The Possibility of an Island Read Free

it. The girl was all right, with rather big breasts, but no bigger than those of others; I was, when you think of it, less overrated than her.
     
     
    The interview took place in my dressing room, after a show that must be described as a
triumph.
Isabelle was then the editor-in-chief of
Lolita,
after a long spell working at
20 Ans.
At first, I wasn’t really up for this interview; while flicking through the magazine, I had, however, been surprised by the level of sluttishness that publications for young girls had stooped to: T-shirts cut to fit ten-year-olds, skintight white shorts, thongs showing everywhere, the knowing use of Chupa Chups, it was all there. “Yes, but they have a bizarre product positioning…” the press officer had insisted. “And then the fact that the editor-in-chief moves around a lot herself, I think that’s a sign…”
    There are, it seems, people who do not believe in
love at first sight;
without giving the expression its literal sense, it is obvious that mutual attraction is, in all cases, very quick; from the first minutes of my encounter with Isabelle I knew that we were going to share a love story, and that this love story would be long; and I knew that she herself was aware of this. After a few opening questions, on my methods of preparation, etc., she fell silent. I flicked again through the magazine pages.
    “These are not really Lolitas…,” I observed, finally. “They are sixteen, seventeen years old.”
    “Yes,” she said. “Nabokov was five years off. What most men like is not the moment that precedes puberty, but the one immediately after. Anyway, he wasn’t a very good writer…”
    I too had never been able to bear that mediocre and mannered pseudo-poet, that clumsy imitator of Joyce, who had never been lucky enough to possess the energy that sometimes enabled the insane Irishman to rise above his ponderous prose.
    A collapsed pastry, that was what Nabokov’s style had always made me think of.
    “But exactly,” she continued. “If a book that is so badly written, and, what’s more, is handicapped by a gross mistake concerning the age of the heroine, manages despite everything to be a very good book, to such an extent that it constitutes a lasting myth, and enters everyday speech, then the author has stumbled upon something essential.”
    If we agreed on everything, the interview risked being rather flat. “We could continue over dinner…,” she proposed. “I know a Tibetan restaurant in the rue des Abbesses.”
     

     
    Naturally, as in all serious love stories, we slept together on the first night. At the moment when she undressed, she seemed slightly uneasy, then proud: her body was incredibly firm and supple. It was much later that I learned she was thirty-seven; at that moment, I would have said thirty at most.
    “What do you do to keep yourself fit?” I asked her.
    “Classical dance.”
    “No stretching or aerobics, none of that stuff?”
    “No, that’s all nonsense; believe me, I’ve been working in women’s magazines for ten years. The only thing that really works is classical dance. Only it’s hard, it demands real discipline; but that suits me. I’m rather psychorigid.”
    “You, psychorigid?”
    “Yes, yes…You’ll see.”
     
     
    As time goes on, what strikes me, when I remember Isabelle, is the incredible frankness of our relations, from the very first moment, even in regard to subjects about which women usually prefer to retain a certain mystery, in the mistaken belief that mystery adds a touch of eroticism to the relationship, when on the contrary, most men are violently excited by a direct sexual approach.
    “It’s not very difficult to make a man come…,” she had told me, wryly, during our first dinner in the Tibetan restaurant. “That’s to say, I’ve always managed to.” She was speaking the truth. She was also speaking the truth when she said that there was nothing extraordinary or strange about the secret. “You need