Hygiene and the Assassin

  “What, then? Should I have let myself be insulted?”

  “The ideal thing would have been not to give him cause for any insults.”

  “Very clever! For him, that’s all the world does, give cause for insults!”

  “Poor Tach! Poor exiled titan.”

  “Poor Tach? That’s the limit. Poor us, you mean!”

  “Don’t you understand that we are bothering him?”

  “Yes, I did realize that. But someone has to do our job, no?”

  “Why?” said the other man, feeling inspired, after spitting in the soup.

  “Then why did you become a journalist, jerk?”

  “Because I couldn’t be Prétextat Tach.”

  “You would have enjoyed being a huge graphomaniac eunuch?”

  Yes, he would have enjoyed it, and he was not the only one to contemplate the idea. The human race is made in such a way that many a person of sound mind would be prepared to sacrifice youth, beauty, health, love, friendship, happiness, and much, much more on the altar of an illusion known as eternity.

  Well, has the war begun?”

  “Uh . . . yes, it has, the first missiles have—”

  “Excellent.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t like to see young people sitting around with nothing to do. So at last, on this day of January 17, those young kids are having a good time.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What, don’t you think it would be fun?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “Maybe you think it is more fun to go running after a fat old man with a tape recorder?”

  “Run after? But we’re not running after you, you yourself gave us permission to come.”

  “Never! It was another trick of Gravelin’s, that old dog.”

  “Go on, Monsieur Tach, you are perfectly free to say no to your secretary, he’s a devoted man who respects your every wish.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. He torments me and never consults me. The nurse, for example, that’s all his doing.”

  “Come now, Monsieur Tach, calm down. Let’s go on with the interview. How do you explain the extraordinary success—”

  “Would you like a Brandy Alexander?”

  “No, thank you. As I was saying, the extraordinary success of—”

  “Wait, I would like one.”

  Alchemical interlude.

  “This brand-new war has given me a raging thirst for Brandy Alexanders. It is such a solemn beverage.”

  “Right. Monsieur Tach, How do you explain the extraordinary success of your novels the world over?”

  “I don’t explain it.”

  “Go on, you must have thought about it and come up with some answers.”

  “No.”

  “No? You have sold millions of copies, even in China, and this doesn’t make you think?”

  “Weapons factories sell thousands of missiles the world over every day, and that doesn’t make them think, either.”

  “There’s no comparison.”

  “You don’t think so? And yet there is a striking parallel. There’s an accumulation, for example: we talk about an arms race, we should also talk about a ‘literature race.’ It’s a cogent argument like any other: every nation brandishes its writer or writers as if they were cannons. Sooner or later I too will be brandished, and they’ll prepare my Nobel Prize for battle.”

  “If that’s the way you look at it, I have to agree with you. But thank God, literature is less harmful.”

  “Not mine. My literature is even more harmful than war.”

  “Don’t you think you’re flattering yourself there?”

  “Well, I’m obliged to, because I am the only reader who is capable of understanding me. Yes, my books are more harmful than war, because they make you want to die, whereas war, in fact, makes you want to live. After reading me, people should feel like committing suicide.”

  “And how do you explain the fact that they don’t?”

  “Well, I can explain it very easily: it is because nobody reads me. Basically, that may also be the reason for my extraordinary success: if I am so famous, my good man, it is because nobody reads me.”

  “But that’s a paradox!”

  “On the contrary: if these poor folk had tried to read me, they would have disliked me from the start and, to avenge themselves for the effort they wasted on me, they would have consigned me to oblivion. But because they do not read me, they find me restful and therefore I am to their liking and deserving of success.”

  “That is an extraordinary argument.”

  “But it is irrefutable. Take Homer, for example: now there is a writer who has never been this famous. Yet do you know many people who have truly read the real Iliad, or the real Odyssey? A handful of bald philologists, that’s all—because you can’t really qualify as readers a few dozy high school students mumbling their way through Homer in the classroom when all they’re thinking about is Depeche Mode or AIDS. And it is precisely for that excellent reason that Homer is the authority.”

  “But assuming this is true, do you really think it’s an excellent argument? Is it not regrettable, rather?”

  “I insist that it is excellent. Is it not comforting for a true, pure, great genius of a writer like myself to know that no one reads me? That no trivial gaze has sullied the beauty to which I have given birth in the secrecy of my inner self and of my solitude?”

  “To avoid that trivial gaze, would it not have been simpler not to get published at all?”

  “That would be too easy. No, you see, the nec plus ultra of refinement is to sell millions of copies and never be read.”

  “Not to mention the fact that you have earned a great deal of money.”

  “Certainly. I do like money.”

  “You like money, do you?”

  “Yes. It’s ravishing. I’ve never found it useful, but I do enjoy looking at it. A five franc coin is as pretty as a daisy.”

  “Now, such a comparison would have never occurred to me.”

  “That’s normal, you are not a Nobel laureate.”

  “Basically, doesn’t your Nobel Prize go against your theory? Doesn’t it oblige us to assume that at least the Nobel committee has read your work?”

  “I wouldn’t bank on it. But in the event that the committee members did read me, you can be sure that it wouldn’t change anything about my theory. There are a great many people who push sophistication to the point of reading without reading. They’re like frogmen, they go through books without absorbing a single drop of water.”

  “Yes, you mentioned them in a previous interview.”

  “Those are the frog-readers. They make up the vast majority of human readers, and yet I only discovered their existence quite late in life. I am so terribly naïve. I thought that everyone read the way I do. For I read the way I eat: that means not only do I need to read, but also, and above all, that reading becomes one of my components and modifies them all. You are not the same person depending on whether you have eaten blood pudding or caviar; nor are you the same person depending on whether you have just read Kant (God help us) or Queneau. Well, when I say ‘you,’ I should say ‘I myself and a few others,’ because the majority of people emerge from reading Proust or Simenon in an identical state: they have neither lost a fraction of what they were nor gained a single additional fraction. They have read, that’s all: in the best-case scenario, they know ‘what it’s about.’ And I’m not exaggerating. How often have I asked intelligent people, ‘Did this book change you?’ And they look at me, their eyes wide, as if to say, ‘Why should a book to change me?’”

  “Allow me to express my astonishment, Monsieur Tach: you have just spoken as if you were defending books with a message, and that’s not like you.”

  “You’re not v
ery clever, are you? So are you of the opinion that only books ‘with a message’ can change an individual? Those are the books that are the least likely to change them. The books that have an impact, that transform people, are the other ones—books about desire, or pleasure, books filled with genius, and above all books filled with beauty. Let us take, for example, a great book filled with beauty: Journey to the End of the Night. How can you not be transformed after you have read it? Well, the majority of readers manage just that tour de force without difficulty. They will come to you and say, ‘Oh yes, Céline is magnificent,’ and then they go back to what they were doing. Obviously, Céline is an extreme example, but I could mention others, too. You are never the same after you have read a book, even as modest a work as one by Léo Malet: one of his books will change you. You will never again look at young women in raincoats in the same way once you’ve read a book by Léo Malet. Really, this is extremely important! Changing the way people see things: that is our magnum opus.”

  “Don’t you think that, consciously or unconsciously, everybody changes the way they see things after they have finished a book?”

  “Oh, no! Only the crème de la crème of readers can do that. The others go on seeing things with their usual flatness. And here we are only talking about readers, who in themselves are a very rare species. Most people do not read. In this regard, there is an excellent quotation by an intellectual whose name I have forgotten: ‘Basically, people do not read; or, if they do read, they don’t understand; or, if they do understand, they forget.’ An admirable summing-up of the situation, don’t you agree?”

  “If that is the case, is it not tragic to be a writer?”

  “If there is something tragic about the situation, that is certainly not the reason. It is beneficial not to be read. You can write whatever you like.”

  “But in the beginning, someone must have read you, otherwise you would not have become famous.”

  “In the beginning, perhaps, a little bit.”

  “Which brings me back to my initial question: how do you explain your extraordinary success? Why did your early novels touch a nerve with readers?”

  “I don’t know. That was back in the 1930s. There was no television, people had to find something to keep busy.”

  “Yes, but why you, rather than another writer?”

  “The truth is, it was after the war that I began to be so successful. Which is amusing when you think about it, because I was in no way involved with that huge farce: I was already virtually a total invalid, and ten years earlier, I had been declared unfit for service because of my obesity. In 1945 the great expiation began: whether they were confused or not, people felt they had reasons to be ashamed. So when they happened upon my novels, which seemed to be screaming with imprecations and were overflowing with filth, they decided they had found a punishment commensurate with their own baseness.”

  “And was it?”

  “It might have been. But it might have been something else, too. But there you are, vox populi, vox dei. And then very quickly they stopped reading me. As with Céline, moreover: Céline is probably one of the least read of all writers. The difference is that I wasn’t being read for the right reasons, whereas he wasn’t being read for the wrong reasons.”

  “You often refer to Céline.”

  “I love literature, sir. Are you surprised?”

  “You do not expurgate him, I gather?”

  “No. He’s the one who is constantly expurgating me.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “No, I’ve done better than that: I’ve read him.”

  “And has he read you?”

  “Certainly. I could often sense as much when I was reading him.”

  “You think you have influenced Céline?”

  “Less than he influenced me, but still.”

  “And who else might you have influenced?”

  “No one, obviously, because no one else has read me. Although, thanks to Céline, I have been read—truly read—at least once.”

  “So you see that you do want to be read.”

  “By him, only by him. I don’t give a damn about other people.”

  “Have you met other writers?”

  “No, I have met no one and no one has come to meet me. I know very few people: Gravelin, of course, and apart from him, the butcher, the milkman, the grocer, and the tobacconist. That’s all, I think. Oh yes, there’s also that bitch of a nurse, and the journalists. I don’t like to see people. If I live alone, it’s not so much because I love solitude but that I hate humankind. You can write in your rag that I’m a filthy misanthropist.”

  “Why are you a misanthropist?”

  “You haven’t read Filthy People, I suppose?”

  “No.”

  “Naturally. If you had read it, you would know why. There are a thousand reasons to despise people. The most important one, for me, is their bad faith, which is incorrigible. What’s more, nowadays, this bad faith is more widespread than ever. You can well imagine that I have lived through a number of eras: nevertheless, I can assure you that never have I so despised an era the way I do this one. An era of full-blown bad faith. Bad faith is worse than disloyalty, duplicity, perfidy. If you are in bad faith, first of all you are lying to yourself, not because you are struggling with your conscience, but for your own syrupy self-satisfaction, using pretty names like ‘modesty’ or ‘dignity.’ And then you’re lying to other people, but not with honest, nasty lies, not to stir up shit, no: your lies are those of a hypocrite, a lite liar, ranting and raving with a smile, as if this would make everyone happy.”

  “For example?”

  “Well, the condition of women in this day and age.”

  “In what way? Are you a feminist?”

  “Me, a feminist? I hate women even more than I hate men.”

  “Why?”

  “For a thousand reasons. First of all, because they are ugly: have you ever seen anything uglier than a woman? What a senseless idea to have breasts, and hips—I’ll spare you the rest. And then, I hate women the way I hate all victims. A filthy race, victims. If we were to exterminate them altogether, perhaps we’d have peace at last, and perhaps at last the victims would get what they want, which is martyrdom. Women are particularly pernicious victims because they are, above all else, the victims of other women. If you want to penetrate the dregs of human emotions, take a good look at the feelings that women cultivate toward other women: you will tremble with horror at the sight of so much hypocrisy, jealousy, nastiness, and iniquity. You will never see two women having a good healthy fistfight or even flinging a good volley of insults at each other: with women, it’s the nasty tricks that triumph, the vile little phrases that hurt far more than a good punch in the jaw. You’ll tell me there’s nothing new about all that, that the world of women has been like this since Adam and Eve. But I will tell you that the lot of women has never been worse, and it’s their own fault, we agree on that, but what does that change? The condition of women has become the arena for truly disgusting manifestations of bad faith.”

  “You still haven’t explained anything.”

  “Let’s look at the way things used to be. Women are inferior to men, that goes without saying: all you have to do is see how ugly they are. In the past, there was no bad faith. No one tried to hide women’s inferiority, and they were treated in consequence. But what we have nowadays is revolting: women are still inferior to men—for they are still just as ugly—but they are being told that they are man’s equal. And because they are stupid, naturally they believe it. Yet women are still being treated as inferior: salaries are merely one minor sign of this. There are others that are far more serious: women are still far behind in every domain—charm, to begin with—there’s nothing surprising about that, given how ugly they are, and how little intelligence they have, and given above all their disgusting spitefulness, which crops
up at the first opportunity. You have to admire the bad faith of the system: take an ugly, stupid, nasty, charmless slave and make her believe that she is starting off with the same opportunities as her master—when in fact she has only a quarter as many. Personally I find it appalling. If I were a woman, I would be sick.”

  “But you do conceive, I hope, that other people might not agree with you?”

  “‘Conceive’ is not the appropriate verb. I do not conceive it, I am offended by it. What perfidy will you invoke to contradict me?”

  “My own taste, to begin with. I don’t think women are ugly.”

  “My poor friend, you have potty taste.”

  “A woman’s breasts are a beautiful thing.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying. Already on the glossy paper of a magazine those female protuberances are at the limit of what is acceptable. What about the ones belonging to real women, the ones they dare not show and which make up the vast majority of tits? Yuck.”

  “That’s just your taste. We’re not obliged to share it.”

  “Oh, of course, you might even think a lump of fat sold at the butcher’s is a thing of beauty: nothing is forbidden.”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “Women are filthy slabs of meat. Sometimes it is said of a particularly ugly woman that she is a lump of fat: the truth of the matter is that all women are lumps of fat.”

  “Allow me to ask you then what you think you are!”

  “A lump of lard. Can you not tell?”

  “So do you think that men are beautiful?”

  “I didn’t say that. Men’s bodies are less horrible than women’s. But that does not make them beautiful.”

  “So no one is beautiful?”

  “No, some children are very beautiful. Unfortunately, it does not last.”

  “Do you consider childhood to be a blessed time?”

  “Did you hear what you’ve just said? ‘Childhood is a blessed time.’”

  “It’s a cliché, but it’s true, no?”

  “Of course it’s true, animal! But is it necessary to say so? Everybody knows it.”