“Or that of others.”
“She was not an ‘other.’”
“Then who was she?”
“That is something I never found out; but she was not an other, that much is certain. I am still waiting for your paraphrase, dear lady.”
“Indeed. The years went by, and they were good years, too good, perhaps. You and Léopoldine had never known any other life, yet you were both aware that it was not usual, and that you were exceedingly lucky. In the depths of your paradise, you began to feel what you call ‘the anxiety of the chosen few,’ which consists of the following: ‘How long can such perfection last?’ This anxiety, like all anxieties, fueled your euphoria to the extreme, while leaving it dangerously fragile—more and more dangerously. A few more years went by. You were fourteen years old, your cousin was twelve. You had reached the culminating point of childhood, the moment that Tournier refers to as the ‘full maturity of childhood.’ You had been shaped by a dream life, and you were dream children. No one had ever told you as much, but you were becoming obscurely aware that a terrible degradation lay in wait, about to attack your perfect bodies and your equally perfect humor, to turn you into pimply, tormented teenagers. I suspect you had arrived at the origin, by then, of the insane plot that followed.”
“Here we go, you’re already trying to exonerate my accomplice.”
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t. It was your idea, was it not?”
“Yes, but there was nothing criminal about it.”
“Not to begin with, no, but it became criminal because of the consequences and, above all, because, sooner or later, it would prove totally unworkable.”
“Later, as it happened.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You were fourteen, Léopoldine was twelve. She was devoted to you, and you could make her believe anything.”
“It wasn’t just anything.”
“No, it was worse. You convinced her that puberty was the worst of all evils, but that it was avoidable.”
“It is.”
“You still believe that?”
“I’ve never stopped believing it.”
“So you’ve always been insane.”
“From my point of view, I am the only one who has always been of sound mind.”
“Naturally. At the age of fourteen, you were already so sound of mind that you solemnly swore you would never become an adolescent. Your hold over your cousin was so strong that you made her take an oath identical to your own.”
“Adorable, isn’t it?”
“That depends. For you were already Prétextat Tach, and along with your grandiose preachings there were a number of dispositions that would prove punitive in the event of perjury. To state things more clearly, you swore, and you made Léopoldine swear, that if either of you betrayed the oath and became pubescent, he or she would be killed by the other one, purely and simply.”
“A mere fourteen years of age, and already the soul of a Titan.”
“I suppose that many children have dreamt up ways to remain eternal children, with varying but always precarious degrees of success. But the two of you seemed to have succeeded. It is true that you displayed an uncommon amount of determination. And you, the Titan in the matter, came up with all sorts of pseudoscientific measures designed to make your bodies unsuited for adolescence.”
“Not so pseudoscientific as all that, because they worked.”
“We’ll see about that. I wonder how you survived such treatment.”
“We were happy.”
“At such a cost! Where the devil did your brain go to find such twisted ideas? Well, I suppose you had the excuse that you were only fourteen.”
“If I had to do it all over again, I would.”
“Today, you have the excuse that you’re senile.”
“I suppose that means I’ve always been senile, or puerile, because I have never changed my ideas.”
“That doesn’t surprise me, coming from you. Already in 1922 you were crazy. Ex nihilo you created what you called ‘a hygiene of eternal childhood’—at the time, the word covered every domain of mental and physical health: hygiene was an ideology. The one you devised was so unhealthy that it would better deserve the name anti-hygiene.”
“On the contrary, it was very healthy.”
“You were convinced that puberty did its evil work during sleep, so you decreed that you must not sleep anymore, or at least not more than two hours a day. You thought the ideal way to hang on to childhood would be an aquatic life, so you and Léopoldine spent entire days and nights swimming in the lakes on the estate, sometimes even in winter. You ate a strict minimum. Some foods were forbidden, and others were recommended, by virtue of principles that seem utterly fantastical: any food considered too ‘adult’ was prohibited, such as canard à l’orange or lobster bisque, or any food that was black in color. On the other hand, you recommended mushrooms, not poisonous ones, but some that were not considered fit for consumption, either, such as puffballs, and when they were in season, you stuffed yourselves with them. To keep from sleeping, you got hold of an excessively strong tea from Kenya—you’d heard your grandmother speaking ill of it, and you would brew it black as ink and drink impressive quantities of it, while administering identical doses to your cousin.”
“Who was fully consenting.”
“Let’s just say, rather, that she loved you.”
“And I loved her, too.”
“In your way.”
“Do you find something wrong with my way?”
“That’s an understatement.”
“Maybe you think that other people are better at it? I know of nothing more vile than what they call loving. Do you know what loving is for them? Taking an unfortunate woman and getting her pregnant, and making her into an ugly servant: that is what these alleged human beings of my sex call loving.”
“And now you’re playing the feminist? I’ve never known you to be more unbelievable.”
“You are lamentably stupid, I do declare. Feminism and what I just said are poles apart.”
“Why can’t you just try to be clear for once?”
“But I’m being crystal clear! You’re the one who refuses to admit that my way of loving is the most beautiful.”
“My opinion on the subject is of no interest whatsoever. However, I would like to know what Léopoldine thought about it.”
“Thanks to me, Léopoldine was the happiest.”
“The happiest what? The happiest of women? Of madwomen? Of sick people? Of casualties?”
“You are completely beside the point. Thanks to me, she was the happiest of children.”
“Of children? At the age of fifteen?”
“Absolutely. At an age when women become dreadful—pimply, stinky, hairy, titty, intellectual, spiteful, and stupid, with prominent hips and protruding asses—in short, women. At that sinister age, as I was saying, Léopoldine was the most beautiful, happy, illiterate, wise child—the most childish of children, and totally thanks to me. Thanks to me, the girl that I loved was spared the torture of becoming a woman. I defy you to find a more beautiful love than that.”
“Are you absolutely sure that your cousin did not want to become a woman?”
“How could she have wanted such a thing? She was far too intelligent for that.”
“I’m not asking you to reply with conjectures. I’m asking you whether, yes or no, she gave you her consent, and whether, yes or no, she said to you in no uncertain terms: ‘Prétextat, I would rather die than leave childhood behind.’”
“She didn’t need to tell me in no uncertain terms. It was self-evident.”
“Just as I thought: she never gave you her consent.”
“Allow me to repeat that it was pointless. I knew what she wanted.”
“You knew, above all, what you wanted.”
&n
bsp; “She and I wanted the same thing.”
“Naturally.”
“What are you trying to insinuate, you shitty little bitch? Are you claiming to know Léopoldine better than I do?”
“The more I talk to you, the more I believe I do.”
“When I hear such rubbish I almost wish I were deaf. I’m going to tell you something that you surely don’t know, bloody female: no one, do you understand, no one knows a person better than their assassin.”
“Ah-hah. At last. Are you prepared to confess?”
“Confess? I have nothing to confess, because you already knew that I killed her.”
“Well, would you believe that I did have my lingering doubts? It’s hard to convince oneself that a Nobel Prize winner could be an assassin.”
“What? Didn’t you know that assassins are the very people who have the greatest chance of receiving a Nobel Prize? Just look at Kissinger, Gorbachev . . .”
“Yes, but you won the Nobel Prize for literature.”
“Precisely! Nobel Peace Prize winners are often assassins, but the literature winners are always assassins.”
“It’s impossible to have a serious discussion with you.”
“I’ve never been more serious.”
“Maeterlinck, Tagore, Pirandello, Mauriac, Hemingway, Pasternak, Kawabata—all assassins?”
“You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“You’ll have learned a few things from me, then.”
“May I know your source of information?”
“Prétextat Tach doesn’t need sources of information. Sources of information are for ordinary people.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t see a thing. You go digging into my past, you rifle through my archives, and then you are surprised to come upon a murder. What would be astonishing is anything to the contrary. If you had gone to the trouble of combing through the archives of those other Nobel Prize winners with as much diligence, no doubt you would have discovered stacks of murders. Otherwise, no one would have ever given them the Nobel Prize.”
“You accused the previous journalist of reversing causality. But you don’t reverse causality, you merely cut in front of it.”
“I want to give you ample warning that if you try to confront me on my own territory where logic is concerned, you don’t stand a chance.”
“Given what you qualify as logic, I don’t doubt it. But I didn’t come here to debate with you.”
“So why did you come, then?”
“To find out whether you really were the murderer. Thank you for illuminating my last doubts: you fell for my bluff.”
The fat man gave a long, hideous laugh.
“Your bluff! That’s a good one! You think you can bluff me?”
“I have every reason to believe I can, because I already have.”
“Poor, pathetic, pretentious goose. Let me tell you that bluffing is extortion. But you haven’t extorted anything for me, because I’ve told you the truth right from the start. Why should I hide the fact I’m a murderer? I have nothing to fear from the law, I’m going to die in less than two months.”
“And what about your posthumous reputation?”
“This will make it all the more grandiose. I can already see the window displays in the bookstores: ‘Prétextat Tach, Nobel Prize for Murder.’ My books will sell like hot cakes. My publishers will be rubbing their hands together. Believe me, this murder is an excellent affair for everyone concerned.”
“Even for Léopoldine?”
“Above all for Léopoldine.”
“Let’s go back to 1922.”
“Why not 1925?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself. You mustn’t skip over those three years, they are extremely important.”
“That’s true. They are extremely important, so they cannot be related.”
“And yet you did relate them.”
“No, I wrote them.”
“Let’s not play with words, all right?”
“You are saying this to a writer?”
“I’m not talking to the writer, I’m talking to the assassin.”
“One and the same.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Writer, assassin: two aspects of a same profession, two conjugations of a same verb.”
“Which verb is that?”
“The rarest and most difficult of verbs: the verb ‘to love.’ Isn’t it funny how school grammar books sometimes use it as an example, when it’s the verb with the most incomprehensible meaning? If I were a teacher, I would replace this esoteric verb with a more accessible one.”
“‘To kill’?”
“‘To kill’ is not so easy, either. No, a trivial, ordinary verb like vote, interview, work, create . . .”
“Thank God you are not a teacher. Do you know that it’s extraordinarily difficult to make you answer a question? You have a real talent for dodging the issue, changing the subject, going off in all directions. I’m forever having to call you to order.”
“I’m flattered.”
“This time, you won’t get off: 1922 through 1925, it’s your turn to speak.”
Heavy silence.
“Would you like a toffee?”
“Monsieur Tach, why don’t you trust me?”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you. In all good faith, I do not see what else I could tell you. We were perfectly happy and divinely in love. What more could I tell you other than silly nonsense like that?”
“Let me help you.”
“I fear the worst.”
“Twenty-four years ago, following your literary menopause, you left one novel unfinished. Why?”
“I already explained this to one of your colleagues. Any self-respecting novelist must leave at least one novel unfinished, otherwise he’s not believable.”
“Do you know very many writers who publish unfinished novels during their lifetime?”
“I don’t know of any. Undoubtedly I am cleverer than the others: during my lifetime I have received honors that ordinary writers enjoy only posthumously. From a struggling writer, an unfinished novel merely represents his awkwardness, his still unbridled youth; but on the part of a great, renowned writer, an unfinished novel is as chic as you get. It suggests a ‘genius stopped in his tracks,’ ‘the Titan’s crisis of angst,’ ‘dazzled when faced with the unspeakable,’ ‘the nightmare vision of a novel to come’—in short, it pays.”
“Monsieur Tach, I think you haven’t quite grasped my question. I wasn’t asking you why you left one novel unfinished, but why you left that novel unfinished.”
“Well, as I was writing, I realized that I had not yet produced the unfinished novel I required for my fame, so I looked down at my manuscript and thought, ‘Why not this one?’ I put down my pen and did not add another line.”
“Do not expect me to believe you.”
“Why not?”
“You said, ‘I put down my pen and did not add another line.’ You should have said, ‘I put down my pen and never wrote another line.’ Isn’t it astonishing that after this famous, unfinished novel, you never wanted to write again, although you had been writing every day for thirty-six years?”
“I had to stop someday.”
“But why that particular day?”
“Don’t go looking for hidden meaning in a phenomenon as banal as old age. I was fifty-nine years old, so I retired. What could be more normal?”
“From one day to the next, not another line: you’re saying old age caught up with you in one day?”
“Why not? You don’t get old every day. You can spend ten, twenty years without getting old, and then suddenly, for no specific reason, you can show the weight of those twenty years in the space of two hours. You’ll see, it will happen to you, too. O
ne evening, you’ll look in the mirror and think, ‘My God, I’ve aged ten years since this morning!’”
“For no specific reason, really?”
“For no reason other than time hurrying everything to its doom.”
“It’s easy to blame time, Monsieur Tach. But you gave it a serious helping hand—with both hands, I’d say.”
“The hand is what enables a writer to experience pleasure.”
“And two hands are what enable a strangler to experience pleasure.”
“Strangling is a pleasant thing, indeed.”
“For the strangler, or the victim?”
“Alas, I’ve only ever known one of the two situations.”
“Don’t give up hope.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have no idea. You’re confusing me with all your digressions. Talk to me about the book, Monsieur Tach.”
“It’s out of the question, Mademoiselle. It’s up to you to talk about it.”
“Of everything you’ve ever written, this book is the one I prefer.”
“Why? Because there’s a château, and aristocrats, and a love story? Typical woman.”
“I do like love stories, it’s true. I often think that nothing beyond love is of any interest.”
“Heavens above.”
“Be as sarcastic as you like, you cannot deny that you are the one who wrote that book, and that it is a love story.”
“If you say so.”
“It is, moreover, the only love story you ever wrote.”
“I’m relieved to hear it.”
“Let me put my question to you again, sir: why did you leave that novel unfinished?”
“My imagination failed me, I suppose.”
“Imagination? You did not need any imagination to write that book, you were relating the facts.”
“What do you know? You weren’t there to check on things.”
“You did kill Léopoldine, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t prove that the rest is true. The rest is literature, Mademoiselle.”
“Well, I believe that everything in that book is true.”
“If it amuses you.”
“It’s not just amusing, I have good reason to think that the novel is strictly autobiographical.”
Hygiene and the Assassin Page 10