Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  To the left of the puzzle, a decorated tray carries a coffee jug, a cup and saucer, and a silver-plated sugarbowl. The scene painted on the tray is partly masked by these objects, but two details can be made out nonetheless: on the right, a boy in embroidered trousers leans over a river bank; in the centre, a carp out of water twists on a line; the fisherman and the other characters remain invisible.

  In front of the puzzle and the tray, several books, exercise books, and folders are spread out on the floor. The title of one of them is visible: Safety Regulations in Mines and Quarries, One of the folders is open at a page partly covered with equations written out in a small, fine hand:

  If f Hom (v, μ) (resp. g Hom (ξ, v)) is a homogeneous morphism whose degree is the matrix α (resp. β), fog is homogeneous and its degree is the product matrix αβ.

  Let α = (αij), 1 ≤ i ≤ m, 1 ≤ j ≤ n and β = (βkl), 1 ≤ k ≤ n, 1 ≤ l ≤ p (|ξ| = p) be the given matrices. Suppose that ƒ = (f1, …,fm),g = (g1, …, gn), and let h: π →ξ be a morphism, (h = (h1, …, hp). Finally let a = (a1, …, ap) be an element of Ap. For each index i between 1 and m (|μ| = m) we compute the morphism

  xi=ƒiog 0(a1h1, …, aphp).

  First we get

  then

  Thus fog satisfies the homogeneity condition of degree αβ([1.2.2]).

  * * *

  The room’s walls are painted in white gloss. Several framed posters are hanging on them. One of them depicts four greedy-looking monks sitting at table around a Camembert cheese on the label of which four greedy-looking monks – the very same – are again at table around, etc. The scene is repeated distinctly four times over.

  Fernand de Beaumont was an archaeologist as ambitious as Schliemann. He tried to find the traces of the legendary city called Lebtit by the Arabs and which was supposed to have been their capital in Spain. Nobody disputed the existence of such a city, but most specialists, be they Arabists or Hispanists, agreed that it should be identified either as Ceuta, on African territory opposite Gibraltar, or as Jaén, in Andalusia, at the foot of the Sierra de Magina. Beaumont wouldn’t agree to these identifications, on the grounds that none of the excavations made at Ceuta and at Jaén had displayed some of the features attributed to Lebtit by the literature. Stories told in particular of a strong castle “with leafed gates meant neither for going in nor for going out but only to be kept locked. Whenever a king died and another took the high throne after him, he set with his own hands a new lock to the gate, until these locks numbered twenty-four – one for each of the kings.” There were seven rooms in the castle. The seventh was “so long that the ablest archer shooting from the threshold could not get his arrow to fix in the end wall”. In the first, there were “perfect figures” representing Arabs “mounted on their swift horses and camels, with turbans hanging down their shoulders and scimitars dangling from their belts and bearing long lances in their right hands”.

  Beaumont belonged to that school of medievalists which described itself as “materialist” and which prompted a professor of the history of religion, for example, to go through the accounts of the Vatican chancery with the sole aim of proving that in the first half of the twelfth century the consumption of parchment, lead, and sigillary ribbon so far exceeded the amount justified by the number of officially declared and registered bulls that even allowing for possible meltings and probable muddles one had to conclude that a relatively large number of bulls (and we are talking about bulls, not briefs, since only bulls were sealed with lead, briefs being sealed with wax) had been kept confidential if not clandestine. Whence the thesis, justly famous in its time, on Secret Bulls and the Question of the Antipopes, which shed new light on the relations between Innocent II, Anaclete II, and Victor IV.

  In a roughly similar manner Beaumont showed that if you took as a yardstick not Sultan Selim’s 1798 world record of 888 metres but the good though not outstanding performance of the English bowmen at Crécy, the seventh room in the castle at Lebtit could not have been less than two hundred yards long and, taking account of the angle of projection, could scarcely have had less than thirty yards’ ceiling height. Neither the excavations at Ceuta nor those at Jaén nor any others had uncovered a room of the requisite dimensions, which allowed Beaumont to state that “if the legend of this city has its origins in some real fortress, then it is not any one of those whose remains we know of to date”.

  Beyond this purely negative argument, another fragment of the legend of Lebtit seemed destined to give Beaumont a hint of the citadel’s site. On the unreachable end wall of the archers’ room, so the legend went, the following sentence was carved: “If ever a King opens the door of this castle, his warriors will turn to stone like the warriors of the first room, and his enemies shall lay his kingdom to waste”. Beaumont saw this metaphor as a translation of the upheavals which shook the Reyes de taifas and provoked the Reconquista. More exactly, in his view, the legend of Lebtit described what he called the “Cantabrian débâcle of the Moors”, that is to say, the battle of Covadonga in the course of which Pelage defeated the emir Alkhamah before having himself crowned King of Asturias on the battlefield. And with an enthusiasm that brought him the admiration of even his sharpest critics, Fernand de Beaumont decided that it was at Oviedo, in the heart of the Asturias, where the remains of the legendary fortress were to be found.

  The origins of Oviedo were obscure. Some believed it was a monastery built by two monks to escape from the Moors; others saw it as a Visigoth citadel; still others held it to be a Hispano-Roman oppidum sometimes called Lucus asturum, sometimes Ovetum; and finally there were those who said that it was Pelage himself (called Don Pelayo by the Spaniards, who believed him to have been King Rodriguez’s old lance-bearer at Jerez, and Belaï al-Roumi by the Arabs since he was supposed to be of Roman extraction) who had founded the city. So many contradictory hypotheses served to support Beaumont’s argument: he took Oviedo to be the fabled Lebtit, the most northerly of the Moorish strongholds in Spain and by that token the symbol of their domination over the peninsula. Its loss would have signalled the end of Islamic hegemony over Western Europe, and it would have been to assert this defeat that the victorious Pelage settled there.

  Excavations began in 1930 and lasted more than five years. In the final year Beaumont was visited by Bartlebooth, who had come to nearby Gijon, also an ancient capital of the Asturian kings, to paint the first of his seascapes.

  A few months later, Beaumont returned to France. He drew up a 78-page technical report on the conduct of the excavations, in which, in particular, he proposed a system for exploiting the results based on the Dewey Decimal Classification, and which is still regarded as a model of its kind. Then, on 12 November 1935, he committed suicide.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Third Floor Right, 1

  THIS WILL BE a drawing room, almost bare, with polished floorboards. The walls will be covered with metal panels.

  Four men squat in the middle of the room, virtually sitting on their heels, with knees wide apart, elbows resting on knees, their hands together with middle fingers hooked and the other fingers stretched out. Three of the men will be in a row, facing the fourth. All will be bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only black silk trousers printed with a repeated design representing an elephant. A metal ring set with a circular obsidian will be worn by each on the ring finger of the right hand.

  * * *

  The room’s only furniture is a Louis XIII armchair with whorled legs and studded leather arms and back. A long black sock is hooked over one of the arms.

  The man facing the others is Japanese. His name is Ashikage Yoshimitsu. He belongs to a sect founded in 1960 in Manila by a deep-sea fisherman, a post-office employee, and a butcher’s mate. The Japanese name of the sect is “Shira Nami”, which means “The White Wave”; in French it is called “Les Trois Hommes Libres”, or “The Three Free Men”.

  In the three years following the founding of the sect, each of these “three free men” managed to convert t
hree others. The nine men of the second generation initiated twenty-seven over the next three years. The sixth level, in 1975, numbered seven hundred and twenty-nine members, including Ashikage Yoshimitsu, who was given the task, along with some other members, of spreading the new faith in the West. Initiation into the sect of The Three Free Men is long, hard, and very expensive, but it does not seem that Yoshimitsu had much difficulty in finding three converts rich enough to set aside the time and the money obligatorily required for such an enterprise.

  The novices are at the very first stage of initiation and have to overcome preliminary trials in which they must absorb themselves in the contemplation of a perfectly trivial mental or material object to such a degree as to become oblivious to all feeling, even to extreme pain: to this end, the squatting tyros’ heels are not resting directly on the floor, but on large metal dice with particularly sharp edges held in balance with one side touching the floor and the opposite side touching the heel: the slightest tautening of the foot makes the dice tumble instantly, causing the prompt and irreversible expulsion not only of the inadequate pupil but also of his two companions; the slightest relaxation of the position causes the edge of the dice to cut into the flesh, with an ensuing pain which quickly becomes unbearable. The three men have to stay in this disagreeable position for six hours; two minutes’ break is allowed every three quarters of an hour, but recourse to this concession more than three times per session is frowned upon.

  As for the object of meditation, each has a different one. The first novice, who has the exclusive sales rights in France for the products of a Swedish manufacturer of hanging files, has to solve a puzzle presented to him in the form of a small square of white card on which the following question has been finely handwritten in violet ink:

  Who loved to eat her fill alongside Aymon?

  above which a bow has been drawn around the figure 6.

  The second pupil is German, the owner of a baby-wear factory in Stuttgart. He has in front of him, placed on a steel cube, a piece of flotsam of a shape quite closely resembling a ginseng root.

  The third – who is French, and a star singer – faces a voluminous treatise on the culinary arts, the sort of book that usually goes on sale in the Christmas season. The book is placed on a music stand. It is open at an illustration of a reception given in 1890 by Lord Radnor in the drawing rooms of Longford Castle.

  Printed on the left-hand page in a frame of art-nouveau colophons and garland decorations is a recipe for

  * * *

  STRAWBERRY CREAM

  Take 100z. wild or cultivated strawberries. Strain through a fine sieve. Mix in 30z. icing sugar. Whip 1pt cream until very firm and blend in the mixture. Spoon the mixture from the bowl into small round paper cups, and cool for two hours in a cellar that is not too cold. To serve, place a large strawberry in each cup.

  * * *

  Yoshimitsu himself is sitting on his heels, but without the encumbrance of dice. Between the palms of his hands he holds a small bottle of orange juice. From it a straw sticks out, connected to several other straws in a line, in such a way as to reach as far as his mouth.

  Smautf has calculated that in 1978 there would be two thousand one hundred and eighty-seven new members of the sect of The Three Free Men, and, assuming none of the older disciples dies, a total of three thousand two hundred and seventy-seven keepers of the faith. Then things would go much faster: by 2017, the nineteenth generation would run to more than a thousand million people. In 2020, the entire planet, and well beyond, would have been converted.

  Nobody lives on the third floor right. The owner is a certain Monsieur Foureau, who is said to live on an estate at Chavignolles, between Caen and Falaise, in a farm of thirty-eight hectares, with a sort of manor house. Some years ago, a television drama was filmed there, under the title The Sixteenth Edge of This Cube; Rémi Rorschach took part in the shooting but never met this owner.

  Nobody ever seems to have seen him. There is no name on the door on the landing, nor on the list fixed on the glass pane of the concierge’s office door. The blinds are always drawn.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Marquiseaux, 1

  AN EMPTY DRAWING room on the fourth floor right.

  On the floor there is a woven sisal mat, its strands entwined in such a way as to form star-shaped designs.

  On the wall, an imitation of Jouy cretonne wallpaper depicts big sailing ships, Portuguese four-masters, armed with cannon and culverins, making ready to put into a harbour; the main jibs and spanker sails billow in the wind; sailors have climbed up the ropes to clew the others.

  There are four paintings on the walls.

  The first is a still life that despite its modern manner is strongly reminiscent of those compositions constructed on the theme of the five senses which were so common throughout Europe from the end of the Renaissance to the eighteenth century: on a table, there is an ashtray with a lighted Havana, a book of which the title and subtitle can be seen – The Unfinished Symphony: A Novel – though the name of the author is hidden, a bottle of rum, a cup-and-ball, and, in a shallow bowl, a pile of dried fruit, walnuts, almonds, apricot halves, prunes, etc.

  The second depicts a street on the edge of a city, at night, alongside wasteland. To the right, a metal pylon with crossbars supporting at each point of intersection a large, lighted electric lamp. To the left, a constellation of stars reproduces precisely the inverse image of the pylon (base in the sky, apex towards the ground). The sky is covered in a flower pattern (dark blue on a lighter background) identical to the shapes made by frost on glass.

  The third is of a legendary beast, the tarand, first described by Gelon the Sarmatian:

  A tarand is an animal as big as a bullock, having a head like a stag, or a little bigger, two stately horns with large branches, cloven feet, hair long like that of a furred Muscovite, I mean a bear, and a skin almost as hard as steel armour. The Scythian said that there are but few tarands to be found in Scythia, because it varieth its colour according to the diversity of the places where it grazes and abides, and represents the colour of the grass, plants, trees, shrubs, flowers, meadows, rocks, and generally of all things near which it comes. It hath this in common with the sea-pulp, or polypus, with the thoes, with the wolves of India, and with the chameleon; which is a kind of lizard so wonderful, that Democritus hath written a whole book of its figure, and anatomy, as also of its virtue and property in magic. This I can confirm, that I have seen it change its colour, not only at the approach of things that have a colour, but by its own voluntary impulse, according to its fear or other affections: as for example, upon a green carpet, I have certainly seen it become green; but having remained there some time, it turned yellow, blue, tanned and purple, in course, in the same manner as you sec a turkey-cock’s comb change colour according to its passions. But what we find most surprising in this tarand is, that not only its face and skin, but also its hair could take whatever colour was about it.

  The fourth picture is a black-and-white reproduction of a painting by Forbes called A Rat Behind the Arras. This painting was inspired by a true story which took place at Newcastle-upon-Tyne during the winter of 1858.

  Old Lady Forthright had a collection of watches and clockwork toys of which she was very proud; the jewel in this crown was a minute watch set in a fragile alabaster egg. She had entrusted the keeping of her collection to her oldest servant. He was a coachman who had been in her service for more than sixty years and who had been madly in love with her ever since he had first had the privilege of driving her. He had transferred his silent passion to his mistress’s collection, and, since he was particularly clever with his hands, he maintained it with ferocious care, and spent his days and his nights keeping these delicate mechanisms in good order, or restoring them, for some of the pieces were more than two centuries old.

  The finest items of the collection were kept in a small room used only for that purpose. Some were locked away in glass-fronted cases, but most were hung on the wall
and protected from dust by a thin muslin curtain. The coachman slept in an adjacent boxroom because a few months previously a solitary scientist had settled not far from the castle, in a laboratory where, like Martin Magron and Vella in Turin, he was studying the contradictory effects of strychnine and curare on rats: whereas the old lady and her coachman were convinced that he was a brigand drawn to the area by greed alone and was plotting some diabolical stratagem for getting hold of these precious jewels.

  One night the old coachman was woken by tiny mewings that seemed to come from the collection room. He imagined that the demon scientist had trained one of his rats and taught it to fetch the watches. He got up, took a hammer from the toolbag he never let out of his sight, went into the room, approached the curtain as silently as he could, and hit hard at the place where the noise seemed to be coming from. Alas, it was not a rat, but only that magnificent watch set in its alabaster egg; its works had got a little out of adjustment, and had given it an almost imperceptible squeak. Lady Forthright, woken in a start by the hammer-blow, ran thereupon to the room, where she found the old servant dumbfounded, open-mouthed, holding in one hand the hammer and in the other the broken jewel. Without giving him time to explain what had happened, she called her other servants and had her coachman locked away as a raving lunatic. She died two years later. The old coachman learnt of her death, managed to escape from his far-distant asylum, returned to the castle, and hanged himself in the very room where the drama had taken place.