Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Gérard, the second son, managed his farm business more or less adequately. But Ferdinand, the third, ran into serious trouble. The Upper Boubandjida Mining Co. (Cameroon), of which he’d become a relatively major shareholder, had been set up some ten years before with the aim of prospecting for and then extracting the rich deposits of tin discovered by three Dutch geologists attached to the Zwindeyn Mission. There had been several preliminary expeditions in succession, reporting back with discouraging results: some confirmed the presence of substantial veins of cassiterite but expressed concern about mining conditions and especially transport; others claimed that the ore was too poor to warrant extraction, since the cost price would necessarily be too high; yet others maintained that the samples that had been taken contained no trace of tin, but on the other hand actually held abundant quantities of bauxite, iron, manganese, copper, gold, diamonds, and phosphates.

  Though mostly pessimistic, these contradictory surveys in no way deterred the Company from trading its shares actively on the Stock Exchange and increasing its capital annually by a new issue. In 1920, the Upper Boubandjida Mining Co. (Cameroon) had amassed nearly twenty million francs subscribed by seven thousand five hundred shareholders, and on its Board of Directors sat three former ministers of state, eight bankers, and eleven industrialists. That year, at an initially riotous but in the end enthusiastic shareholders’ meeting, the decision was reached unanimously to call a halt to these useless preliminaries and to go ahead immediately with mining the ore, whatever it was.

  Ferdinand was a trained civil engineer and managed to get appointed site controller. On 8 May 1923, he reached Garoua and undertook the ascent of the upper reaches of the Boubandjida as far as the high plateaux of Adamawa with five hundred locally recruited hands, eleven and a half tons of equipment, and twenty-seven management staff of European origin.

  Building the foundations and cutting the drifts turned out to be difficult; work was delayed by rain, which fell every day, causing the river to burst its banks in an irregular and unpredictable way, but on average with sufficient force on each occasion to wash out everything that had been cut or embanked so far.

  After two years Ferdinand Gratiolet caught the fevers and had to be repatriated. He was inwardly convinced that mining the tin of the Upper Boubandjida would never be economically viable. On the other hand, he’d seen in the lands he’d crossed great quantities of animals of all species and varieties, and that gave him the idea of going into the skin and fur trade. Scarcely out of convalescence, he sold his shares and set up a company for the import of animal skins, furs, horns, and exotic carapaces, which quickly specialised in furnishings: at that time the fashion was for fur bedside rugs, for cane furniture upholstered in zorille, antelope, giraffe, leopard, or zebra hide: a small deal dresser with buffalo-hide decorations sold easily for 1,200 francs, and a Tortosi vanity set in a trionix shell had been auctioned up to 38,295 francs at the Drouot Sales Room!

  The business took off in 1926. From 1927, world prices for leathers and skins began falling headlong over the next six years. Ferdinand refused to believe in the crisis and carried on building up stocks. By the end of 1928 his entire capital was frozen in virtually non-negotiable goods, and he could not meet his freight and storage charges. To avoid a bankruptcy which would cheat his creditors, Emile put his brother afloat again by selling off two of the flats in his apartment house, including the one Bartlebooth moved into. But that didn’t do much good.

  In April 1931, when it was becoming clearer and clearer that Ferdinand, the owner of some forty thousand animal skins that had cost three or four times the price he could now get for them, was as unable to provide for their upkeep and security as he was unable to meet any of his other commitments, the warehouse at La Rochelle where his goods were in store was burnt to the ground.

  The insurance companies refused to pay and publicly accused Ferdinand of criminal arson. Ferdinand fled, leaving his wife, his son (who had just passed his philosophy agrégation with first-class marks) and the still-smoking ruin of his business. A year later his family heard that he had met his death in Argentina.

  But the insurance companies continued to persecute his widow. Her two brothers-in-law, Emile and Gérard, sacrificed themselves to come to her aid, the former selling seventeen of the thirty dwellings he still owned, the latter cashing in almost half of his agricultural estate.

  Emile and Gérard both died in 1934; Emile first, of pneumonia, in March; Gérard second, in September, of a brain haemorrhage. They left their children a shaky legacy which the following years would continue to gnaw away.

  END OF PART ONE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Entrance Hall, 1

  THE ENTRANCE HALL is relatively spacious, and almost perfectly square. At the rear, on the left, there is a door to the cellar; in the middle, the lift cage; on its wrought-iron door, a notice has been hung; on the right, the first flight of the stairs. The walls are painted in light green gloss, the floor is laid with a very tightly knotted cord carpet. On the left-hand wall, the glass-panel door of the concierge’s office, draped with little lace curtains.

  A woman is standing in front of the office, reading the list of the building’s occupants; she is wearing a capacious brown linen overcoat done up with a large fish-shaped brooch set with alabandite stones. A blood-red canvas bag is slung over her shoulder, in the manner of a bandolier, and in her right hand there is a sepia-tint photograph of a man in a black cloak. He has sideburns and pince-nez; he is standing beside a brass-and-mahogany revolving bookcase in Second Empire style, on the top of which there is a paste-glass vase filled with arum lilies. His top hat, gloves, and stick are laid beside him on a shell-encrusted kneehole desk.

  This man – James Sherwood – was the victim of one of the most celebrated swindles of all time: in eighteen ninety-six, a pair of tricksters of genius sold him the vase in which Joseph of Arimathæa gathered the blood of Christ. The woman – an American novelist by the name of Ursula Sobieski – has spent three years unravelling this shady deal for her next book, and her research has finally brought her to visit this block of flats today, for some piece of information to end her investigations.

  Born in Ulverston (Lancashire) in 1833, James Sherwood went overseas very young and became a druggist in Boston. In the early eighteen seventies he invented a ginger-based recipe for lung pastilles. In less than five years, these cough sweets became famous: they were vaunted by a celebrated slogan, “Sherwoods Put You in the Mood”, and illustrated on hexagonal vignettes showing a knight in armour driving his lance through the ghost of influenza personified as a grumpy old man lying flat on his stomach in a fog-enshrouded landscape: the vignettes were distributed in great numbers throughout America and painted on school blotters, on the backs of matchboxes, on soft-drink bottlecaps, on the reverse side of cheesebox lids, and on thousands of little toys and classroom baubles given away free to people who purchased a tin of Sherwoods at specified periods: pen-stands, exercise books, wooden cubes, little jigsaws, small gold-pans (exclusively for Californian customers), photos of leading music hall stars with forged autographs.

  The colossal fortune which came with such prodigious popularity did not suffice, unfortunately, to cure the druggist of his affliction: he was kept in a virtually chronic state of lethargy and exhaustion by ineradicable neurasthenia. But at least the fortune allowed him to indulge just about the only activity which helped him forget his troubles: collecting unica.

  In the jargon of the rare book, antique, and curio trade, an unicum, as its name implies, is an object which is the only one of its kind. This rather vague definition covers several classes of object; it can mean things of which only one example was ever made, such as the octobass, a monstrous double-bass for two musicians, one at the top of a ladder doing the fingering, the other on a mere stool drawing the bow, or the Legouix-Vavassor Alsatia, which won the Amsterdam Grand Prix in 1913 but was never marketed owing to the war; or it can mean
animal species of which only one member is known to exist, like the tendrac Dasogale fontoynanti, the sole specimen of which was caught in Madagascar and is now in the Natural History Museum in Paris, like the butterfly Troides allottei bought by a collector in 1966 for 1,500,000 francs, or like the Monachus tropicalis, the white-backed seal whose existence is known only by a photograph taken in 1962, in Yucatan; or it can mean objects of which only one example now remains, as is the case for several postage stamps, books, engravings, and sound-recordings; or, finally, it can mean objects rendered unique by this or that detail of their history: the pen with which the Treaty of Versailles was initialled and signed, the bread basket into which the head of Louis XVI or Danton rolled, the stub of the piece of chalk Einstein used at his memorable 1905 lecture, the first milligram of pure radium isolated by the Curies in 1898, the Ems Telegram, the boxing gloves Dempsey wore to defeat Carpentier on 21 July 1921, Tarzan’s first underpants, Rita Hayworth’s glove in Gilda, are all classic instances of this last category of unica, the most common but also the most slippery class, when you think that any object whatsoever can always be identified uniquely, and that in Japan there is a factory mass-producing Napoleon’s hat, or Napoleon hats.

  Scepticism and passion are the two traits of unica-lovers. Scepticism will lead them to amass an excess of evidence of the genuineness and – especially – of the uniqueness of the sought-after object; passion will lead them into sometimes boundless gullibility. It was with these two traits in mind that the confidence tricksters succeeded in stripping Sherwood of a third of his fortune.

  One day in 1896, an Italian workman called Longhi, hired a fortnight earlier to repaint the railings around his estate, came up to the druggist as he was giving his three greyhounds their daily walks, and explained in rather approximate English that three months earlier, he, the workman, had rented a room to a compatriot, a certain Guido Mandetta, who claimed to be a history student; this Guido had gone without warning, leaving behind only an old trunk full of books and papers. Longhi said he’d like to get his money back by selling the books, but was afraid of being swindled, and asked if Sherwood would like to help him. Sherwood didn’t see much to interest him in history textbooks and lecture notes and was about to say no, when Longhi added that the books were mainly old, and in Latin. Sherwood’s curiosity was awakened, and it was not disappointed. Longhi took him back to his house, a big wooden barn, brimful with bambini and masses of mammas, and took him into the little room under the roof where Mandetta had lived; scarcely had he opened the trunk than Sherwood shuddered with surprise and joy: in the midst of a heap of notebooks, loose leaves, pads, newspaper cuttings, and dog-eared books, he discovered an ancient Quarli, one of those sumptuous books with wooden boards and painted edges which the Quarlis printed in Venice between 1530 and 1570 and which have almost entirely disappeared from sight.

  Sherwood studied the volume carefully: it was in very poor condition, but there was no doubt that it was genuine. The druggist didn’t hesitate: he pulled two hundred-dollar bills from his billfold and handed them to Longhi; he cut short the Italian uttering jumbled thanks, had the trunk carried over to his house, and began to explore its contents systematically, and as time went on and his discoveries became clearer, his feeling of intense excitement became more and more overwhelming.

  The Quarli itself was valuable not just in bibliographic terms. It was the celebrated Vita brevis Helenae by Arnaud de Chemillé, in which the author, after retracing the main episodes in the life of the mother of Constantine the Great, vividly describes the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the circumstances of the discovery of the True Cross. Inserted into a kind of pocket sewn onto the vellum endpaper were five manuscript sheets, of much later date than the volume but nonetheless very old, probably late eighteenth century: they contained a painstaking, highly detailed compilation enumerating in unending columns of tiny and now almost indecipherable handwriting the locations and specifications of the Relics of the Passion: the fragments of the Holy Cross at St Peter’s, Rome, at St Sophia, at Worms, at Clairvaux, at Chapelle-Lauzin, at the Hospice of the Incurables at Baugé, at St Thomas’s, Birmingham, etc.; the Nails at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, at Naples Cathedral, at S Felice at Syracuse, at SS Apostoli in Venice, at the Church of Saint-Sernin, Toulouse; the spear with which Longinus pierced the Lord’s breast at S Paolo fuori le Mura, at S Giovanni in Laterano, at Nuremberg, and at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris; the chalice, in Jerusalem; the Three Dice used by the soldiers to gamble for Christ’s Tunic, at Sofia Cathedral; the Sponge Soaked in Vinegar and Gall at S Giovanni in Laterano, at S Maria-di-Trastevero, at S Maria Maggiore, at Saint Mark’s, at S Silvestro-in-capite, and at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris; the Thorns of the Crown at St Taurin’s, Evreux, Châteaumeillant, Orléans, Beaugency, and at Notre-Dame in Rheims, at Abbeville, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Vézelay, Palermo, Colmar, Montauban, Vienna, and Padua; St Lawrence’s Vase at S Lorenzo in Genoa, Veronica’s Veil (the vera icon) at S Silvestro in Rome; the Holy Shroud, in Rome, Jerusalem, Turin, Cadouin in the Périgord, Carcassonne, Mainz, Parma, Prague, Bayonne, York, Paris, Ayrshire, etc.

  The remaining items were no less interesting. Guido Mandetta had collected a whole scientific and historical file on the Relics of Golgotha and most particularly on the most highly treasured of all, the vase Joseph of Arimathæa was said to have used to gather the blood springing from Christ’s wounds: a set of articles by J. P. Shaw, formerly professor of history at Columbia University, New York, reviewed the various legends circulating about the Holy Vase and attempted to identify the elements of reality on which they might be rationally based. Professor Shaw’s analysis was not very hopeful: the tradition that Joseph himself had taken the Vase to England and founded the monastery at Glastonbury to house it in merely rested, according to his demonstration, on a (late?) Christian contamination of the Grail legend; the Sacro Catino at Genoa Cathedral was an emerald goblet, allegedly discovered by Crusaders at Caesarea in 1102, and it was not obvious how Joseph of Arimathæa could have got hold of it; the two-handled Golden Vase kept at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which Bede (who had never seen it) said had contained the Saviour’s Blood, was obviously just an ordinary chalice, mistakenly identified through a scribal error, “contained” having been copied instead of “consecrated”. As for the fourth legend, which said that Gonderic’s Burgundians, allied at Aetius’s instigation to the Saxons, the Alani, the Francs, and the Visigoths in order to halt Attila the Hun, reached the Catalaunian Fields bearing in front of them – as was customary for the period – their propitiatory relics, including the Holy Vase left to them by the Aryan missionaries who had converted them and which Clovis would take from them thirty years later at Soissons, Professor Shaw rejected this as the least plausible of all, for never would Arianists, who did not recognise the Transubstantiality of Jesus, have thought of worshipping or making others worship his relics.

  Nonetheless, Professor Shaw concluded, in the context of the intense movement between the Christian West and Constantinople lasting from the beginning of the fourth to the end of the thirteenth centuries, and of which the Crusades formed but a tiny chapter, it was not inconceivable that the True Vase could have been preserved, in so far as it had been, from the day after the Burial, an object of the greatest veneration.

  When he’d finished going through all of Mandetta’s material exhaustively – even though most of the documents remained undecipherable – Sherwood was convinced that the Italian had tracked down the Holy Vase. He put an army of detectives on his trail, but they came up with nothing, since Longhi hadn’t even been able to give a correct description of the man. He then decided to turn to Professor Shaw for advice. He found his address in the latest edition of Who’s Who in America and wrote to him. A reply arrived one month later: Professor Shaw had just returned from a voyage; kept busy by final examinations, he could not come to Boston but would willingly see Sherwood at his place in New York.

  The intervi
ew therefore took place at J. P. Shaw’s New York home on 15 June 1896. Sherwood had barely mentioned his discovery of the Quarli when Shaw interrupted him:

  “It’s the Vita brevis Helenae, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, but …”

  “There’s a pocket, on the rear endpaper, containing a list of all the Relics of Golgotha?”

  “Indeed there is, but …”

  “Well, my dear fellow, I’m delighted to make your acquaintance at last! That’s my copy you’ve found! As far as I know there aren’t any others. It was stolen from me two years ago.”

  The professor rose, hunted through a filing cabinet, and returned with a few crumpled sheets in his hand.

  “Look, here’s the announcement I had put in specialist journals and sent to every library in the country:

  STOLEN on 6 April 1893 from the house of Professor J. P. SHAW in New York, N.Y., United States of America, an extremely rare copy of VITA BREVIS HELENAE by Arnaud de Chemillé. Venice, Quarli, 1549, 171 num.pp., 11 unnum.pp. Badly damaged wooden press-boards. Vellum endpapers. Painted edges. Two of three hasps intact. Numerous mss. annotations in margins. INSET OF 5 MANUSCRIPT SHEETS BY J. B. ROUSSEAU

  Sherwood had to return to Shaw the book he thought he’d got so cheaply. He turned down the two hundred dollars’ compensation which Shaw offered. In return he asked the historian to help him exploit Mandetta’s copious file of information. Now it was the Professor’s turn to refuse: he was entirely absorbed in his work at the University, and above all he did not believe that he would learn anything from Mandetta’s papers: he had been studying the history of the relics for twenty years, and he didn’t think anything of the slightest importance had escaped him.