Hygiene and the Assassin

by Amélie Nothomb

  “What hypocritical gobbledygook!”

  “Hypocritical or not, I am leaving this very instant if you do not present your apology in due form.”

  “I beg you please to accept my humble apologies.”

  “Mademoiselle.”

  “I beg you please to accept my humble apologies, Mademoiselle. Are you happy now?”

  “Not at all. Did you hear the tone of your voice? You would use the same tone of voice to ask me what brand of lingerie I wear.”

  “What brand of lingerie do you wear?”

  “Farewell, Monsieur Tach.”

  She opened the door again. The fat man cried out, his voice filled with urgency, “I beg you please to accept my humble apologies, Mademoiselle.”

  “That’s better. Next time, make it snappier. To punish you for your slowness, I order you to tell me why you don’t want me to go.”

  “What, you haven’t finished yet?”

  “No. I feel I deserve a perfect apology. By restricting yourself to a simple formula, you were not very credible. In order to convince me, you have to justify yourself, you have to make me want to forgive you—because I haven’t forgiven you yet, that would be too easy.”

  “You’re going too far!”

  “You have the nerve to say such a thing to me?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Fine.”

  She opened the door once again.

  “I don’t want you to leave because I’m bored shitless! I’ve been bored for twenty-four years!”

  “Ah-hah.”

  “You should be happy, you’ll be able to write in your rag that Prétextat Tach it is a poor old man who’s been bored for twenty-four years. You’ll be able to throw me to the rabble, for their odious commiseration.”

  “Dear monsieur, I knew very well that you were bored. You’re not telling me anything new.”

  “You’re bluffing. How could you have known?”

  “There were certain contradictions, unmistakable signs. I listened to the other journalists’ recordings together with Monsieur Gravelin. You said that your secretary had organized the interviews with the press against your will. Monsieur Gravelin asserted the contrary: he told me how pleased you were at the idea of being interviewed.”

  “Traitor!”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Monsieur Tach. I found you rather to my liking when I heard that.”

  “I don’t give a shit whether I’m to your liking or not.”

  “And yet you don’t want me to leave. What sort of entertainment are you expecting from me?”

  “I’m really in a mood to piss you off. I can’t think of anything more entertaining.”

  “I’m delighted to hear that. And you imagine that that will make me want to stay?”

  “One of the greatest writers of the century gives you the enormous honor of telling you he needs you, and that’s not enough for you?”

  “Maybe you’d like to see me weep with joy and wash your feet with my tears?”

  “Yes, I think I’d rather like that. I like to see people crawling at my feet.”

  “In that case, don’t retain me any longer: that’s not my style.”

  “Stay: you’re tough, and that amuses me. Since you don’t seem to have any intention of forgiving me, let’s make a bet, all right? I’ll wager you that by the end of the interview, I’ll have forced you to give back your ill-gotten gains, just like your predecessors. You like bets, don’t you?”

  “I don’t like gratuitous betting. There has to be something at stake.”

  “Ah, so you’re interested, huh? Is it money you want?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Mademoiselle is above such base considerations?”

  “Not at all. But if I wanted money, I would have looked for someone richer than you. It’s something else I want from you.”

  “It wouldn’t be my virginity?”

  “You are obsessed with your virginity. No, I’d really have to be desperate to entertain such a horrible prospect.”

  “Thank you. So what is it you want?”

  “You said something about crawling. I suggest identical stakes for both of us: if I crack, I’m the one who’ll crawl at your feet, but if you crack, you’ll crawl at my feet. I like to see people crawling at my feet, too.”

  “It’s touching that you think you might be able to measure up to me.”

  “It seems to me I already won a first round just now.”

  “My poor child, you call that a first round? That was nothing but adorable preliminaries.”

  “At the end of which you were crushed.”

  “That’s as may be. But for your victory you had at your disposal one very dissuasive argument, which you now no longer have.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Yes, your argument was that you would leave. And now you no longer can, the stakes are too tempting. I saw the way your eyes shone at the thought of me crawling at your feet. The prospect is too appealing to you now. You won’t leave before the end of the wager.”

  “You may regret it.”

  “I may. In the meantime I think I shall have some fun. I love squashing people, I love getting the better of anyone who’s the lackey of bad faith—all of you, that is. And there is one exercise that really brings me extreme pleasure: humiliating pretentious airhead females like yourself.”

  “As for me, my preferred entertainment is to take the wind out of obese self-satisfied airbags.”

  “What you just said is so typical of your day and age. Does this mean I’m dealing with someone who churns out slogans?”

  “Have no fear, Monsieur Tach: you too, with your reactionary spitefulness and everyday racism, are typical of our day and age. You take pride in thinking you’re an anachronism, don’t you? Well you’re not, not at all. Historically, you’re not even original: every generation has had its prophet of doom, its sacred monster whose glory was founded solely on the terror he inspired in naïve souls. Do I need to tell you how fragile that glory is, and that you will be forgotten? You are right to say that no one reads you. Nowadays, your crassness and insults may remind people that you exist; but once your shouts fall silent, no one will even remember you because no one will read you. And so much the better.”

  “What a delicious little morsel of eloquence, Mademoiselle! Where the devil were you educated? This mixture of pathetic aggression and Ciceronian flights of oratory—all carefully nuanced, so to speak, with little touches of Hegel and amateur sociology: what a masterpiece.”

  “Sir, may I remind you that, wager or no wager, I am still a journalist. Everything you say is being recorded.”

  “Fantastic. We are enriching Western thought with its most brilliant dialectic.”

  “Dialectic, isn’t that the word everyone drags out when they’ve run out of anything else to say?”

  “Well put. The joker of the drawing room.”

  “Am I to conclude that you’ve already run out of things to tell me?”

  “I never have had anything to tell you, Mademoiselle. When you are as bored as I am and have been for twenty-four years, you have nothing to say to people. If you nevertheless aspire to their company, it is in the hopes of being entertained, if not by their wit, at least by their stupidity. So do something, entertain me.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll manage to entertain you, but I am certain I shall manage to disturb you.”

  “Disturb me! My poor child, my respect for you has just dropped below zero. Disturb me! Well, you could have come out with something worse, you could have said disturb, full stop. What era does that intransitive use of the verb disturb date from? May 1968? It wouldn’t surprise me, it reeks of little Molotov cocktails and police barricades, a nice little revolution for well-fed students, and bright little futures for young men of means. Wanting to ‘disturb�
�� means wanting to ‘re-examine everything,’ to ‘raise consciousness’—and no pronouns, please, it sounds so much more intelligent, and then it’s very practical because, basically, it enables you not to specify what you would be incapable of specifying in the first place.”

  “Why are you wasting your time telling me this? I already used a pronoun: I said ‘disturb you.’”

  “Yeah. That’s not much better. My poor child, you would have made a perfect social worker. The funniest thing is the foolish pride of people who declare that they want to disturb: they speak to you with all the smugness of budding messiahs. Because they’re on a mission, aren’t they! Well then, go ahead, raise my consciousness, disturb me, let’s have a good laugh.”

  “It’s extraordinary, I’m entertaining you already.”

  “I’m a good audience. Go on.”

  “All right. Just now you said that you had nothing to tell me. It’s not reciprocal.”

  “Let me guess. What might a little female like you have to say to me? That women are not portrayed favorably in my work? That without women, men will never achieve fulfillment?”

  “Wrong.”

  “Well, maybe you’d like to know who does housework here?”

  “Why not? It will give you the opportunity to be interesting for a change.”

  “Go ahead, provoke, it’s the weapon of mediocre people. Well, I would have you know that a Portuguese woman comes every Thursday afternoon to clean my apartment and take my dirty laundry. There you have at least one woman who has respectable employment.”

  “In your ideology, women stay at home with a broom and a dust-rag, is that it?”

  “In my ideology, women don’t exist.”

  “Better and better. The Nobel committee must have had a serious sunstroke the day they chose you.”

  “For once, we agree. This Nobel Prize was a high point in the history of misunderstandings. To give me the Nobel Prize for literature is equivalent to giving the Nobel Peace prize to Saddam Hussein.”

  “Don’t brag. Saddam is more famous than you are.”

  “That’s normal, no one reads me. If people read me, I would cause more harm and therefore be more famous than Saddam.”

  “But the fact remains that no one reads you. How do you explain this universal refusal to read you?”

  “An instinct for self-preservation. An immune-system reflex.”

  “You always come up with explanations that are flattering for you. And what if people did not read you simply because you are boring?”

  “Boring? What an exquisite euphemism. Why don’t you say a pain in the ass!”

  “Because I don’t think it’s necessary to resort to bad language. But don’t dodge the question, monsieur.”

  “Am I boring? I will give you a reply that is resplendent with good faith: I have no idea. Of all the inhabitants on the planet, I am the least well situated to know. Kant surely thought that the Critique of Pure Reason was a fascinating book, and that wasn’t his fault: he had his nose in it. Consequently I feel obliged, Mademoiselle, to redirect my question to you baldly: am I boring? As silly as you may be, your reply will be more interesting than mine, even if you haven’t read me, a matter about which I have many doubts.”

  “You are wrong. Sitting before you is one of the rare human beings who has read all twenty-two of your novels, without skipping a single line.”

  The fat man sat there speechless for forty seconds.

  “Bravo. I like people who are capable of such enormous lies.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, it’s the truth. I’ve read everything you’ve ever written.”

  “With someone holding a gun to your head?”

  “Of my own free will—no, of my own free desire.”

  “That’s impossible. If you had read everything I’ve written, you would not be the person I see before me.”

  “And who do you see before you?”

  “I see an insignificant little female.”

  “And do you think you can see what is going on in the head of this insignificant little female?”

  “What, is there something going on in your head? Tota mulier in utero.”

  “I regret to inform you, I did not read you with my belly. So you will be subjected to my opinions. There’s no way around it.”

  “Go ahead, let’s see what you mean by ‘opinion.’”

  “First and foremost, to respond to your first question, I was not bored for a single moment reading your twenty-two novels.”

  “That’s strange. I would think that reading something without understanding it would be deadly boring.”

  “And what about writing without understanding, is that boring?”

  “Are you suggesting that I do not understand my own books?”

  “I would say, rather, that your books are overflowing with a desire to show off and bluff. And that is part of their charm: while I was reading you, I was aware of a continuous alternation between passages that were deep with meaning and interludes that were absolute bluff—I say absolute because they were bluffing the author just as much as the reader. I can imagine the jubilation you must have felt while filling these brilliantly hollow, outrageously solemn interludes with an appearance of depth and cogency. For someone who is such a virtuoso, it must have been exquisite recreation.”

  “What the hell are you going on about?”

  “I found it exquisite. To discover so much bad faith in the words of a writer who claims to be at war with bad faith is utterly charming. It would have been irritating if your perfidy had been homogeneous. But to go back and forth between good and bad faith the way you did was a brilliant display of dishonesty.”

  “And do you think you’re capable of differentiating between the two, pretentious little female?”

  “What could be simpler? Every time a passage made me burst out laughing, I could tell that you were bluffing. And I thought it was very clever: an excellent strategy, using bad faith and intellectual terrorism to fight against bad faith, being even more underhand than your adversary. Maybe too excellent, in fact, because it’s too refined for such a vulgar enemy. It will come as no news to you, but Machiavellianism rarely hits the bull’s eye: sledgehammers do a better job at crushing than subtle mechanisms do.”

  “You say that I am bluffing: well, I make a paltry bluffer compared to you, claiming you’ve read all my novels the way you do.”

  “Everything that was available, yes. Question me, if you want to make sure.”

  “Uh-huh, just like Tintin addicts: ‘What is the license plate number of the red Volvo in The Calculus Affair?’ It’s grotesque. Don’t expect me to dishonor my works in such a fashion.”

  “Well, how can I convince you, then?”

  “You can’t. You will not convince me.”

  “In that case, I have nothing to lose.”

  “With me, you never have had anything to lose. You’ve been doomed from the start because of your sex.”

  “Incidentally, I indulged in a little survey of your female characters.”

  “Here we go. God knows.”

  “Earlier on, you said that according to your belief system, women do not exist. I find it astonishing that a man who professes such a creed has created so many women on paper. I won’t go over all of them, but I counted roughly forty-six female characters in your work.”

  “And what is that supposed to prove?”

  “It proves that women do exist in your ideology: a first contradiction. And you will see, there are others.”

  “Oh! Mademoiselle is on the hunt for contradictions! I would have you know, Mademoiselle Schoolmarm, that Prétextat Tach has raised contradiction to the level of a fine art. Can you imagine anything more elegant, more subtle, more disconcerting, or more acute than my system of self-contradiction? And now along comes a silly little goose—all tha
t’s missing is a pair of glasses on her nose—triumphantly announcing to me that she has uncovered a few unfortunate contradictions in my work! Isn’t it marvelous having such discerning readers?”

  “I never said that the contradiction was unfortunate.”

  “No, but it’s obvious that’s what you were thinking.”

  “I’m in a better position than you to know what I am thinking.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “And, as it happens, I thought the contradiction was interesting.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Forty-six female characters, as I was saying.”

  “For your calculations to be of any interest whatsoever, you should have counted how many male characters there are, too, my child.”

  “I did.”

  “Such presence of mind.”

  “One hundred and sixty-three male characters.”

  “My poor girl, if you did not inspire so much pity, I would readily laugh at such a disproportion.”

  “Beware of pity.”

  “Ooh! She’s read Zweig! How cultured she is! You see, my dear, the peasants who resemble me go no further than Montherlant, who seems to be cruelly lacking from your reading. I pity women, so I hate them, and vice versa.”

  “Since you have such healthy feelings toward our sex, please explain why you created forty-six female characters.”

  “It’s out of the question: you are the one who is going to explain it to me. I would not forego such entertainment for anything on earth.”

  “It is not up to me to explain your work to you. However, I can share a few remarks.”

  “Please do.”

  “I’ll give them to you off the top of my head. You have written books without any women: there is Apology of Dyspepsia, of course—”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “Because it contains no characters at all, obviously.”

  “So it’s true you have read me, at least in part.”