The Eldorado 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 There, we will wait, slightly withdrawn, for the twenty second spectator.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 I knew him when he was already old and already withdrawn personally from the affairs which occupied his youth and maturity.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." Another stroke will be made. He will be dead. Forever.