Hygiene and the Assassin

by Amélie Nothomb

  “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 fr
om 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.”

  “I am beginning to understand.”

  “You took long enough.”

  “I’m beginning to understand how very sick you really are.”

  “Well, what will you have to say about what’s next, then?”

  “With you, I can always be sure of the worst.”

  “With me or without me, you may always be sure of the worst, but I believe I have spared at least one person from the worst. Léopoldine saw my gaze stop abruptly behind her and she turned around. She got out of the water as quickly as she could, as if she were terrified. She hoisted herself up next to me onto the stony island. There was no longer any doubt as to the origin of the stream of blood. My cousin was filled with aversion, which I could well understand. All through the three preceding years, we had never evoked this possibility. We had a sort of tacit agreement regarding the behavior we would adopt in this event—an event that was so unacceptable that in order to preserve our blissful stupor, we preferred to keep to a tacit agreement.”

  “This is what I was afraid of. Léopoldine had asked nothing of you, and you killed her in the name of a ‘tacit agreement’ that stemmed from the unhealthy darkness of your imagination alone.”

  “She did not ask me anything explicitly, but it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Just as I said. In a few minutes you’re going to start bragging about the virtue of what remains unsaid.”

  “Someone like you would have wanted a contract drawn up and signed in the presence of a lawyer, is that it?”

  “I would have preferred anything to the way you behaved.”

  “It hardly matters what you would have preferred. The only thing that mattered was Léopoldine’s salvation.”

  “The only thing that mattered was your conception of Léopoldine’s salvation.”

  “It was also her conception. The proof, dear Mademoiselle, is that we said nothing to each other. I kissed her eyes very softly and she understood. She seemed calm, and she smiled. It all happened very quickly. Three minutes later she was dead.”

  “What, just like that, without any time elapsing at all? That’s . . . that’s monstrous.”

  “You would have wanted it to last for two hours, like at the opera?”

  “But you don’t just go around killing people that way.”

  “Oh, no? I wasn’t aware that there are was a prescribed way of doing it. Is there a treatise on etiquette for assassins? A handbook on savoir-vivre for victims? Next time, I promise you that I will kill more courteously.”

  “Next time? Thank God, there will not be a next time. In the meantime, you make me want to vomit.”

  “In the meantime? You intrigue me.”

  “So, you claimed to love her, and you strangled her without even telling her one last time?”

  “She knew it. My gesture was the proof, after all. If I had not loved her so deeply, I would not have killed her.”

  “How can you be sure that she knew?”

  “We never talked about such things, we were on the same wavelength. And besides, we weren’t talkative. But let me tell you about the strangling. I’ve never had the opportunity to talk about it, but I like thinking about it—how many times have I relived that beautiful scene in the private realm of my memory?”

  “What a way to pass the time!”

  “You’ll see, you’ll begin to like it, too.”

  “Like what? Your memories, or strangling?”

  “Love. But let me tell you the story, please.”

  “Since you insist.”

  “There we were on the stony island, in the middle of the lake. From the moment that death was decreed, Eden, which had just been brutally wrenched from us two minutes earlier, was restored to us for three. We were absolutely aware that all we had left was one hundred and eighty seconds of Eden, so we were determined to do things properly, and we did them properly. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: that all the credit for a good job of strangling belongs to the strangler alone. That is not true. The victim is far less passive than you would think. Have you seen that very bad film made by a barbarian—a Japanese filmmaker, if my memory serves me correctly—which ends with a scene of strangling that lasts roughly thirty-two minutes?”

  “Yes, Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses.”

  “The strangling scene is botched. As something of an expert, I can assure you that it doesn’t happen like that. First of all, a strangling that lasts thirty-two minutes: I ask you, such bad taste! It’s as if there were a reluctance on the part of all art forms to accept that murders are alert, rapid events. Hitchcock at least had figured that much out. And then, another thing that this Japanese gentleman did not understand: there is nothing languid or painful about strangling; on the contrary, it’s invigorating, it’s fresh.”

  “Fresh? Not the way I’d describe it! Why not say nourishing, while you’re at it?”

  “Why not, indeed? You do feel revitalized, when you’ve strangled someone you love.”

  “The way you talk about it, you’d think you do it on a regular basis.”

  “All it takes is to have done something once—but done it deeply—in order to do it again continually, throughout your entire life. To this end, it is imperative that the crucial scene be one of aesthetic perfection. That Japanese man must not have known this, or else he was extremely clumsy, because his strangling scene is ugly, even ridiculous: the woman who is strangling looks as if she’s pumping, and the victim looks as if he’s being crushed under a steamroller. My own strangling scene, on the other hand, and you can take my word for it, was splendid.”

  “I don’t doubt it. And yet I would like to ask you one question: why did you choose strangling? Given where you were, drowning would have been more logical. That was, moreover, the explanation you gave your cousin’s parents, when you brought them the corpse—hardly a believable explanation, given the marks on her neck. So, why didn’t you simply drown the child?”

  “An excellent question. It did cross my mind on that day of August 13, 1925. I reached my decision very quickly. I told myself that if all Léopoldines were to die by drowning, it would become something of a standard procedure, subject to the law of genre, and that would be altogether too trite. Not to mention the fact that the memory of Victor Hugo might have been outraged by such servile plagiarism.”1

  “So you renounced the idea of drowning to avoid creating a reference. But the choice of strangling exposed you to other references.”

  “True, yet I did not really take that into consideration. No, my decision to strangle my cousin was based, above all, upon the beauty of her neck. Whether you looked at her nape or at her throat, she had a sublime neck, long and supple, admirably conceived. Such finesse! To strangle someone like me, you would need at least two pairs of hands. With a delicate neck like hers, it was incredibly easy to put my hands around her.”

&n
bsp; “And if she had not had this beautiful neck, would you have not strangled her?”

  “I don’t know. I might have done it all the same, because I’m a very hands-on sort of person. And as far as death techniques go, you can’t get much more hands-on than strangling. It gives your hands an incomparable impression of sensual plenitude.”

  “So you see, you did do it for your own pleasure! Why are you trying to sell me on the idea that you strangled her for her own salvation?”

  “My dear young woman, you have the excuse that you know nothing about theology. However, since you claim to have read all my books, you ought to understand. I wrote a fine novel entitled Concomitant Grace, which describes the ecstasy that God gives us in the course of our actions to make them meritorious. I did not invent the notion, it’s one that true mystics know well. You see, as I was strangling Léopoldine, my pleasure was a grace concomitant with the salvation of my beloved.”

  “You’re going to end up telling me that Hygiene and the Assassin is a Catholic novel.”

  “No. It’s an edifying novel.”

  “So please complete my edification, and tell me the last scene.”