Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Detective Inspector Waldemar, who conveniently takes the painter-narrator as his confidant, is in charge of the investigation. He searches every room in the villa thoroughly, and has many forensic tests done in the lab. The most revealing clues are all inside the school desk: found in it are, item a, a live tarantula; item b, the classified advertisement about the rental of the villa; item c, the programme of a fancy-dress ball held on the evening of the crime, with the singer Mickey Malleville in person as a special attraction; and item d, an envelope containing a blank sheet on which the following cutting from an African daily has been simply glued:

  BAMAKO (APA). 16 June. A mass grave containing the bones of at least 49 human corpses has been discovered near Fouïdra. First reports suggest that the bodies were buried 30 years ago. An enquiry is taking place.

  Three people had called on Oswald Zeitgeber that day. They had all arrived more or less at the same time – the painter saw them drop in one after the other at intervals of a few minutes – and left together. All three were in fancy dress for the ball. They were quickly identified and questioned separately.

  The first person to have come was the Quaker lady. She is called Madame Quaston. She claims she came to offer her services as charlady, but nobody can prove it. Moreover, the investigation soon discovers that her daughter had been Madame Zeitgeber’s maid and had drowned in circumstances that remained obscure.

  The second caller was the man wearing the Fool’s suit. His name is Jarrier; he owns the villa. He came, he says, to see if his tenant had settled in and to get his signature on the inventory of furniture and fittings. Madame Quaston had been present at the interview and can confirm his statement; she adds that scarcely had he arrived than Jarrier nearly came a cropper on the newly polished parquet floor, but had caught himself on the windowsill, spilling half the contents of the goldfish bowl onto a rug placed near the wall-mounted telephone.

  The third visitor was the big baby: he is the singer Mickey Malleville. He confesses straightaway that he is none other than Oswald Zeitgeber’s son-in-law, and that he had come to borrow money from him. Jarrier and Madame Quaston both confirm that when the singer came in, the jeweller almost immediately asked them to leave the two of them alone. A little later he called them back in, apologised for not accompanying them to the ball, but promised to come along later when he had dealt with some urgent telephone calls. The painter saw the three disguises pass by again and even when, he says, he saw them from the front walking side by side across the whole width of the little lane, he could not avoid having an unpleasant impression. About an hour later the shepherdess heard the scream.

  The cause of death is easily established: there was a long metal plate beneath the rug: when he used the telephone, Zeitgeber caused a short circuit, which was what killed him. Only Jarrier could have fitted the plate, and it becomes immediately obvious that it was so as to cause an electrocution that he had arranged to soak the rug with water on entering the room; then two more details of even greater significance are discovered: first, that it was Jarrier who had given Zeitgeber his fancy dress for the ball, and the steel tips and spurs on the boots and all the metallic decorations of the jacket were also intended to facilitate the conduction of an electric current; second, and most important, that Jarrier had adapted the telephone fixture so that the fatal short could only occur if the victim, identified by his very disguise – Zeitgeber in his superconductive suit – dialled a particular number: that of the surgery where Jarrier’s wife worked!

  Confronted with these damning pieces of evidence, Jarrier confesses almost straight away: a pathologically jealous man, he had noticed that Oswald Zeitgeber – whose philandering was notorious throughout the area – was chasing after his wife. Wanting to resolve his suspicions, he designed a homicidal device which would not be triggered unless the jeweller was truly guilty, that is to say unless he telephoned the surgery.

  Even if the motive was manifestly imaginary – Madame Jarrier weighs twenty stone, and anyone “chasing after” her would catch up with her without much effort – the murder was nonetheless premeditated by Jarrier: he is charged, arrested, and held in custody. But that clearly doesn’t satisfy the detective or the reader: the death of the goldfish, the hangman’s noose, the tarantula, the envelope with its African cutting remain unexplained, as does Waldemar’s latest discovery: a long pin, like a hatpin but without a head, found buried in the pot of mignonette. As for the forensic tests, they produce two results: first, the fish were poisoned by a fast-acting substance called fibrotoxin; second, on the tip of the pin there are traces of a much slower poison, hydantergotine.

  After various subplots have been worked out, and after various false trails have been followed and abandoned – suspicions being entertained respectively as to the possible guilt of Madame Jarrier, Madame Zeitgeber, the painter, the shepherd girl, and one of the organisers of the fancy-dress ball – the perverse and polymorphous solution of this indulgent brainteaser is finally found, and it allows Detective Inspector Waldemar, at one of those gatherings at the scene of the crime, with all the surviving actors present, and without which a detective novel would not be a detective novel, to reconstruct the whole affair with brilliance: obviously all three are guilty, and each was acting on a different motive.

  Madame Quaston – whose daughter, pursued by the old lecher, had to jump into a lake to save her honour – had introduced herself to the diamond-trader claiming she was a clairvoyant, and set about reading the lines in his hand: she took advantage of this to prick him with her pin, smeared with a poison which she knew would take some time to have an effect. Then she hid the pin in the mignonette and put the tarantula, concealed so far in the lid of her pickle jar, in the desk: she knew that a tarantula sting provokes reactions similar to the effects of her poison, and though she was aware that the subterfuge would be unmasked eventually she thought, rather naïvely, that it would mislead the investigators for long enough to allow her to escape scot-free.

  Mickey Malleville, for his part, the victim’s son-in-law, a failed singer riddled with debt, unable to foot the extravagant bills run up by the jeweller’s daughter – a scatterbrain accustomed to yachts, breitschwanzes and caviar – knew that his father-in-law’s death alone could save him from his ever more inextricable plight: he had nonchalantly poured into the water jug the contents of a small phial of fibrotoxin hidden in the teat of his giant bottle.

  But the real bottom of this business, the story’s ultimate twist, its terminal turn, its final revelation and closing fall, was something entirely different: the letter Oswald Zeitgeber was reading sealed his own death warrant: the mass grave recently unearthed in Africa was all that was left of an insurgent village whose entire population he had had killed and which he had razed to the ground before pillaging a fabulous elephant graveyard. From this crime committed in cold blood came his colossal fortune. The man who sent him the letter had been on his trail for twenty years, restlessly seeking evidence of Zeitgeber’s guilt: now he had the evidence, and the news would be out next day in all the Swiss papers. Zeitgeber had that confirmed to him on the telephone by his associates who had been accomplices in the old business and who, like him, had received the letter: none saw any way out of the scandal except death.

  So Zeitgeber went to get a stool and a rope to hang himself. But first, maybe with a superstitious feeling that he had to do one good deed before dying, he saw that the goldfish did not have enough water and emptied the jug of water into the bowl which Jarrier had spilt on purpose when he came. Then he set up his rope. But the first symptoms of hydantergotine poisoning (nausea, cold sweat, stomach cramp, palpitations) were already upon him and, bent double by the pain, he called the lady doctor – not because he was remotely in love with her (in fact he had his eye rather more on the barefoot shepherdess) but to ask for help.

  Does a man about to commit suicide worry that much about stomach pains? The novelist was aware of the question and added a postscript where he specified that hyda
ntergotine produces alongside its toxic effects a pseudohallucinatory psychic state, in which the jeweller’s reactions would not be unimaginable.

  THE FIFTY-FIRST CHAPTER

  Valène

  (Servants’ Quarters, 9)

  HE WOULD BE in the painting himself, in the manner of those Renaissance painters who reserved for themselves a tiny place in the midst of the crowd of vassals, soldiers, bishops, or burghers; not a central place, not a significant or privileged place at a chosen intersection, along a particular axis, in this or that illuminating perspective, in the line of any deeply meaningful gaze which could give rise to a reinterpretation of the whole painting, but an apparently inoffensive place, as if it had been done just like that, in passing, a little accidentally, because the idea had arisen without his knowing why, as if he had not wanted it to be too noticeable, as if it were only supposed to be a signature to be read by initiates, something like a mark which the commissioning buyer would only just tolerate the painter signing his work with, something to be known only to a few and forgotten straightaway: as soon as the painter died, it would become an anecdote to be handed down from generation to generation, from studio to studio, a legend people would no longer believe in until, one day, proof of its truth would be found, thanks to a chance cross-reference, or by comparing the picture with preparatory sketches unearthed in the attic of a gallery, or even in a completely haphazard fashion, just as when reading a book you come across sentences you have read before somewhere else: and maybe people would realise then what had always been a bit special about that little figure, not just the greater care taken with the facial detail, but a greater blankness, or a certain way he tips his head imperceptibly to one side, something that might resemble understanding, a certain gentleness, joy tinged perhaps with nostalgia.

  * * *

  He would be in the painting himself, in his bedroom, almost at the top on the right, like an attentive little spider weaving his shimmering web, standing, beside his painting, with his palette in his hand, with his long grey smock all stained with paint, and his violet scarf.

  He would be standing beside his almost finished painting, and he would be precisely in the process of painting himself, sketching in with the tip of his brush the minute silhouette of a painter in a long grey smock and a violet scarf, with his palette in his hand, painting the infinitesimal figurine of a painter painting, once again one of these nested reflections he would have wanted to pursue to infinite depths, as if his eyes and his hand had unlimited magnifying power.

  He would paint himself painting, and already you would be able to see the ladles and knives, the serving spoons and door handles, the books and newspapers, the rugs, jugs, firedogs, umbrella stands, dishstands, radios, bedside lamps, telephones, mirrors, toothbrushes, washing lines, playing cards, cigarette stubs in ashtrays, family photographs in insect-repellent frames, flowers in vases, radiator shelves, potato mashers, floor protectors, bunches of keys in saucers of small change, sorbet makers, catboxes, racks of mineral water, cradles, kettles, alarm clocks, Pigeon lamps, and universal spanners. And Dr Dinteville’s two plaited raffia pot-holders, Cinoc’s four calendars, Berger’s Tonkinese landscape, Gaspard Winckler’s carved chest, Madame Orlowska’s lectern, the Tunisian babouches Béatrice Breidel brought back for Mademoiselle Crespi, the manager’s kidney table, Madame Marcia’s mechanical toy and her son David’s map of Namur, Anne Breidel’s pages of equations, the spice box belonging to Madame Marcia’s cook, Dinteville’s Admiral Nelson, the Altamonts’ Chinese chairs and their precious tapestry depicting amorous old folk, Nieto’s lighter, Jane Sutton’s macintosh, Smautf’s sea chest, the Plassaerts’ starry wallpaper, Geneviève Foulerot’s mother-of-pearl oyster shell, Cinoc’s printed bedspread with its large triangular leaves and the Réols’ synthetic leather bed – doeskin style, master saddler finish, strap and chrome-plated buckle – Gratiolet’s theorbo, the curious coffee boxes in Bartlebooth’s dining room and the shadowless light of his scialytic lamp, the Louvets’ exotic carpet and the Marquiseaux’, the mail on the concierge’s table, Olivia Rorschach’s big cut-glass chandelier, Madame Albin’s carefully wrapped objects, the antique stone lion found by Hutting at Thuburbo Majus, and all around the long procession of his characters with their stories, their pasts, their legends:

  1 The Coronation at Covadonga of Alkhamah’s victor, Don Pelage

  2 The Russian singer and Schönberg living in Holland as exiles

  3 The deaf cat on the top floor with one blue & one yellow eye

  4 Barrels of sand being filled by order of the fumbling cretin

  5 The miserly old woman marking all her expenses in a notebook

  6 The puzzlemaker’s backgammon game giving him his bad tempers

  7 The concierge watering potted plants for residents when away

  8 The parents naming their son Gilbert after Bécaud their idol

  9 A bigamous count’s wife accepting his Turkish female rescuer

  10 The businesswoman, regretting that she had to leave the land

  11 The boy taking down the bins dreaming how to write his novel

  12 The Australian round-the-worlder and her well-dressed nephew

  13 The anthropologist, failing to locate the ever-evasive tribe

  14 The cook’s refusal of an oven with the self-cleansing device

  15 1% sacrificed to art by the MD of a world-wide hotel company

  16 The nurse casually leafing through a shiny new photomagazine

  17 The poet who went on a pilgrimage shipwrecked at Arkhangelsk

  18 The impatient Italian violinplayer who riled his miniaturist

  19 The fat, sausage-eating couple keeping their wireless set on

  20 The one-armed officer after the bombardment of General H.-Q.

  21 The daughter’s sad reveries, at the side of her father’s bed

  22 Austrian customers getting just the steamiest “Turkish Bath”

  23 The Paraguayan odd-job man, getting ready to ignite a letter

  24 The billionaire sporting knickerbockers to practice painting

  25 The Woods & Water Dept. official opens a sanctuary for birds

  26 The widow with her souvenirs wrapped in old weekly magazines

  27 An international thief taken to be a high-ranking magistrate

  28 Robinson Crusoe leading a very decent life style on his isle

  29 The domino-playing rodent who feasted on dried-out Edam rind

  30 The suffering “word-snuffer” messing around in old bookshops

  31 The black-clad investigator selling the latest key to dreams

  32 The man in vegetable oils opening a fish restaurant in Paris

  33 The famous old soldier killed by a loose Venetian chandelier

  34 The injured cyclist who then married his pace-maker’s sister

  35 The cook whose master ingested only eggs and poached haddock

  36 The newly-weds taking credit over 2 yrs to have a luxury bed

  37 The art dealer’s deserted wife, left for an Italian Angelina

  38 The childhood friend reading the biographies of her 5 nieces

  39 The gentleman who inserted into bottles figures made of cork

  40 An archaeologist researching the Arab kings’ Spanish capital

  41 The Pole living quietly in the Oise now his clowning is over

  42 The hag who cut the hot water to stop her son-in-law shaving

  43 A Dutchman who knew any No. could be but the sum of K primes

  44 Robert Scipion devising his supremely clever cross-word clue

  45 The scientist learning to lip-read the deaf-mute’s equations

  46 The Albanian terrorist serenading his love, an American star

  47 The Stuttgarter businessman wanting to roast his leg of boar

  48 Dodéca’s owner’s son preferring the porn trade to priesthood

  49 A barman speaking pidgin in order to swap his mother-goddess

  50 The boy seeing in his dream the cake he had not been al
lowed

  51 7 actors each refusing the role after they’d seen the script

  52 A deserter from US forces in Korea allowing his squad to die

  53 The superstar who started out as a sex-changed guitar-player

  54 A redheaded white man enjoying a rich maharajah’s tiger hunt

  55 A liberal grandfather moved to creation by a detective story

  56 The expert penman copying suras from the Koran in the casbah

  57 Angelica’s aria from Arconati’s Orlando requested by Orfanik

  58 The actor plotting suicide with the help of a foster brother

  59 Her arm held high a Japanese athlete bears the Olympic torch

  60 Embattled Aetius stopping the Huns on the Catalaunian Fields

  61 Selim’s arrow hitting the end wall of a room 888 metres long

  62 The staff sergeant deceasing because of his rubber-gum binge

  63 The mate of the Fox alighting on Fitz-James’s final messages

  64 The student staying in a room for six months without budging

  65 The producer’s wife off yet again on a trip around the globe

  66 The central-heating engineer making sure the fueljet ignites

  67 The executive who entertained all his workmates very grandly

  68 The boy sorting medical blotters he’d been collecting avidly

  69 The actor-cook hired by an American lady who was hugely rich

  70 The former croupier who turned into a shy, retiring old lady

  71 The technician trying a new experiment, and losing 3 fingers

  72 The young lady living in the Ardennes with a Belgian builder

  73 The Dr’s ancestor nearly solving the synthetic gem conundrum

  74 The ravishing American magician and Mephisto agreeing a deal