Free The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq Page A

to the adolescent.”
    Bruno jumped, afraid that his mother had been awake that morning as he was staring at her vagina. In fact, his mother’s remark was banal: the incest taboo is well documented in the animal kingdom, especially among mandrills and gray geese. The car sped toward Sainte-Maxime.
    “When I got to my father’s house I realized that he wasn’t well,” Bruno would go on. “He had only taken a couple of weeks off that summer. I didn’t know it at the time, but for the first time the business was doing badly and he had money problems. He told me later that it was because he had completely missed out on the market for silicone breast implants. He thought it was a passing fad that would never catch on outside the U.S. Which was utterly stupid. Nothing has ever caught on in America that didn’t engulf Western Europe a couple of years later—nothing. One of his junior associates had left the clinic and set up on his own. He’d poached a lot of my father’s clients simply by offering silicone implants as his specialty.”
    Bruno’s father was seventy when he made this confession. He would die shortly afterward of cirrhosis of the liver. “History repeats itself,” he told Bruno, tinkling the ice in his glass. “That idiot Poncet . . . [He was talking about the dynamic young surgeon who twenty years earlier had been his ruination.] That idiot Poncet just refused to diversify into penis enlargement—thinks it’s too much like butchery. He doesn’t think the men’s market will catch on in Europe. Moron. Almost as much of a moron as I was twenty years ago. If I was thirty years old now, I’d set myself up in prick enlargement.” Having said this, he usually slipped back into a daydream at the edge of consciousness. Conversation tended to stagnate at his age.
    In July 1974 Bruno’s father was only at the beginning of a long, slow decline. He would spend the afternoons locked in his room with a pile of cigars and a bottle of bourbon. He would come downstairs at seven and heat up something, his hands shaking. It was not that he didn’t want to speak to his son, but that he couldn’t; he really couldn’t. After two days, the atmosphere had become oppressive. Bruno started to go out; he would spend whole afternoons at the beach.
    The psychiatrist was less interested in the part of the story that followed, but Bruno thought it was important and had no intention of passing over it. After all, he was paying the bastard to listen to him, wasn’t he?
    “She was alone,” Bruno went on. “She went to the beach every afternoon on her own. She was seventeen, a poor little rich girl—a bit like me. A chubby little thing, she was shy and very pale and had pimples. The fourth afternoon—it was the day before I left, in fact—I put down my towel and sat beside her. She was lying on her stomach and she’d unfastened her bikini top. I remember the only thing I could think to say was ‘You on vacation?’ She looked up. I’m sure she wasn’t expecting brilliant conversation, but maybe not something quite so moronic. Anyway, we introduced ourselves: her name was Annick. I knew she would have to sit up sooner or later and I wondered would she try to fasten her bikini top behind her? Would she sit up and show me her breasts? She did something midway between the two; she turned over, holding the ends of her top together. When she’d finished, the bra was a bit lopsided and only half covered her breasts. She had big tits, which were already sagging a bit and must have got a lot worse later. I thought she was very brave. I reached over and slipped my hand under her bra, feeling her breast as I did. She didn’t move, but she stiffened a little and closed her eyes. I went on stroking her tits; her nipples were hard. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life.
    “Things got complicated after that. I took her back to my house and we went up to my room. I was scared my father would see her. He had been