The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet

Author:Laurent Binet
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781473524637
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Published: 2017-04-23T23:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Ithaca

48

Althusser is in a panic. He’s searched through all his papers, but he cannot find the precious document that was entrusted to him and which he hid in a junk-mail envelope, left in plain sight on his desk. Although he never read the document, he’s a nervous wreck because he knows it is of the utmost importance that he returns it to the people who gave it to him for safekeeping, and that this is his responsibility. He rummages around in his wastepaper basket, empties his drawers, takes his books one by one from the shelves and hurls them onto the floor in a rage. He feels filled with a dark anger at himself, mixed with an embryonic suspicion when he decides to shout: ‘Hélène! Hélène!’ She runs up to him, worried. Does she, by any chance, know where … an envelope … opened … junk mail … a bank or a pizzeria … he can’t remember … Hélène, in a natural voice, says: ‘Oh yes, I remember, that old envelope … I threw it away.’

Time stops for Althusser. He doesn’t ask her to repeat it. What’s the point? He heard her perfectly well. But still, there’s hope: ‘The bin …?’ I emptied it last night, and the binmen took it away this morning. A long groan howls deep inside the philosopher while he tenses his muscles. He looks at his wife, dear old Hélène, who has put up with him for so many years, and he knows that he loves her, he admires her, he feels sorry for her, he blames himself, he knows what he put her through with his caprices, his infidelities, his immature behaviour, his childlike need for his wife to support him in his choice of mistresses, and his manic-depressive fits (‘hypomania’, they call it), but this, this is too much, this is much, much more than he can tolerate – yes, him, the immature impostor – and he throws himself at his wife, screaming like a wild beast, and grabs her throat with his hands that tighten around it like a vice, and Hélène, taken by surprise, stares at him wide-eyed but does not try to defend herself, putting her hands on his but not really struggling. Maybe she knew all along that it would have to end like this, or maybe she just wanted to put an end to it one way or another, and this way was as good as any, or maybe Althusser is just too fast, too violent. Maybe she wanted to live and recalled, at that instant, one or two phrases written by Althusser, this man she loved – ‘one does not abandon a concept like a dog’, perhaps – but Althusser strangles his wife like a dog, except that he is the dog, ferocious, selfish, irresponsible, maniacal. When he loosens his grip, she is dead. A bit of tongue – a ‘poor little bit of tongue’, he will say – sticks out of her mouth and her bulging eyes stare at her murderer or the ceiling or the void of her existence.

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