Hygiene and the Assassin (6 page)

“It's doesn't matter, you are not alone.”

“Couldn't you explain it to me?”

“I despise wasting my time.”

“Monsieur Tach, even supposing that I am stupid and obtuse, can't you imagine that behind me somewhere there is a future reader of this article, an intelligent, open reader who does deserve to understand? And who might be disappointed by what you've just said?”

“And supposing this reader exists: if he is truly intelligent and open, he won't need any explanation.”

“I don't agree. Even an intelligent individual needs an explanation when he is confronted with a new and unknown idea.”

“What do you know? You've never been intelligent.”

“That's as may be, but I am humbly trying to imagine.”

“My poor boy.”

“Go on, show me your proverbial kindness and explain it to me.”

“Do you really want to know? Truly intelligent, open people do not beg for explanations. Nothing is more vulgar than to have everything explained, including the things that are inexplicable. So why should I provide you with an explanation that an idiot would not understand and a more astute individual could not care less about?”

“Already I am ugly, stupid, and obtuse, and now I must add vulgar, is that it?”

“I cannot keep secrets from you.”

“If I may be so bold, Monsieur Tach, this is not the way to go about trying to make people like you.”

“Make people like me? That's all I need. Besides, who are you to come and preach to me, less than two months before my glorious death? Who do you think you are? You began your sentence with ‘If I may be so bold,' well, you may not be so bold! Go on, get out, you're bothering me.”

The journalist was dumbfounded.

“Are you deaf?”

Sheepish, the journalist joined his colleagues in the café across the street. He did not know whether he had gotten off lightly or not.

 

As they listened to the tape, his colleagues didn't say anything, but it was most certainly not at Tach that they aimed their condescending smiles.

“That man is really a case,” said the most recent victim. “Go figure! You never know how he's going to react. Sometimes you get the impression he'll listen to anything, that nothing fazes him, that he even enjoys it if you nuance your questions with some impertinent remarks. And then suddenly without warning he goes and explodes because of a ridiculous detail, or he throws you out the door if you have the unfortunate wisdom to make a tiny, legitimate remark.”

“Genius cannot bear any commentary,” said one of his colleagues, as haughtily as if he were Tach himself.

“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.

W
ell, 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 very 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.”