Hygiene and the Assassin

by Amélie Nothomb

  “I’m getting there. Everything happened with the simplicity of a masterpiece. Léopoldine sat on my lap, facing me. Please note, Mademoiselle the clerk of the court, that she did so on her own initiative.”

  “That doesn’t prove a thing.”

  “Do you think she was surprised, when I put my hands around her neck, and when I began to tighten the vise? Not at all. We were smiling to each other, gazing into each other’s eyes. This was not a parting, because we were dying together. The pronoun ‘I’ meant both of us.”

  “How romantic.”

  “Don’t you agree? You will never be able to imagine how beautiful Léopoldine was, particularly at that moment. One mustn’t strangle someone whose neck is scrunched down between their shoulders, it’s not aesthetically pleasing. However, strangling is very fitting for long, graceful necks.”

  “Your cousin must have made a most elegant strangling victim.”

  “Ravishingly elegant. Between my hands I could feel her delicate cartilage gradually giving way.”

  “He who kills by the cartilage shall die by the cartilage.”

  The fat man looked at the journalist, stunned.

  “Did you hear what you said?”

  “I said it deliberately.”

  “That’s extraordinary! You are a clairvoyant. Why did I not think of this myself? We already knew that Elzenveiverplatz Syndrome was the cancer of murderers, but we were lacking an explanation: now we have it! Those ten convicts in Cayenne must have had a go at their victims’ cartilage. Our Lord said as much: the arms of murderers always turn against them. Thanks to you, Mademoiselle, I know at last why I have cartilage cancer! Didn’t I tell you that theology was the science of sciences!”

  The novelist seemed to have attained the intellectual ecstasy of the scholar who after twenty years of research finally discovers the coherence of his system. His gaze was deconstructing some invisible absolute, while his greasy forehead pearled with moisture like a mucous membrane.

  “I am still waiting for the end of the story, Monsieur Tach.”

  The slim young woman contemplated the fat old man’s illuminated features with disgust.

  “The end of the story, Mademoiselle? The story doesn’t end, it’s only just beginning! And you are the one who has just made me understand it. The purpose of cartilage is to assist articulation. Articulation of the body, but also of this story!”

  “What are you jabbering on about now ?”

  “You may think I’m jabbering, but it’s the jabbering of coherence regained! Thanks to you, Mademoiselle, I shall at last be able to continue and perhaps even finish my novel. Underneath Hygiene and the Assassin, I will place a subtitle: ‘A Story of Cartilage.’ The finest testament in the world, don’t you think? But I shall have to hurry, I have so little time left to write! My God, such urgency! What an ultimatum!”

  “Whatever you like, but before you go on to write the rest of the story, you have to tell me the end of what happened on August 13, 1925.”

  “I won’t prolong it, I’ll make it a flashback! Here’s what I mean: cartilage is the missing link, the ambivalent articulation that allows me to go from the past to the future, but also from the future to the past, to have access to all time, to eternity! You are asking me for the end of August 13, 1925? But there is no end to August 13, 1925, because eternity began on that day. So, today, you may think that it is January 18, 1991, you may think that it’s winter, and that we are at war in the Persian Gulf. A vulgar error! The calendar stopped sixty-five and a half years ago! It’s the middle of summer, and I am a beautiful child.”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “Because you’re not looking at me intensely enough. Look at my hands: they are so pretty, so fine.”

  “They are, I must admit. You may be obese and shapeless, but you have kept graceful hands, a page boy’s hands.”

  “You see? It’s a sign, naturally: my hands have played an enormous part in this story. Ever since August 13, 1925, my hands have never ceased from strangling. Can’t you see that right now, as I am speaking to you, I am in the process of strangling Léopoldine?”

  “No.”

  “But I am. Look at my hands. See my knuckles curling round that swanlike neck, look at my fingers massaging her cartilage, sinking into the spongy tissue, the spongy tissue that will become text.”

  “Monsieur Tach, I have caught you red-handed using a metaphor.”

  “It’s not a metaphor. What is text, if not gigantic verbal cartilage?”

  “Whether you like it or not, it’s a metaphor.”

  “If you could just see things as a whole, the way I see them at the moment, you would understand. Metaphors were invented to enable human beings to establish a coherence between the fragments in their vision. When this fragmentation disappears, metaphors no longer have any purpose. Poor little blind girl! Someday perhaps you will be able to see things as a whole, and your eyes will open, as mine have finally opened, after sixty-five and a half years of blindness.”

  “Don’t you think you need a tranquilizer, Monsieur Tach? You seem to me to be dangerously overexcited.”

  “With good reason. I had forgotten one could be this happy.”

  “What reason do you have to be happy?”

  “I told you: I am in the process of strangling Léopoldine.”

  “And this makes you happy?”

  “Indeed it does! My cousin is approaching seventh heaven. She has her head thrown back, her ravishing mouth is half open, her huge eyes are swallowing infinity, unless it’s the other way round, her face is one big smile, and there we are, she’s dead. I loosen my embrace, I let her body slip into the lake, and it floats—Léopoldine’s eyes gaze skyward in ecstasy, then she sinks and disappears.”

  “Aren’t you going to fish her out?”

  “Not right away. First of all I have to think about what I’ve just done.”

  “Are you pleased with yourself?”

  “Yes. I burst out laughing.”

  “You’re laughing?”

  “Yes. I am thinking about how, normally, assassins draw their victim’s blood, whereas I, without spilling a single drop of her blood, have killed her to put an end to her hemorrhage, to restore her to her original, unbloodied immortality. The paradox of it makes me laugh.”

  “Your sense of humor is extraordinarily inappropriate.”

  “And then I look at the lake: the wind has ruffled the surface evenly, erasing even the last traces of Léopoldine’s fall. And I think it makes a worthy shroud for my cousin. I suddenly call to mind the drowning of Hugo’s daughter in Villequier and recall my motto: ‘Careful, Prétextat, no law of genre, no plagiarism.’ And so I dive into the water, far into the greenish depths where my cousin is waiting for me, still so close, yet already enigmatic, like a submerged vestige. Her long hair is floating high above her face, and to me she has the mysterious smile of Atlantis.”

  A long silence.

  “And then?”

  “Oh, after that . . . I lift her back up to the surface and take her light, supple body in my arms, like seaweed. I carry her back to the château, where the arrival of these two charming naked bodies makes a great impression. They quickly discover that Léopoldine is far more naked than I am. What could be more naked than a corpse? Then there begin all those ridiculous effusions of emotion—cries, tears, lamentation, imprecations against destiny and my negligence, despair—a scene of such kitsch, worthy of a third-rate scribbler: the moment I am no longer in charge of arranging things, these scenes begin to display the most hideous bad taste.”

  “You might try and understand their distress, particularly that of the victim’s parents.”

  “Distress, distress . . . that seems quite exaggerated to me. To them Léopoldine was never anything but a charming decorative idea. They almost never saw her. For almost three years we had been
residing in the forest, and they never worried about where we were. You know, those lords and ladies live in a world of fairly conventional imagery; in this instance, they understood that the theme of the scene was ‘The Corpse of the Drowned Child Restored to Its Parents.’ You may imagine the naïvely Shakespearean and Hugolian references that prevailed in the minds of those good people. They were not weeping for Léopoldine de Planèze de Saint-Sulpice, but for Léopoldine Hugo, for Ophelia, for all the drowned innocence in the world. For them, the hierinfanta was an abstract corpse, one might even say she was a purely cultural phenomenon, and their lamentations merely served to prove the profound literacy of their sensibilities. No, the only person who knew the real Léopoldine, the only person who might have a concrete reason to weep over her death, was me.”

  “But you weren’t weeping.”

  “On the part of an assassin, to weep for one’s victim would betray a blatant lack of single-mindedness. Besides, I was in a good position to know that my cousin was happy, and would be happy forever after. So I was serene and smiling in the midst of all their shaggy lamentations.”

  “Something you were subsequently reproached for, I suppose.”

  “You suppose correctly.”

  “I will have to make do with these suppositions, given the fact your novel does not go much further.”

  “Indeed. You will have noticed that Hygiene and the Assassin is a very aquatic work. To end this book with the fire in the château would have ruined its perfect liquid coherence. There’s nothing more annoying than artists who couple water with fire: such banal dualism is downright pathological.”

  “Don’t try and fool me—it is hardly metaphysical considerations of the sort that convinced you to abandon your narration so abruptly. You said as much yourself, earlier on: some mysterious cause blocked your writing. Let me recapitulate the final pages: you leave Léopoldine’s corpse in the arms of her weeping parents, after providing them with an explanation so brief that it was downright cynical. The last sentence in the novel reads as follows: ‘And I went up to my room.’”

  “Not a bad ending.”

  “That’s as may be, but you will agree the reader might be hungry for more.”

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “For a metaphorical reading, yes. Not for the type of flesh-eating reading that you recommend.”

  “Dear Mademoiselle, you are both right and wrong. You are right, in that something mysterious forced me to leave this novel unfinished. And nevertheless you are wrong because, like any good journalist, you want me to continue my narration in a linear fashion. Believe me, that would have been sordid, because what followed on August 13 was never, to this very day, anything more than a disgusting, grotesque decline. From 14 August on, the thin, sober child that I had been turned into a terrible glutton. Was it the void left by Léopoldine’s death? I continuously craved the most revolting food—a taste which I have preserved. In six months, my weight tripled, I became pubescent and horrible, I lost all my hair, I lost everything. I told you about my family’s conventional imagery: this imagery required that when a loved one died, the family should fast and lose weight. Therefore, everyone at the château was fasting and losing weight, whereas I, all alone of my scandalous species, stuffed my face and blew up like a balloon before their very eyes. I recall, not without a certain mirth, the contrast between our meals: my grandparents, my uncle, and my aunt hardly smudged their plates, and they watched with consternation as I emptied out the dishes and gobbled everything down like a swine. My bulimia and the suspicious bruises they had seen on Léopoldine’s neck fuelled their conclusions. No one spoke to me anymore, and it was as if I were in a halo of hateful suspicion.”

  “Well-founded suspicion.”

  “You must realize that I wanted to destroy an atmosphere that was gradually ceasing to amuse me. And you must imagine that I would have found it abhorrent to demystify my splendid novel with such a lamentable epilogue. So you were mistaken to want the novel to continue in due form, and yet you were right to think that the story deserved a real ending—but I could not possibly know that ending before today, since you are the one who has brought it to me.”

  “I brought you an ending for your novel?”

  “It is what you are doing at this very moment.”

  “If you are trying to make me feel ill at ease, well, you’ve succeeded, but I would like an explanation.”

  “You already provided a supremely interesting closing element, with your comment about cartilage.”

  “I hope you don’t intend to spoil that fine novel by grafting onto it the cartilaginous nonsense you flung at me just now.”

  “Why not? It’s an absolutely great find.”

  “I would be angry with myself for suggesting such a bad ending. You would do better to leave your novel unfinished.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. But there’s something else you’re going to bring me.”

  “And what is that?”

  “You yourself will show me, my dear child. Let’s move on to the climax, shall we? We have waited the prescribed amount of time.”

  “What climax?”

  “Don’t act all innocent. Aren’t you going to tell me who you are, in the end? What mysterious ties you might have with me?”

  “No ties whatsoever.”

  “Are you not the last survivor of the Planèze de Saint-Sulpice lineage?”

  “You know very well that the family died without progeny—you had something to do with it, after all.”

  “Might you be a distant relation of the Tach family?”

  “You know perfectly well that you are the last descendent of the Tach dynasty.”

  “Are you the tutor’s granddaughter?”

  “Absolutely not! What will you dream up next?”

  “Who was your ancestor, then? The steward or the butler of the château? The gardener? A chambermaid? The cook?”

  “Stop right there, Monsieur Tach; I have no connection of any sort with your family, your château, your village, or your past.”

  “That’s unacceptable.”

  “Why?”

  “You would not have gone to so much trouble in your research if you did not have some obscure connection with me.”

  “I have caught you flagrante delicto under the influence of your profession, monsieur. Like any self-respecting obsessive writer, you cannot stand the thought that there is no mysterious correlation between your characters. Genuine novelists are basically genealogists at heart. I’m sorry to disappoint you: I am a stranger to you.”

  “I am sure you are wrong. Perhaps you do not even know yourself what family, historical, geographical, or genetic tie unites us, but there can be no doubt, such a tie must exist. Let’s see . . . perhaps one of your ancestors died of drowning? Were there any stranglings in your immediate entourage?”

  “Stop raving, Monsieur Tach. Your search for similarities between our two cases is in vain—and what meaning might any such similarities hold? What does seem significant is your need to establish a similarity.”

  “Significant in what respect?”

  “That is the true question, and you yourself will have to answer.”

  “I see, once again I have to do everything myself. Basically, the theoreticians of the nouveau roman were inveterate pranksters: the truth is that there is nothing new under the sun. Faced with a shapeless, senseless universe, a writer is obliged to play the demiurge. Without the remarkable assistance of his pen, the world would never have been able to give shape to things, and the stories of men would always have been wide open, like some horrible madhouse. And here you are, in keeping with this multi-millennial tradition, begging me to play the glassblower, to make up your own text, and punctuate your dialogue.”

  “Well go ahead then, blow.”

  “I have been doing little else, my child. C
an’t you see that I too am begging you? Help me to give meaning to this story, and do not have the bad faith to tell me that we have no need of meaning: we need meaning more than anything else. Don’t you realize! For sixty-six years, I have been waiting to meet someone like you—so don’t go trying to make me believe you’re just anybody. You cannot deny that a strange denominator must have orchestrated an interview like this. Let me put the question to you one last time—I repeat, one last time, because patience is not my strong point—and I implore you, tell me the truth: who are you?”

  “Alas, Monsieur Tach.”

  “What do you mean, alas? Have you nothing else to say?”

  “I do, but can you bear to hear my response?”

  “I would prefer the worst possible response to an absence of response.”

  “Precisely. My response is an absence of response.”

  “Be clear, if you please.”

  “You asked who I am. Well, you already know, not because I told you, but because you already said so yourself. Have you already forgotten? Earlier, amidst your hail of insults, you were spot on.”

  “Go ahead, I am perplexed.”

  “Monsieur Tach, I am a filthy little muckraker. There is nothing else to be said, you can believe me on that score. I am truly sorry. You may be sure that I would have loved to have another response for you, but you demanded the truth and that is my only truth.”

  “I will never believe that.”

  “You are wrong. On the subject of my life and my genealogy, I can tell you no more than very ordinary things. If I had not been a journalist, I would never have tried to meet you. You may search all you like, you will always come to the same conclusion: I am a filthy little muckraker.”

  “I do not know if you fully realize what a response like this suggests in the way of horrors.”

  “Indeed, I do not realize.”

  “No, you do not realize, or not well enough. Let me describe those horrors to you: imagine an old man who is dying, absolutely alone and without hope. Imagine that a young person comes to see him, after he has waited sixty-six years, and suddenly she restores hope to the old man by bringing his buried past back to life. There are two possibilities: either this person is a mysterious archangel who is close to the old man, and it’s an apotheosis; or this person is a perfect stranger motivated by the most unhealthy curiosity, and in that case, allow me to contend that it is sordid: it is grave-digging coupled with an abuse of trust, it is stealing from a dying man his most precious treasure by holding up before him the promise of some miraculous retribution and, in the end, giving him nothing in exchange but a huge pile of shit. When you arrived here, you found an old man dying amidst his beautiful memories, resigned to the fact he no longer has a present. When you leave here, you will leave behind an old man dying in the rotting decomposition of his memories, and desperate that he no longer has a present. If you had a bit of heart or human decency, you would have lied to me, you would have invented a tie between us. Now it’s too late, so if you do have a scrap of humane decency, finish me off, put an end to my disgust, because it’s causing me unbearable suffering.”