Things and A Man Asleep

by Georges Perec

  You have fallen headlong into the spellbinding pleasures of patience. You deal out four columns of thirteen cards on the bed, you remove the four aces. The game consists in arranging the forty-eight remaining cards by using the four spaces left by the removal of the aces; if one of the spaces happens to be the first in a column, you are allowed to put a two there; if it follows, say, a six, you can insert the seven of the same suit, a seven can be followed by an eight, an eight by a nine, a jack by the queen; if the space follows a king, you may not lay anything and the space is dead.

  Chance has virtually no role to play in this patience. You can foresee a long time in advance the moment when the four cleared spaces would bring you up against kings, and therefore failure, if you were to play them in order; but, precisely, you do not have to: you are allowed to use one space, then a different one, come back to the first, jump to the third, the fourth, back to the second again. Nevertheless, you rarely succeed; there always comes a point when the game is blocked, when, with half or a third of the cards already in order, you can no longer fill a space without turning up a king every time. In theory, you have the right to two more attempts: you just have to leave the ordered cards where they are and deal out again the other cards into four new columns, after having shuffled them. But you rarely avail yourself of these two supplementary chances; no sooner does the game appear lost than you scoop up all the cards, shuffle them once or twice, and deal them out again for another attempt.

  You shuffle the cards, deal them out, remove the aces, and take stock of the situation. You begin more or less at random, taking care only to avoid laying bare a king too soon. Gradually, the game starts to take shape, constraints appear, possibilities come to light: there is one card already in its proper place, over here a single move will allow you to arrange five or six in one go, over there a king that is in your way cannot be moved.

  You hardly ever get the patience out. You cheat sometimes, a little, rarely, increasingly rarely. Winning doesn't matter to you, for what would winning mean to you anyway, and if it's just a question of having the gods on your side, there are easier ways of inducing them to look kindly on you. But you play more and more often, for longer and longer, sometimes all afternoon, or as soon as you get up, or right through the night, and not even, not even any longer, just to kill time.

  There is something about this game that fascinates you, perhaps even more than the game with the water under the bridges, or the labyrinths in the ceilings, or the imperfectly opaque twigs which drift slowly across the surface of your cornea. Depending on where it is, or when it crops up, each card acquires an almost poignant density. You protect, you destroy, you construct, you plot, you concoct one plan after another: a futile exercise, a danger that entails no risk of punishment, a derisory restoration of order: forty-eight cards keep you chained to your room and you feel almost happy when a ten happens to fall into place or when a king is unable to thwart you, and you feel almost unhappy when all your patient calculations lead to the same impossible outcome. It is as if this solitary silent strategy were your only way forward, as if it had become your reason for being.

  IT'S DARK. The occasional car roars past in the street below. The drop of water forms on the tap on the landing. Your neighbour is silent, out perhaps, or dead already. You are stretched out on the bed, fully clothed, your hands crossed behind your neck and your knees up. You close your eyes, you open them. Viral, microbial forms, inside your eye, or on the surface of your cornea, drift slowly downwards, disappear, suddenly reappear in the centre, hardly changed, discs or bubbles, twigs, twisted filaments, which, when brought together, produce something resembling a barely mythological beast.

  You lose track of them, then find them again; you rub your eyes and the filaments explode, proliferate.

  Time passes, you are drowsy. You put down the open book beside you on the bed. Everything is vague, throbbing. Your breathing is astonishingly regular. A tiny, black insect, quite possibly unreal, opens up an undreamt-of breach in the labyrinth of cracks in the ceiling.

  You drift around the streets, by night, by day. You go into local cinemas where the insistent stink of disinfectant hangs in the air, you eat sandwiches standing at the counter, chips in paper cones, you walk through fun-fairs, you play pinball, you go to museums, markets, stations, public libraries, you stare at the windows of the antique shops in Rue Jacob, the glassware shops in Rue du Paradis, the furniture stores in Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

  As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you withdraw your affections, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free, that nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments that you procure through the playing cards, or certain noises, certain sights, an almost perfect, fascinating happiness, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You experience complete rest, at every moment you are spared, protected. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist: across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive, without joy and without sadness, without a future and without a past, just like that: simply, self-evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing, like six socks soaking in a pink plastic bowl, like a fly or a mollusc, like a cow or a snail, like a child or an old man, like a rat.

  SOMETIMES THE DARKNESS forms first the indistinct shape of an ace of spades: in front of you is a point from which two lines take off, move apart, and then come back in towards you after describing a long curve.

  Later, it's an ocean, a black sea upon which you are sailing, as if your nose were the leading edge, or rather the stem of a gigantic ocean liner. Everything is black. It is not night-time, or heavily overcast, it is the whole world that is black, naturally black, like the negative of a photograph, and only the waves are white, or perhaps grey, the bow-waves thrown up on either side of your advancing nose, running the length of your eyes which are perhaps the sides of the ship, in the place where, previously, the ace of spades was inscribed, as if it had merely been the prelude to this wake, this off-white, undulating track that you cut before you as you slide through the black water. You are completely surrounded by water, a black, motionless sea, as flat as a mill-pond, without the slightest phosphorescence, and yet you have the impression that you could discover every little detail, the slightest wisp of cloud if there were a sky, the tiniest dot of land if there were a horizon. But there is only the sea and you are nothing more than this stem, cutting effortlessly, silently, without vibration, the deep white traces of your passage, like a ploughshare furrowing a field.

  Soon, however, somewhere above, as if on an inset map, as if a cinema screen had appeared and the negative of a film were projected on to it, there is the same ship, but this time seen from above, in its entirety, and you are alone on deck, leaning on the ship's rail, or on the gunwale rather, striking a somewhat romantic pose. For a long time the impression of duplication remains quite precise, to the point where, if something is irritating you, nagging at you, it is that you are no longer able to distinguish between two alternatives: are you in the first instance the lone stem sliding over the black sea and throwing up white waves, and only subsequently, almost simultaneously, something resembling the consciousness of being this stem, that is to say, the ship, above, in its entirety and upon which you are the motionless passenger leaning on the deck, in a rather romantic pose? Or is it the other way round: is it the ship in its entirety that comes first, sliding over the black sea, with you, the lone passenger, leaning on the upper deck, and only then, enormously enlarged, a single detail of the ship, the stem, parting the seas, throwing up on either side two white waves, thick white waves that are perhaps a little too well delineated really to be waves, as if they wer
e, rather, creases, the folds of a curtain, with something majestic about them, as if captured in slow motion?

  For a long time the two ships, the part and the whole, your nose-stem and your body-liner, sail in convoy without your being able to separate them: you are at one and the same time the stem and the ship, and you on the ship. Then, a first contradiction arises, but it is perhaps just an optical illusion that could be ascribed to the disparity in scales, the difference in perpectives: it seems to you that the ship is slowing down, getting slower and slower, perhaps a little as though you were viewing it from further and further away, from an ever greater height, but you, at the same time, leaning on the ship's rail, you do not shrink in size at all, you remain just as visible; it seems also that the stem itself is accelerating, that it is no longer sliding, but skimming over the black water like a motor launch, like a speed-boat almost, and certainly no longer like a passenger liner.

  But then - and this is straightaway far more serious, as if you knew by experience, perhaps, that what is taking shape is the beginning of the end, because you would never be able to stand for more than a couple of moments, a couple of seconds, the intensity of what is in the offing, although nothing has taken definite shape yet, apart from, perhaps, at the very most, a premonitory sign, a clue whose meaning was far from clear and whose explanation you now await in the vain hope that everything will remain vague as long as possible, because already, you know, a sudden awakening awaits you, indeed it is your very impatience that has set the process in motion and all your efforts to delay the moment serve only to hasten its arrival — but then, there emerges, like every other time, and not slowly enough, an impression which is at once exciting and tiresome, wondrous and appalling, straightaway too precise, very quickly obsessive and almost painful: the absurd certainty - well, not yet altogether absurd, but surely already destined to become so - that you have lived this image before, that it is a real memory, faithful in every respect: the sea was black, the ship advanced slowly down the narrow channel throwing up showers of white spume on either side, you were leaning against the rail of the walkway on the promenade deck in the rather romantic pose adopted by all passengers when they go up on deck to watch the sea-gulls, you felt precisely the same sensation that you feel now, and yet you no longer feel anything, except the perilous, the increasingly perilous sensation of knowing both the impossibility, and, at the same time, the irreducibility of such a memory.

  Later, much later, perhaps you woke up and dozed off again several times, you turned onto your right side, onto your left side, onto your back, onto your front, perhaps you even switched on the light, perhaps you smoked a cigarette, later, much later, sleep becomes a target, or rather the reverse, it is you who become a target for sleep. It is a source of radiant, sporadic light. In front of you, or, to be more precise, before your eyes, sometimes a little to the left, other times more to the right, never in the centre, myriad tiny white dots begin to coalesce, forming at length something vaguely feline, a panther's head seen in profile, coming towards you, growing bigger and baring two sharp fangs, then disappearing and giving way to a luminous point which grows, turns into a lozenge, a star which hurtles towards you at great speed and misses you on the right at the very last moment. The phenomenon is repeated several times, regularly: nothing at first, then some faintly luminous dots, a panther's head which takes shape vaguely, becomes more precise, grows bigger and roars gapingly, baring two sharp fangs, then a shimmering, almost exploding, point of light which expands into the lozenge, the star, then the ball of light bearing down on you, passing by so close that you almost thought you had touched it, felt it, heard it, then nothing again, for a long time, white dots, the panther's head, the star that grows and whistles past your head.

  Then nothing for a long time, or rather, later, sometimes, somewhere, something resembling a white star, which explodes . . .

  IN THE COURSE OF TIME your coldness becomes awesome. Your eyes have lost the last vestige of their sparkle, your silhouette now slumps perfectly. An expression of serenity without lassitude, without bitterness, plays at the corners of your mouth. You slip through the streets, untouchable, protected by the judicious wear and tear of your clothing, by the neutrality of your gait. Now, your movements are simply acquired gestures. You utter only those words which are strictly necessary. You ask for:

  — a coffee

  — front of stalls

  — the usual and a glass of red

  — a beer

  — a toothbrush

  — a notebook

  You pay, you pocket the change, you sit down, you eat. You take a copy of Le Monde from the top of its pile and place two twenty-centime coins in the vendor's dish. You never say please, hello, thank you, goodbye. You never say sorry. You do not ask your way.

  You wander around, and around, and around. You walk. All moments are equivalent, all spaces are alike. You are never in a hurry, never lost. You do not look to see the time on the clocktowers. You are not sleepy. You are not hungry. You never yawn. You never burst into laughter.

  You don't even stroll any more, since the only people who can stroll are those who snatch the time to do so, those who contrive to fiddle a few precious moments off their schedules. In the beginning you used to choose where you would go, you set goals for yourself, you devised complex itineraries, which, despite yourself, began to resemble the voyages of Ulysses. Like so many others before, you went on a pilgrimage to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, you walked round and round near the entrance to the Catacombs, you went and stood beneath the Eiffel Tower, you went up a few monuments, you crossed all the bridges, walked along all the embankments, visited all the museums, Guimet, Cernuschi, Carnavalet, Bourdelle, Delacroix, Nissim de Camondo, the Palais de la Découverte and the Aquarium du Trocadéro, you saw the rose gardens of Bagatelle, Montmartre by night, les Halles at first light, Saint-Lazare station in the rush-hour, Concorde at midday on August 15. But the fact that a given goal was trippery or cultural, disappointing or badly chosen, or even provocative (Rue de la Pompe, Rue des Saussaies, Place Beauvau, Quai des Orfèvres) did not stop it from being a goal, that is to say, a tension, an act of will, an emotion. Your tourism, even when it was disenchanted or derisory, and despite the distant memory of the Surrealists, was still a source of vigilance, a tabling of time, a measuring of space.

  Just as you no longer choose your films, entering indiscriminately the first cinema you come to at around eight, nine or ten in the evening, the merest shadow of a spectator in the darkened auditorium, the shadow of a shadow watching as various combinations of shadow and light, form and dissolve on a rectangular oblong, ceaselessly sketching the same adventure: music, enchantment, suspense; just as you no longer choose your meals, as you no longer bother to vary them, to work your way right through the three hundred or so combinations that your five one-franc coins could procure for you at the counter of the Petite Source, those five one-franc coins which represent one third of your daily allowance, chinking in your pocket; just as you no longer choose when to sleep, or what to read, or what to wear . . .

  You let yourself go, you allow yourself to be carried along: all it takes is for the crowd to be going up or going down the Champs Elysées, all it takes is for a grey back a few yards in front of you to turn off suddenly down a grey street; or else a light or an absence of light, a noise or an absence of noise, a wall, a group of people, a tree, some water, a porch, a fence, advertising posters, paving stones, a pedestrian crossing, a shopfront, a luminous stop/go sign, the name plate of a street, the red sign outside a tobacconist's, a haberdasher's stall, a flight of steps, a traffic island . . .

  You walk or you do not walk. You sleep or you do not sleep. You walk down your six flights of stairs, you climb back up again. You buy Le Monde or you do not buy it. You eat or you do not eat. You sit down, you stretch out, you remain standing, you slip into the darkened auditorium of a cinema. You light a cigarette. You cross the street, you cross the Seine, you stop, you start again. You play pin
ball or you don't.

  Sometimes, you stay in your room for three, four, five days at a time, you couldn't say for sure. You sleep almost uninterruptedly, you wash your socks, your two shirts. You reread a detective novel that you've already read, and forgotten, twenty times. You do the crossword in an old copy of Le Monde that you find lying around. You deal out on your bed four columns of thirteen cards, you remove the aces, you place the seven of hearts below the six of hearts, the two of spades in its space, the king of spades below the queen of spades, the jack of hearts below the ten of hearts.

  You eat jam on bread, for as long as the bread lasts, then you spread it on crackers, if you have any, then you eat it straight from the jar on a spoon.

  You stretch out on the narrow bed, hands crossed behind your neck, knees up. You close your eyes, you open them. Twisted filaments drift slowly down the surface of your cornea.

  You count and organise the cracks, the flakes of paint and the flaws in the ceiling. You look at your face in the cracked mirror.

  You don't talk to yourself, yet. You don't scream, especially not that.

  Indifference has neither beginning nor end: it is an immutable state, a dead weight, an unshakeable inertia. Doubtless, messages from the outside world still make it through to your nerve centres, but no organised response involving the totality of the organism appears to be able to develop. All that remains are elementary reflexes: when the light is red you do not cross the road, you shelter from the wind in order to light a cigarette, you wrap up warmer on winter mornings, you change your sports shirt, your socks, your underpants and your vest about once a week, and your bed linen roughly every fortnight.

  Indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs. You are patient and you are not waiting, you are free and you do not choose, you are available and nothing arouses your enthusiasm. You ask for nothing. You demand nothing, you make no impositions. You hear without ever listening, you see without ever looking: the cracks in the ceilings, in the floorboards, the patterns in the tiling, the lines around your eyes, the trees, the water, the stones, the cars passing in the street, the clouds that form . . . cloud shapes in the sky.