Hygiene and the Assassin (17 page)

“I am beginning to understand.”

“You took long enough.”

“I'm beginning to understand how very sick you really are.”

“Well, what will you have to say about what's next, then?”

“With you, I can always be sure of the worst.”

“With me or without me, you may always be sure of the worst, but I believe I have spared at least one person from the worst. Léopoldine saw my gaze stop abruptly behind her and she turned around. She got out of the water as quickly as she could, as if she were terrified. She hoisted herself up next to me onto the stony island. There was no longer any doubt as to the origin of the stream of blood. My cousin was filled with aversion, which I could well understand. All through the three preceding years, we had never evoked this possibility. We had a sort of tacit agreement regarding the behavior we would adopt in this event—an event that was so unacceptable that in order to preserve our blissful stupor, we preferred to keep to a tacit agreement.”

“This is what I was afraid of. Léopoldine had asked nothing of you, and you killed her in the name of a ‘tacit agreement' that stemmed from the unhealthy darkness of your imagination alone.”

“She did not ask me anything explicitly, but it wasn't necessary.”

“Just as I said. In a few minutes you're going to start bragging about the virtue of what remains unsaid.”

“Someone like you would have wanted a contract drawn up and signed in the presence of a lawyer, is that it?”

“I would have preferred anything to the way you behaved.”

“It hardly matters what you would have preferred. The only thing that mattered was Léopoldine's salvation.”

“The only thing that mattered was your conception of Léopoldine's salvation.”

“It was also her conception. The proof, dear Mademoiselle, is that we said nothing to each other. I kissed her eyes very softly and she understood. She seemed calm, and she smiled. It all happened very quickly. Three minutes later she was dead.”

“What, just like that, without any time elapsing at all? That's . . . that's monstrous.”

“You would have wanted it to last for two hours, like at the opera?”

“But you don't just go around killing people that way.”

“Oh, no? I wasn't aware that there are was a prescribed way of doing it. Is there a treatise on etiquette for assassins? A handbook on
savoir-vivre
for victims? Next time, I promise you that I will kill more courteously.”

“Next time? Thank God, there will not be a next time. In the meantime, you make me want to vomit.”

“In the meantime? You intrigue me.”

“So, you claimed to love her, and you strangled her without even telling her one last time?”

“She knew it. My gesture was the proof, after all. If I had not loved her so deeply, I would not have killed her.”

“How can you be sure that she knew?”

“We never talked about such things, we were on the same wavelength. And besides, we weren't talkative. But let me tell you about the strangling. I've never had the opportunity to talk about it, but I like thinking about it—how many times have I relived that beautiful scene in the private realm of my memory?”

“What a way to pass the time!”

“You'll see, you'll begin to like it, too.”

“Like what? Your memories, or strangling?”

“Love. But let me tell you the story, please.”

“Since you insist.”

“There we were on the stony island, in the middle of the lake. From the moment that death was decreed, Eden, which had just been brutally wrenched from us two minutes earlier, was restored to us for three. We were absolutely aware that all we had left was one hundred and eighty seconds of Eden, so we were determined to do things properly, and we did them properly. Oh, I know what you're thinking: that all the credit for a good job of strangling belongs to the strangler alone. That is not true. The victim is far less passive than you would think. Have you seen that very bad film made by a barbarian—a Japanese filmmaker, if my memory serves me correctly—which ends with a scene of strangling that lasts roughly thirty-two minutes?”

“Yes, Oshima's
In the Realm of the Senses
.”

“The strangling scene is botched. As something of an expert, I can assure you that it doesn't happen like that. First of all, a strangling that lasts thirty-two minutes: I ask you, such bad taste! It's as if there were a reluctance on the part of all art forms to accept that murders are alert, rapid events. Hitchcock at least had figured that much out. And then, another thing that this Japanese gentleman did not understand: there is nothing languid or painful about strangling; on the contrary, it's invigorating, it's fresh.”

“Fresh? Not the way I'd describe it! Why not say nourishing, while you're at it?”

“Why not, indeed? You do feel revitalized, when you've strangled someone you love.”

“The way you talk about it, you'd think you do it on a regular basis.”

“All it takes is to have done something once—but done it deeply—in order to do it again continually, throughout your entire life. To this end, it is imperative that the crucial scene be one of aesthetic perfection. That Japanese man must not have known this, or else he was extremely clumsy, because his strangling scene is ugly, even ridiculous: the woman who is strangling looks as if she's pumping, and the victim looks as if he's being crushed under a steamroller. My own strangling scene, on the other hand, and you can take my word for it, was splendid.”

“I don't doubt it. And yet I would like to ask you one question: why did you choose strangling? Given where you were, drowning would have been more logical. That was, moreover, the explanation you gave your cousin's parents, when you brought them the corpse—hardly a believable explanation, given the marks on her neck. So, why didn't you simply drown the child?”

“An excellent question. It did cross my mind on that day of August 13, 1925. I reached my decision very quickly. I told myself that if all Léopoldines were to die by drowning, it would become something of a standard procedure, subject to the law of genre, and that would be altogether too trite. Not to mention the fact that the memory of Victor Hugo might have been outraged by such servile plagiarism.”1

“So you renounced the idea of drowning to avoid creating a reference. But the choice of strangling exposed you to other references.”

“True, yet I did not really take that into consideration. No, my decision to strangle my cousin was based, above all, upon the beauty of her neck. Whether you looked at her nape or at her throat, she had a sublime neck, long and supple, admirably conceived. Such finesse! To strangle someone like me, you would need at least two pairs of hands. With a delicate neck like hers, it was incredibly easy to put my hands around her.”

“And if she had not had this beautiful neck, would you have not strangled her?”

“I don't know. I might have done it all the same, because I'm a very hands-on sort of person. And as far as death techniques go, you can't get much more hands-on than strangling. It gives your hands an incomparable impression of sensual plenitude.”

“So you see, you did do it for your own pleasure! Why are you trying to sell me on the idea that you strangled her for her own salvation?”

“My dear young woman, you have the excuse that you know nothing about theology. However, since you claim to have read all my books, you ought to understand. I wrote a fine novel entitled
Concomitant Grace
, which describes the ecstasy that God gives us in the course of our actions to make them meritorious. I did not invent the notion, it's one that true mystics know well. You see, as I was strangling Léopoldine, my pleasure was a grace concomitant with the salvation of my beloved.”

“You're going to end up telling me that
Hygiene and the Assassin
is a Catholic novel.”

“No. It's an edifying novel.”

“So please complete my edification, and tell me the last scene.”

“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.”