In the moonlight, Brisso slept soundly. He lay on his back on the bed, his fat belly standing tall, and a silly smile curled into the corner of his mouth, as if he were an inanimate object, such as a big football or two opera tickets. After a while, he turned over, and the moonlight seemed to shine on him from another angle, and he was like a twenty-seven silver cutlery set of the first course, including a salad bowl and a soup pot.
He was sleeping, and Cloquet was standing in front of him with a revolver thinking, he was dreaming, and I was in reality. Cloquet doesn't like reality, but realizes it's the only place he can eat a good steak. He had never killed anyone before. Indeed, he killed a mad dog, but only after it was proven insane by a group of psychiatrists. (The dog bit off Cloquet's nose and laughed, and was later diagnosed with manic blues.) ）
In the dream, Brizo was happily running to his mother's open arms on the sunlit beach, but as he was about to hug the gray-haired woman with tears in her eyes, she turned into two spoonfuls of vanilla-flavored ice cream. Brissot groaned, and Cloquet put down his revolver. He came in through the window and had been standing calmly in front of Brisso for more than two hours, just unable to pull the trigger. At one point, he even opened the safety and stabbed the muzzle into Brissot's left ear. At this moment, there was a noise on the other side of the door, and Cloquet jumped behind the wardrobe, the pistol still poked in Brisoe's ear.
Brissoe entered the room wearing a flower-patterned yukata, turned on a small lamp, and noticed that the weapon was poked at the side of her husband's head. Almost like a mother, she sighed and took it away and put it next to the pillow, and folded the quilt in the corner of the lift, snapped the light and went out.
Cloquet, who had passed out, woke up an hour later. Panicked, he imagined himself as a child and returned to the Riviera again, but a quarter of an hour passed and he did not see the tourists, only to think that he was still behind Brissot's closet. He went back to bed, grabbed the pistol, and aimed it at Brisso's head again, but still failed to fire the shot to kill the notorious fascist informant.
Guyston Brissot comes from a wealthy right-wing family and has long aspired to be a professional whistleblower. As a young man, he took speech classes in order to make his whistleblowing clearer. He once confessed to Cloquet: "Oh my God, I really like to tell people's secrets!" ”
"Why?" Cloquet asked.
"I don't know. Let them feel bad and scream. ”
Cloquet thought that Brissoe was guilty of snitching on his friend solely for the sake of whistleblowing! Cloquet used to know an Algerian who liked to slap people on the back of the head, then smiled and denied it. People in the world seem to be divided into two kinds, good people and bad people, Cloquet thought to himself, good people sleep better, and when it comes to waking up, bad people seem to have a much happier life.
Brandenburg, Germany
Cloquet and Brisso met a few years ago, and the experience was peculiar. One night Brisso got drunk at the Café and staggered toward the river. Thinking he had arrived at his apartment, he undressed, but instead of lying on the bed, he fell into the Seine. When he tried to pull the sheet, he grabbed a hand of water and screamed. Cloquet was chasing his wig along the new bridge when he heard a shout from the icy water. It was windy and dark that night, and Cloquet had only one moment to decide whether he would risk his life to save a stranger. Unwilling to make this fateful decision on an empty stomach, I went into a restaurant to eat. Later, full of remorse, he went to buy some fishing gear and returned to the scene, trying to catch Brissot. At first he tried to dry the fly, but Brisso was too clever to bite the hook, and eventually Cloquet had to lure him ashore with free dancing lessons and then scoop him up with a net. While measuring and weighing Brisoe, the two became friends.
Cloquet soon approached Brissoe's sleeping bulky body again and raised his pistol again. While contemplating the meaning of his actions, a sense of nausea crossed his mind. It is an existential nausea, caused by a very strong awareness of the contingencies of life, which cannot be relieved with a common cold medicine, but needs an existential cold medicine—a product sold in the Left Bank pharmacy in Paris, a pill that is large, like a car wheel cap, dissolved in water, and can eliminate the nausea that arises when too much thought of life. Cloquet felt that eating Mexican food was also useful.
Cloquet thought at this point, if I choose to kill Brissot, I will define myself as a murderer, and I will become Cloquet the murderer, not simply me: a teacher who teaches poultry psychology at the University of Paris. By choosing my actions, I choose for all humanity. But what if everyone in the world, like me, came here and shot Brizo in the ear? What a mess! Not to mention that the doorbell rings all night. Of course, we also need to have waiters to park for customers. Oh my God, thinking about morality or ethics, makes people's heads big! It's better not to think too much and rely more on the body - the body is more reliable. It is present at meetings, looks good in sportswear, and is really convenient when you want to have a full body massage.
Cloquet suddenly felt the need to reaffirm his existence and looked in the mirror at Brissel's closet. (Every time he passes a mirror, he must glance at it.) Once, at a health club, he stared at his reflection in the pool, so long that managers had to drain the water. It's useless, he can't kill a person. He put down his pistol and ran away.
Once on the street, he decided to go to the Dome Cafe for a glass of brandy. He liked the Dome Cafe because it was always bright and crowded, but he could always find a table to sit in—very different from his own apartment, where the light was dark and oppressive, and where his mother lived, often forbade him to sit. But tonight, the Dome Cafe is full of people. Who are they, Cloquet wondered. They seem to vaguely form an abstract concept: "the masses." Yet there were no masses, he thought, only individuals. Cloquet felt that this was an extraordinarily wonderful point of view, something that could be said at a stylish banquet and impressive. Because of such lofty opinions, he has not been invited to any kind of social gathering since 1931.
He decided to go to Juliet's house.
"Did you kill him?" She asked Juliet's apartment as she walked into him.
"Yes." Cloquet said.
"Are you sure he's dead?"
"It's like dead. I imitated a quote of Maurice Chevalier, which usually gets a lot of applause, but this time there was nothing. ”
"Well, then he can never betray the party again."
Juliet was a Marxist, Cloquet reminded herself, and the most interesting kind — long tanned legs. As far as he knew, she was one of the few women who could have two completely different concepts in her head at the same time, such as Hegel's dialectic and why you put your tongue into someone's ear while he was speaking, why he spoke like Jerry Lewis. She was now standing in front of him in a tight skirt and shirt, and he wanted to possess her—like any other object, like his radio, or a rubber pig mask worn during the occupation to harass the Nazis—as he did.
Suddenly he and Juliet are having sex – or is it just sex? He knows that there is a difference between sex and love, but feels that unless one of them wears a bib when eating lobster, both behaviors are great. He muses that women are gentle, inclusive beings, and living is also a gentle, inclusive being, sometimes completely inclusive of you, and then you never want to go out, except in some really important circumstances, such as your mother's birthday or the obligation to be a juror. Cloquet often thinks of the great difference between "surviving" and "surviving on earth," and thinks that no matter which category he falls into, the other type of person is definitely happier.
After having sex, he slept well as usual. The next morning, however, he was shocked that he had been arrested for murdering Gaston Brissot.
At the police station, Cloquet claimed to be innocent, but they told him Brisoeau's room was full of his fingerprints and on the pistol he found. When Cloquet broke into Brissoe's house, he also made the mistake of signing the guest book. Hopeless, this is a clear case.
The trial that followed in the weeks looked like a circus show, but there were some troubles pulling the elephant to court. In the end, the jury found Croquet guilty and he was guillotined. His appeal for clemency was rejected on a technical basis, namely that Croquet's lawyer wore a fake beard made of cardboard when he filed his appeal.
Six weeks later, on the eve of his execution, Cloquet was alone in his cell, still unable to believe what had happened in the past few months — especially the elephants in the courtroom. At this point tomorrow, he will already be dead. Cloquet always thought that death happened to someone else. "I've noticed that it happens a lot to fat people." He told the lawyer. To Cloquet himself, death seems to be nothing more than another abstract concept. Man dies, he thought, but will Cloquet too? The question puzzled him, but one of the guards explained it clearly by drawing a few simple sketches on a paper book. There is no escape, and soon he will cease to exist.
I'm dying, he thought, nostalgically, but Mrs. Poutnick—whose face looks like something from the menu of a seafood restaurant—will live. Cloquet panicked. He wanted to run away and hide, or even better, into something sturdy and durable—like a bulky chair. A chair wouldn't be in trouble, he thought, it was there, no one bothered it, it didn't have to pay rent and it didn't have to get involved in politics. A chair doesn't hurt its toes or misplaced its earmuffs, it doesn't have to smile or get a haircut, and if you take it to a party, it will suddenly cough or make a noise in public. People just sit in a chair, and when those people die, someone else will come and sit again. From this reasoning, Croquet was comforted by the fact that when the jailer came to shave the hair on his neck, he pretended to be a chair. They asked him what he wanted for his last meal, and he said, "You guys ask a piece of furniture what does it want to eat?" Why don't you put a cover on me? As they glared at him, he softened and said, "Let's have some Russian sauce." ”
Cloquet had always been an atheist, but when Father Bernard arrived, he asked if he had time to convert.
Father Bernard shook his head. "At this time of year, I think the number of people of all major faiths is full." He said, "Time is so short, I can probably make a phone call at most to arrange for you to believe in Hinduism or something." But I need a passport-sized photo. ”
It's useless, Cloakey mused, I had to face my fate alone. Without God, life has no purpose and nothing lasts. When the universe burns out, even works as great as Shakespeare will disappear – of course, if there are no works like Titus? Andronix" is not too bad, but what about the rest? No wonder anyone is suicidal! Why not prevent this absurdity from happening? This empty looking gesture charade game called life, why go through it? Apart from a voice inside us saying "live", what other reason is there? From somewhere inside, we can always hear the command: "Live!" Cloquet recognized whose voice it was: the one who sold him the insurance. Of course, he thought—Fishbine didn't want to lose money.
Cloquet longed for freedom - to leave prison and jump on an empty meadow. (Cloquet always jumped when he was happy, a habit that certainly kept him from joining the army.) The thought of freedom made him both excited and afraid. If I were truly free, he thought, I would have to do my best. Maybe I can be a performer, as I've always hoped. Either appear in the Louvre wearing a fake nose and glasses and wearing bikini underwear.
He thought about how many things he could choose to do, and the more he thought about it, the more excited he became, and he almost fainted, when the jailer opened the cell door and told him that the real murderer of Brisoe had just confessed and that Cloquet could go. Cloquet knelt down and kissed the floor of his cell and sang the La Marseillaise, and he wept! He dances! Three days later, he went to jail again because he appeared at the Louvre wearing a fake nose and glasses and in his bikini underwear.