We stroll in a museum where one of the critically lauded exhibitions is being
held and where the crowds appear to rush with furor for want of fervor. We have
the idea of ambushing before the artwork, whichever it may be, exhibited under
inventory number 92, the original index of the sentence where Proust has lodged
Bregotte in the volume we are currently occupied with reducing. We bet that the
work thus elected will have, by the providence of the curators, been hung in a
judiciously strategic gallery. There, we will wait, slightly withdrawn, for the
twenty second spectator.
(Don't hope, if you please dear reader, for a description of the number 92
work. It could just as well be: a View of Delft after the explosion of 1654, a
Deposition, a Lamentation, Christ on the Cross, a Nocturne of ruins with St.
Augustine, a round of beef on a butcher's hook. Anything you want! This story is
a potlach, where the reader is asked to bring their own album, their own food,
their own museum.)
We wait, we count, we marvel at the squeeze gathering before the pictures.
Finally, we catch sight of "Bregotte," or even, we are presented with the body,
going against the grain of this painterly melange, dwindling slowly from left to
right, against the viscous mass, which will be Bregotte. As he enters the group,
we only see his back, but he is definitely the twenty second body captured by
the spectacle of the elected work.
When he will finally be tempted to tear himself away from the attraction of
the painting and the human cluster agglutinated around it, he will turn around,
and I will recognise and realise that this crime, above all, is for me an
atrocity capable of exceeding my determination.
In "Bregotte," I have recognized Mr. Cadillac.
I must stop here to tell you about Mr. Cadillac. I don't know anything about
his personal life. I suspect above all that he was a promising mathematician or
talented criminal long before even I was born. I knew him when he was already
old and already withdrawn personally from the affairs which occupied his youth
and maturity. That's the tendency of all criminal enterprise.
Since after the swelling wave of crime seizes and overflows life, when the
appetite for risk is attenuated, and like a river which returns to its course
after backflow from a huge wave, life regains the upper hand. Now, throughout
this first period, the criminal has slowly but surely brought out the strategy,
the formula, of his violence. He knows which situations, if he is an assassin,
which objects, if he is a thief, furnish for him the indifferent yet necessary
material for his depredations, whether a firearm or oxyacetylene torch. He knows
that he has committed the best assaults under the cover of foggy nights, with
women half-drowned or hanged from trees. A day came when, by the wearing thin of
his nerves, he no longer had the material needed to serve his genius, the force
and effort of cruelty able to produce his crime. He continues in his research
however, happy to find in them a cause for violent pleasure, bait for the
passage to an act which they have awoken in him. Surrounding himself with others
as a sort of talisman, as though a good part of the criminal act resided and
could be carried out by them ready-made, he does not go further than the
frequentation or surveillance of his virtual victims. He buys a country house in
a region where the nights are saturated with fog; he passes the long hours
eyeing women as they bathe; he collects the rope.
It is at this stage, situated on this other side of crime, through the
deceleration of murderous genius, commodity fetishism, and risk aversion,
finished off by retrogression, where we find Mr. Cadillac.
It had been left at the edge of an airport, shut in between highway
interchanges and a knot of railway lines, a wreaking yard, a cemetery for
crashed up cars and other broken machines. The wreckage, compressed and piled up
to a height of many meters, formed an enclosed rampart. Inside, more wreckage
was piled in concentric circles, dreadful angles of steel, rust, glass and iron,
oil, brake fluid, and antifreeze oozing from all their deadly fissures. At the
centre, in the heart of this fortified labyrinth, a corrugated steel hangar sat
enthroned in refuge, sheltered in an empty pit, its four rectangular movable
lanterns eternally oriented towards a yellow convertible Cadillac Eldorado 1976,
the rosary and cross of its guardian who I have named after this monstrosity.
The fortress had been named "The CarCase," a name incised with a blowtorch in
seven rusted car hoods which hung side by side on a chain bolted onto the
portico of scrap metal scaffolding which marked the threshold.
The cannibalistic genius of Mr Cadillac: tank, fridge, bike, hydraulic press,
any trash, he would take it apart. Rigorously. With a pipe wrench, with a
screwdriver, with metal shears, with a blowtorch, whatever suited his fancy. Mr.
Cadillac had as intimate a knowledge of metal as a mite of skin, a driller
beetle of its sustaining forest. A dissector, an anatomist of wreckage, of iron,
he would dislocate a fender for you, depose an engine, pull off a wheel with a
single precise, measured motion, without humming and hawing, unbolt, unscrew,
desolder, luxate.
However, his genius came with a curse attached, a tragic flaw: he was not as
good a mechanic as he was at taking things apart, a surgeon inspired only by
autopsies. And the Eldorado which he had entirely eviscerated, skinned, and
excoriated to its very skeleton in 24 furious hours, took him no less than four
years to reassemble and bring back to a drivable state.
When he made this acquisition, the mice had already finished stripping the
electrical wires. Always put up on blocks, she reposed upon her rims which her
monstrous mass had hidden and bent. The oil had seized in the engine, paralysed
the pistons in their housings. The radiator, pierced, crumbled into flakes of
rust.
Even so, he brought her here: let me tell ya, when Mr. Cadillac tried
changing a sparkplug, he couldn't help but, by some strange mistake, strip the
threading and screw up the hole. He, consequently, reamed the whole thing out
and rethreaded a fresh one. An ironic fatality was when this flaw in the iron
remained just as it was until the day Mr. Cadillac inclined himself to this
dormant engine block, decided to assault it with an auger, and split the whole
cylinder head in half in the process...
Thus, proceeded the resurrection of the Eldorado: through ignitions fused by
the force of tentative engine timings, through thrown connecting rods, through
de-toothed gears, through incendiary short-circuits... And the quest, like so
many mystic Grails, for spare parts: some improvised, other cannibalized here
and there, some others unobtainable, copied in despair from scratch with antique
tooling machines, lathes or mills arrived at the last possible moment, and how
many victims succumbed to that particular curse of Mr. Cadillac? Besides, maybe,
the massive chassis, not one original piece remained. They had been piled up to
and by measure of their demise in old bathtubs filled with used oil, and in
these sarcophagi, they were protected from corrosion for a time. Since Mr.
Cadillac, when I knew him, having achieved the reconstruction of the Eldorado,
planned nothing less than proceeding thus in their selection and cleaning, then
reconstructing an entire car from these fragments, these ruins, an original
double of the Eldorado which, he himself admitted, would never drive.
But this other Eldorado would not have been a car. Rather, a statue, a model
of the natural grandeur of the other, its Idea, and stripped in its immobile
in-utility, more perfect, more desirable, more enigmatic than the other.
The other, she has been driven and will be driven again perhaps. She drove
during a good month when he sold plenty of hubcaps, alternators, starters,
radiators, doors, and fenders... Mr. Cadillac invited me: we went for a spin. I
put down my Allen Key, scoured my hands, took off, out of respect for the white
leather seats, my blue boilersuit. We slammed the enormous doors, pet the thick
bodywork of the monster encouragingly. Mr. Cadillac turned the starter, lifting
the gearshift into Drive, depressing the brake pedal like an invitation and
maneuvered the beast out of the labyrinth.
Once launched onto the asphalt, into the 8-Track Player we put the only
cartridge we could hunt down for this long obsolete medium, we listened
religiously to John Denver's Greatest Hits, attentive each time to the melody --
slightly syncopated... the tape speed never perfectly synchronized... -- the
eight cylinders, the cooing of the connecting rod, the clicking of the gimbals,
all slightly out of sync in the divine symphony of the Eldorado resuscitated
from among the wreckage. We braved all seasons, and through all the ventilation
grills, air conditioning pushed to the point of extreme frigidity. There was no
way to interrupt it, the controller had died permanently set to Max, barring
changing the fuse, but that -- the mysteries of electrical circuits fiddled
about by Mr. Cadillac -- would shunt out the turn indicators as well. The old
magnetic band spluttered a bit; we sometimes heard double, and it took us aback,
the echo coming in advance of the voices to come: a masking effect or one of
phantom prefiguration, the magnetic field having died, reverberating through its
support, losing its colour to the force of time and intimacy, the turn of one
band upon the other.
It's not that we went through it quickly, but he often stopped to fill the
gas tank which opened up like a money pit. From ignition, with every automatic
drink taken, it let out a puff of black smoke... We returned to the yard
consummated, filled up, or rather as soon as it looked like rain: Mr. Cadillac
never had managed to patch up the convertible roof of his Eldorado and
re-tighten the ragged black fabric onto its articulated steel struts, leaving it
to flap about in the breeze.
I knew therefore, as I left the museum, without needing to launch myself into
his toolkit, where to find that work I had designed for my victim.
My determination for the first time vacillated. I wandered the streets
aimlessly, without a prey to which I could attach my path, uncertain which
direction to take and my reason for taking it, on this occasion.
My project, as I understood it, responded to three principles which I had
discerned for my work in a necessary flash of intuitional coherence that
memorable night.
First, the moral principle, I had been led toward conceiving an enterprise
that was certainly difficult, but not impossible, mastered and regulated from
start to finish and in return governing all the details of my fully dedicated
life.
Second, the formal principle, combining the most rigorous determinism with
the purest randomness, required that I correlate ostensibly and according to an
ultimately necessary law, the two distinct sequences of language with bodies, of
names with the world.
Third, the aesthetic principle, allowed me, excluding all subjective
mirroring, to capture in the reflection of one in the other, the following two
mirages: the perfect crime and the free act.
However, here is something which has entered into the perfect form of my
murder and set up an obstacle.
Must we, could we follow a rule of which the constraint threatens the most
natural inclinations of our heart, violates our most tender affections? Could I
have remained devoted to Art, through crime, and to the necessary impersonality
I had consecrated to inhumanity? Who obliged me to follow this horrible rule?
Was I not free, since I had freely imposed it upon myself, to disengage as well,
fully and freely following my personal preference to make an exception of Mr.
Cadillac, that is to say, give him mercy?
The name "Mr. Cadillac" was the very obstacle. The name was not alive, was
not simply the adventitious label stuck onto an unknown and indifferent body. My
acquaintance with that man was attached necessarily to a whole series of traits,
properties, descriptions. How could I make, to put it this way, a tabula rasa of
my memory and substitute for this name, that which hastened my remembrances
through allusions and affectations, the bundle of descriptions through which the
novel evoked the personality of Bregotte? An impossible palimpsest: the person
between the opaque body and the transparent name interposes itself, the
devastating supplementary link in the equation on which I aimed to establish my
murder. Between the identity proposed between "Bregotte" and some X allocated in
two pure formal indices, a gender and a number, is a complicated instance of the
third term, Mr. Cadillac, just as valid? Is murderous identification an
operation endowed with transitivity?
Wasn't there in the same fact of excusing myself from following the trace of
the body I had chosen by the usual operation, the sign that I had dispelled my
own rule? If I contravened the procedure which boils down ultimately to the very
same rule, do I not deceive myself in adhering once again to my rule, am I not
already in the process of interpreting it, that is to say, at the point of
faking adherence? I would succeed doubtlessly in searching for Mr. Cadillac in
the place I knew I would find him, and assassinating him, with the same apparent
result as if I had followed him effectively, in his footsteps, by the regular
procedure and would be able to shoot him down, an instance accomplished in the
murderous ascension of "Bregotte" into Bregotte, the result being his death, but
I would have reached this result by virtue -- or by the fault of -- a false
calculation of probability and a nullifying vice of form.
Imagine if we asked a colour-blind person if the traffic light before them
was green, yellow, or red. He will certainly furnish a correct answer, not
however by virtue of effectively identifying the colour of the light but by the
grace of some surreptitious operation by which, through extensive practice of
outwitting the infirmity of his perception, he breaks out to produce that
response from the knowledge he already has of the conventional spatial
distribution of colours on these traffic lights, at the bottom "green," in the
middle "amber," at the top "red." And this man who has never in his life gone
through a "red" light is the same man who is incapable of pulling two of the
same colour socks out of his drawer every morning.
At the end of the day, was it not obscene, to have the facility (and a
dangerous facility if one abandons themselves to it) to assassinate someone we
know, like an author recounting, under various masks and guises, his own life,
then passing off as a novel what amounts to his own personal diary? That
confounds fiction and falsification. But, however fluently our current
ultra-postmodern authors proceed, these grand cosmetics, making up outrageous
lives as though fabricating a crime from an accident -- or if the crime is
lacking, making up all the little contingencies of existence into a fatal
destiny -- , and convincing us that it suffices for a false license plate and a
coat of paint to give their wheezy family novel all the allure of a vehicle
desirable enough to inspire the temptation of audacious robberies and the charm
of smuggling. Neither writers nor aesthetes, or more properly aestheticians, all
of those little beauty parlors, skin care, manicures, facial masks, smooth the
ironic wrinkles.
Thus I was reasoning, how can we not suspect that these philosophical systems
which seem to contain the most truth, in the final analysis, have not been
dictated to their followers through emotional reasons, and how can we not
suppose that reasons of this kind can govern without them realising it? I
accepted without doubt the logical choice of sparing Mr. Cadillac even though I
knew that my affection for him, my pain at the prospect of his disappearance, of
his resorption into Bregotte, was dictated by an old familiarity. Doubtlessly
reason is free: yet it yields surreptitiously to certain laws which do not come
from within.
Is it not for us to assure that no contingency, no consideration of our
reticular predilections troubles the order of our duties which we have fixed in
codes of conduct? Is it not by their subjugation, cruel but necessary, that we
finally abandon the indulgences of our selves and the seduction of our
capricious reason? Who forces me to follow these rules, horror of horrors, if
not myself? What kind of duty is an asceticism that we renounce and desert at
the first sign of temptation? It is neither a rule nor an imperative, it is
hypocritical libertinage, vain ceremony. If it costs nothing to follow the
categorical law to which I have devoted myself, where would be my courage, my
liberty?
What does it matter to others if the colour-blind person wears mismatching
socks if he always manages to stop at red lights? Who could object to him if he
does not stop truly due to the red of the red light? In practice, and whether
the light is red or "red," the result is identical and therefore indiscernible.
Or as could be said although it sets up a contradiction to what I had previously
suggested: Wenn sich alles so verhält als hätte eine Tat Bedeautung, dann hat
sie ach Bedeutung.
The aesthetic objection even more so than the moral or formal objection
restrained me. Here's the argument I opposed it with. The obscenity, the
facility are not, in the assassination of those we know, no more than in the
rest of the work, inevitable fatalities. If the murder might be conceived as a
sacrifice accorded integrally by some impersonal law, it therefore evades the
dishonourable motivation: it becomes perfectly free. Abraham, Agamemnon rendered
themselves to divine injunction, to the order of a tragic or peculiar form of
election. In our world, finally disenchanted of transcendence, my murderous rule
is the last categorical position possible. Or again: if we do not seek to read
the indecipherable, express that which is not, but only if it has been
safeguarded from disappearance, and maybe the indecipherable void, unspeakably,
it will find itself a figuration.
My resolution would hold. I would go to the threshold of the wreaking yard.
At this moment of my sojourn, an airplane taking off in the haze of a nearby
runway, engines roaring, so close, so far outside the fortress, would awaken
echoes in its metallic caverns, like a tragic sympathy, like a nostalgia, that
of the wreckage for soaring and living speed. Mr. Cadillac would be there, at
the centre of his labyrinth, perched upon a beater car, tinkering with its bits.
My visit, surprisingly, will be delightful. He will fetch water for coffee made
by the flame of his blowtorch. He will tell me a story, obscene and subtle,
inevitably kitch, whose duration will not miss coinciding with the time it takes
for the water in his tin bottle to reach its boiling point.
Gavagaï, the deaf-blind mutt, will leave to greet me from the tambour of the
washing machine which serves as his niche. He will make his tour pissing on the
red Panhard, his favourite, climbing up on the mountain of exhaust pipes,
provoking an avalanche. He will get lost in the guts of the maze and groan
softly in whatever carcass has been ruined in this necropolis of metal, this
sarcophagus which resonates like a statue of the great god Ba'al on the day when
sacrifices to the patron of Carthage took place. Then, coffee drunk, and as
though recovering our old habits I would go and start a work of heroic
demolition, I will seize myself of the mass which trails from the lemon-rust
oil, and with a single well-adjusted stroke to the forehead, knock down
Bregotte. He will fall backward among his boxes of bolts, pistons, fragments of
broken cylinders. He will attach his gaze, like a child in pursuit of a
butterfly, to his precious little piece of yellow bodywork which, lying in the
corner of the hanger, appears there at the edge of his vision. He might think
upon the various coats of paint he had promised to layer on. His lips will move.
He will repeat to himself, even if you don't hear it, "Little chipped piece of
yellow bodywork, little chipped piece of yellow bodywork."
