Hygiene and the Assassin

by Amélie Nothomb

  She could not reply. Her glee did not allow her the leisure of speech.

  “Uncontrollable laughter: yet another female ailment. I’ve never seen a man double over the way women do in these cases. It must come from the uterus: everything disgusting in life comes from the uterus. Little girls do not have a uterus, I don’t think, or if they do, it’s a toy, a parody of a uterus. Little girls should be killed the moment their fake uterus becomes real, to spare them the type of terrific, painful hysteria you are suffering from at this very moment.”

  “Ah.”

  This “ah” was the clamor of an exhausted belly, still shaken by morbid spasms.

  “Poor little thing. You’ve had a hard life. Who is the bastard who failed to kill you at puberty? But perhaps you didn’t have a real friend at the time. Alas, I fear that Léopoldine was the only one who was that fortunate.”

  “Stop, I can’t take it anymore.”

  “I understand your reaction. The belated discovery of the truth, the sudden awareness of your disappointment must come as a terrible shock . . . Your uterus is suffering a dreadful blow! Poor little female! Poor creature, spared by those cowardly males! You do have my sympathy.”

  “Monsieur Tach, you are the most ghastly, most entertaining individual I have ever met.”

  “Entertaining? I don’t understand.”

  “I admire you. To be able to come up with a theory that is both so insane and so coherent is absolutely amazing. In the beginning I thought you were going to come out with some banal macho rubbish. But I underestimated you. Your explanation is ridiculously exaggerated and subtle at the same time: women must simply be exterminated, isn’t that it?”

  “Naturally. If women did not exist, things would finally start going their way.”

  “What an ingenious solution. Why has no one ever thought of it before?”

  “In my opinion, people have thought of it, but no one before me was courageous enough to implement the solution. Because after all, the idea is there for anyone to take up. Feminism and anti-feminism are the scourge of humankind; the remedy is obvious, simple, logical: do away with women.”

  “Monsieur Tach: you are a genius. I admire you, and I am delighted to have met you.”

  “I’m going to surprise you: I too am happy to have met you.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “On the contrary. First of all, you admire me for what I am and not for what you imagined I must be: that is already a good point. And then, I know I’m going to be able to do you a huge favor, and that brings me great delight.”

  “What favor?”

  “What do you mean, what favor? You know what it is.”

  “Am I to understand that you intend to do away with me, too?”

  “I am beginning to think that you are worthy of such a thing, yes.”

  “Your praise is great, Monsieur Tach, and believe me, it affects me deeply, but . . .”

  “I see that you are indeed blushing.”

  “But don’t go to the trouble.”

  “Why not? I think you deserve it. You are much better than I thought at the beginning. I would like so much to help you to die.”

  “I am touched, but you really needn’t bother; I wouldn’t want you to have any problems because of me.”

  “Now, now, my little friend, what could I possibly risk? I only have a month and a half to live.”

  “I wouldn’t want your posthumous reputation to be ruined on my account.”

  “Ruined? Why should it be ruined by such a good deed? On the contrary! People will say, ‘Not even two months before he died, Prétextat Tach was still doing good deeds.’ I will be an example for humankind.”

  “Monsieur Tach, humankind will not understand.”

  “Oh dear, I fear that once again you are right. But what do I care for humankind and my reputation? I would have you know, Mademoiselle, that I respect you so much that I deeply desire to do something disinterested for you alone, a good deed.”

  “I am sure you are greatly overestimating me.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Open your eyes, Monsieur Tach. Didn’t you say that I was ugly, stupid, rotten, and then some? And the simple fact that I’m a woman—is that not enough to discredit me?”

  “In theory, everything you say is true. But something strange is happening, Mademoiselle: theory is no longer enough. I am currently experiencing another dimension of the problem, and I am feeling delicious emotions that I had not felt for sixty-six years.”

  “Open your eyes, Monsieur Tach: I am not Léopoldine.”

  “No. And yet, you are not a stranger to her.”

  “She was as pretty as a picture, and you think I’m ugly.”

  “That’s not altogether true. Your ugliness is not without beauty. There are moments when you’re beautiful.”

  “Moments.”

  “There are many such moments, Mademoiselle.”

  “You think I’m stupid, you have no respect for me.”

  “Why are you so eager to discredit yourself?”

  “For a very simple reason: I do not want to end up assassinated by a Nobel laureate.”

  A sudden chill seemed to come over the fat man.

  “You would prefer a Nobel Prize for chemistry?” he asked in an icy voice.

  “Very funny. I do not want to end up assassinated at all, you see, be it by a Nobel Prize winner or a grocer.”

  “Am I to understand that you want to put an end to your days yourself?”

  “If I had wanted to commit suicide, Monsieur Tach, I would have done it long ago.”

  “So you say. Do you believe it’s that easy?”

  “I don’t believe anything, it doesn’t concern me. You see, I have no desire to die.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Is it so absurd to want to live?”

  “There is nothing more praiseworthy than the desire to live. But you are not living, poor silly goose! And you will never live! Don’t you understand that girls die the day they begin puberty? Worse than that, they die without disappearing. They leave life behind, not to reach the beautiful shores of death, but to begin the painful, ridiculous conjugation of a trivial, tedious verb, and they never stop conjugating it, in every tense and every mode, deconstructing it, over-constructing it, and never escaping from it.”

  “And what might that verb be?”

  “Something like reproduce, in the rather filthy sense of the term—or ovulate, if you prefer. It is neither death, nor life, nor a state in between. There is no other name for it than being a woman: no doubt our vocabulary, with its customary insidiousness, wanted to avoid giving a name to such an abject concept.”

  “By what right do you claim to know what a woman’s life is about?”

  “A woman’s non-life.”

  “Life or non-life, you know nothing about it.”

  “I would have you know, Mademoiselle, that great writers have a direct and supernatural access to the lives of others. They have no need to levitate, or to go rummaging in archives, in order to penetrate the mental universe of other individuals. All they need is a pen and a piece of paper to transfer the thoughts of others.”

  “Well, I never. My good man, I believe your system is a washout, if I am to judge from the inanity of your conclusions.”

  “Stupid woman! What would you have me believe? Or rather, what are you trying to make yourself believe? You think you’re happy? There are limits to autosuggestion. Open your eyes! You’re not happy, you’re not alive.”

  “What would you know?”

  “You are the one who must answer that question. How could you know whether, yes or no, you are alive, whether, yes or no, you are happy? You don’t even know what happiness is. If you had spent your childhood in an earthly paradise, like Léopoldine and myself—”<
br />
  “Oh, spare me, stop making yourself out to be some exceptional case. All children are happy.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. No children have ever been as happy as little Léopoldine and little Prétextat. Of that I am certain.”

  The journalist once again threw her head back and began to laugh hysterically.

  “There goes your uterus, at it again. What did I say that is so funny?”

  “Please forgive me, it’s those names . . . especially yours!”

  “So? You have a reason to find fault with my name?”

  “Find fault, no. But to be called Prétextat! I swear it’s a joke. What were your parents thinking the day they decided to give you that name?”

  “I forbid you to judge my parents. And frankly, I don’t see what’s so funny about Prétextat. It’s a Christian name.”

  “Is it really? That makes it even funnier.”

  “Do not mock religion, you sacrilegious cow. I was born on February 24, which is Saint Prétextat’s day; my father and mother, who were lacking in inspiration, complied with the calendar’s decision.”

  “Heavens! Whereas if you had been born on Fat Tuesday, they would have called you Fat Tuesday, or maybe just Fat all on its own?”

  “Stop blaspheming, vile creature! I would have you know, you ignoramus, that Saint Prétextat was the Archbishop of Rouen in the sixth century, and a great friend of Grégoire de Tours—who was a very fine man, you’ve never heard of him, naturally. It was thanks to Prétextat that the Merovingian dynasty came into being, because he was the one who married Mérovée to Brunehaut, at the risk of his own life, moreover. Which all adds up to the fact that you have no right to laugh at such an illustrious name.”

  “I don’t see why these historical details should make your name any less ridiculous. And as names go, your cousin’s is not bad, either.”

  “What! How dare you make fun of my cousin’s name? I forbid you! You are a monster of triviality and bad taste! Léopoldine is the most beautiful, noble, gracious, heartbreaking name that has ever been given.”

  “Ah.”

  “You heard me! I know of only one name that can even come close to Léopoldine, and that is Adèle.”

  “Well, well.”

  “Yes. Victor Hugo may have had his faults, but there is one thing that no one can ever criticize: he was a man of taste. Even when his oeuvre commits the sin of bad faith, it is beautiful and grandiose. And he gave the two most magnificent names to his two daughters. Compared to Adèle and Léopoldine, all other female first names are ghastly.”

  “A matter of taste.”

  “Not at all, imbecile! Who could care less about the taste of people like yourself—common, mediocre folk, rabble, riffraff? All that matters is the taste of people of genius, people like Victor Hugo and myself. What’s more, Adèle and Léopoldine are Christian names.”

  “So what?”

  “I see, Mademoiselle belongs to that newfangled sector of the population that likes pagan names. You would be all in favor of calling your children Krishna, Elohim, Abdallah, Chang, Empedocles, Sitting Bull, or Akhénaton, right? Grotesque. I like Christian names. In fact, what is your name?”

  “Nina.”

  “Poor thing.”

  “What you mean, poor thing?”

  “Yet another girl who is called neither Adèle nor Léopoldine. The world is unfair, don’t you agree?”

  “Have you nothing more important to say to me?”

  “You find this trivial? But nothing could be more important. If your name is not Adèle or Léopoldine, that is a fundamental injustice, a primordial tragedy, above all for you, saddled with a pagan name—”

  “Let me stop you right there: Nina is a Christian name. St. Nina falls on January 14, the date of your first interview.”

  “I do wonder what you are trying to prove with such an insignificant coincidence.”

  “Not as insignificant as all that. I came back from vacation on January 14, and it was on that day that I learned of your imminent demise.”

  “And then? Do you think that means we are connected somehow?”

  “I don’t think anything, but you said some extremely strange things a few minutes ago.”

  “Yes, I overestimated you. You have greatly disappointed me since that time. And your name—that is the ultimate debacle. Henceforth you mean nothing to me.”

  “I’m absolutely delighted. This way I know my life is no longer in danger.”

  “Your non-life, you mean. What do you plan to do with it?”

  “All sorts of things: finish this interview, for example.”

  “How insulting. And to think that out of the goodness of my heart I could have ensured you a superb apotheosis.”

  “By the way, how would you have gone about killing me? It is easy, when one is an agile boy of seventeen, to murder a besotted little girl. But for an aging invalid to murder a hostile young woman—that seems like an impossible task.”

  “I naïvely thought you were not hostile. The fact that I am an old, obese cripple would have been no obstacle if you had loved me the way Léopoldine loved me, if you had been consenting as she was . . .”

  “Monsieur Tach, you have to tell me the truth: was Léopoldine truly and consciously consenting?”

  “If you had seen how docile and compliant she was, you would not ask.”

  “Well, it remains to be seen why she was so docile: did you drug her, or galvanize her, or lecture her, or beat her?”

  “No, no, no, and no. I loved her, the way I still love her, by the way. That was more than enough. That love was of a quality that neither you nor anyone else has ever experienced. If you had known her, you would not ask me such useless questions.”

  “Monsieur Tach, is it impossible for you to imagine a different version of this story? You were in love, we agree on that. But that does not necessarily mean that Léopoldine wanted to die. If she went along with it, perhaps it was solely out of love for you, and not out of a desire to die.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “It’s not the same thing. Perhaps she loved you so much that she did not want to go against your wishes.”

  “Go against my wishes! What marvelous domestic-strife vocabulary to describe such a metaphysical moment.”

  “Metaphysical for you, but it might not have been for her. A moment that for you was filled with ecstasy—perhaps for her it was mere resignation.”

  “Look, I’m in a better position than you to be the judge of that, am I not?”

  “And it’s my turn to say to you that nothing could be less certain.”

  “What do you want, dammit! Who is the writer here, you or me?”

  “You are, and that is why I find it very difficult to believe you.”

  “And if I were to narrate my story to you out loud, would you believe me?”

  “I don’t know. Go ahead and try.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. If I wrote about that moment, it was because it was impossible to speak about it. Writing begins where speech leaves off, and a great mystery lies behind the passage from the unspeakable to the speakable. The written word takes over where the spoken word leaves off, and they do not overlap.”

  “Those are perfectly admirable ideas, Monsieur Tach, but may I remind you that we are talking about murder, not literature.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “The same difference that exists between the Court of Assizes and the Académie Française, I suppose.”

  “There is no difference between the Court of Assizes and the Académie Française.”

  “An interesting point, but you’re getting off the topic, dear sir.”

  “Too true. But how can I tell the story! Do you realize I’ve never spoken about it in my life?”

  “There’s a first time f
or everything.”

  “It was August 13, 1925.”

  “That’s already an excellent beginning.”

  “It was Léopoldine’s birthday.”

  “What an amusing coincidence.”

  “Will you be quiet? Can’t you see how this torments me, how hard it is for me to find my words?”

  “I can indeed, and I’m delighted. I am relieved to know that sixty-six years later, the memory of your crime is at last tormenting you.”

  “You are mean-spirited and vengeful, like all females. You are right to say that Hygiene and the Assassin contained only two female characters: my grandmother and my aunt. Léopoldine was not a female character, she was—and will be, forever—a child, a miraculous being, beyond the sexes.”

  “But not beyond sex, if I am to believe what I’ve read in your book.”

  “We alone knew that it is not necessary to be pubescent to make love; on the contrary: puberty comes and spoils everything. It diminishes sensuality and the capacity for ecstasy and abandonment. No one makes love as well as a child does.”

  “So when you said you were a virgin, you were lying.”

  “No, I wasn’t. In common parlance, males cannot lose their virginity until after puberty. Whereas I never made love after puberty.”

  “I see that you are playing with words, yet again.”

  “Not at all, you simply know nothing about it. But I would appreciate it if you would stop interrupting me all the time.”

  “You interrupted a life; allow others to interrupt your logorrhea.”

  “Come now, my logorrhea suits you fine. It makes your job so much easier.”

  “I suppose that’s true. Well then, train your logorrhea on August 13, 1925.”

  “August 13, 1925: the most beautiful day ever. I hope that every human being, at least once in their life, will have an August 13, 1925—because it is more than a mere date. That day was a consecration. The most beautiful day of the most beautiful summer, balmy and breezy, the air light beneath the dense trees. Léopoldine and I had begun our day at around one o’clock in the morning, after our ritual sleep of roughly an hour and a half. You might think that with such a timetable we were continuously exhausted: that was never the case. We were so avid for our Eden that we often had difficulty falling asleep. It was only at the age of eighteen, after the fire at the château, that I began to sleep eight hours a day: people who are too happy or unhappy are incapable of such long absences. Léopoldine and I liked nothing better than to wake up. In the summer, it was even better, because we spent the night outside and slept in the heart of the forest, wrapped in a pearl damask bedspread that I had stolen from the château. Whoever woke up first would contemplate the other, and a gaze was enough to rouse us. On August 13, 1925, I was the first to wake, at around one o’clock, and she joined me shortly after that. We had all the time in the world to do everything a beautiful night invites one to do, everything which, on a damask bedspread that was less and less of pearl and more and more of dead leaves, could elevate us to the dignity of the hierophant—I liked to call Léopoldine the hierinfanta, I was already so cultured, so spiritual, but I’m getting off the subject—”