Hygiene and the Assassin (13 page)

“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.”

“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. One 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.”

“Good reason? Pray explain, so we can have a good laugh.”

“Your descriptions of the château are exact, according to the archives. The characters have the same names in real life, except for you yourself, of course, but Philémon Tractatus is a transparent pseudonym, with the initials to prove it. Finally, the registers confirm that Léopoldine died in 1925.”

“Archives, registers: is that what you call real life?”

“No, but the fact that you respected official facts has led me, perfectly reasonably, to deduce that you also respected a more secret truth.”

“A weak argument.”

“But I have others: the style, for example. An infinitely less abstract style than that of your previous novels.”

“An even weaker argument. This impressionism replaces any critical judgment you might have, and can hardly serve as proof, particularly where style is concerned: slaves of your sort invariably come out with utter nonsense when the issue of a writer's style is in question.”

“I have one final argument, which is all the more devastating in that it is not an argument.”

“What on earth are you on about now?”

“It's not an argument, it's a photograph.”

“A photograph? What of?”

“Do you know why no one has ever suspected that this novel was autobiographical? Because the main character, Philémon Tractatus, was a magnificent, slender boy with an admirable face. You weren't really lying when you told my colleagues that from the age of eighteen on, you have been ugly and obese. Let's just say that you were lying by omission, for in all the years prior to that, you were unbelievably handsome.”

“How do you know?”

“I found a photograph.”

“Impossible. I did not have my picture taken until 1948.”

“I'm sorry, but I am forced to find your memory lacking. I discovered a photograph where on the back is written, in pencil, ‘Saint-Sulpice, 1925.'”

“Show me.”

“I'll show you when I'm certain that you won't try to destroy it.”

“I see, you're bluffing.”

“I'm not bluffing. I went on a pilgrimage to Saint-Sulpice. I regret to inform you that on the site of the former château—of which nothing remains—there is an agricultural co-op. Most of the lakes on the estate have been drained, and the valley has been transformed into a public dump. I'm sorry, but you inspire no pity in me. I questioned all the old people I could find in the area. They still remembered the château and the various marquis de Planèze de Saint-Sulpice. They even remembered the little orphan adopted by his grandparents.”

“I wonder how on earth those locals could possibly remember me, I never had any contact with them.”

“There are different ways of having contact. Maybe they never spoke to you, but they saw you.”

“That's impossible. I never set foot outside the estate.”

“But friends came to visit your grandparents, and your aunt and uncle.”

“They never took any photographs.”

“You're mistaken. Listen, I don't know under what circumstances the photograph was taken, nor by whom—my explanations were just hypotheses—but the fact remains that the photograph does exist. You are standing in front of the château with Léopoldine.”

“With Léopoldine?”

“A ravishing child with dark hair. Who else could it be?”

“Show me that photograph.”