Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Against the rear wall, above the table with the green plants, is a wooden board with numbered pegs most of which support sets of keys, a printed notice with instructions for the use of the central-heating safety device, a colour photograph, no doubt cut out of a catalogue, of a ring with a huge solitaire, and a square-shaped piece of embroidery on canvas, with a quite startling design compared to the hunting scenes and fancy-dress balls on the Grand Canal you usually find; it depicts a parade in front of a great circus tent: to the right, two tumblers, one of whom is huge, a Falstaff two yards tall with a barrel-sized head and shoulders to match, a chest like a blacksmith’s bellows, legs as thick as twelve-year-old staddles, arms like push-rods and hands like crocodile shears, and is holding aloft at arm’s length the other, a slim, small lad of twenty whose weight in pounds would not number a quarter of what the other weighs in kilograms; in the middle, a group of dwarves performing various somersaults around their queen, a dog-faced dwarf dressed in a crinoline; and lastly, on the left, a lion tamer, a shabby little man with a black shade over one eye, wearing a black coat, but a beautiful sombrero with long gay tassels down the back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  On the Stairs, 5

  ON THE LANDING of the second floor. The Altamonts’ door, framed by two dwarf orange trees emerging from hexagonal marble plant pot-holders, is open. Through it exits an old family friend, who obviously arrived too early for the reception.

  He is a German industrialist called Hermann Fugger, who made a fortune in the early postwar years selling camping equipment, and has since moved into one-piece floor coverings and wallpaper. He is wearing a double-breasted suit, whose sobriety is overcompensated for by a mauve scarf with pink polka dots. He carries under his arm a Dublin daily – The Free Man – on which the following headline can be read:

  NEWBORN POP STAR WINS PIN BALL CONTEST

  and also a small display box advertising a travel agency:

  * * *

  EGYPT

  ITS SUN

  ITS EVENINGS

  ITS FIRMAMENT

  * * *

  Hermann Fugger has in fact arrived very early on purpose: an amateur cook, he spends his time regretting that business does not permit him to be at his stove more often, dreaming of the ever less likely day when he will be able to devote himself entirely to the culinary arts, and he was planning to cook his own recipe this evening for leg of wild boar in beer, whose knuckle end, he claims, is the most delectable thing on earth, but the Altamonts angrily refuse.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Louvet, 1

  THE LOUVETS’ FLAT on the first floor right. An executive’s living room. Walls hung with yellow leather; a sunken grate in a hexagonal fireplace, and a made-up fire on the point of flaming; an integrated suite of audio-visual equipment: stereo, tapedeck, TV, slide projector; sofa and matching armchairs in buttoned natural leather. Purple, cinammon, and toast-coloured hues; a low table tiled with small brownish hexagonal tiles, supporting a dish-bowl containing a set of poker dice, several darning eggs, a miniature bottle of angostura bitters, and a champagne cork that is actually a lighter; a pack of matches advertising the San Francisco club it comes from, Diamond’s; a naval officer’s desk, with a modern imported Italian lamp, a slender skeleton of black metal which can be made to hold almost any position; an alcove hung with red curtains and a bed buried under tiny multicoloured cushions; on the rear wall, a large watercolour depicting musicians playing antique instruments.

  The Louvets are away. They travel a lot, on business and for pleasure. Louvet looks – perhaps a bit too much – like the image people have of him, and which he shares: English fashions, Viennese moustache. Madame Louvet is a very stylish woman, coming on forty, who likes to wear culottes, yellow check waistcoats, leather belts, and chunky tortoiseshell bracelets.

  There is a photograph showing them on a bear hunt in the Andes, in the Macondo area; they are posing with another couple who can only be described as exercises in the same style: all four wear khaki combat jackets full of pockets and pouches. In the foreground, Louvet half-squats with one knee on the ground and a gun in his hand; behind him his wife is seated on a deckchair; behind the deckchair the other couple are standing.

  A fifth person, no doubt the guide whose job it was to go with them, stands a little to the side: a tall man with close-cropped hair, looking like an American GI; dressed in camouflage fatigues, he seems totally rapt in reading a cheap detective novel with an illustrated jacket, entitled El Crimén piramidal.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Lift Machinery, 1

  THE LIFT IS out of order, as usual. It has never worked really well. On the night of the fourteenth to the fifteenth of July 1925, barely a few weeks after it was installed, it got stuck for seven hours. There were four people in it, which allowed the insurance to refuse to pay for the repair, since it was designed for three people or two hundred kilograms. The four victims were Madame Albin, then called Flora Champigny, Raymond Albin, her fiancé, then doing his military service, Monsieur Jérôme, who was then a young history teacher, and Serge Valène. They had gone to Montmartre to see the firework display and had walked back by way of Pigalle, Clichy, and Batignolles, stopping at most of the bars for a glass of dry white wine or a drop of well-chilled rosé. They were therefore rather more than merry when the event occurred, around four in the morning, between the fourth and fifth floors. After the first moment of panic, they called the concierge: it wasn’t yet Madame Claveau, but an old Spanish woman who’d been there ever since the early days of the building; she was called Madame Araña and really looked like her name, as she was dry, dark, and hunched. She came, dressed in an orange dressing gown with green branch motifs and a sort of cotton sock serving as a nightcap, ordered them to be quiet, and warned them not to expect to be rescued for several hours.

  Left alone in the grey light of dawn, the four young folk, for they were all young then, made a list of their assets. Flora Champigny had scraps of roast hazelnut in the bottom of her handbag, and they shared them, but regretted it immediately as it increased their thirst. Valène had a lighter and Monsieur Jérôme had some cigarettes; they lit a few, but obviously they’d have preferred a drink. Raymond Albin suggested they pass the time with a game of belote and got a greasy pack of cards out of his pocket, but saw straightaway that the jack of clubs was missing. They decided to substitute for the lost jack a piece of card-sized paper on which they were going to draw a face both ways up, a club (), a capital J, and even the jack’s name. “Baltard!” said Valène. “No! Ogier!” said Monsieur Jérôme. “No! Lancelot!” said Raymond Albin. They argued in whispers for a while, then agreed they really didn’t have to name the jack. Then they tried to find a piece of paper. Monsieur Jérôme proposed one of his visiting cards, but it wasn’t the right size. The best they found was the back of an envelope that Valène had got the previous evening from Bartlebooth to tell him that owing to Bastille Day he would not be able to come tomorrow for his daily watercolour lesson (he had already told him that orally a few hours earlier, at the end of his last session, but the letter no doubt demonstrated one of the characteristic traits of Bartlebooth’s behaviour, or perhaps simply provided an opportunity to use the letterhead he had just had printed on a magnificent hazy vellum paper, almost bronze in colour, with his monogram in modern style inscribed in a lozenge). Obviously Valène had a pencil in his pocket, and when they had managed to use Flora Champigny’s nail scissors to cut out a correct-sized piece of envelope more or less neatly, he dashed off a very presentable jack of clubs with a few strokes, which provoked his three companions into whistles of admiration for the good likeness (Raymond Albin), for the speed of execution (Monsieur Jérôme), and for the intrinsic beauty of the drawing (Flora Champigny).

  But they then ran into another problem because, brilliant as it was, the substitute jack was too easy to distinguish from the other cards, which in itself was not reprehensible except in belote where the jack does in fact play an i
mportant role. The only solution, Monsieur Jérôme then said, was to use an otherwise ordinary card, say the seven of clubs, as the jack of clubs, and to draw a seven of clubs on another piece of envelope. “You should have said so in the first place,” grumbled Valène. And in fact there wasn’t enough envelope left. What’s more, Flora Champigny, tired no doubt from waiting to be taught to play belote, had gone to sleep, and her fiancé had ended up following her example. Valène and Monsieur Jérôme thought for a while of playing two-handed, but neither was very keen, and they soon gave up the idea. Thirst and hunger more than weariness gnawed at them; they began to tell each other of the best meals they’d ever had, then to swap recipes, a domain in which Monsieur Jérôme turned out to be unbeatable. He hadn’t quite finished listing the ingredients needed to make eel pâté, according to a recipe going back (he said) to the Middle Ages, before it was Valéne’s turn to drop off. Monsieur Jérôme, who must have drunk more than any of the others, and wanted to carry on having fun, tried for a few minutes to wake him. He couldn’t, and to pass the time he began to hum some of the hits of the day, then, getting into his stride, began to improvise freely on a tune which in his mind must have been the closing theme of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, of which he had seen the Paris premiere a few weeks before at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.

  His merry vociferation soon roused from their beds, then from their respective flats, the occupants of the fourth and fifth floors: Madame Hébert, Madame Hourcade, grandfather Echard with his cheeks in lather, Gervaise (Monsieur Colomb’s housekeeper) in a zenana-cloth bedjacket, lace bonnet, and bobbled slippers, and finally, with his moustache bristling, Emile Gratiolet himself, the landlord, who lived at the time on the fifth floor left in one of the two flats Rorschach would knock into one thirty-five years later.

  Emile Gratiolet was not exactly an accommodating man. In other circumstances he would certainly have evicted the four trouble-makers on the spot. Was it the spirit of Bastille Day that moved him to clemency? Or Raymond Albin’s trooper’s uniform? Or the delicious flush on Flora Champigny’s cheeks? Whatever the cause, the upshot was that he pulled the lever allowing the lift doors to be opened from the outside, helped the four merrymakers to clamber out of the narrow cage, and sent them to bed without even threatening to sue or fine them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Marcia, 3

  LÉON MARCIA, THE curio dealer’s husband, is in his bedroom. He is a thin, puny, sick old man, with an almost grey face and bony hands. He is sitting in a black leather armchair, dressed in pyjama trousers and a collarless shirt, an orange check scarf thrown over his skinny shoulders, faded felt slippers on his sockless feet, and a sort of flannel thing vaguely like a Phrygian bonnet on his skull.

  This burnt-out, blank-eyed, slow-moving man is still considered even now by most valuers and art dealers to be the world authority in areas as diverse as Prussian and Austro-Hungarian coins and medals, Ts’ing ceramics, French Renaissance prints, antique musical instruments, and Iranian and Persian Gulf prayer mats. He made his reputation in the early 1930s when in a series of articles published in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute he showed that the set of small engravings attributed to Léon Gaultier and sold at Sotheby’s in 1899 under the name of The Nine Muses in fact depicted Shakespeare’s nine greatest female roles – Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Portia, Rosalind, Titania, and Viola – and was the work of Jeanne de Chénany, an attribution which caused a sensation because at that time no works were known by this artist, who had been identified solely by her monogram and by a biography written by Humbert and published in his Brief History of the Origins and Progress of Engraving, Woodcuts, and Intaglio (Berlin, 1752, in-8°), which claimed – though unfortunately without quoting any sources – that she had worked in Brussels and Aachen from 1647 to 1662.

  Léon Marcia – and this is what is certainly the most surprising thing – is completely self-taught. He left school at nine. At twenty he hardly knew how to read, and the only thing he did read regularly was a sporting daily called Lucky Strike; at that time he was working for a motor mechanic on Avenue de la Grande Armée who built racing cars, which not only never won, but almost always crashed. Thus it was not long before the garage closed down for good, and, with a small gratuity in his pocket, Marcia spent a few months resting; he lived in a cheap hotel, the Hôtel de l’Aveyron, rose at seven, drank a hot strong coffee at the bar whilst leafing through Lucky Strike, and went back up to his room (the bed had meanwhile been made up) where he lay back for a nap, but not before spreading the paper over the end of the bed so as not to dirty the eiderdown with his shoes.

  Marcia, a man of very modest needs, could have lived like that for many years, but he fell ill the following winter: the doctors diagnosed tubercular pleurisy and strongly recommended mountain air: since he clearly could not afford a long stay in a sanatorium as a patient, Marcia solved the problem by getting a job as a room waiter in the most luxurious of them all, the Pfisterhof at Ascona, in the Ticino. It was there that in order to fill the long hours of compulsory resting, which he forced himself to observe once his work was done, he began to read, and grew to enjoy reading everything he could lay his hands on, borrowing book upon book from the wealthy international clientele – the owners of and heirs to corned-beef kingdoms, rubber empires, or tempered-steel syndicates – staying at the sanatorium. The first book he read was a novel, Silbermann, by Jacques de Lacretelle, which had won the Prix Fémine the previous autumn; the second was a critical edition with facing-page translation of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree …

  In four years Léon Marcia read a good thousand volumes and learned six languages: English, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese, which he mastered in eleven days, not with the help of Camoëns’s Lusiades through which Paganel thought he was learning Spanish, but with the fourth and last volume of Diego Barbosa-Machado’s Bibliotheca Lusitana, which he’d found, without the rest of the set, on the penny shelf of a Lugano bookshop.

  The more he learnt, the more he wanted to find out. His enthusiasm seemed to have no practical limit, and was as boundless as his ability to absorb knowledge. He only needed to read something once to remember it for good, and he consumed treatises on Greek grammar, histories of Poland, epic poems in twenty-five songs, and instruction manuals on fencing and horticulture with as much speed, as much appetite, and as much intelligence as popular novels and encyclopaedic dictionaries, although admittedly he did have a marked predilection for the latter.

  In nineteen twenty-seven, a group of residents at the Pfisterhof, on the initiative of Herr Pfister himself, subscribed to a fund to provide Marcia with an income for ten years to allow him to devote himself entirely to whatever studies he wished to pursue. Marcia, who was then thirty, spent a whole term hesitating between courses given by Ehrenfels, Spengler, Hilbert, and Wittgenstein, then, since he’d been to listen to Panofsky lecturing on Greek statuary, discovered that his true vocation was art history and left forthwith for London to enrol at the Courtauld Institute. Three years later he made his spectacular entry into the art world in the way we have seen.

  His health remained delicate and made him housebound nearly all his life. He lived in hotels for a long time, first in London, then in Washington and New York; he scarcely travelled except to check this or that detail in a library or an art gallery, and he gave his increasingly sought-after opinions from his bed or his armchair. It was he who demonstrated, amongst other things, that the Hadriana at Atri (better known by their nickname of Hadrian’s Angels) were forged, and he who established the authoritative chronology of Samuel Cooper’s miniatures at the Frick Collection: it was this latter work which provided the occasion where he met the woman he was to marry: Clara Lichtenfeld, the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants to the United States, who was on a course at the museum. Though she was fifteen years his junior, they married a few w
eeks later and decided to live in France. Their son David was born in 1946, shortly after they arrived in Paris and moved into 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, where Madame Marcia set up her antique shop in premises formerly used by a saddler. Oddly, her husband always refused to take any interest in it.

  Léon Marcia – like some other occupants of the building – has not left his room for many weeks; all he eats any more is milk, petitbeurre, and raisin biscuits; he listens to the radio, reads or pretends to read old art reviews; there is one such on his lap, the American Journal of Fine Arts, and two others by his feet, a Yugoslav review, Umetnost, and The Burlington Magazine; on the cover of the American Journal there is a reproduction of a splendid, flamboyant, green, red, golden, and inky blue ancient American estampe – a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps, and a tremendous cow-catcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds. On the cover of Umetnost, hiding Burlington Magazine almost completely, there is a photograph of a work by the Hungarian sculptor Meglepett Egér: rectangular metal plates fixed to each other in such a way as to form an eleven-sided solid object.