIP I had a single room, of course. Sinking after the meal into a mildly drunken state, alone between the immaculate sheets of my king-size bed, I drew up a sort of balance sheet for this first day. Surprisingly, many of the adherents had forgotten to be twats; and, even more surprisingly, many women had forgotten to be ugly. It’s true, also, that they didn’t miss any opportunity to do themselves up. On this subject, the teachings of the prophet were consistent: if man was to make an effort to repress his masculine side (machismo had shed too much blood in the world, he exclaimed with emotion in the different interviews I had seen on his Web site), woman could on the contrary give free rein to her femininity and the exhibitionism that is consubstantial with her, through all kinds of sparkling, transparent, or skintight clothing that the imagination of various couturiers and creators had put at her disposal: nothing could be more pleasant and excellent, in the eyes of the Elohim.
    That’s what the women did, then, and at the evening meal there was a certain erotic tension: it was light, but constant. I sensed that this was only going to grow stronger, as the week wore on; I also sensed that I was not really going to suffer from it, and that I would content myself with getting peacefully plastered while watching the banks of mist drift in the moonlight. The freshness of the pastures, the Milka cows, the snow on the summits: a very beautiful place for forgetting, or for dying.
     
     
    The next morning, the prophet himself made an appearance for the first lecture: dressed all in white, he leaped onto the stage, under the light of the projectors, amid enormous applause—immediately there was a standing ovation. Seen from afar, it struck me that he looked a bit like a monkey—undoubtedly owing to the