“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.”
“What will you do with it?”
“Show me that photograph, I tell you.”
“A very old woman in the village gave it to me. I don’t know how it ended up in her hands. It doesn’t matter: the identity of the two children leaves no doubt. Children, yes—even you, at the age of seventeen, show no signs of adolescence. It’s very odd: you are both very tall, thin, and gaunt, but your faces and your long bodies are perfectly childlike. You don’t look normal, actually: you look like two twelve-year-old giants. And yet the result is superb: fine features, childlike eyes, but your face is too small in comparison with your skull. Your torso is that of a child, your legs are lanky and interminable—worthy subjects for a painting. It’s enough to make me believe that your insane precepts on hygiene actually worked, and that puffballs are a beauty secret. And you are the greatest shock of all. Totally unrecognizable!”
“If I’m so unrecognizable, how do you know that it’s me?”
“Who else could it be? Besides, you have the same white, smooth, hairless skin—that is indeed the only thing you have preserved. You were so handsome, your features so pure, with such delicate limbs and an asexual complexion so asexual—of the order of an angel.”
“Spare me your religious twaddle, would you? And show me the photograph, instead of spouting rubbish.”
“How could you have changed so much? You said that at the age of eighteen you were already as you are now, and I’m willing to believe it—but in this case, it just makes it all the more astounding: how could you, in less than a year, have swapped your seraphic appearance for the bloated monster I see before me? Not only did you triple in weight, your delicate face became bovine, your refined features so thick as to be completely vulgar . . .”
“Have you finished insulting me?”
“You know very well that you are ugly. Besides, you constantly use the most disgusting adjectives in referring to yourself.”
“I may use them on myself with a witty turn of phrase, but I will not allow other people to use them. Is that clear?”
“I don’t give a damn whether you allow me or not. You’re horrible, that’s all there is to it, and it’s incredible that you could be so horrible when you were once so handsome.”
“There’s nothing incredible about it, it happens all the time. But, as a rule, it doesn’t happen so quickly.”
“Ah, good, you’ve just confessed again.”
“Huh?”
“Yes. By saying that, you have implicitly acknowledged the truth of my words. At the age of seventeen, you were indeed as I described—and unfortunately, no photograph ever captured you like that for immortality.”
“I knew it! But how did you manage to describe me so well?”
“I simply paraphrased the descriptions of Philémon Tractatus in your novel. I wanted to make sure that you were just as you described your character: in order to find out, there was no other way to go about it than to bluff, since you refused to answer my questions.”
“You are a filthy little muckraker.”
“It’s effective, raking up muck: I now know for certain that your novel is strictly autobiographical. I have every reason to be proud of myself, because I had the same elements to go on as everyone else. And yet I’m the only one who has had any inkling of the truth.”
“Be my guest, act all proud.”
“So allow me henceforth to ask my first question all over again: why is Hygiene and the Assassin an unfinished novel?”
“That’s it, that’s the title that was missing earlier!”
“Don’t try to act all surprised. I won’t give up until you answer: why is the novel unfinished?”
“You could frame the question in a more metaphysical way: why is that incompletion a novel?”
“I’m not interested in your metaphysics. Answer my question: why is the novel unfinished?”
“Hell and damnation, you piss me off! Does the novel not have the right to be unfinished?”
“Whether it has the right or not really has nothing to do with it. You were writing truth with a true purpose, so why didn’t you finish the novel? After Léopoldine’s murder, the story comes to an abrupt end, above a void. Would it have been so difficult to wrap it up, give it a proper ending?”
“Difficult! I would have you know, silly goose, that nothing is difficult for Prétextat Tach.”
/> “Precisely. Which makes this abrupt non-ending all the more absurd.”
“Who are you to rule on the absurdity of my decisions?”
“I’m not ruling on anything, I’m just wondering.”
The old man suddenly looked like an old man, eighty-three years of age.
“You are not the only one. I too am wondering, and I cannot find the answer. I could have chosen dozens of endings for that book: either the murder itself, or the night that followed, or my physical metamorphosis, or the fire in the château, a year later . . . ”
“That was your doing, the fire, wasn’t it?”
“Of course. Saint-Sulpice had become intolerable without Léopoldine. Moreover, I was getting annoyed with my family’s suspicions about me. So I decided to get rid of the château and its occupants. I wouldn’t have thought they’d burn so well.”
“You clearly don’t seem to be troubled by a respect for human life, but had you no scruples about burning down a seventeenth-century château?”
“Scruples have never been my strong point.”
“Indeed. Let’s get back to our ending, or rather the absence of an ending. So, you claim you know nothing about the reasons why the novel is unfinished?”
“You can believe me on that point. Yes, there were any number of elegant endings I could have chosen, but none of them ever seemed suitable. I don’t know, it was as if I had been expecting something else, something I’ve been expecting for twenty-four years, or sixty-six years, if you prefer.”
“What sort of something else? For Léopoldine to be brought back to life?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have stopped writing.”
“So I was right in making a connection between the fact the novel was unfinished and your famous literary menopause.”
“Of course you were right. What is there to be so proud of? When you’re a journalist, all you need is a bit of skill to be right. When you’re a writer, being right doesn’t exist. Your profession is disgustingly easy. Whereas mine is dangerous.”
“And you have managed to make it even more dangerous.”
“What do you mean by this strange compliment?”
“I don’t know if it’s a compliment. I don’t know whether it’s admirable or insane, exposing yourself the way you are. Can you explain what came over you, when you decided to give a faithful narration of the story that not only was dearest to you, but also presented the greatest risk of seeing you dragged before the courts? What obscure perversion did you yield to by taking up your pen and wielding it so eloquently to provide humankind with such a blatantly transparent deed of self-incrimination?”
“But humankind doesn’t give a damn! The proof of it is that for twenty-four years this novel has been collecting dust in libraries and no one, you hear me, no one has ever even talked to me about it. And that’s perfectly normal because, as I told you, no one has read it.”
“What about me?”
“A negligible quantity.”
“What proof do you have that there aren’t other negligible quantities like me around?”
“A dazzling proof: if others like you had read me—and I insist on the word ‘read’, in its most carnivorous sense—I would have been sent to prison long ago. You asked me a very interesting question, and the answer sticks out a mile. Here you have a murderer who has been on the loose for forty-two years. His crimes have never been discovered, and he has become a famous writer. Far from making the most of such a comfortable situation, this sick man ventures into an absurd wager, since he has everything to lose and nothing to gain—nothing to gain, except proof of the most comical sort.”
“Let me guess: he wants to prove that no one reads him.”
“Better than that: he wants to prove that even the very rare people who do read him—because those people exist—have read him without reading him.”
“And that’s supposed to be self-evident.”
“But it is, I assure you. You know, there is always a handful of idle people—vegetarians, budding critics, masochistic students, and other nosy sorts—who actually read the books they buy. I wanted to carry out my experiment on those people. I wanted to prove that I could write the worst things imaginable about my own person, with impunity: this deed of self-incrimination, as you so rightly describe it, is rigorously authentic. Yes, Mademoiselle, you have been right from beginning to end: in this book, not one detail has been made up. Of course you can find excuses for readers: no one knows a thing about my childhood, it’s not the first horrible book I’ve written, how could anyone ever imagine I might have been so divinely handsome, and so on. But I maintain that such excuses do not hold up to scrutiny. Are you familiar with a review regarding Hygiene and the Assassin, one that I read in a newspaper twenty-four years ago? ‘A richly symbolic fairytale, a dreamlike metaphor of original sin and, consequently, of the human condition.’ When I told you that people read me without reading me! I can allow myself to stray dangerously close to the truth, and all anyone will ever see is metaphors. There’s nothing surprising about that: the pseudo-reader, clad in his diving suit, can swim perfectly impermeably through my bloodiest sentences. From time to time he will exclaim with delight, ‘What a lovely symbol!’ That is what you call clean reading. A marvelous invention, very pleasant to practice in bed before falling asleep; it calms the mind and doesn’t even dirty the sheets.”
“What would you have preferred? To be read in an abattoir, or in Baghdad during a bombing?”
“Not at all, dunderhead. I’m not questioning the venue where reading takes place, but the act of reading itself. I would have preferred to be read without the frogman’s suit, without a certain perspective, without a vaccination and, to be honest, without adverbs.”
“You must know that reading of that nature does not exist.”
“In the beginning I didn’t know, but now, in the light of my brilliant proof, you can be sure I do.”
“So? Shouldn’t you be happy that there are as many ways of reading as there are readers?”
“You missed my point: there are no readers, and there are no ways of reading.”
“Yes there are, there are readings that differ from your own, that’s all. Why should your way be the only acceptable one?”
“Oh, that’s enough, stop reciting your sociology textbook. Besides, I would like to know what your sociology textbook would have to say about the edifying situation I have brought to light: a writer-assassin has openly denounced himself, and not a single reader was clever enough to realize.”
“I couldn’t care less about the opinions of sociologists, and personally I think it’s not a reader’s role to act like a cop, and if no one tried to make trouble for you after this book came out, it’s a good sign: it means that Fouquier-Tinville is no longer in fashion, and people are open-minded and capable of civilized reading.”
“Uh-huh, I get it: you are just as rotten as all the others. I’ve been stupid to think you might be different from the masses.”
“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to believe that I am different, however minutely, because I am the only one in my entire species who sniffed at the truth.”
“Let’s agree that you do have a particularly good nose. That’s all. You see, you disappoint me.”
“That’s almost a compliment, coming from you. Am I to understand that for the space of a few minutes I was able to inspire you with a better opinion?”
“You’re going to laugh: yes. You are not completely devoid of human platitudes, but you do have a very rare quality.”
“I’m dying to know what it is.”
“I think that it is something innate, and I’m relieved to see that your stupid apprenticeships have not managed to corrupt it.”
“So what is this quality?”
“You, at least, know how to read.”
Silence.
“How old are
you, Mademoiselle?”
“I’m thirty.”
“Twice the age of Léopoldine when she died. My poor young woman, here it is, your attenuating circumstance: you have lived far too long.”
“What! You think I need an attenuating circumstance? What next!”
“You see, I’m looking for an explanation: sitting across from me is someone with a sharp mind, and who is gifted with a rare ability to read. So I’ve been wondering what could have spoiled such fine qualities. You have just given me the answer: time. Thirty years is far too long.”
“You, at your age, are telling me this?”
“I died at the age of seventeen, Mademoiselle. And besides, for men it’s not the same thing.”
“Here we go.”
“It’s pointless trying to sound sarcastic, young lady, you know perfectly well that it’s true.”
“That what is true? I want to hear you say it clearly.”
“It’s your funeral. Well you see, men are entitled to all sorts of reprieves. Women aren’t. On this last point, I am far more precise and earnest than on any other: the majority of males give females a respite of varying length before they forget about them, which is far more cowardly than killing them outright. I find this respite absurd and even disloyal toward females: because of the lapse of time, women begin to imagine that men actually need them. The truth is that from the moment they become women, the moment they leave their childhood behind, they are doomed to die. If men were gentlemen, they would kill women on the day they have their first period. But men have never been gallant, they prefer to let these unfortunate women trail their sufferings through life rather than show enough kindness to eliminate them. I know of only one male who had enough greatness, respect, love, sincerity, and courtesy to do it.”
“You.”
“Precisely.”
The journalist threw her head back. She began to laugh, a thin, hoarse laugh. It gradually picked up speed, climbing the octaves with each new rhythm, until it became an incessant, suffocating fit. It was uncontrollable laughter, at a clinical stage.
“This makes you laugh?”