Life

by Perec, Georges

  From nineteen sixty on, his lavishness began to decline, and staff leaving were not replaced. It is only three years since Smautf engaged Hélène, after Madame Adèle took her retirement. Hélène, who is only just thirty, copes with everything, laundry, meals, cleaning, with Kléber, who hardly has occasion to use the car these days, lending a hand for heavy jobs.

  Bartlebooth has not entertained for many years, and these last two years he has scarcely ever left the flat. Most of the time he shuts himself up in his study, having once and for all forbidden anyone to disturb him unless he calls. Sometimes forty-eight hours go by without his giving any sign of life: he sleeps in his clothes in great-uncle Sherwood’s easy chair, and lives on nibbles of crispbread and gingernut biscuits. Only exceptionally does he now take his meals in his large, austere, Empire dining room. When he does consent to do so, Smautf dons his old coat-tails and, trying to keep his hand from shaking, serves him his boiled egg, his small helping of poached haddock, and his cup of verbena tea, which to Hélène’s despair are the only foods he has, these many months, agreed to ingest.

  Valène took many years to grasp exactly what Bartlebooth was after. The first time he came to see him, in January nineteen twenty-five, all Bartlebooth said was that he wanted to learn all there was to know about painting watercolours, and he wanted a lesson a day for ten years. The frequency and the duration of these private lessons startled Valène, who was perfectly content if he landed eighteen lessons a quarter. But Bartlebooth seemed determined to devote as much time as was necessary to his apprenticeship, and he seemed to have no money worries. Fifty years later, Valène sometimes reflected that, anyway, those ten years hadn’t been such a waste, seeing how Bartlebooth displayed at the start a complete lack of natural talent.

  Not only did Bartlebooth know nothing about the delicate art of watercolours, he’d never even held a paintbrush and scarcely ever tried a crayon. For the first year, therefore, Valène began by teaching him how to draw, and had him do copies in charcoal, in pencil, in red chalk, of models on squared grids, had him do positioning sketches, and exercises in crosshatched sketches highlighted with chalk, and exercises in shading, and exercises in perspective. Next he made him work with Indian ink and sepia wash, forced him to practise complicated calligraphy, and showed him how to make his brush strokes thicker and thinner so as to establish different values and obtain a range of tones.

  In two years Bartlebooth learnt to master these initial skills. The rest, Valène assured him, was just a matter of material and experience. They began to do open-air work, at first in the Monceau Gardens, on the banks of the Seine, and in the Bois de Boulogne, then further afield in the Paris region. Every day at two, Bartlebooth’s chauffeur – not yet Kléber, but Fawcett, who had served Priscilla, Bartlebooth’s mother – called for Valène; in the capacious black-and-white Chenard & Walker limousine, the painter would find his pupil dressed sensibly in golfing breeches, spats, check cap, and woollen sweater. They would go to the Forest of Fontainebleau, to Senlis, to Enghien, to Versailles, to Saint-Germain, or to the Chevreuse valley. There they would set up their three-legged camp stools (known as “Pinchart stools”) side by side, and their parasol with its jointed pole and ground spike, and their fragile articulated easel. With manic precision, so obsessively meticulous as to be almost clumsy with it, Bartlebooth would first hold his sheet of Whatman paper (already damped on the reverse side) up to the light, so he could check by the watermark that he had got it the right way round, then he would take drawing pins and fix it onto his board of cross-grained ash, and then he would open his zinc palette with its enamelled inside surfaces spotlessly cleaned after the previous day’s session, and would arrange on it, in ritual sequence, thirteen little cups of paint – ivory black, coloured sepia, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, Indian yellow, chrome yellow, vermilion, madder gloss, Veronese green, olive green, ultramarine, cobalt, Prussian blue, as well as a few drops of Madame Maubois’s zinc white – then he would set out his water, his sponges, and his crayons, check that his brushes were properly mounted in their handles, perfectly tipped, not too thick in the middle, had no stray, loose hairs, and then he would get down to it, first sketching in softly in crayon the volumes, the horizon, the foreground, the vanishing lines, before trying to fix in all their unforeseeable, split-second splendour the ephemeral metamorphoses of a cloud, or a breeze rippling the surface of a pond, or a sunset over the Ile-de-France, a flock of starlings ascending, a shepherd bringing in his sheep, moonrise over a dormant village, a road lined with poplars, a dog halting at a thicket, and so on.

  Most of the time Valène would shake his head and with a few curt phrases – your sky’s too heavy, that’s out of balance, you’ve missed the effect, not enough contrast, you haven’t got the atmosphere, there’s no gradation, the layout is banal – alternating with ringings and crossings-out nonchalantly scrawled over the watercolour, he would mercilessly destroy the work of Bartlebooth, who, without a word, would tear the sheet from his ashwood board, affix a fresh piece, and start all over again.

  Outside this laconic tuition, Bartlebooth and Valène hardly spoke to each other. Although they were exactly the same age, Bartlebooth seemed entirely uninterested in Valène, and Valène, though intrigued by his employer’s eccentricity, usually didn’t dare question him straight out. Nonetheless, several times, during the return journeys to Paris, he did ask him why he was so obstinately determined to learn to paint watercolours. Bartlebooth’s usual reply was:

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Valène retorted one day, “most of my pupils, in your shoes, would have given up long ago.”

  “Am I that bad?” Bartlebooth asked.

  “In ten years you can get anywhere, and you will get there; but why do you want to master an art for which you have absolutely no spontaneous inclination?”

  “It’s not watercolours I’m interested in, but what I plan to do with them.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Why, to make puzzles, of course,” was Bartlebooth’s unhesitating reply. That day Valène began to grasp more precisely what was in Bartlebooth’s mind. But only after getting to know Smautf and then Gaspard Winckler could he gauge the full extent of the Englishman’s ambition.

  Let us imagine a man whose wealth is equalled only by his indifference to what wealth generally brings, a man of exceptional arrogance who wishes to fix, to describe, and to exhaust not the whole world – merely to state such an ambition is enough to invalidate it – but a constituted fragment of the world: in the face of the inextricable incoherence of things, he will set out to execute a (necessarily limited) programme right the way through, in all its irreducible, intact entirety.

  In other words, Bartlebooth resolved one day that his whole life would be organised around a single project, an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion.

  The idea occurred to him when he was twenty. At first it was only a vague idea, a question looming – what should I do? – with an answer taking shape: nothing. Money, power, art, women did not interest Bartlebooth. Nor did science, nor even gambling. There were only neckties and horses that just about did, or, to put it another way, beneath these futile illustrations (but thousands of people do order their lives effectively around their ties, and far greater numbers do so around their weekend horse-riding) there stirred, dimly, a certain idea of perfection.

  It grew over the following months and came to rest on three guiding principles.

  The first was moral: the plan should not have to do with an exploit or record, it would be neither a peak to scale nor an ocean floor to reach. What Bartlebooth would do would not be heroic, or spectacular; it would be something simple and discreet, difficult of course but not impossibly so, controlled from start to finish and conversely controlling every detail of the life of the man engaged upon it.

  The second was logical: all recourse to chance would be ruled out, and the project would make time and space serve as the abstract
coordinates plotting the ineluctable recursion of identical events occurring inexorably in their allotted places, on their allotted dates.

  The third was aesthetic: the plan would be useless, since gratuitousness was the sole guarantor of its rigour, and would destroy itself as it proceeded; its perfection would be circular: a series of events which when concatenated nullify each other: starting from nothing, passing through precise operations on finished objects, Bartlebooth would end up with nothing.

  Thus a concrete programme was designed, which can be stated succinctly as follows.

  For ten years, from 1925 to 1935, Bartlebooth would acquire the art of painting watercolours.

  For twenty years, from 1935 to 1955, he would travel the world, painting, at a rate of one watercolour each fortnight, five hundred seascapes of identical format (royal, 65cm × 50cm) depicting seaports. When each view was done, he would dispatch it to a specialist craftsman (Gaspard Winckler), who would glue it to a thin wooden backing board and cut it into a jigsaw puzzle of seven hundred and fifty pieces.

  For twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, Bartlebooth, on his return to France, would reassemble the jigsaw puzzles in order, at a rate, once again, of one puzzle a fortnight. As each puzzle was finished, the seascape would be “retexturised” so that it could be removed from its backing, returned to the place where it had been painted – twenty years before – and dipped in a detergent solution whence would emerge a clean and unmarked sheet of Whatman paper.

  Thus no trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period of fifty years, the sole motivation and unique activity of its author.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Rorschach, 3

  IT SUGGESTS SOME kind of petrified memory, like a Magritte painting in which stone may have come to life or life been turned to stone, some kind of image indelibly fixed for all time. The man is sitting down; his moustache droops, his arms are crossed on the table top, his thick neck emerges from a collarless shirt. The woman stands behind him, with her left arm on his shoulder, her hair pulled back, in a black skirt and flowered blouse. Hand in hand, the twins stand in front of the table, in sailor suits with short trousers, with the armbands worn for confirmation on their sleeves and their socks falling down around their ankles. On the oilcloth table-covering stands a blue-enamel coffee pot and a photograph of grandfather in an oval frame. On the mantelpiece, bluish clumps of rosemary sprout from two flowerpots that have conical bases and are decorated with black-and-white chevrons. Between them, under an oblong glass bell, appears a bridal wreath with artificial orange blossoms (pellets of cotton dipped in wax), a beaded armature, and ornamental garlands, birds, and bits of mirror.

  In the fifties, long before Gratiolet sold Rorschach the two superimposed apartments that would become his duplex, an Italian family called Grifalconi lived for a while on the fourth floor to the left of the stairs. Emilio Grifalconi was a cabinet-maker from Verona. His speciality was repairing antiques, and he had come to Paris to restore the furnishings in Château de la Muette. He was married to a young woman fifteen years his junior; her name was Laetizia; three years before, she had borne him twins.

  The building, the block, and the neighbourhood were captivated by Laetizia’s severe, almost sombre beauty. Every afternoon, in the Monceau Gardens, she used to walk her children in a double perambulator built especially for twins. No doubt it was during such an outing that she met one of the men most troubled by her beauty. His name was Paul Hébert. (He also lived in the building, on the fifth floor to the right.) He had been arrested on 7 October 1943, when he was barely eighteen, in the big roundup on Boulevard Saint-Germain that followed the assassination of Captain Dittersdorf and Lieutenants Nebel and Knödelwurst. Paul Hébert was sent to Buchenwald. He was liberated in forty-five. After spending seven years in a sanatorium in the Grisons, he had only recently returned to France and found a job teaching physics and chemistry at Collège Chaptal, an independent school. Naturally, his students at once nicknamed him pH.

  Their affair – not intentionally platonic, but probably limited by circumstance to furtive hand-holding and an occasional embrace – had been going on for four years when, in the autumn of 1955, pH was transferred to Mazamet. His doctors had insisted he be moved to a dry climate near the mountains.

  For several months he wrote letters to Laetizia begging her to join him; each time she refused. By chance a draft of one of her replies was found by her husband:

  I am depressed, troubled, a mass of nerves. I feel the way I did two years ago, horribly on edge. Everything wounds me, tears me to pieces. Your last two letters made my heart beat almost to bursting. They move me so, when I unfold them and the scent of your writing paper rises to my nostrils and the fragrance of your caressing words penetrates me to the heart. Spare me; you make me giddy with your love! We must convince ourselves, however, that we cannot live together. We must resign ourselves to a flatter, more pallid existence. I wish that you would accustom yourself to this; I want the thought of me to comfort you, not consume you; to console you, not drive you to despair. What can we do, darling? It must be so. We cannot continue with these convulsions of the soul. The despondency that follows is a kind of death. Work, think of other things. You have so much intelligence: use a little of it to become more serene. I am at the end of my strength. I had plenty of courage for myself: but for two! My role is to sustain everyone, and I am exhausted. Don’t distress me with your outbursts, which make me curse myself, without seeing any remedy….

  Emilio naturally could not know for whom this unfinished draft was intended. He so trusted Laetizia that he thought at first that she must have copied a passage out of some novelette; and Laetizia could have made him believe this, had she so wanted. But if, during those long years, she had been able to leave the truth unspoken, she was incapable now of disguising it. When Emilio questioned her, she confessed with appalling calm that her dearest wish had been to live with Hébert, and that she had decided against doing so only for his sake and the twins’.

  Grifalconi let her go. He did not commit suicide or become an alcoholic but instead devoted all his attention to the care of the twins. Each morning before going to work he took them to school, and in the evening he brought them home. He did the shopping, he cooked for them and washed them. He cut up their meat, helped with their homework, read them bedtime stories, took them on Saturday afternoons to Avenue des Ternes to buy them shoes, duffel-coats, and jumpers. He made sure they went to Sunday school and were confirmed.

  In 1959, at the termination of his contract with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs (the agency overseeing the work at Château de la Muette), Grifalconi returned with his children to Verona. A few weeks earlier, he called on Valène to commission a picture. He wanted the painter to portray him in the company of his wife and their two children. The four of them would be in the dining room. He would be seated; she would be standing behind him in her black skirt and flowered blouse, her left hand resting on his left shoulder in a gesture of serene trust; the twins would be wearing their handsome sailor suits and their confirmation armbands. A photograph of his grandfather, who had visited the Pyramids, would be set on the table; and on the mantel Laetizia’s bridal wreath would appear between the two pots of rosemary she so loved.

  Instead of a painting, Valène executed a coloured pen-and-ink drawing. With Emilio and the twins posing for him, making use for Laetizia of several photographs that were none too new, he lavished the greatest care on all the details the cabinet-maker requested of him – the little blue and purple flowers on Laetizia’s blouse, his forebear’s spats and pith helmet, the laborious gilding of the bridal wreath, the damask folds of the twins’ armbands.

  Emilio was so pleased with Valène that he insisted not only on paying him but on presenting him with two objects that were incomparably dear to him. He brought the painter to his apartment and laid an oblong case of green leather on the table. Having turned on a ceiling spotlight to illuminate the case, he opened i
t. A weapon rested on the brilliant red lining, its smooth handle of ash, its bill-shaped flat blade of gold. “Do you know what this is?” he asked. Valène raised his eyebrows to express his perplexity. “It’s a golden billhook – the kind the Gallic druids used for harvesting mistletoe.” Valène looked at Grifalconi incredulously, but the cabinet-maker seemed sure of himself. “I made the handle, of course, but the blade is original. It was discovered in a tomb near Aix-en-Provence. It’s said to be typical Salian workmanship.” Valène examined the blade more closely. Seven minute engravings were delicately chased on one of its sides, but he was unable to make out what they represented, even with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass. All he could see was that in several of them there apparently figured a woman with very long hair.

  The second object was even stranger. When Grifalconi extracted it from its padded case, Valène thought at first that it was a large cluster of coral. Grifalconi shook his head. In one of the attics in Château de la Muette he had found the remains of a table. Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was exceptionally well preserved; but its base, a massive, spindle-shaped column of grained wood, turned out to be completely worm-eaten. The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverised wood. No sign of this insidious labour showed on the surface. Grifalconi saw that the only way of preserving the original base – hollowed out as it was, it could no longer support the weight of the top – was to reinforce it from within; so once he had completely emptied the canals of their wood dust by suction, he set about injecting them with an almost liquid mixture of lead, alum, and asbestos fibre. The operation was successful; but it quickly became apparent that, even thus strengthened, the base was too weak, and Grifalconi had to resign himself to replacing it. It was after he had done this that he thought of dissolving what was left of the original wood so as to disclose the fabulous arborescence within, this exact record of the worms’ life inside the wooden mass: a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence, their undeviating single-mindedness, their obstinate itineraries; the faithful materialisation of all they had eaten and digested as they forced from their dense surroundings the invisible elements needed for their survival, the explicit, visible, immeasurably disturbing image of the endless progressions that had reduced the hardest of woods to an impalpable network of crumbling galleries.