Hygiene and the Assassin (12 page)

“How did you hear about the château?” asked the fat man in a languid voice sticky with toffee.

“Oh, that was very easy. Elementary research in registers and archives—easy stuff for journalists. You see, Monsieur Tach, I didn't wait until January 10 to become interested in you. I've been studying your case for years now.”

“How industrious you are! You must have thought, ‘The old man won't live much longer, let's be ready for the day he dies,' is that it?”

“Stop talking and chewing that toffee at the same time, it's disgusting. Let me get back to my story. My research was long and hazardous, but not difficult. I eventually found the trace of the last members of the Tach family known to the public: there is the record of the death in 1909 of Casimir and Célestine Tach, who drowned in the tide at Mont Saint-Michel, where the young couple had gone on a trip. They'd been married for two years and they left behind a one-year-old child—I'll let you guess who that was. On learning of the tragic death of their only son, Casimir Tach's parents died of sorrow. After that, there was only one Tach left, Prétextat. It was more difficult for me to follow your own trajectory. I had the bright idea of looking up your mother's maiden name and I learned that, while your father came from a little-known family, Célestine was born the marquise de Planèze de Saint-Sulpice, a branch that has now died out, not to be confused with the de Planèze counts and countesses . . .”

“Do you intend to tell me the history of a family that is not my own?”

“You're right, I'm getting off the subject. Let's get back to the Planèze de Saint-Sulpice family: there were not many of them left by 1909, but their background was impeccable and they were well respected. When they learned of their daughter's death, the marquis and marquise decided to take charge of their orphaned grandson, and that is how you came to live in the château at Saint-Sulpice at one year of age. You were pampered not only by your nurse and your grandparents, but also by your uncle and aunt, Cyprien and Cosima de Planèze, your mother's brother and sister-in-law.”

“These genealogical details are so interesting they're taking my breath away.”

“Don't they indeed? Let's see what you will have to say about that which is still to come?”

“What? You haven't finished yet?”

“Certainly not. You're not even two years old yet, and I want to tell you your life story up to the age of eighteen.”

“Lord help us.”

“If you had told it to me yourself, I wouldn't be obliged to do it.”

“And what if I didn't feel like talking about it, huh?”

“Well, that was because you have something to hide.”

“Not necessarily.”

“It's too early to go into that. Now, you were a baby your family adored, despite your mother's misalliance. I've seen sketches of that château that no longer exists: it was splendid. What a dream of a childhood you must have had!”

“Do you write for that rag
Hello!
by any chance
?
”

“When you were two, your aunt and uncle gave birth to their only child, Léopoldine de Planèze de Saint-Sulpice.”

“It makes you foam at the mouth, a name like that, doesn't it? Not the sort of name you could ever have.”

“Yes, but at least I'm alive.”

“For all the good it does you.”

“May I go on, or do you want me to let you do the talking? Your memory must be resuscitated by now.”

“Go on, please, I'm having a wonderful time.”

“So much the better, because we're a long way from the end, still. So, as I was saying, they gave you the only thing that was missing: some company your own age. You never had to experience the dreary days of a friendless only child; naturally, even though you didn't go to school and didn't have any classmates, you had something much better: an adorable little cousin. You became inseparable. Do you want to know how I came upon these details?”

“With the help of your imagination, I suppose.”

“In part. But an imagination needs fuel, Monsieur Tach, and I owe the fuel to you.”

“Stop continually interrupting yourself and tell me about my childhood, it's bringing tears to my eyes.”

“Scoff all you like, monsieur. There will be plenty more to bring tears to your eyes. Your childhood was far too beautiful. You had everything anyone can dream of, and then some: a château, a huge estate with lakes and forests, horses, incredible material ease, an adoptive family who cherished you, a tutor who was not at all authoritarian and who was often on sick leave, loving servants, and above all, you had Léopoldine.”

“Tell me the truth: you're not a journalist. You are looking for material to write a romance novel.”

“A romance novel? We'll see about that. Back to my story. Of course, in 1914, there was the war, but children find a way to live with war, particularly rich kids. Viewed from your paradise, the conflict seemed insignificant, and it scarcely ruffled the waters of the long, slow flow of your happiness.”

“My dear, you are a peerless storyteller.”

“Not as good as you.”

“Continue.”

“The years hardly went by. Childhood does not move at a very rapid pace. What is a year for an adult? For a child, a year is a century, and for you these centuries were made of gold and silver. The lawyers regularly invoked an unhappy childhood as an attenuating circumstance. But in delving into your past, I realized that too happy a childhood could also serve as an attenuating circumstance.”

“Why are you trying to give me the benefit of attenuating circumstances? I don't need them at all.”

“We'll see. You and Léopoldine were inseparable. You could not live without each other.”

“Loving cousins: that's as old as the world.”

“When two people are as close as you two were, can one even still speak of loving cousins?”

“Brother and sister, if you prefer.”

“Incestuous brother and sister, then.”

“Are you shocked? It happens in the best of families. Which just goes to show.”

“I think it's up to you to tell me the rest of the story.”

“I'll do no such thing.”

“Do you really want me to go on?”

“I would be much obliged.”

“I'm not asking you to be obliged, but if I were to go on with my story from the point that I've reached, it would be only a pale and mediocre paraphrase of the most beautiful, unusual, and least known of your novels.”

“I adore pale, mediocre paraphrases.”

“Then too bad, you asked for it. Am I right, then?”

“About what?”

“To have classified that novel among your books with two female characters and not three female characters.”

“You are absolutely correct, dear lady.”

“In that case, I have nothing left to fear. The rest is literature, isn't it?”

“The rest is indeed my work alone. In those days, I had no paper other than my own life, no ink other than my own blood.”

“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.”