Things and A Man Asleep

by Georges Perec

  Or again, they would push open a door into a small restaurant and joyfully, almost ritually, absorb the ambient warmth, the clutter of cutlery, the clinking of glasses, the muffled sounds of conversation, the inviting whiteness of napkins. They would select their wine punctiliously, unfold their napkins, and then it would seem to them, as they sat in the warm, in a close huddle, smoking a cigarette to be stubbed out in a moment's time when the hors d'oeuvres would arrive, that their life was going to be only the infinite sum of such auspicious moments, and that they would always be happy, because they deserved to be happy, because they would manage to stay free, because happiness was within them. They would sit facing each other, they were going to eat after having been hungry, and all these things - the thick white tablecloth, the blue blot of a packet of Gitanes, the earthenware plates, the rather heavy cutlery, the stem glasses, the wicker basket full of newly baked bread - constituted the ever-fresh setting of an almost visceral pleasure, a pleasure so intense as to verge on numbness: an impression, almost exactly opposite and almost exactly identical to the experience of speed, of a tremendous stability, of tremendous plenitude. From this table set for dinner arose for them the feeling of perfect synchrony: they were in tune with the world, they were swimming in it, in their element, with nothing to fear from it.

  Perhaps they were a bit more adept than others at making out or even provoking these auguries of good fortune.

  Their ears, their fingers, their palates - permanently on the alert, as it were - lay in wait only for such propitious instants, which could be set off by minute details. But when they surrendered to those feelings of unruffled beatitude, of eternity undisturbed by the slightest ripple, when everything was in balance, deliciously slow, the very intensity of their bliss underlined the ephemerality and fragility of such instants. It did not take much to make it all crumble: the slightest false note, a mere moment's hesitation, a sign that was perhaps too vulgar, and their happiness would be put out of joint; it went back to being what it always had been, a kind of deal, a thing they had bought, a pitiful and flimsy thing, just a second's respite which returned them all the more forcefully to the real dangers, the real uncertainties in their lives, in their history.

  The trouble with market researching is that it can't go on for ever. The day was already marked down in Jérôme's and Sylvie's history when they would have to choose between unemployment, or underemployment, on the one side, or, on the other, a fuller kind of involvement in an agency - a full-time job, with executive status. Or else change their careers, find a job in some other line; but that would have only shifted the same problem to another terrain. For if it is commonly accepted that people who have not yet reached thirty may remain relatively independent and work as and when it suits them, even if their availability, openness of mind, the variety of their experience and what is still called their adaptability is sometimes valued, it is on the other hand required, paradoxically, of any potential partner, once he has passed the milestone of his thirtieth birthday (and this is, precisely, what makes your thirtieth birthday a milestone) that he show some evidence of stability, provide some guarantees as to his punctuality, discipline, judicious behaviour. Employers, especially in advertising, not only decline to take on people over the age of thirty-five, they are reluctant to rely on someone who, at the age of thirty, has never been on the staff. No question, either, of carrying on using them as if nothing had changed, on short-term contracts: such instability looks unconvincing; at thirty, you owe it to yourself to have got somewhere, or else you are nowhere. And no-one is anywhere unless he has found his niche, built his nest, got his own keys, his own desk, his own little name-plate.

  Jérôme and Sylvie thought often about this problem. They still had a few years left, but the life they led, the entirely relative peace they enjoyed, would never be a permanent possession. Everything would crumble progressively; they would have nothing left. They did not feel crushed by their work, they were sure of a living, more or less, for better or worse, taking the rough with the smooth, without their profession consuming the whole of their lives. But that was not destined to last.

  You can never remain just a market researcher for very long. Almost as soon as they are trained, researchers rush towards the higher rungs, to become deputy director or director of an agency, or to find one of those coveted jobs in some big firm, as director of, say, recruitment, or staff training, or industrial relations. These are the plum jobs: carpeted offices, two telephones, a dictaphone, a refrigerated cocktail cabinet and even, sometimes, hanging on the wall, a painting by Bernard Buffet.

  Alas, said Jérôme and Sylvie to themselves very often and sometimes to each other, you have to work to earn your crust, that's obvious, but if you work you do not live. They thought they had learned that, in years gone by, from experience, of a few weeks' duration. Sylvie had become a filing clerk in a market research consultancy, whilst Jérôme coded and decoded interview questionnaires. Their working conditions were more than pleasant. They turned up when they liked, read the newspapers in the office, went down for a beer or a coffee quite often, and they even felt a degree of liking for the work they performed in dilatory fashion, led on as they were by an exceedingly vague promise of proper employment on a regular contract and accelerated promotion. But they didn't stick it out for very long. They were atrociously grumpy on getting up; full of resentment every evening, going home on the overcrowded metro; they would slump onto their sofa, dog-tired and dirty, and do nothing but dream of long weekends, free days and not getting up in the morning.

  They felt locked in, trapped, done for. They could not resign themselves to such a fate. They still believed that masses of things could happen to them, that it was the fixed daily hours of work, the unending sequence of days and weeks that made the straitjacket which they did not hesitate to describe as infernal. It was, all the same, and whatever else might be said about it, the start of a fine career: it held out good prospects for them; they were at that epic stage when the boss assesses you as a youngster, feels privately pleased with himself for having taken you on, gets straight down to training you, to shaping you in his own image, invites you to dinner, gives you a friendly thump, and, with a wave of his hand, opens your door to fortune.

  They were stupid - how many times did they repeat to themselves that they were stupid, that they were wrong, that they were in any case no more right than the others, the ones who hang on determinedly and climb? - but they liked their long days of idleness, their lazy wakings, their mornings in bed, with a pile of detective novels and science-fiction beside them, they liked their walks in the night, down by the riverside, and the almost elating sense of freedom that they felt on some days, the feeling of holiday time which overcame them each time they got back from a campaign in the provinces.

  Of course they knew that was all wrong, that their freedom was just a will o' the wisp. Their lives were much more marked by almost panic-stricken hunting for work each time (and there were many) one of the agencies they worked for went bust or got taken over by a bigger firm, by their days before pay when cigarettes had to be counted out one by one, by the time it took, on some days, to get invited out for a meal.

  They were right in the middle of the most idiotic, the most ordinary predicament in the world. But knowing it was idiotic and ordinary did not prevent them being right in it. Long ago, they had let slip, work and freedom had ceased to be strict opposites; all the same, it was that opposition which was, for them, the determining factor.

  People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world - Jérôme and Sylvie had taken on this vast programme for themselves - such people will always be unhappy. It is true, they would admit, that there are people for whom this kind of d
ilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction. But nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortunes begin.

  Let us take a young man who does a year or two at university, then completes his military service honourably.

  Around the age of twenty-five, there he is, as naked as the day he was born, although he is also, by virtue of his education, already in virtual possession of more money than he ever wished for. That is to say, he knows with certainty that the day will come when he will have his flat in the city, his country cottage, his car, his hi-fi. It so happens, however, that these elating promises continue to evade his actual grasp. By their very nature they belong to a process which also includes, if you care to think about it, marriage, parenthood, a change in values, social attitudes and patterns of personal behaviour. In short, our young man will have to settle down, and it will take him fifteen years.

  Such a prospect is not comforting. No-one embarks upon it without protest. For Christ's sake, our young lad thinks, am I going to have to spend my days behind these glass walls instead of going for walks in flowery meadows? am I going to catch myself hoping the night before each promotion exercise? am I going to calculate, connive, champ my bit, me, who used to dream of poetry, of night trains, of warm sandy beaches? And, taking it mistakenly to be a consolation, he falls into the trap of hire-purchase. Then he is caught, well and truly caught. All he can do is to gird up his patience. Alas, when he gets to the end of his troubles, our young man is no longer quite so young, and, to cap his misfortune, it can even seem to him that his life is behind him, that it consisted only of his striving and not of what he strove for, and even if he is too cautious, too sensible - his slow climb has given him plenty of experience - to dare to say such things to himself, it will none the less be true that he will be forty, and straightening out his home and his weekend place and his children's education will have filled more than adequately the few hours he will have been able to spare from his work . . .

  Impatience, thought Jérôme and Sylvie, is a twentieth-century virtue. At twenty, when they saw, or thought they saw, what life could be, the sum of bliss it held, the endless conquests it allowed, etc., they realised they would not have the strength to wait. Like anyone else, they could have made it; but all they wanted was to have it made. That is probably the sense in which they were what are commonly called intellectuals.

  For everything contradicted them, beginning with life itself. They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership. They wanted to stay free, and virtually innocent, but time went by notwithstanding, and brought them nothing. The others ended up seeing wealth as an end in itself, but as for them, they didn't have any money at all.

  They told themselves they weren't the worst off. Perhaps they were right. But modern life irritated their misfortune whilst it erased the misfortunes of others: the others were on the right track. Jérôme and Sylvie didn't amount to much: penny-scrabblers, freelancers, flitters. On the other hand, time, in a certain sense, was actually on their side, they had an image of a possible world which could seem exhilarating. But this, they agreed, was, by way of consolation, pretty small beer.

  VI

  They had put down roots in a temporary soil. They did their work in the way others study, choosing their own hours. They could waste time like only students can.

  But on all sides dangers lurked. They would have liked their story to be a story of happiness; but more often than not it was a tale of happiness under threat. They were still young, but the years were going by fast. An old student is a gruesome thing; a burnt-out case is more gruesome still. They were afraid.

  They had free time; but time was also working against them. There were bills for gas, electricity and the telephone that had to be paid. Every day they had to eat. They had to have clothes, they had to redecorate, change the sheets, take the washing to the laundry, gets shirts ironed, buy shoes, catch the train, buy furniture.

  Money, sometimes, consumed them entirely. They did not stop thinking about it. Even their emotional life, to a considerable extent, depended on it directly. There was every reason to think that when they had a little wealth, when they got a breathing space, their shared happiness was indestructible, no constraint appeared to limit their love. Their tastes, imagination, new ideas and appetites blended indistinguishably into freedom. But these were privileged moments; more often they had to struggle: at the first signs of overspending, quite often they would rise up against each other. They would clash over nothing, for a wasted one hundred old francs, for a pair of stockings, for not doing the washing-up. Then for hours on end, for whole days at a stretch, they stopped speaking to each other. They would dine hurriedly, opposite one another, each for himself, for herself, not looking. They would sit at opposite ends of the sofa, half-turning their backs on each other. One or the other would play patience, interminably.

  Money stood like a barrier between them. It was a wall, a kind of buffer they banged against at every turn. It was something worse than poverty: a narrow, straitened, exiguous absence of ease. They inhabited the closed world of their closed lives, without a future, without openings other than impossible miracles, stupid dreams which wouldn't hold water. They were suffocating. They felt they were sinking.

  They could of course talk of other things, about a recent book, a theatre director, about the war in Algeria or about people, but it sometimes felt as if their only real conversations were about money, comfort and happiness. That was when their voices would rise, the tension grow. They would talk and, as they talked, they would feel just how impossible, unreachable and paltry these things were. They would grow irritated; they were over-anxious; they would feel implicitly challenged, each by the other. They would dream up holiday plans, travel plans, plans for the flat, and then tear them down, rabidly: it would seem as if what was most real in their lives would then appear in its true light as something without substance, something absent. So they would fall silent, and their silence was full of rancour; they resented life and sometimes were weak enough to resent each other; they remembered their messed-up degrees, their unappealing holidays, their drab life, their cluttered flat, their impossible dreams. They would look at each other, they would find the other partner ugly, badly dressed, graceless, crumpled. Beside them, in the street, cars slid slowly on. In the city squares, the neon lights flashed in turn. At the café terraces, people looked like complacent fish. They hated the world. They went home on foot, tired out. They went to bed without saying a word.

  If some day something were to give way, such as an agency going out of business or their being seen as too old, or too unreliable in their work, or one of them falling ill, that was all it would take for everything to come tumbling down. They had no prospects, no reserves. Their minds often turned to this subject, anxiously. They would come back to it incessantly, in spite of themselves. They could see themselves out of work for months on end, taking on penny jobs just to survive, borrowing, begging. Then, sometimes, they would experience moments of intense despair. They would dream of offices, of established posts, of regular hours, of proper contracts of employment. But these reversed images threw them into perhaps even greater despair. They just could not, so they thought, recognise themselves in the face of a desk-bound executive, however splendid his apparel. They decided that they detested hierarchies, and that solutions, miraculous or other, would come from elsewhere, from the world, from History. They went on in their bumpy way; it fitted their natural inclination. In an imperfect world, of this they convinced themselves easily, it was not by any means the most imperfect way. They lived for the day; in six hours they would spend what it had taken three days to earn; they often borro
wed; they ate ghastly French fries, smoked their last cigarette between them, sometimes spent two hours looking for a spare metro ticket, wore recycled shirts, listened to scratched records, hitch-hiked to get places, and, quite frequently still, put off changing the sheets for five or six weeks. They were quite near to believing that, all in all, this kind of life was not without its charm.

  VII

  When they talked to each other about their kind of living, their way of life, their future - when they surrendered themselves in a kind of frenzy, and entirely, to an orgy of better worlds - they sometimes said, with a rather hollow melancholy, that they had not sorted things out properly in their minds. They saw the world through muddled eyes, and the clarity they proclaimed as a value was often accompanied by indecisive fluctuations, ambiguous compromises and assorted other considerations which modulated, minimised or even undermined entirely what were, quite obviously still, their good intentions.

  It seemed to them that there they had found a path, or an absence of path, which defined them perfectly, and not just them but all those of their age. Earlier generations, they would sometimes tell each other, had probably found it possible to reach a fuller awareness of themselves and of the world they lived in. They would have liked, perhaps, to have been twenty during the Spanish Civil War, or during the Resistance: in fact, they talked about it a great deal; it seemed to them that the problems facing people then, the problems they imagined people facing, were clearer, even if the need to respond had turned out to be more pressing. As for themselves, the questions that faced them were all booby-traps.