Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Usually Léon Marcia is silent and still, plunged in recollections: one of which, surfacing from the depths of his prodigious memory, has been obsessing him for several days: it is a memory of a lecture which Jean Richepin, shortly before he died, went to give at the sanatorium; the subject was the Legend of Napoleon. Richepin recounted that in his youth the tomb of Napoleon had been opened once a year, and the embalmed face was displayed to disabled soldiers filing past in procession; the face was bloated and greenish, more a spectacle of terror than of admiration, which is why they later stopped opening the tomb. But nevertheless Richepin saw the face from the arms of his great-uncle, who had served in Africa and for whose sake the Commandant opened the tomb.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Beaumont, 4

  A BATHROOM FLOORED with large, square, cream-coloured tiles. On the walls, flower-printed washable wallpaper. No item of decoration complements the purely sanitary furniture and fittings, apart from a small round table with a moulded cast-iron centre pillar on whose veined marble top, lipped with a vaguely Empire-style rim, stands an ultraviolet lamp of brutally modernistic ugliness.

  On a turned-wood clothes-stand hangs a green satin dressing gown with a cat silhouette and the symbol designating spades at cards embroidered on its back. Béatrice Breidel alleges that this indoor gown which her grandmother still occasionally uses was the match robe of an American boxer called Cat Spade, whom her grandmother must have met on one of her US tours and who had been her lover. Anne Breidel does not agree at all with this version. It is the case that in the nineteen thirties there was a black boxer called Cat Spade. His career was very short. In nineteen twenty-nine he won the Combined Forces Tournament, left the army to go professional, and was beaten successively by Gene Tunney, Jack Delaney, and Jack Dempsey, even though this last was on the way out. So he went back into the army. It’s not likely he moved in the same circles as Véra Orlova, and even if they had met, a white Russian with rigid prejudices would never have given herself to a black, even if he was a gorgeous heavyweight. Anne Breidel’s explanation is different but also based on the many anecdotes of her forebear’s love life: the dressing gown, she claims, was indeed a present from one of her lovers, a history professor at Carson College, New York, called Arnold Flexner, the author of a significant thesis on The Voyages of Tavernier and Chardin and the Image of Persia in Europe from Scudéry to Montesquieu, and, under various pseudonyms – Marty Rowlands, Kex Camelot, Trim Jinemewicz, James W. London, Harvey Elliott – of detective stories laced with quite explicitly sexy, not to say pornographic, interludes: Murders at Pigalle, Hot Nights in Ankara, etc. They met, so the story went, at Cincinnati (Ohio), where Véra Orlova had been engaged to sing Blondine in Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Quite apart from their sexual suggestiveness, which Anne Breidel mentions only in passing, the cat and the spade allude directly, in her view, to Flexner’s most famous novel, The Seventh Crack Shot of Saratoga, the story of a pickpocket working the racecourse, nicknamed “The Cat” because of his quick, light touch, who gets mixed up against his will in a police investigation which he solves with flair and cunning.

  Madame de Beaumont is unaware of these two explanations; for her part, she has never made the slightest comment on the origin of her dressing gown.

  On the rim of the bath, designed to be wide enough to serve as a shelf, there are some bottles, a sky-blue dimpled rubber bathcap, a purse-shaped toilet bag made of a spongy pink substance with a plaited string closing, and a shiny parallelepipedic metal box, with a long slit opening on the top side, out of which emerges, in part, a Kleenex.

  Anne Breidel lies prone on the floor by the bath, on a green bath towel. She is wearing a white buckram nightdress pulled halfway up her back; on her stretchmarked buttocks there lies an electrical thermal massage vibrator, about fifteen inches in diameter, covered in a red plastic material.

  Whilst Béatrice, her sister, younger by one year, is tall and slim, Anne is chubby and puffed with fat. As she is constantly preoccupied by her weight, she imposes Draconian diets on herself but never has the strength to keep them up to the end, inflicts on herself treatments of every variety, from mud baths to sweating suits, from saunas followed by twig-beating to anorexic pills, from acupuncture to homeopathy, and from medicine balls, home trainers, forced marches, foot treading, chest expanders, parallel bars, and other exhausting exercises to every kind of massage possible: hair-glove massage, dried-squash massage, boxwood rolling-pin massage, massage with special soap, pumice stone, alum powder, gentian, ginseng, cucumber milk, and coarse salt. The one she is going through now has a particular advantage over all the others: it allows her to get on with other things at the same time; specifically, she uses these daily seventy-minute sessions during which the vibrator cushion will bring its alleged benefit successively to her shoulders, her back, her hips, her buttocks, her thighs, and her stomach to tot up her dietary performance: she has in front of her a little brochure entitled Complete Table of Energy Values of Customary Foods, in which the foods whose names are printed in special characters are obviously those to avoid, and she compares the figures it gives – chicory 20, quince 70, haddock 80, sirloin 220, raisins 290, coconut 620 – with those of the foods she took the previous day and of which she has noted the precise quantities in a diary obviously kept for this purpose alone:

  Despite the Saint-Nectaire, this analysis would be absolutely reasonable if it did not sin grievously by omission; to be sure, Anne has scrupulously entered all she ate at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but she has taken no account at all of the forty or fifty furtive raids she made between meals on the fridge and the larder to try to calm her insatiable appetite. Her grandmother, her sister, and Madame Lafuente, the cleaning lady who’s looked after them for more than twenty years, have tried everything to stop her, even going so far as to empty the fridge every evening and shut all edibles in a padlocked cupboard; but it was pointless: deprived of snacks, Anne Breidel flew into indescribable tantrums and went out to a café or to friends to appease her irrepressible bulimia. As it happens, the worst thing is not that Anne eats between meals, which many dieticians even believe to be quite beneficial, but that whilst she is irreproachably strict about her diet at table, forcing it moreover on her grandmother and sister as well, once she has left the dining room she turns amazingly slack: though she will not tolerate on the dinner table bread or butter or even supposedly neutral foods like olives, shrimps, mustard, or salsify, she wakes up at night to go and wolf down quite shamelessly oat flakes (350), slices of bread and butter (900), bars of chocolate (600), stuffed brioches (360), Auvergne blue cheese (320), walnuts (600), rillette pâté (600), Gruyère Cheese (380), or tuna in oil (300). In fact she is practically continuously nibbling something or other, and whilst she is now doing her self-consoling sum with her right hand, with her left hand she is gnawing a chicken leg.

  Anne Breidel is only eighteen. She is as clever at school as her younger sister. But where Béatrice shines at languages – she won first place in the nationwide Concours général for Greek – and aims to do ancient history and maybe even archaeology, Anne is a scientist: she graduated at sixteen, and has just come seventh at her first attempt at the entrance examination for the Ecole Centrale.

  In 1967, at the age of nine, Anne discovered her vocation to be an engineer. That year, a Panamanian tanker, the Silver Glen of Alva, capsized off Tierra del Fuego with one hundred and four crew on board. Her distress signals were poorly received due to storms raging over the South Atlantic and the Weddell Sea, and her position could not be pinpointed. For two weeks, Argentinian coastguards and Chilean civil-defence teams, with help from ships sailing in the waters, searched tirelessly around all the myriad islets off Cape Horn and Nassau Bay.

  Every evening, with increasing excitement, Anne read the news of the search; bad weather hampered it considerably, and, with every week that passed, the chances of finding survivors diminished. When all hope had been abandoned, the national dailies paid their respects t
o the unselfish men of the rescue teams, who had done the impossible in dreadful conditions to help any survivors there might have been; but several journalists claimed with some justification that the real cause of the disaster was not the bad weather but the absence in Tierra del Fuego, and more generally on all the seven seas, of receiving aerials of sufficient power to pick up Maydays in all atmospheric conditions from vessels in distress.

  It was after she had read these articles, and cut them out, and stuck them into a special scrapbook, which she later used as the basis for a talk she gave in class (she was then in the first form), that Anne Breidel decided she would build the biggest radio beacon in the world, an aerial eight hundred yards high which would be called Breidel’s Tower and which would be capable of picking up any message broadcast within a radius of five thousand miles.

  Up until she was about fourteen years of age, Anne spent most of her spare time drawing plans of her tower, calculating its weight and wind resistance, checking its coverage, working out its optimal siting – Tristan da Cunha, the Crozet Islands, the Bounty Islands, São Paolo Island, Isla Margarita, and, finally, Prince Edward Islands, south of Madagascar – and inventing detailed accounts of all the miraculous rescues it would make possible. Her taste for the physical and mathematical sciences grew out of this mythical image of a fusiform mast piercing the freezing fog of the Indian Ocean.

  Her two last years of school, studying hard for competitive college entrance examinations, and the growth of satellite telecommunications finally got the better of her project. All that is left of it now is a newspaper photograph of her at the age of twelve, posing in front of a model she had spent six months making, an airy metal construction made out of 2,715 steel pickup needles held together by microscopic dots of glue, two yards high, as delicate as lace, as graceful as a ballerina, and bearing at its apex 366 minute parabolic receiving dishes.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Marquiseaux, 3

  BY KNOCKING THE Echard parents’ old bedroom and the little dining room into one, and incorporating into the new room the corresponding and now redundant portion of the hall as well as a broom cupboard, Philippe and Caroline Marquiseaux have created a quite spacious area which they have turned into a meeting room for their agency: it is not at all like an office, but a room inspired by the latest techniques of brainstorming and group dynamics, what Americans call an “Informal Creative Room”, abbreviated to ICR, familiarly, I see her; for their part, the Marquiseaux call it their bawlroom, their cogitorium, or, even better, considering the kind of music they are responsible for promoting, their popshop: it is where they decide on the grand strategy of each campaign, the details of which will be settled later in the offices their agency occupies on the seventeenth floor of one of the skyscrapers at La Défense.

  The walls and ceiling are papered in white vinyl; the floor is covered in a foam-rubber carpet identical to those used by the practitioners of some of the martial arts; nothing on the walls; almost no furniture: a low sideboard painted in white gloss with bottles of V-8, 7-Up, and root beer on it; an octagonal, “zen”-style jardiniere full of coloured sand in thin stripes, whence emerge a few solitary pebbles; and a host of cushions, of every colour and shape.

  Four objects fill most of the space: the first is a bronze gong about as big as the one used on the credits of films produced by Rank, that is to say more than man-size; it comes not from the Far East but from Algiers: it is alleged to have been used to rally the prisoners in the sadly celebrated Barbary jail where Cervantes, Régnard, and St Vincent-de-Paul were incarcerated; in any case, an inscription in Arabic

  the very same one, the al-Fâtiha, which begins every one of the one hundred and fourteen surahs of the Koran: “In the name of kind and merciful God”, is engraved in the middle of it.

  The second is a shiny chrome-plated “Elvis Presley”-type juke-box; the third is an electric pinball machine of a particular model known as Flashing Bulbs. its back and board have no studs or springs or counters: only mirrors pierced by innumerable little holes behind each one of which is a bulb connected to an electronic flash device; the movement of the steel ball, which can be neither seen nor heard, sets off flashing lights of such intensity that in a darkened room an observer three yards away from the machine can easily read print as small as that in a dictionary; for anyone standing right in front of it or just beside the pinball table, and even if protective spectacles are worn, the effect is “psychedelic” to such a degree that one hippie poet spoke with reference to it of astral copulation. Production of this machine was stopped after it had been acknowledged as the cause of six cases of blindness; it has become very difficult to get hold of one, because some fans grow accustomed to these miniature flashes as to a drug, and surround themselves with three or four machines which they play simultaneously.

  The fourth object is an electric organ, incorrectly referred to as a synthesiser, flanked by two spherical loudspeakers.

  The Marquiseaux, absorbed in their aquatic caresses, have not yet come into this room, where they are awaited by two friends who are both also clients.

  One of them, a young man in a denim suit, barefoot, slumped on the cushions, lighting a cigarette with a Zippo lighter, is a Swedish musician called Svend Grundtvig. A disciple of Falkenhausen and Hazefeld, a believer in post-Webernian music, the composer of constructions as scholarly as they are secretive, the most famous of which, Crossed Words, presents a score curiously similar to a cross-word, with the across and down lines corresponding to sequences of chords and the blacked-out boxes serving as rests, Svend Grundtvig is nonetheless keen to tackle more popular kinds of music and has just written an oratorio, Proud Angels, with a libretto based on the story of the fall of the angels. This evening’s meeting will look at ways of promoting it prior to its first performance at the Tabarka Festival.

  The other is the famous “Hortense”, a much more curious individual. She is a woman of about thirty, with a hard face and anxious eyes; she is squatting by the electric organ and is playing it to herself, with the headphones on. She too is barefoot – it must be a house rule to take your shoes off before entering this room – and is wearing long, khaki silk bloomers tied beneath the knee and at the waist by white laces decorated with paste-diamond tabs, and a short jacket, more a sort of bolero, made of a multitude of small pieces of fur.

  Up until 1973, “Hortense” – it has become customary to write her name in quotation marks – was a man called Sam Horton. He played the guitar and wrote for The Wasps, a small New York group. His first song, Come in, Little Nemo, stayed in the Top 50 in Variety for three weeks, but the ones that followed – Susquehanna Mammy, Slumbering Wabash, Mississippi Sunset, Dismal Swamp, I’m Homesick for Being Homesick – did not live up to expectations, despite their very nine-teen-fortyish charm. So the group vegetated and watched anxiously as bookings got thinner and recording-company managers passed on messages that they were in a meeting, until, in early 1973, Sam Horton read by chance, in a magazine he was thumbing through in his dentist’s waiting room, an article on that Indian Army officer who became a respectable lady. What caught Sam Horton’s interest was not so much that a man had been able to change sex, but that the story recounting this unusual experience had been a bestseller. Yielding to the misleading temptation of analogical reasoning, Sam Horton convinced himself that a pop group composed of transsexuals would necessarily top the charts. Obviously he didn’t manage to convince his four partners, but the idea went on bothering him. It certainly corresponded to a need of his beyond mere publicity, for he set off alone for Morocco, where he underwent the necessary surgery and endocrine treatment in a specialist clinic.

  When “Hortense” returned to the States, The Wasps had in the meanwhile taken on a new guitarist and seemed to be making a go of it, and they refused to take him back; fourteen publishers sent him back his manuscript, “merely a copy”, they said, “of a recent hit”. It was the start of several months of roughing it, when s/he had to work mornings as a c
leaner in travel agencies to survive.

  From the depths of misery – to use the terms of the potted biography printed on the back of the sleeves of the discs she cut – “Hortense” began to write songs again, and since no one else wanted to sing them, she began to perform them herself: her rough and wobbly voice indisputably brought that new sound which the trade is always after, and the songs themselves fitted the anxious expectation of an increasingly agitated audience, for whom “Hortense” quickly became the incomparable symbol of the fragility of all things: Lime Blossom Lady, a nostalgic ballad of a herbalist’s shop demolished to make way for a pizzeria, won her in a few days the first of her 59 Golden Discs.

  By getting the exclusive European and North African rights for this timid and unstable creature, Philippe Marquiseaux has certainly pulled off the best deal in his as yet brief career; not because of “Hortense” herself, who, with her unending escapades, her breaches of contract, suicide attempts, depressions, court cases, sex parties and orgies, her convalescences and miscellaneous manias, costs him at least as much as he earns out of her, but because all those who aspire to making their name in music hall are now determined to belong to the same agency as “Hortense”.