Submission: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq

Author:Michel Houellebecq
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780374714482
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t peak tourist season yet, and I had no trouble booking a room at the Beau Site Hotel, agreeably located within the medieval citadel. The restaurant offered a view of the Alzou: the site was, in fact, impressive and received plenty of visitors. After a few days watching wave after wave of tourists from all four corners of the earth, each tourist different, each the same, camcorder in hand, roaming amazed over the jumble of towers, parapets, oratories, and chapels that climbed the side of the cliff, I felt as if I had somehow stepped out of historical time, and I barely noticed when, on the evening of the second electoral Sunday, Mohammed Ben Abbes won by a landslide. I had drifted into a dreamy state of inaction, and even though here the hotel Internet worked fine, I wasn’t especially worried not to have heard from Myriam. In the eyes of the owner and his staff, I was a type: a bachelor, rather cultured, rather sad, without much in the way of distractions—all accurate enough. In the end, I was the kind of guest who never gives you any trouble, which was all that mattered.

I’d been at Rocamadour for a week or two when finally I got her e-mail. She had lots to say about Israel, about the special atmosphere she felt all around her—extraordinarily dynamic and lively, but with an undercurrent of tragedy. It might seem strange, she wrote, to leave a country like France because you were afraid of hypothetical dangers, only to emigrate to a country where the dangers weren’t the least bit hypothetical. A Hamas splinter group had just launched a new series of attacks, and practically every day some bomb-wearing kamikaze blew himself up in a restaurant or on a bus. It was strange, but now that she was there she understood: since Israel had always been at war, the attacks and the battles seemed inevitable, in a sense natural. They didn’t keep people from enjoying life, at any rate. She attached two photos of herself in a bikini on the beach in Tel Aviv. In one of the photos, a three-quarters rear view of her running toward the sea, you could really see her ass and I started to get a hard-on; I wanted to touch her ass so badly my hands tingled with pain. It was incredible how well I remembered it.

Closing up my computer, I realized that she hadn’t once said anything about coming back to France.

* * *

Early in my stay I fell into the habit of visiting the Chapel of Our Lady. Every day I went and sat for a few minutes before the Black Virgin—the same one who for a thousand years inspired so many pilgrimages, before whom so many saints and kings had knelt. It was a strange statue. It bore witness to a vanished universe. The Virgin sat rigidly erect; her head, with its closed eyes, so distant that it seemed extraterrestrial, was crowned by a diadem.

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