Hygiene and the Assassin Read Online Free PDF Page B

Those nurses are all obsessed. That’s why they go into such a filthy profession.”
    â€œMonsieur Tach, I believe we are getting off the subject again . . .”
    â€œI don’t agree. This daily episode is so perverse that it upsets my digestion. Can you imagine! I’m all alone, humiliated, monstrously fat, and as naked as a worm in the bathwater, in the presence of this clothed creature who undresses me every day, wearing her hypocritically professional expression to hide the fact that she’s wetting her underpants—if the bitch is even wearing any—and when she goes back to the hospital, I’m sure she shares all the details with her girlfriends—they’re all bitches, too—and maybe they even—”
    â€œMonsieur Tach, please!”
    â€œThis will teach you to record me, young man! If you took notes like any honest journalist, you could censor the senile horrors I’m sharing with you. With your machine, however, there is no way you can sort out my pearls from my filthy rubbish.”
    â€œAnd once the nurse has left?”
    â€œShe’s left already? You don’t waste time. Once she’s left, it’s already six o’clock or later. That bitch has gotten me in my pajamas, like a baby you bathe and wrap up in his rompers before giving him his last bottle. By then I feel so infantile that I play.”
    â€œYou play? What do you play?”
    â€œAnything. I drive around in my wheelchair, I set up a slalom, I play darts—look at the wall behind you, you’ll see the damage—or else, supreme delight, I tear out the bad pages in classic novels.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYes, I expurgate.
La Princesse de Clèves
, for example: it’s an excellent novel, but it’s far too long. I don’t suppose you have read it, so I recommend the version I have taken the pains to abridge: a quintessential masterpiece.”
    â€œMonsieur Tach, what would you say if, three centuries from now, someone tore the pages deemed superfluous from your novels?”
    â€œI challenge you to find even one superfluous page in my books.”
    â€œMadame de La Fayette would have told you the same thing.”
    â€œYou’re not going to compare me to that schoolgirl, are you?”
    â€œReally, Monsieur Tach . . .”
    â€œWould you like to know my secret dream? An auto-da-fé. A fine auto-da-fé of my entire work! That’s shut you up, hasn’t it?”
    â€œFine. And after your entertainment?”
    â€œYou are obsessed with food, I swear! The moment I talk about anything else, you get me onto the subject of food again.”
    â€œI am not obsessed, but since we started on that subject, we have to see it through to the end.”
    â€œYou’re not obsessed? You disappoint me, young man. So let’s talk about food, since it doesn’t obsess you. When I’ve finish expurgating, and have had a good round of darts, and slalomed and played nicely, when these educational activities have made me forget the horrors of my bath, I switch on the television, the way little children do, watching their idiotic programs before they have their pablum or their alphabet soup. At that time of day, it’s very interesting. There are endless amounts of commercials, primarily about food. I channel surf in order to put together the longest sequence of commercials on earth: with the sixteen European channels, it is perfectly feasible, if you surf intelligently, to get a full half-hour of uninterrupted commercials. It’s a marvelous multilingual opera: Dutch shampoo, Italian cookies, German organic washing powder, French butter, and so on. What a treat. When the programs get too inane, I switch off the television. I’ve worked up an appetite after all the hundreds of commercials I’ve seen, so I set about making some food. You’re pleased, aren’t you? You should have seen your face, when I pretended to be