Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  On the Stairs, 6

  TWO MEN MEET on the fourth-floor landing, both over fifty, both with square-framed glasses, both dressed in the same black suit, trousers, jacket, waistcoat, a little oversized, shod in black shoes, black tie on white shirt with an untapered collar, black bowler hat. But the one seen from behind has a printed cashmere-type scarf, whilst the other has a pink scarf with violet stripes.

  They are two doorstep salesmen. The first is selling a New Key to Your Dreams, allegedly based on the Teachings of a Yaqui sorcerer collected at the end of the seventeenth century by an English traveller named Henry Barrett, but actually composed a few weeks earlier by a botany student at Madrid University. Apart from the anachronisms without which this key to dreams would obviously unlock nothing at all, and the ornamentations with which the Spaniard’s imagination had sought to embellish this tiresome enumeration by emphasising its chronological and geographical exoticism, several of the suggested associations turn out to be surprisingly rich:

  BEAR = CLOCK

  WIG = ARMCHAIR

  HERRING = CLIFF

  HAMMER = DESERT

  SNOW = HAT

  MOON = SHOE

  FOG = ASH

  COPPER = TELEPHONE

  HAM = SINGLE PERSON

  The second door-to-door man is selling a newspaper called The Watchtower!, the organ of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In each issue there are some longer articles – “What is Human Happiness?”, “The 67 Truths of the Bible”, “Was Beethoven Really Deaf?”, “The Magic and the Mystery of Cats”, “Learn to Love the Prickly Pear” – and some pieces of general news: “Do Before you Die!”, “Did Life Begin by Chance?”, “Fewer Marriages in Switzerland” and a few old saws of the likes of Statura justa et aequa sint pondere. Secretly slipped in between the pages are advertisements for articles of hygiene, offering mailing under plain wrappers.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Foulerot, 2

  A ROOM ON the fifth floor right. It was Paul Hébert’s room, until his arrest, a student’s room with a woollen carpet spotted with cigarette burns, greenish wallpaper, and a cosy-corner covered with striped cloth.

  The perpetrators of the outrage on Boulevard Saint-Germain on the seventh of October 1943, which cost three German officers their lives, were arrested the same day towards evening. They were two former serving Army officers who belonged to a “Davout Action Group”, and it soon became apparent that they were its only members; their gesture was intended to restore their lost Dignity to the French: they were arrested as they were preparing to hand out a leaflet beginning: “That splendid sturdy fellow the Boche soldier is strong and healthy and thinks only of the greatness of his country, Deutschland über alles! Whereas we are hopelessly sunk in dilettantism!”

  All those picked up in the raids made within sixty minutes of the explosion were released the following afternoon after identity checks, except for five students whose situations were not regular and about whom the authorities required further information. Paul Hébert was one of them: his papers were in order, but the inspector who interrogated him was surprised that he had been picked up at the Odéon crossroads at three p.m. on a Thursday when he should have been at the Civil Engineering College, 152 Avenue de Wagram, studying for the entrance examination to the Ecole Supérieure de Chimie. The thing in itself was not important, but the explanations Paul Hébrt gave were not at all convincing.

  The grandson of a druggist with a shop at 48 Rue de Madrid, Paul Hébert took abundant advantage of his doting and generous grandfather by relieving him of phials of paregoric elixir which he traded for forty to fifty francs each to the young addicts of the Latin Quarter; he had made his monthly delivery that day and was on his way to the Champs-Elysées to spend the five hundred francs he’d just made when he was arrested. But instead of flatly saying that he’d skipped class to go to the cinema to see Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire or It Happened at the Inn, he launched into ever more contorted justifications, starting with the story that he had had to go to Gibert’s bookshop to buy a copy of Polishovsky & Spaniardel’s Course in Organic Chemistry, a weighty tome of 856 pages published two years previously by Masson. “So where is it, then, this book?” the inspector asked. “Gibert’s didn’t have it,” Hébert claimed. The inspector, who, at this stage of the enquiry, no doubt only wanted a bit of fun, sent a man to Gibert’s who obviously came back a few minutes later with the aforementioned Course. “Sure, but it was too expensive for me,” Hébert mumbled, tying his own noose.

  In so far as the perpetrators of the outrage had just been arrested, the inspector was no longer trying to find “Terrorists” at any price. But out of ordinary conscientiousness, he had Hébert searched, found the five hundred francs, and, thinking he had hit upon a band of black marketeers, ordered a full search of his flat.

  In the boxroom adjacent to Hébert’s room, in the midst of piles of old shoes, stocks of mint and verbena tea, dented copper electrical footwarmers, ice skates, loose-strung racquets, odd issues of magazines, illustrated novels, old clothes, and bits of string, they found a grey macintosh, and in the pocket of this macintosh they found a cardboard box, not very deep, about fifteen centimetres by ten, on which was written:

  * * *

  The only reliable

  inkeraser

  KANSELL

  Sold by Hely’s Ltd

  85 Lame Street, Brussels

  * * *

  Inside the box was a green silk handkerchief, probably cut from a parachute, a diary full of sibylline notes such as “Stand up”, “Lozenge engraving”, “X-27”, “Gault-de-Perche” etc., which when deciphered after much trouble provided no conclusive evidence; a fragment of a map of Jutland, scale of 1:160,000, based on J. H. Mansa’s cartography; an unused envelope containing a sheet of paper folded in four: at the top left of the sheet there was a printed letterhead

  Anton

  Tailor & Shirt-Maker

  16 bis, avenue de Messine

  Paris 8*

  EURope 21-45

  above a silhouette of a lion which in heraldic terms would be described as passant or passant gardant. On the remainder of the sheet was a carefully drawn plan in violet ink of Le Havre town centre, from the Grand-Quai to Place Gambetta: an X in red marked the position of Les Armes de la Ville, a hotel just about on the corner of Rue d’Estimauville and Rue Frédéric-Sauvage.

  Now it was in this hotel, which the Germans had requisitioned, that just over three months previously, on 23 June, Ordnance General Pferdleichter had been assassinated: he was one of the senior members of the Todt Organisation, and had supervised the fortification of the Jutland coastline, where he had had moreover two miraculous escapes from assassination attempts; and he had just been entrusted by Hitler with the supervision of Operation Parsifal, an operation similar to the Cyclops project, which had been begun one year before in the Dunkirk area. Its purpose was to build, about fifteen miles behind the main Atlantic Defence Wall, in the area between Goderville and Saint-Romain-du-Colbosc, a set of three remote control bases and eight underground silos from which V2s and multistage rockets capable of reaching the United States could be launched.

  Pferdleichter was killed by a bullet at a quarter to ten – German time – in the main lounge of his hotel, whilst playing a game of chess with one of his executive officers, a Japanese engineer called Ushida. The marksman had taken up position in the attic of an uninhabited house just opposite the hotel, and took advantage of the fact that the lounge windows were wide open; despite having a particularly difficult angle of departure, he needed only one shot to wound Pferdleichter fatally, severing his carotid artery. Because of this it was assumed that the assassin was a crack marksman, and this was confirmed the next day by the discovery, in the bushes in the public gardens in the Town Hall square, of the weapon he had used, an Italian-made .22 sports rifle.

  The investigation followed several tracks which all led nowhere: the registered owner of the gun, a certain Mons
ieur Gressin, from Aigues-Mortes, could not be found; as for the owner of the house where the marksman had hidden, he turned out to be a colonial civil servant in post at Nouméa.

  The items produced by the search of Paul Hébert’s flat gave new life to the affair. But Paul Hébert had never seen that macintosh nor, a fortiori, the box and its contents; the Gestapo tortured him in vain, without learning anything from him.

  Despite his youth, Paul Hébert lived alone in the flat. He was looked after by an uncle whom he saw barely more than once a week and by his grandfather, the druggist. His mother had died when he was ten, and his father, Joseph Hébert, a rolling stock inspector on the State Railways, was virtually never in Paris. The Germans’ suspicions were directed towards the father, from whom Paul Hébert had had no news for more than two months. It became quickly apparent that he had also stopped working, but all attempts to find him failed. There was no Hely’s Ltd in Brussels, any more than there was a tailor called Anton at number 16 bis of the Avenue de Messine, which was a fictitious number in any case, as fictitious as the telephone number which, they later realised, corresponded simply to the time of the murder. After a few months, the German authorities took the view that Joseph Hébert had either been killed already or had succeeded in getting to England, so they closed the file and sent his son to Buchenwald. After the torture he had been undergoing every day, it was almost a liberation for him.

  Today, a young girl of seventeen, Geneviève Foulerot, lives in the flat with her son, who is just a year old. Paul Hébert’s old bedroom has become the baby’s room, a room that is almost empty except for a few pieces of children’s furniture: a white wickerwork crib on a folding stand, a changing table, a rectangular playpen with rims padded for safety.

  The walls are bare. Only one photograph is pinned to the door. It depicts Geneviève, her face beaming with joy, holding her baby with her arms outstretched; she is wearing a tartan two-piece swimsuit and is posing beside a portable swimming pool of which the outside metal wall is decorated with large, stylised flowers.

  This photograph comes from a mail-order catalogue for which Geneviève works as one of six permanent models. In it she can be seen paddling a studio canoe in an orange plastic inflatable lifejacket, or sitting in a tubular steel garden chair in yellow-and-blue-striped canvas beside a blue-roofed tent, wearing a green bathing robe and accompanied by a man in a pink bathing robe, or in a lace-necked nightdress holding small dumbbells, and in a host of working clothes of all kinds: in blouses for nurses, sales girls, infant teachers, in tracksuits for gym teachers, in waitresses’ aprons, butcheresses’ pinafores, dungarees, jumpsuits, jackets, pilot-coats, etc.

  Besides earning a living in this unglamorous way, Geneviève Foulerot is studying drama and has already appeared in several films and serials. She will perhaps soon be the female lead in a television drama adapted from a Pirandello story which she is preparing to read, at the other end of the flat, in her bath: her madonna-like face, her large clear eyes, her long black hair got her selected from amongst the thirty who were auditioned to play Gabriella Vanzi, the woman whose glance, direct and depraved at the same time, drove Romeo Daddi mad.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Winckler, 2

  TO BEGIN WITH, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: the perceived object – we may be dealing with a perceptual act, the acquisition of a skill, a physiological system, or, as in the present case, a wooden jigsaw puzzle – is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element’s existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it. That means that you can look at a piece of a puzzle for three whole days, you can believe that you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further on than when you started. The only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces, and in that sense the art of the jigsaw puzzle has something in common with the art of go. The pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing – just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbours, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece. The intense difficulty preceding this link-up – which the English word puzzle indicates so well – not only loses its raison d’être, it seems never to have had any reason, so obvious does the solution appear. The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in its turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay, and expectation.

  The role of the puzzle-maker is hard to define. In most cases – and in particular in all cardboard jigsaws – the puzzles are machine-made, and the lines of cutting are entirely arbitrary: a blanking die, set up once and for all, cuts the sheets of cardboard along identical lines every time. But such jigsaws are eschewed by the true puzzle-lover, not just because they are made of cardboard instead of wood, nor because the solutions are printed on the boxes they come in, but because this type of cut destroys the specific nature of jigsaw puzzles. Contrary to a widely and firmly held belief, it does not actually matter whether the initial image is easy (or something taken to be easy – a genre scene in the style of Vermeer, for example, or a colour photograph of an Austrian castle) or difficult (a Jackson Pollock, a Pissarro, or the poor paradox of a blank puzzle). It’s not the subject of the picture, or the painter’s technique, which makes a puzzle more or less difficult, but the greater or lesser subtlety of the way it has been cut; and an arbitrary cutting pattern will necessarily produce an arbitrary degree of difficulty, ranging from the extreme of easiness – for edge pieces, patches of light, well-defined objects, lines, transitions – to the tiresome awkwardness of all the other pieces (cloudless skies, sand, meadow, ploughed land, shaded areas, etc.).

  Pieces in puzzles of this kind come in classes of which the best-known are the little chaps

  the double crosses

  and the crossbars

  and once the edges have been put together, the detail pieces put in place – the very light, almost whitish yellow fringe on die carpet on the table holding a lectern with an open book, the rich edging of the mirror, the lute, the woman’s red dress – and the bulk of the background pieces parcelled out according to their shade of grey, brown, white, or sky blue, then solving the puzzle consists simply of trying all the plausible combinations one by one.

  The art of jigsaw puzzling begins with wooden puzzles cut by hand, whose maker undertakes to ask himself all the questions the player will have to solve, and, instead of allowing chance to cover his tracks, aims to replace it with cunning, trickery, and subterfuge. All the elements occurring in the image to be reassembled – this armchair covered in gold brocade, that three-pointed black hat with its rather ruined black plume, or that silver-braided bright yellow livery – serve by design as points of departure for trails that lead to false information. The organised, coherent, structured signifying space of the picture is cut up not only into inert, formless elements containing little information or signifying power, but also into falsified elements, carrying false information; two fragments of cornice made to fit each other perfectly when they belong in fact to two quite separate sections of the ceiling, the belt buckle of a uniform which turns out in extremis to be a metal clasp holding the chandelier, several almost identically cut pieces belonging, for one part, to a dwarf orange tree placed on a mantelpiece and, for the other part, to its scarcely attenuated reflection in a mirror, are classic examples of the types of traps puzzle-lovers come across.

  From this, one can make a deduction which is quite cert
ainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.

  To find his puzzle-maker, Bartlebooth put advertisements in Le Jouet Français and in Toy Trader, asking applicants to submit a sample, fourteen centimetres by nine, cut into two hundred pieces. He got twelve responses; most were obvious and unappealing, of the Meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold kind, or an Evening in an English Cottage in all its purportedly authentic detail: an aged Lady So-and-So in a black silk dress with a hexagonal quartz brooch, a butler bringing coffee on a tray, Regency furniture and the portrait of the ancestor (a gentleman with short side whiskers, wearing a red jacket of the period of the last horse-drawn stagecoaches, dressed in white jodhpurs, top boots, and a grey top hat, holding a switch in his hand), a patchwork rug over the hearth, issues of The Times laid out on the small table by the wall, a large Chinese carpet with a sky-blue ground, a retired general (recognisable as such by his cropped grey hair, his short white moustache, his ruddy skin, and his row of decorations) beside the window, looking at the barometer with a supercilious air, a young man standing at the fireplace engrossed in Punch, etc. Another design, which simply showed a magnificent peacock in his pride, Bartlebooth liked enough to summon its inventor – a Russian émigré prince living rather poorly at Le Raincy – but he looked too old for Bartlebooth’s plans.