Life

by Perec, Georges

  Three workmen are now leaving the room. They have already begun the work needed to unite the two dwellings. They have stuck on the bottom wall, by the door, a large tracing-paper plan showing the intended location of the radiator, the routing of the pipework and electrical wires, and the section of partition wall to be knocked down.

  One of the workmen is wearing big gloves like those used by electrical cable-layers. The second has an embroidered suede waistcoat with fringes. The third is reading a letter.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Winckler, 1

  NOW WE ARE in the room Gaspard Winckler called the lounge. Of the three rooms in his flat, it is the one nearest the stairs, the furthest to the left from where we are standing.

  It is a rather small, almost square room whose door gives straight onto the landing. The walls are covered in hessian, once blue, now returned to an almost colourless condition except in the places where the furniture and the pictures have protected it from the light.

  There weren’t many pieces of furniture in the lounge. It’s a room which Winckler didn’t live in very much. He worked all day in the third room, the one where he had set up his equipment. He didn’t eat at home anymore; he had never learnt to cook and hated it. Since 1943, he preferred to take even his breakfast at Riri’s, the bar on the corner of Rue Jadin and Rue de Chazelles. It’s only when he had guests whom he didn’t know very well that he entertained them in his lounge. He had a round table with extension flaps that he couldn’t have used very often, six straw-seated chairs, and a chest that he had carved himself with designs illustrating the principal scenes of The Mysterious Island: the landing of the balloon that had got away from Richmond, the miraculous finding of Cyrus Smith, the last match rescued from Gedeon Spilett’s waistcoat pocket, the discovery of the trunk, down to Ayrton’s and Nemo’s heartrending confessions, which end these adventures and connect them magnificently to The Children of Captain Grant and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. It took a long time to see this chest, to really see it. From a distance it looked like any old rustic-Breton-Renaissance box. It was only when you got closer, almost fingering the incrustation, that you discovered what these minute scenes showed, and realised how much patience, meticulousness, and even genius had gone into their carving. Valène had known Winckler since 1932, but it was only in the early 1960s that he had noticed that it wasn’t any ordinary sideboard and that it was worth looking at more closely. It was the period when Winckler had begun to make rings and Valène had brought along the girl who ran the cosmetics shop in Rue Logelbach and who wanted to set up a knickknack display in her shop for the Christmas season. All three sat down at the round table on which Winckler had spread his rings, there must have been about thirty at the time, all lined up, on black satin cushions in presentation boxes. Winckler had apologised for the poor light from the ceiling fixture, then opened his chest and got out three small glasses and a decanter of 1938 brandy; he drank very rarely, but every year Bartlebooth sent him several bottles of vintage wines and spirits which Winckler generously redistributed around the building and the quartier, keeping only one or two for himself. Valène was sitting next to the chest, and while the cosmetics girl took the rings gingerly one by one, he sipped his brandy and looked at the carvings. What amazed him before he was even clearly aware of it was that where he had expected to find stags’ heads, garlands, foliations, or puffy-cheeked cherubs, he was discovering miniature characters, the sea, the horizon, and the whole island, not yet named Lincoln, in the same way as the spacewrecked travellers, dismayed and challenged at the same time, had first seen it, when they had reached the highest peak. He asked Winckler if it was he who had carved the chest, and Winckler said yes; when he was younger, he added, but gave no further details.

  Everything has gone now, of course: the chest, chairs, table, ceiling lamp, the three framed reproductions. Valène can only recall one of them with any accuracy: it portrayed The Great Parade of the Military Tattoo; Winckler had come across it in a Christmas issue of L’Illustration; years later, in fact only a few months ago, Valène learnt as he flicked through the Petit Robert dictionary that it was by Israël Silvestre.

  It went just like that, from one day to the next: the removal men came, the distant cousin auctioned the lot, not at Drouot but at Levallois; when they heard, it was too late, or else they – Smautf, Morellet, or Valène – would have tried, maybe, to get there and buy a thing Winckler had particularly held to – not the chest, they’d never have found room for it, but maybe that engraving, or the one that hung in the bedroom and showed the three men in evening dress, or some of his tools or picture books. They spoke about it to each other and said to themselves that maybe after all it was better they hadn’t gone, that the only person who should have was Bartlebooth, but that neither Valène nor Smautf nor Morellet would have made so bold as to mention it to him.

  Now in the little lounge what is left is what remains when there’s nothing left: flies, for instance, or advertising bumph slipped under the door by students, proclaiming the benefits of a new toothpaste or offering twenty-five centimes’ reduction to every buyer of three packets of washing powder, or old issues of Le Jouet Français, the review he took all his life and to which his subscription didn’t run out until a few months after his death, or those things without meaning that lie around on floors and in cupboard corners, you never know how they got there nor why they stayed: three faded flowers of the field; bendy sticks with probably calcinated threads etiolating at each end, an empty Coke bottle, a cake box, opened, still keeping its false raffia string and its legend “Aux Délices de Louis XV, Pastrycooks and Candymakers since 1742” forming a fine oval shape surrounded by a garland and flanked by four puffy-cheeked putti, or behind the door to the landing a kind of wrought iron coatstand, with a mirror cracked roughly Y-shaped into three unequal surface portions, and in the edge of which there is still stuck a postcard showing an incontrovertibly Japanese woman athlete holding a flaming torch at arm’s length.

  Twenty years ago, in 1955, Winckler completed as planned the last of the puzzles Bartlebooth had ordered. There is every reason to suppose that the contract he had signed with the multimillionaire contained a clause stipulating explicitly that he would never make any other puzzles, but in any case it’s likely he didn’t want to.

  He began to make little wooden toys, cubes for children, very simple ones with designs on them copied from his albums of popular Epinal prints, which he coloured in with tinted inks.

  It was not until later that he started to make rings: he took small stones – agate, cornelian, Ptyxes, Rhine pebbles, sunstones – and mounted them on delicate rings made of minutely plaited silver threads. One day he explained to Valène that they were also a kind of puzzle, one of the most difficult there is: in Turkey they are called “Devil’s Rings”: they are made of seven, or eleven, or seventeen gold or silver circles chain-linked to each other, and whose complex interweaving produces a closed, compact, and perfectly regular coil. In the cafés of Ankara, streetsellers accost foreigners, and show them the ring assembled, and then flick the linked coils apart; they usually have a simplified design with only five circles that they entwine in a few invisible moves and then open out again, leaving the tourist to struggle in vain with it for a few long moments until an associate – most often one of the café waiters – agrees to fit the ring together with a few careless turns of his hand or gives away the knack, something like once over, once under, then turn it all inside out when there’s only one coil left disengaged.

  What was admirable in Winckler’s rings was that the coil, once entwined, although perfectly regular, left a minute circular space in which was set a semi-precious stone; once inserted and tightened with two minute tweaks of a pincer, it closed the ring for ever. “It’s only for me,” he said one day to Valène, “that they’re diabolical. Bartlebooth himself would approve.” It was the only time Valène heard Winckler utter the Englishman’s name.

  He took ten years to make five s
core of the rings. Each required several weeks’ work. To begin with, he tried to sell them through local jewellers. Then he began to lose interest in them; he gave some on sale or return to the cosmeticist’s shop; he lent some others to Madame Marcia, the antique dealer whose shop and flat were on the ground floor of the building. Then he began to give them away. He gave some to Madame Riri and her daughters, to Madame Nochère, to Martine, to Madame Orlowska and her two neighbours, to the two Breidel girls, to Caroline Echard, to Isabelle Gratiolet and to Véronique Altamont, and even, in the end, to people who didn’t live in the building and whom he hardly knew.

  Some time later he found at the flea market at Saint-Ouen a set of small convex mirrors and he began to make what are called “witches’ mirrors” by inserting them into infinitely crafted wooden mouldings. He was prodigiously clever with his hands and kept all his life quite exceptional gifts of accuracy, control, and eye, but it seems that from that time on he didn’t want to work very much at all. He finicked over each frame for days on end, cutting, fretsawing endlessly away until it was an almost immaterial piece of wooden lace in whose centre the small polished mirror looked like a metallic glance, an icy eye, wide open, full of irony and malice. The contrast between the unreal corona, as elaborate as a Gothic stained-glass window, and the harsh grey light of the mirror created a feeling of unease, as if this quantitatively and qualitatively disproportionate surround was only there to emphasise the maleficent power of convexity which seemed to want to concentrate all available space into a single point. The people he showed them to didn’t like them. They would pick one up, turn it around a couple of times, admire the carving, then put it down again, quickly, almost uneasily, wondering why he had given so much rime to making the things. He never tried to sell them and never gave any as a present to anybody; he didn’t hang them on his wall at home; as soon as he finished one, he put it away stored flat in a cupboard and began to make another.

  These were virtually his last works. When he had run out of his stock of mirrors, he made a few more baubles, little toys that Madame Nochère would beg him to make for one or another of her innumerable great-nephews or for one of the children in the building or the block who had just caught whooping cough or measles or mumps. He always began by saying no, then ended up making an exception for a two-dimensional wooden bunny with ears that flapped, or a cardboard puppet or a rag doll or a little landscape with a handle which when turned made you see first a rowing boat, then a sailing boat, then a swan-shaped punt pulling a water-skier.

  Then, four years ago, two years before he died, he stopped altogether, carefully packed his tools away, and dismantled his workbench.

  At first, he still enjoyed going out. He would go to the park at Monceau for a walk, or would go down Rue de Courcelles and Avenue Franklin-Roosevelt as far as the Marigny gardens, at the bottom of the Champs-Elysées. He would sit on a bench, legs together, his chin resting on the handle of his walking stick, which he gripped with both hands, and he would stay like that for an hour or two, without moving, looking straight ahead at the children playing in the sand or at the old blue-and-orange-canvas-covered round about with its horses and their stylised manes and its two gondolas decorated with an orange-coloured sun, or at the swings or the little Punch and Judy stall.

  Soon his excursions became less frequent. One day he asked Valène if he would be kind enough to come to the cinema with him. They went to the Film Theatre at the Palais de Chaillot one afternoon to see Green Pastures, an ugly, feeble rehash of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On leaving, Valène asked him why he’d wanted to see this film; he replied that it was only because of the title, because of that word “pastures”, and that if he’d known that it was going to be what they’d just seen, he would never have come.

  After that he only went out to have his meals at Riri’s. He would come at about eleven in the morning. He would sit down at a little round table, between the counter and the terrace, and Madame Riri or one of her daughters would bring a big bowl of chocolate and two fine slices of bread and butter. That wasn’t his breakfast but his lunch, it was his favourite food, the only thing he ate with real pleasure. Then he would read the papers, all the papers that Riri took – The Auvergne Messenger, The Soft Drink Echo – as well as those left by the morning’s customers: L’Aurore, Le Parisien Libéré, or, less often, Le Figaro, L’Humanité, or Libération. He didn’t skim through them but read them through conscientiously, line by line, without making any heartfelt or perspicacious or indignant comments, but in a calm and settled manner, without taking his eyes off the page, not noticing the midday cannon which filled the café with the hubbub of fruit machines and jukeboxes, glasses, plates, the noises of voices and of chairs being pushed back. At two o’clock, when the effervescence of lunch subsided and Madame Riri went upstairs for a rest and the two girls did the washing-up in the tiny working quarters at the back of the café and Monsieur Riri drowsed over his accounts, Winckler was still there, in between the sports page and the used-car mart. Sometimes he stayed at his table all afternoon, but usually he went back up to his flat at around three o’clock and came down again at six: that was the great moment of his day, the time for his game of backgammon with Morellet. Both played heatedly, excitedly, breaking out into exclamations, swearwords, and tempers, which were not surprising in Morellet but seemed quite incomprehensible in Winckler – a man whose calmness verged on apathy, whose patience, sweetness, and resignation were imperturbable, whom no one had ever seen angry; such a man could, when for example it was Morellet’s go and he threw a double five, thus enabling him to get his leading man to a blot and back in one go (he persisted in calling it his “jockey” in the name of an allegedly rigorous etymology he had found in some dubious source like Vermot’s Almanach or the Reader’s Digest “Enlarge Your Vocabulary” column), such a man, then, was able to seize the board with both hands and send it flying, calling Morellet a cheat and unleashing a quarrel which the café’s customers sometimes took ages to sort out. Usually, though, it all calmed down pretty quickly so that the game could begin again before they shared, in freshly made-up amity, the veal cutlet with pasta shells or the liver with creamed potatoes that Madame Riri cooked especially for them. But several times one or other went out slamming the door behind him, thus depriving himself of backgammon and of dinner.

  In his last year he didn’t go out at all. Smautf became accustomed to taking him up his meals twice a day, and seeing to his cleaning and washing. Morellet, Valène, or Madame Nochère did all the bits of shopping he needed. He stayed all day in his pyjama trousers and a sleeveless red cotton vest over which he would pull, when he was cold, a kind of indoor jacket of soft flannel and a polka-dot scarf. Valène called on him in the afternoon several times. He found him sitting at his table looking at the hotel labels that Smautf had added for him to each of the watercolours he’d despatched: Hotel Hilo Honolulu, Villa Carmona Granada, Hotel Theba Algeciras, Hotel Peninsula Gibraltar, Hotel Nazareth Galilee, London, Hotel Cosmo, s.s. Ile de France, Regis Hotel Canada, Hotel Mexico DF, Hotel Astor New York, the Town House Los Angeles, s.s. Pennsylvania, Hotel Mirador Acapulco, Compaña Mexicana de Aviación, etc. He wanted, so he said, to sort the labels into order, but it was very difficult: of course, there was chronological order, but he found it poor, even poorer than alphabetical order. He had tried by continents, then by country, but that didn’t satisfy him. What he would have liked would be to link each label to the next, but each time in respect of something else: for example, they could have some detail in common, a mountain or volcano, an illuminated bay, some particular flower, the same red and gold edging, the beaming face of a groom, or the same dimensions, or the same typeface, or similar slogans (“Pearl of the Ocean”, “Diamond of the Coast”), or a relationship based not on similarity but on opposition or a fragile, almost arbitrary association: a minute village by an Italian lake followed by the skyscrapers of Manhattan, skiers followed by swimmers, fireworks by candlelit dinner, railway by aeroplane, baccarat tabl
e by chemin de fer, etc. It’s not just hard, Winckler added, above all it’s useless: if you leave the labels unsorted and take two at random, you can be sure they’ll have at least three things in common.

  After a few weeks he put the labels back in the shoebox where he kept them and tidied the box away in the back of his cupboard. He didn’t start on anything special again. He stayed all day in his bedroom, sitting in his armchair by the window, looking down onto the street, or maybe not even looking, just staring at nothing. On his bedside table there was a radio that was permanently on at low volume; no one ever really knew if he could hear it, although one day he did stop Madame Nochère from switching it off, saying that he listened to the hit parade every night.

  Valène had his bedroom immediately above Winckler’s workroom, and for nearly forty years his days had been accompanied by the thin noise of the craftsman’s tiny files, the almost inaudible throb of his jigsaw, the creaking of his floorboards, the whistling of his kettle when he boiled water, not for making tea but for some glue or glaze he needed for his puzzles. Now, since he had dismantled his bench and packed away his tools, he never went into the room. He never told anybody how he spent his days and nights. People only knew that he hardly slept anymore. When Valène came to see him, he entertained him in his bedroom; he offered him his armchair and sat on the edge of the bed. They didn’t talk much. Once he said he was born at La Ferté-Milon, on the Ourcq Canal. Another time, with sudden warmth, he told Valène about the man who had taught him his work.