Hygiene and the Assassin (16 page)

“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 for 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—”

“Indeed.”

“On August 13, 1925, as I was saying. An absolutely calm, dark night, unusually gentle. It was Léopoldine's birthday, but that meant nothing to us: for the last three years, time had no longer mattered. We had not changed so much as an atom; we had simply grown in length, prodigiously, but in no way had this amusing stretching of our bodies altered our shapeless, hairless, odorless, infantile constitution. So I did not wish her a happy birthday that morning. I believe I did something much better, I gave a lesson in summer to summer itself. It was the last time in my life that I made love. I did not know that, but no doubt the forest knew it, because it was as silent as an old voyeur. It was when the sun rose above the hills that the wind began to blow, banishing the nocturnal clouds to reveal a sky almost as pure as we were.”

“What admirable lyricism.”

“Stop interrupting me. Let's see, where was I?”

“August 13, 1925, sunrise, post-coital.”

“Thank you, Mademoiselle the clerk of the court.”

“You're welcome, Monsieur the murderer.”

“I prefer my title to yours.”

“I prefer my title to Léopoldine's.”

“If you had seen her that morning! She was the most beautiful creature in the world, an immense smooth and white
infanta
with dark hair and dark eyes. In the summer, with the exception of the very rare times we went to the château, we lived naked—the estate was so vast that we never ran into anyone. So we would spend most of our days in the lakes, to which I attributed amniotic virtues, which may not have been as absurd as it seems, given the results. But the cause hardly matters; all that mattered was this miracle that occurred daily—a miracle of time frozen for eternity, or at least that is what we believed. And on August 13, 1925, we had every reason to believe as much, as we gazed upon each other in a stupor. That morning, like any other, I dove into the lake without hesitating, and I laughed at Léopoldine, because she always took forever to get into the icy water. My mockery was yet another pleasant ritual, because my cousin was never more lovely to behold than when she stood with one foot in the lake, pale and laughing from the cold, swearing to me that she would never manage, then gradually unfolding her long pale limbs to join me, as if in slow motion, like some shivering wading bird, her lips blue, her big eyes full of terror—fright became her—stammering that it was awful—”

“You are horribly sadistic!”

“What would you know! If you had the slightest knowledge of pleasure, you would know that fear and pain and above all shivers make the best preludes. Once she was all the way in the water, like me, the cold gave way to fluidity, to the gentle ease of life in the water. That morning, like every morning that summer, we marinated endlessly, sometimes gliding together toward the depths of the lake, our eyes open, looking at our bodies that were green in the glistening water, sometimes swimming on the surface, competing for speed, sometimes bobbing in place, clinging to the branches of the weeping willows, speaking the way children speak, but with a greater knowledge of childhood, sometimes floating for hours, drinking up the sky with our eyes, in the perfect silence of icy waters. When the cold had completely penetrated us, we pulled ourselves out onto huge slabs of stone to dry in the sun. The wind on that August 13 was particularly pleasant and quickly warmed us. Léopoldine dove in again first, and held on to the little island where I was still getting warm. It was her turn to make fun of me. I can see her as if it were only yesterday, her elbows on the stone and her chin on her crossed wrists, her impertinent expression and her long hair which, in the water, undulated to the rhythm of her scarcely visible legs, almost frightening in their faraway whiteness. We were so happy, so unreal, so in love, so beautiful, all for the last time.”

“No elegies, please. If it was the last time, that was your fault.”

“So? Does that make things any less sad?”

“On the contrary, it merely makes them sadder, but because you were responsible, you have no right to complain.”

“No right? The last thing I want to hear. I don't give a damn about rights, and however responsible I might have been in the matter, I think I do have a reason to complain. Besides, my responsibility in the matter was negligible.”

“Oh, really? Maybe it was the wind that strangled her?”

“It was I, but it was not my fault.”

“You mean you strangled her in a moment of distraction?”

“No, silly woman, I mean it was the fault of nature, life, hormones, and all that rubbish. Let me tell you my story and allow me to be elegiac. I was describing Léopoldine's white legs—such a mysterious whiteness, particularly when seen through the green darkness of the water. To stay afloat horizontally, my cousin was slowly kicking her long legs, I could see each one rising alternately to the surface—no sooner did one foot have time to emerge than her leg was already on its way down, swallowed by the void to make way for the whiteness of the other leg, and so on. On that August 13, 1925, lying on my stony island, I could not get enough of that graceful spectacle. I don't know how long the moment lasted. It was interrupted by an abnormal detail, of a crudeness I still find shocking: the ballet of Léopoldine's legs caused something to rise up from the depths of the lake, a thin stream of red fluid, of a very special density, judging from its reluctance to mingle with pure water.”

“In short, it was blood.”

“How crude you are.”

“Your cousin, quite simply, had gotten her period for the first time.”

“You're disgusting.”

“There's nothing disgusting about it, it's normal.”

“Precisely.”

“This attitude isn't like you, Monsieur Tach. You are such an outspoken enemy of bad faith, the carnivorous defendant of coarse language, and now here you act offended, like some hero out of Oscar Wilde, because you've heard someone call a spade a spade. You may have been madly in love, but your love could not displace Léopoldine from the human race.”

“Yes it could.”

“This can't be true: is this you, the sarcastic genius, with your Célinian way with words, the cynical vivisectionist, the metaphysician of ridicule, producing drivel worthy of a baroque adolescent?”

“Shut up, iconoclast. It's not drivel.”

“Isn't it? A love story between two little aristocrats, the young boy in love with his noble cousin, the romantic wager against time, the limpid lakes in the legendary forest—if that's not drivel, then nothing here on earth is.”

“If you would allow me to tell you the rest, you would understand that it really is not a driveling story.”

“Then go ahead, try and convince me. It won't be easy, because what you've told me so far has filled me with dismay. And this boy who is incapable of accepting the fact his cousin has her first period—it's grotesque. It stinks of vegetarian lyricism.”

“What comes next is not vegetarian, but I do need a minimum of silence to be able to narrate it.”

“I promise nothing; it's difficult to listen to you without reacting.”

“Wait at least until I have finished before you react. Shit, where was I? You've made me lose the thread.”

“Blood in the water.”

“Heavens above, that's right. Imagine my shock: the jarring intrusion of that red, hot color amidst so much paleness—the icy water, the chlorotic darkness of the lake, the whiteness of Léopoldine's shoulders, her lips as blue as mercury sulfate, and then above all her legs, like imperceptible epiphanies evoking, in their unfathomable slowness, some sort of Hyperborean caress. No, it was unacceptable: the source of such repulsive effusion could not lie between those legs.”

“Repulsive!”

“Repulsive, I insist. Repulsive because of what it was, and even more so because of what it signified—a terrible rite, a passage from mythical life to hormonal life, a passage from eternal life to cyclical life. You have to be a vegetarian to be content with cyclical eternity. In my opinion, it's a contradiction in terms. For Léopoldine and me, eternity could not be conceived in any other way than in the first person of a singular singular, because it encompassed both of us. Cyclical eternity, on the other hand, suggests that a third party will come and interfere with other people's lives—and one is supposed to go along with this expropriation, to be happy about this whole usurpatory process! I have nothing but scorn for those who accept such a sinister comedy: I scorn them not so much for their sheep-like capacities of resignation as for the anemia of their love. Because if they were capable of true love, they would not submit so spinelessly, they could not bear to witness the suffering of those whom they claim to love, and without any selfish cowardice they would take responsibility for sparing their loved ones from such an abject fate. That stream of blood in the lake water signified the end of eternity for Léopoldine. And because I loved her deeply, I decided to restore her to that eternity, without further ado.”