Hygiene and the Assassin

by Amélie Nothomb

  Europa Editions

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 1992 by Éditions Albin Michel

  First publication 2010 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Alison Anderson

  Original Title: Hygiène de l’assassin

  Translation copyright © 2010 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  ISBN 9781609451257

  Amelie Nothomb

  HYGIENE AND THE ASSASSIN

  Translated from the French

  by Alison Anderson

  When the imminent demise of the great writer Prétextat Tach became public knowledge—he was given two months to live—journalists the world over requested private interviews with the eighty-year-old gentleman. To be sure, he enjoyed considerable prestige; nevertheless, it was astonishing to see them flocking to his bedside, these emissaries from dailies as renowned as (we have taken the liberty of translating their names) The Nanking Tattler and The Bangladesh Observer. Thus, two months before his death, Monsieur Tach was given the opportunity to measure the extent of his celebrity.

  His secretary set about making a drastic selection from among the various proposals: he eliminated all the solicitations from the foreign press, because the dying man spoke only French, and did not trust interpreters; he turned down all reporters of color, because with age the writer had begun to express racist views, which contrasted sharply with his most deeply held opinions—Tachian specialists were greatly discomfited, and interpreted this as a senile desire to cause a scandal; finally, the secretary politely discouraged requests from television networks, women’s magazines, papers that were considered too political, and, above all, any medical journals that might have wanted to investigate how the great man had developed such a rare form of cancer.

  It was not without a certain sense of pride that Monsieur Tach learned he was afflicted with the dread Elzenveiverplatz Syndrome, more commonly referred to as “cartilage cancer,” which the eponymous learned physician had individuated in Cayenne in the nineteenth century among a dozen or so convicts imprisoned for sexual crimes followed by homicide, and which had never been diagnosed since that time. Monsieur Tach viewed his diagnosis as a hitherto unhoped-for ennoblement: with his hairless, obese physique—that of a eunuch in every respect except for his voice—he dreaded dying of some stupid cardiovascular disease. Upon composing his epitaph, he was careful to mention the sublime name of the Teutonic doctor thanks to whom he would leave this world with a flourish.

  Modern medicine was sincerely puzzled by the fact that this adipose, sedentary man had survived to the age of eighty-three. He was so fat that for years he had admitted to not being able to walk; he blatantly ignored any recommendations from nutritionists and had terrible eating habits. In addition, he smoked twenty Havana cigars a day. But his alcohol consumption was moderate, and he had practiced chastity since time immemorial: the doctors could find no alternative explanation for the sound functioning of a heart smothered in fat. For all that, his survival remained a mystery, like the origins of the syndrome that would bring an end to it.

  Not a single newspaper the world over could help but be scandalized by the media coverage devoted to this upcoming death. Letters to the editor were largely devoted to reaffirming the papers’ self-criticism. Thus, in keeping with the laws of modern news coverage, the features by the rare journalists who had been selected were eagerly anticipated.

  Biographers were already hovering. Editors were arming their battalions. There were of course a number of intellectuals who wondered if the man’s prodigious success was not overrated: had Prétextat Tach been truly innovative? Had he not simply been the ingenious heir to overlooked creators? They went on to support their thesis by citing authors with esoteric names, whose works they themselves had not read, a fact which enabled them to speak about them penetratingly.

  All these factors helped to ensure that the man’s dying moments would make an exceptional stir. No doubt about it: it was a resounding success.

  The author, who had twenty-two novels to his name, lived on the ground floor of a modest building: he required accommodation where everything was on the same level, because he could only get around in a wheelchair. He lived alone, without any pets. Every day, a very brave nurse would come by at around five o’clock to bathe him. He could not have stood for anyone else to do his shopping, so he went himself to buy what he needed in the neighborhood stores. His secretary, Ernest Gravelin, lived four stories up, but as much as he could he avoided seeing him; he telephoned regularly, and Tach never missed an opportunity to begin their conversation by saying, “So sorry, my dear Ernest, I’m not dead yet.”

  Gravelin reminded those journalists who had been selected that the old man, basically, had a good heart: did he not give half his income every year to charitable organizations? And could this secret generosity not also be detected in some of the characters of his novels? “Of course he terrorizes us all, me to begin with, but I maintain that his mask of aggression is mere playfulness: he enjoys acting the placid, cruel fat man in order to hide his great sensitivity.” His words did little to reassure the chroniclers who, in any case, had no desire to overcome their jealously guarded fear, for it gave them an aura of war correspondents.

  The news of the writer’s imminent death was reported on January 10. On the fourteenth a first journalist went to meet him. He entered the apartment: it was so dark that it took a moment before he was able to distinguish a corpulent figure in a wheelchair in the middle of the living room. The old man’s lugubrious voice uttered no more than an inexpressive “Good morning, Monsieur,” to put him at ease—which in fact only served to make the poor fellow more tense than ever.

  “I am extremely pleased to meet you, Monsieur Tach. This is a great honor.”

  The tape recorder was switched on, eagerly awaiting the words of the silent old man.

  “I beg your pardon, Monsieur Tach, would you mind if I switch on a light? I cannot see your face.”

  “It is ten o’clock in the morning, Monsieur; I do not switch on the lights at such a time. And besides, you will see me soon enough, once your eyes have adjusted to the darkness. So make the most of the respite you have been granted, and in the meantime you’ll have to make do with my voice; it’s the most beautiful thing about me.”

  “You do indeed have a very beautiful voice.”

  “Yes.”

  The silence weighed heavily upon the intruder, and he wrote in his notebook: “T.’s silence is caustic. Avoid as much as possible.”

  “Monsieur Tach, people the world over admire your determination to avoid being admitted to the hospital, despite all the doctors’ orders. So the first question I must ask you is, how do you feel?”

  “I feel just as I have felt for twenty years.”

  “In other words?”

  “I do not feel much.”

  “Not much of what?”

  “Not much.”

  “I understand.”

  “Then I admire you.”

  There was no irony in the sick man’s implacably neutral voice. The journalist gave an awkward little laugh before continuing: “Monsieur Tach, with a man like yourself, I won’t waste time with the circumlocutions common to my profession. So, if you’ll allow me, I’
ll ask you outright: what might be the thoughts and moods of a great writer who knows he is going to die?”

  Silence. A sigh.

  “I don’t know, my good man.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “If I knew what I was thinking, I suppose I would never have become a writer.”

  “You mean that you write in order to find out what you are thinking?”

  “It’s a possibility. I’m not really sure anymore, it’s been such a long time since I’ve written anything.”

  “What? But your last novel came out less than two years ago . . .”

  “Emptying my drawers, my good man. There is enough material in my drawers for a new novel by me to be published every year for a full decade after my death.”

  “That’s extraordinary! When did you stop writing?”

  “At the age of fifty-nine.”

  “Then that means that all the novels that have come out in the last twenty-four years . . . you were emptying your drawers?”

  “You have done your math.”

  “How old were you when you began to write?”

  “That would be hard to say: I began, then stopped, several times. The first time, I was six years old, and I wrote tragedies.”

  “Tragedies at the age of six?”

  “Yes, and in verse. Ludicrous. I stopped when I was seven. At the age of nine I had a relapse, which earned me a few elegies, again in verse. I had nothing but scorn for prose.”

  “That’s astonishing, coming from one of the greatest prose writers of our era.”

  “At the age of eleven I stopped again, and did not write another line until I was eighteen.”

  The journalist wrote in his notebook: “T. does not respond to compliments.”

  “And then?”

  “I started writing again. To begin with I wrote fairly little, then more and more. By the age of twenty-three I had hit my cruising speed, and maintained it for the next thirty-six years.”

  “What do you mean by ‘cruising speed’?”

  “That I did nothing else. I wrote, nonstop; apart from eating, smoking, and sleeping, I had no other activity.”

  “You never went out?”

  “Only when forced to.”

  “In fact, no one has ever found out what you did during the war.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “How do you expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s the truth. From the age of twenty-three to the age of fifty-nine, all my days were alike. I have a long, homogeneous memory of those thirty-six years, which were virtually devoid of chronology. I got up to write and went to bed when I had finished writing.”

  “But, after all, you must have gone through the war like everyone. For example, how did you feed yourself?”

  The journalist knew he had touched upon one of the fat man’s major preoccupations.

  “Yes, I do recall eating badly during those years.”

  “So you see!”

  “I did not suffer. In those days I was a glutton, not a gourmet. And I had an extraordinary reserve of cigars.”

  “When did you become a gourmet?”

  “When I stopped writing. Before that, I did not have time.”

  “And why did you stop writing?”

  “On the day of my fifty-ninth birthday I felt it was all over.”

  “What made you feel that way?”

  “I don’t know. It simply came on, like menopause. I left one novel unfinished. That’s fine: in a successful career, you must always have one unfinished novel if you are to be taken seriously. Otherwise, they think you’re a third-rate writer.”

  “So you spent thirty-six years writing continuously, and from one day to the next—not another line?”

  “Correct.”

  “What have you been doing for the last twenty-four years, then?”

  “I told you, I became a gourmet.”

  “Full time?”

  “Let’s say, rather, full capacity.”

  “And other than that?”

  “It takes time, you know. Other than that, almost nothing. I reread some classics. Ah yes, I forgot, I bought a television.”

  “What, you like television?”

  “Commercials, only commercials. I love them.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, I don’t like television, other than commercials.”

  “This is extraordinary: so you have spent the last twenty-four years eating and watching television?”

  “No, I have also been sleeping and smoking. And reading a bit.”

  “And yet we have been hearing about you constantly.”

  “That’s the fault of my excellent secretary, Ernest Gravelin. He’s the one who empties out my drawers, meets my publishers, fuels my legend, and, above all, brings me the latest doctors’ theories—they all hope to put me on a diet.”

  “In vain.”

  “Fortunately. It would have been really too silly to deprive me because, at the end of the day, the origin of my cancer is not nutritional.”

  “What is the origin of your cancer?”

  “It’s mysterious, but not nutritional. According to Elzenveiverplatz”—(here the fat man took great delight in articulating the name),—“it seems to be the result of a genetic accident, programmed before my birth. Therefore, I was quite right to eat anything and everything.”

  “So you were already doomed at birth?”

  “Yes, Monsieur, like a true tragic hero. And to think there are people who still talk about human freedom.”

  “But you were granted a reprieve of eighty-three years all the same.”

  “A reprieve, precisely.”

  “But you won’t deny that during those eighty-three years you have been free? For example, you could very well have chosen not to write . . .”

  “Might you by any chance be reproaching me for having written?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Ah. A pity, I was beginning to have some respect for you.”

  “But you don’t regret having written?”

  “Regret? I am incapable of regret. Would you like a toffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The novelist shoved a caramel in his mouth and chewed it noisily.

  “Monsieur Tach, are you afraid of death?”

  “Not at all. Death must not be a very big change. I do, however, have a fear of pain. I’ve acquired a stockpile of morphine, which I can inject myself. Thanks to this measure, I’m no longer afraid.”

  “Do you believe in life after death?”

  “No.”

  “So, do you believe that death is annihilation?”

  “How can you annihilate something that has already been annihilated?”

  “That’s a terrible answer.”

  “It isn’t an answer.”

  “I see.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Well, what I meant was . . .” The journalist attempted to come up with something he might have meant to say if not for being thrown off by a difficulty in putting his words together. “. . . a novelist is a person who asks questions, not one who answers them.”

  Silence of the dead.

  “Well, that’s not exactly what I meant . . .”

  “No? Pity. I was just beginning to think that was rather good.”

  “And may we talk about your oeuvre, now?”

  “If you insist.”

  “You don’t like to talk about it, do you?”

  “I can’t hide a thing from you.”

  “Like all great writers, you are very modest when it comes to your work.”

  “Modest, me? You must be mistaken.”

  “You seem to enjoy underestimating your own worth. Why do you deny that you are modest?�
��

  “Because, Monsieur, I am not.”

  “Then why are you so reluctant to talk about your novels?”

  “Because there is no point in talking about a novel.”

  “But it’s fascinating to hear a writer talk about his creation, to hear him say how and why he writes, and what he writes against.”

  “If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot; or he is explaining interesting things that he didn’t discuss in his book, in which case the book in question is a failure, since it does not live up to its claims.”

  “But still, any number of great writers have been able to talk about their work and avoid such pitfalls.”

  “You are contradicting yourself: two minutes ago you said that all great writers were extremely modest when it came to their work.”

  “But you can talk about a work and still preserve its mystery.”

  “Oh, indeed? Have you ever tried?”

  “No, but I’m not a writer.”

  “Then what makes you think you are entitled to come out with such rubbish?”

  “You are not the first writer I have ever interviewed.”

  “Might you by any chance be comparing me to those scribblers you normally interview?”

  “They are not scribblers!”

  “If they can discuss their oeuvre and be fascinating and modest at the same time, there can be no doubt that they are scribblers. How can a writer possibly be modest? It is the most immodest profession on earth: whether it’s the style, the ideas, the story, the research, writers never talk about anything but themselves and, what’s more, with words. Painters and musicians also talk about themselves, but with a language that is substantially less crude than our own. No, Monsieur, writers are obscene; if they were not, they would be accountants, or train conductors, or telephone operators; they would be respectable.”

  “That’s as may be. How do you explain the fact that you personally are so modest?”

  “What on earth are you going on about?”