Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  In this early work over which the influence of Bonnat still hangs heavily, Forbes has made very free use of the original story. He shows the room with its clock-covered walls. The old coachman is dressed in a uniform of white leather; he has climbed onto an elaborately shaped, dark-red lacquered Chinese chair. He is hanging a long silk scarf onto one of the ceiling rafters. Old Lady Forthright stands at the doorway; she is looking at her servant with an expression of great anger; in her right hand she is holding, with outstretched arm, a silver chain at the end of which hangs a shard of the alabaster egg.

  There are several collectors in this building, and they are often more maniacal than the characters in the painting. Valène himself kept the postcards Smautf sent him from each place they stopped off at. He had one such from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in fact, and another from the Australian Newcastle, in New South Wales.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Foulerot, 1

  ON THE FIFTH floor, right-hand side, right at the end: right below where Gaspard Winckler had his workroom. Valène remembered the parcels he received every fortnight for twenty years: even at the height of war they had kept coming regularly, and every one identical, absolutely identical; obviously, the postage stamps varied, allowing the concierge, who wasn’t yet Madame Nochère, but Madame Claveau, to ask if she could have them for her son Michel; but apart from the stamps there was nothing to distinguish one parcel from another: it was the same kraft paper, the same string, the same wax seal, the same address label; it made you think that before leaving, Bartlebooth must have asked Smautf to work out in advance how much tissue paper, kraft paper, string, and sealing wax would be needed for all five hundred parcels! He probably hadn’t needed to ask, Smautf would have understood without prompting! It’s not as if they had been short of trunks.

  Here, on the fifth floor right, the room is empty. It is a bathroom, painted a dull orange colour. On the rim of the bath, a large oyster shell lined with mother-of-pearl – for it had once contained a pearl – now holds a piece of soap and a pumice stone. Above the washbasin there is an octagonal mirror in a veined marble surround. Between the bath and the basin, a Scottish cashmere cardigan and a skirt with braces have been thrown onto a folding chair.

  The door at the end is open and gives onto a long corridor. A girl of barely eighteen comes towards the bathroom. She is naked. In her right hand she holds an egg, which she will use for washing her hair, and in her left hand she carries issue No. 40 of Les Lettres Nouvelles (July–August 1956), a review containing, alongside a note by Jacques Lederer on Le Journal d’un prêtre by Paul Jury (Gallimard), a short story by Luigi Pirandello, dating from 1913, entitled In the Abyss, and telling the tale of how Romeo Daddi went mad.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Servants’ Quarters, 1

  IT’S A MAID’S room on the seventh floor, to the left of the one right at the end of the corridor where the old painter Valène lives. The room is attached to the large flat on the second floor right, the one where Madame de Beaumont, the archaeologist’s widow, lives with her two granddaughters, Anne and Béatrice Briedel. Béatrice, the younger, is seventeen. A clever child, outstanding at school, she is studying for the entrance examination to the girls’ section of the Ecole Normale Supérieure at Sèvres. She has obtained the permission of her strict grandmother to use this independent room to study, but not to live in.

  There are hexagonal red tiles on the floor, and the walls are papered with a design depicting various shrubs. Despite the tiny size of the flatlet, Béatrice has invited five of her classmates in. She is seated at her work-desk on a high-backed chair, which stands on feet carved in the shape of sheep bones. She is wearing a skirt with braces and a red top with slightly puffed cuffs; on her right wrist she wears a silver bangle and holds between the thumb and index finger of her left hand a long cigarette, which she is watching burn away.

  One of her friends, dressed in a long white linen coat, is standing by the door and seems to be carefully studying a map of the Paris underground. The other four, uniformly dressed in jeans and striped shirts, are seated on the floor, around a tea-set on a tray, placed beside a lamp of which the base is a small barrel, of the sort Saint Bernard dogs are generally supposed to carry. One of the girls pours tea. Another opens a box of cheese packed in small cubes. The third is reading a novel by Thomas Hardy, on the cover of which can be seen a bearded character sitting in a rowing boat in the middle of a stream and fishing with rod and line, whilst on the bank a knight in armour appears to be hailing him. The fourth, with an air of profound indifference, is looking at an engraving depicting a bishop leaning over a table on which you can see one of those games called solitaire. It is made of a wooden board, trapezoidal in shape, much like a racket-press, in which twenty-five holes have been drilled so as to form a lozenge, deep enough to take the pieces which are in this case good-sized pearls, placed to the right of the board on a little black silk cushion. The engraving, which manifestly copies the famous painting by Bosch known as The Conjuror, in the Municipal Gallery at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, has a humorous – though not, apparently, very illuminating – title, handwritten in Gothic lettering:

  be that with his soup will drink

  when he is dead shall see no wink

  The suicide of Fernand de Beaumont left his widow Véra with a daughter of six, Elizabeth, who had never seen her father, kept far from Paris by his Cantabrian excavations; nor had she seen much more of her mother, who had pursued her career as a singer in the Old World and in the New practically uninterrupted by her brief marriage to the archaeologist.

  Born in Russia at the turn of the century, Véra Orlova – that is the name by which music-lovers still know her – fled in the spring of 1918 and settled first in Vienna, where she was Schoenberg’s pupil at the Verein für musikalische Privataufführung. She followed Schoenberg to Amsterdam, but their ways parted when he returned to Berlin and she came to Paris to give a series of recitals at the Salle Erard. Despite the sometimes sarcastic and sometimes tempestuous hostility of audiences clearly unfamiliar with the technique of Sprechgesang, and supported only by a small band of aficionados, she managed to insert into her programmes, mostly composed of operatic arias, lieder by Schumann and Hugo Wolf, and songs by Mussorgsky, some of the vocal pieces of the Vienna School, which she thus introduced to Parisians. It was at a reception given by Count Orfanik, at whose request she had come to sing Angelica’s last aria in Arconati’s Orlando –

  Innamorata, mio cuore tremante

  Voglio morire

  – that she met the man who would become her husband. But she was in demand, everywhere, more and more insistently, and was dragged off on triumphant tours which sometimes lasted a full year, and hardly lived at all with Fernand de Beaumont, who, for his part, only ever left his study in order to check his speculative hypotheses in the field.

  Born in 1929, Elizabeth was therefore brought up by her paternal grandmother, the old Countess de Beaumont, and saw her mother for scarcely a few weeks each year when the singer consented to resist her impresario’s ever-increasing demands and came to take a rest at the Beaumont castle at Lédignan. It was only towards the end of the war, when Elizabeth had just turned fifteen, that her mother, who had now given up concerts and touring to devote herself to teaching singing, brought her to Paris to live with her. But the girl soon rejected the guardianship of a woman who, when deprived of the glitter of boxes and gala performances, of the bunches of roses thrown at the end of her recitals, turned shrewish and domineering. She ran away one year later. Her mother would never see her again, and all the enquiries she made to track her down came to nought. It was only in September 1959 that Véra Orlova learnt, at the same time, what her daughter’s life had been, and how she died. Elizabeth had married a Belgian bricklayer, François Breidel, two years earlier. They lived in the Ardennes, at Chaumont-Porcien. They had two little girls, Anne, who was one year old, and Béatrice, who was a newborn baby. On Monday 14 September, a neighbour, hearing crying in the house,
tried to break in. Unable to do so, she went to fetch the gamekeeper. They shouted, but the only reply they could get was the ever more strident crying of the babies; then, with the help of some other villagers, they broke down the back door and rushed to the parents’ bedroom, where they found them, lying naked in bed, their throats slit, swimming in blood.

  Véra de Beaumont heard the news that same evening. Her wailing scream echoed through the whole building. Next morning, after being driven through the night by Bartlebooth’s chauffeur, Kléber, who when he was told of the business by the concierge spontaneously offered his services, she arrived at Chaumont-Porcien, and left almost straightaway with the two children.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Servants’ Quarters, 2

  Morellet

  MORELLET HAD A room in the eaves, on the eighth floor. On his door could still be seen the number 17, in green paint.

  After plying diverse trades which he enjoyed reciting in an accelerating list – bench hand, music hall singer, baggage handler, sailor, riding instructor, variety artist, musical conductor, ham stripper, saint, clown, a soldier for five minutes, verger in a spiritualist church, and even a walk-on in one of the first Laurel and Hardy shorts – Morellet, at the age of twenty-nine, had become a technician in the chemistry lab at the Ecole Polytechnique, and would no doubt have remained so until retirement if, like so many others’, his path had not been crossed one day by Bartlebooth.

  When he returned from his travels, in December nineteen fifty-four, Bartlebooth sought a process which would allow him, once he had reassembled his puzzles, to recover the original seascapes; to do that, first the pieces of wood would need to be stuck back together, then a means of eliminating all the traces of the cutting lines would have to be found, as well as a way of restoring the original surface texture of the paper. If the two glued layers were then separated with a razor, the watercolour would be returned intact, just as it had been on the day, twenty years before, when Bartlebooth had painted it. It was a difficult problem, for though there were on the market even in those days various resins and synthetic glazes used by toyshops for puzzles in window displays, they left the cutting lines far too visible.

  As was his custom, Bartlebooth wanted the person who would help him in this search to live in the same building, or as near as possible. That is how, through his faithful Smautf, whose room was on the same floor as the lab technician’s, he met Morellet. Morellet had none of the theoretical knowledge required to solve such a problem, but he referred Bartlebooth to his head of department, a chemist of German origin named Kusser, who claimed to be a distant descendant of the composer

  KUSSER or COUSSER (Johann Sigismond), German composer of Hungarian extraction (Pozsony, 1660–Dublin, 1727). He collaborated with Lully during his stay in France (1674–1682). Music-master at various princely courts in Germany, conductor in Hamburg, where he wrote and performed several operas: Erindo (1693), Porus (1694), Pyramus and Thisbe (1694), Scipio Africanus (1695), Jason (1697). In 1710 he was appointed master of music at Dublin Cathedral and remained there until his death. He was one of the founders of the Hamburg opera, where he introduced the “French overture”, and was a precursor of Handel in the field of oratorio. Six of his overtures and various other compositions have survived.

  After many fruitless trials using all kinds of animal and vegetable glues and various synthetic acrylics, Kusser tackled the problem from a different angle. Grasping that he had to find a substance capable of bonding the fibres of the paper without affecting the coloured pigmentation which it supported, he fortunately recalled a technique he had seen used, in his youth, by certain Italian medal makers: they would coat the inside of the die with a very fine layer of powdered alabaster, which allowed them to strike almost perfectly smooth coins and eliminated virtually all trimming and finishing work. In pursuing this line of research, Kusser discovered a type of gypsum that turned out to be satisfactory. Reduced to an almost impalpably fine powder and mixed with a gelatinous colloid, injected at a given temperature under high pressure through a microsyringe which could be manipulated in such a way as to follow precisely the complex shapes of the cutting lines Winckler had originally made, the gypsum reagglutinated the threads of the paper and restored its prior structure. The fine powder became perfectly translucid as it cooled and had no visible effect on the colour of the painting.

  The process was simple and required only patience and care. Appropriate instruments were specially built and installed in Morellet’s room; handsomely remunerated by Bartlebooth, Morellet let his job at the Ecole Polytechnique slip more and more, and he devoted himself to the wealthy amateur.

  In truth, Morellet didn’t have much to do. Every fortnight Smautf brought him up the puzzle which, despite its difficulty, Bartlebooth had, once again, succeeded in reassembling. Morellet inserted it into a metal frame and put it under a special press which gave an imprint of the cutting lines. With this imprint he used an electrolytic process to make an open-work stencil, a piece of rigid, fantastical metal lace which faithfully reproduced all the delineations of the puzzle on which this matrix was then delicately and accurately overlaid. After preparing his gypsum suspension and heating it to the required temperature, Morellet filled his microsyringe and fixed it on an articulated arm so that the needle-point, no more than a few microns thick, was located precisely above the open lines of the stencil. The remainder of the operation was automatic, since the ejection of the gypsum and the movement of the syringe were controlled by an electronic device using an X-Y table, giving a slow but even deposit of the substance.

  The last part of the operation did not concern the lab technician: the puzzle, rebonded into a watercolour stuck to a thin sheet of poplar, was taken to the restorer Guyomard, who detached the sheet of Whatman paper by means of a blade and disposed of all traces of glue on the reverse side, two tricky but routine operations for this expert who had made his name famous by lifting frescoes covered by several layers of plaster and paint, and by cutting in half, through its thickness, a sheet of paper on which Hans Bellmer had drawn on recto and verso sides.

  All in all, what Morellet had to do, once a fortnight, was simply to make ready and supervise a series of manipulations which, including cleaning and tidying away, took a little less than a day.

  This enforced idleness had unhappy consequences. Relieved of all financial cares, but bitten by the research bug, Morellet took advantage of his free time to devote himself, in his flat, to the sort of physical and chemical experiments of which his long years as a technician seemed to have left him particularly frustrated.

  In all the local cafés he gave out his visiting card, which described him as “Head of Practical Services at the Ecole Pyrotechnique”, and he offered his services generously; he obtained innumerable orders for superactive hair and carpet shampoos, stain-removers, energy-saving devices, cigarette filters, martingales for 421, cough potions, and other miracle products.

  One evening in February 1960, whilst he was heating a pressure cooker full of a mixture of rosin and diterpene carbide destined to produce a lemon-flavoured toothpaste, the apparatus exploded. Morellet’s left hand was torn to shreds, and he lost three fingers.

  This accident cost him his job – preparing the metal grid required some minimal dexterity – and all he had to live on was a part-pension meanly paid by the Ecole Polytechnique, and a small pension from Bartlebooth. But his vocation for research did not abate; on the contrary, it grew sharper. Though severely lectured by Smautf, by Winckler, and by Valène, he persevered with experiments which turned out for the most part to be ineffective, but harmless, save for a certain Madame Schwann who lost all her hair after washing it in the special dye Morellet had made for her exclusive use; two or three times, though, these manipulations ended in explosions, more spectacular than dangerous, and in minor fires which were quickly brought under control.

  These incidents filled two people with glee: his neighbours on the right, the Plassaert couple, young traders in pr
inted cotton goods, who had ingeniously converted three maids’ rooms into a pied-à-terre (in so far as a dwelling situated right under the eaves may be referred to as a foot on the ground), and who were reckoning on Morellet’s room for further expansion. After each explosion they made a complaint, and took a petition around the building demanding the eviction of the former technician. The room belonged to the building manager, who, when the property had gone into co-ownership, had bought up almost all of the two top floors in his own name. For several years, the manager held back from putting the old man out on the street, for he had many friends in the building – to begin with, Madame Nochère herself, who regarded Monsieur Morellet as a true scientist, a brain, a possessor of secrets, and who had a personal stake in the little disasters which now and again struck the top floor of the building, not so much because of the tips she sometimes got on these occasions as for the epical, sentimental, and mysterious accounts she could give of them to the whole quartier.

  Then, a few months ago, there were two accidents in the same week. The first cut off the lights in the building for a few minutes; the second broke six windowpanes. But the Plassaerts won their case this time, and Morellet was locked away.

  In the painting the room is as it is today; the printed-cotton trader has bought it from the manager and has started to have work done on it. On the walls there is a dull, old-fashioned light-chestnut paint, and on the floor a coconut-fibre carpet worn down almost everywhere to the backing. The neighbour has already put two pieces of furniture in place: a low table, made of a pane of smoked glass set on a polyhedron of hexagonal cross-section, and a Renaissance chest. Placed on the table is a box of Münster, the lid of which depicts a unicorn, an almost empty sachet of caraway seeds, and a knife.