Free The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson Page B

She shouts into the phone, she puts her music on really loud (and that really gets to me), she slams doors, gives a running commentary on everything she does, including the most fascinating things like brushing her hair and looking for pencils in the drawer. In short, since she can’t invade anything else because I am totally inaccessible to her on a human level, she invades my personal auditory space, and ruins my life from morning to night. You really have to have a pretty impoverished concept of territory to stoop this low; I don’t give a damn about where I happen to be, provided nothing stops me from going into my mind. But Colombe won’t stop at just ignoring the facts; she converts them into philosophy: “My pest of a little sister is an intolerant and depressive little runt who hates other people and would rather live in a cemetery where everyone is dead—whereas I am outgoing, joyful, and full of life.” If there is one thing I detest, it’s when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed. With Colombe, I’ve really lucked out.
    But for the last few months Colombe has not merely been content with being the most dreadful sister in the universe. She has also had the poor taste to behave in a way that worries everyone. I really don’t need this: a hostile lesion of a sister and the spectacle of all her little woes. For the last few months Colombe has been obsessed with two things: order and cleanliness. The infinitely pleasant consequence? From the zombie that I used to be, I have become a dirty swine; she spends her time shouting at me because I left crumbs in the kitchen or because there was a hair in the shower this morning. Having said that, it’s not just me she’s after. Everybody is harassed from morning to night because there’s mess or crumbs. Her room, which used to be the most incredible shambles, has become clinical: everything shipshape, not a speck of dust, every object has its allotted space and woe befall Madame Grémond if once she’s done the cleaning she doesn’t put things back exactly where they were. It looks like a hospital. In a way it wouldn’t bother me that Colombe has become such a neat freak. But what I cannot stand is that she goes on acting as if she’s really laid back. There’s a problem here somewhere but everyone pretends they haven’t noticed and Colombe goes on claiming to be the only one of the two of us to take life “as an Epicurean.” I assure you however that there is nothing the least bit Epicurean about taking three showers a day and shouting like a lunatic because the lamp on your night table has moved two inches.
    What is Colombe’s problem? I really don’t know. Perhaps all this wanting to crush everyone has turned her into a soldier, quite literally. She wants everything just so, she scrubs and cleans as though she is in the army. Soldiers are obsessive about order and cleanliness, that’s a well-known fact. For Colombe, cleanliness is a necessity, a way of combatting chaos, of holding at bay the filth of war and all those little shreds of human being it leaves behind. But in fact I wonder if Colombe is not the extreme case that reveals the norm. Don’t we all deal with life the way we do our military service? Doing what we can, while we wait either to be demobbed or do battle? Some will clean up the barrack-room, others will shirk, or spend their time playing cards, or trafficking, or plotting something. Officers command, soldiers obey, but no one’s fooled by this comedy behind closed doors: one day, you’ll have to go out and die, officers and soldiers alike, the morons along with the wise guys who smuggle toilet paper or deal in cigarettes on the black market.
    While I’m at it, let me give you the basic shrink’s hypothesis: Colombe is so full of chaos inside, so empty and cluttered at the same time, that she is trying to create some order in herself by tidying up and cleaning her inner space. Very funny, right? I