Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  HIEROGLYPHICKS: Holie inscriptions. Were thus ycleped the lettres of the clerkes of Auntient Egypte made on divers images of trees, grasses, animals, fisshes, briddes, & tools by nature and office of whiche was shewn their designations.

  OBELISKS: Longe and heighe stone bodkins, brode at the foot and tapering to a poinct at yr hede. To be seen at Rome, about the Church of Seint Peter, is one swich intire, and manie others also. Upon those that be aboute an stronde, they weren wont to licht a leming fire the Seylors to avaunce in stormie weather, and weren cleped obeliskolychnies.

  PYRAMIDS: Tall and square biltings of stone or brickes, brode at the foot and poincted at the top, in the shap of a flame of fire. Manie are to be seen above the Nil, by Cayre.

  CATADUPES of the Nil: a place in the Ethiops’ land whereon the Nil falleth from high mountaines in swich horribile noise that men of those parts are almost alle deaf as is wryt by Claude Galen. The noise is herd more an thrie days off, which is as much as from Paris to Tours. See Ptol., Cicero in Som. Scipionis; Plinius, lib. 6, cap 9, and Strabo.

  The Plassaerts, traders in Indian cotton goods and other exotic merchandise, are organised, efficient, and, in their own words, “professional”.

  Their first contact with the Far East, about twenty years ago, coincided with their first meeting. That year the Employees’ Association of the bank where they were both on placement (he at the Aubervilliers branch, she at Montrouge) organised a trip to Outer Mongolia. The country itself held little interest for them, Ulan Bator Hoto being just a big village with a few official buildings of typically Stalinist design, and the Gobi desert having nothing much to show for itself apart from its horses and a few grinning Mongols with protruding cheekbones and fur hats, but the stop-overs they made in Iran on the outward journey and in Afghanistan on the return filled them with excitement. They shared a taste for travel and for fixing deals; they both possessed a certain kind of unconventional inventiveness, a developed sense of alternative life styles, and considerable resourcefulness; all of which prompted them to pack in the cash counter, where in truth nothing very exalting awaited them, and to set up in the antiques business. With a patched-up truck and a float of a few thousand francs, they started to clear cellars and attics, touring country fairs and on Sunday mornings selling at the then not very popular flea market at Vanves slightly dented hunting horns, mostly incomplete encyclopaedias, silver forks, some flaking, and decorated plates (A Bad Joke: a man asleep in a garden, another man stealing up on him, pouring a liquid into his ear; or, on another one, in the middle of a thicket in which the faces of two grinning scamps are hidden, an angry gamekeeper: Where have those two scoundrels got to?; or another, showing a very young sailor-suited sword-swallower, with the caption: One Swallow doesn’t make a Mummer).

  Competition was fierce, and though they had flair, they lacked experience; on several occasions they got landed with job lots containing nothing saleable, and the only good deals they pulled off were with stocks of old clothing, RAF jackets, American-style button-down shirts, Swiss moccasins, T-shirts, Davy Crockett headgear, and blue jeans, thanks to which they managed to survive through those years even if they didn’t expand.

  In the early sixties, not long before they moved into Rue Simon-Crubellier, they came across a most curious character, in a pizzeria in Rue des Ciseaux: a neurasthenic lawyer, of Dutch origin, settled in Indonesia, who had spent many years as the Djakarta agent for several trading companies before setting up his own export-import business. With his remarkable knowledge of all the craft products made in Southeast Asia, having no equal when it came to evading customs controls, or short-circuiting insurance companies and handling agents, or avoiding taxes, he packed three rusty freighters to the gunwales, all year round, with Malaysian seashells, Philippine handkerchiefs, Formosan kimonos, Indian shirts, Nepalese jackets, Afghan furs, Sinhalese lacquers, Macao barometers, Hong Kong toys, and a hundred other kinds of goods from dozens of different places, which he redistributed around Germany with a mark-up of between two and three hundred per cent.

  He liked the Plassaerts and decided to give them a commission. For seven francs he would sell them shirts which had cost him three, and which they would resell at seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-five, or thirty francs according to the case. They started off in a tiny cobbler’s stall near Place Saint-André-des-Arts. Today they have three stores in Paris, two others in Lille and Cannes, and plan to open a dozen more on a permanent or seasonal basis in spas, on the Atlantic coast, and in winter sports resorts. Meanwhile, they have succeeded in tripling – and soon they will have quadrupled – the floor area of their Parisian apartment and have entirely refurbished a country house near Bernay.

  Their business acumen is the perfect complement to their Indonesian associate’s commercial talents: not only do they go over there to find local products that can be marketed easily in France, but they also have European knickknacks and jewellery manufactured there on modern-style or art-déco patterns: in the Celebes, at Macassar, they have found a craftsman, whom they describe unreservedly as a genius, and who, with his dozen workers, can supply on demand and for a few centimes per item clips, rings, brooches, novelty buttons, lighters, smoker’s sets, pens, false eyelashes, yoyos, spectacle frames, combs, cigarette holders, inkwells, letter openers, and a whole heap of trinkets, gewgaws, and baubles in Bakelite, celluloid, galalith, and other plastic materials which you could swear were at least half a century old and which he supplies with ‘pre-aged patina’ and even sometimes with fake repair marks.

  Though they still go in for the laid-back style, offering coffee to customers and calling employees by their first names, their rapid expansion is beginning to create difficult problems for them, in stock control, accounting, profitability, and personnel; they are being forced to attempt to diversify their range of products, to sub-contract a portion of their business to major stores or to mail-order warehouses, and to look elsewhere for new materials, new items, and new ideas; they have begun to make contacts in South America and black Africa, and they have already signed up an Egyptian trader for the supply of fabrics, imitation Coptic jewellery, and small painted furniture for which they have secured the exclusive rights for Western Europe.

  The Plassaerts’ dominant character trait is meanness – methodical, organised meanness, on which they even pride themselves from time to time: for instance, they boast that in their flat and in their shops they never have any fresh flowers – highly perishable goods – but display instead arrangements of everlasting flowers, reeds, Alpine sea holly, and honesty, enhanced by a few peacock feathers. Their meanness is constant and unremitting: not only does it prompt them to eliminate the superfluous – the only overheads allowed are supposed to be productive overheads contributing to prestige required for professional purposes and therefore able to be accounted as investments – but also inspires them to commit acts of unspeakable stinginess, such as pouring Belgian whisky into bottles bearing expensive labels when they have guests, or systematically scrounging sugar lumps from cafés for their own sugar bowl, or asking in the same cafés for the Entertainment Guide which they then leave by their own cash desk for their customers to use, or paring a few pennies off their shopping by haggling over every item and buying loss leaders most of the time.

  With an exactness that leaves nothing to chance, in the same way as in the nineteenth century the mistress of the house went through her cook’s account book and didn’t hesitate to demand two pennies back on the turbot, Adèle Plassaert enters every day in a school exercise book the stark figures of her daily outgoings:

  Behind them, on the off-white-painted wall with pale-yellow gloss mouldings, hang sixteen little rectangular drawings in a style reminiscent of fin-de-siècle caricatures. They represent the classical “Paris Streetsellers”, with captions giving their traditional cries:

  THE SEAFOOD-SELLER

  “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!”

  THE RAG AND BONE MAN

  “Any old rags,
any old iron

  Any any any old iron”

  THE SNAIL LADY

  “I’ve got snails, juicy snails

  A shilling a dozen, fresh snails”

  THE FISH WOMAN

  “Prawns, lovely prawns, alive-o!

  Skate, nice fresh skate”

  THE COOPER

  “Barrels, barrels!”

  THE OLD-CLOTHES MAN

  “Old clothes, any old clothes

  Old … clothes”

  THE GRINDER AND HIS STONE

  “Knives, scissors, razors!”

  THE COSTERMONGER

  “Tender and green artichokes

  Tender and young

  Ar … tichokes”

  THE TINKER

  “Tan, ran, tan, tan, ran, tan

  For pots and cans, oh! I’m your man

  I’ll mend them all with a tink, tink, tink

  And never leave a chink, chink, chink”

  THE WAFFLE LADY

  “Enjoy yourselves, ladies

  Here’s a treat!”

  THE ORANGE LADY

  “Valencia oranges, lovely ripe oranges!”

  THE DOG-CLIPPER

  “I clips dogs

  And cuts yer cats

  Tails an’ ears an’ all”

  THE VEGETABLE-SELLER

  “Lettuce, cos lettuce, not to hawk

  Lovely cos lettuce out for a walk”

  THE CHEESE MAN

  “Good cream cheese, fresh cheese!”

  THE SAW-SETTER

  “Here comes the saw-setter

  Any saws to set?”

  THE GLAZIER

  “Glazier, gla-zier

  Any broken panes

  Here comes the gla-zier!”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Servants’ Quarters, 10

  HENRI FRESNEL, THE chef, came to live in this room in June nineteen nineteen. He was a sad-hearted Southerner aged about twenty-five, short, dry, with a thick black moustache. He had quite stylish ways of doing fish and shellfish dishes, and also vegetable starters: raw artichokes in pepper and salt, cucumber in dill, courgettes with turmeric, cold ratatouille flavoured with mint, radishes in cream and chervil, capsicum with basil, plum tomatoes in Provençal thyme. By way of homage to his long-dead namesake (the inventor of the optical lens, or lentille) he had also invented a recipe for lentils cooked in cider and served cold with a sprinkling of olive oil and saffron on toasted circular slices of the kind of bread used for the dish known as pan bagnat.

  In nineteen twenty-four this man of few words married the daughter of the sales director of a sizable cooked-meats supplier at Pithiviers specialising in the celebrated lark pâté which gives the town one part of its renown, the remainder deriving from its famous almond cake. Bolstered by the reputation his cuisine had acquired, and correctly reckoning that Monsieur Hardy, far too concerned with promoting his olive oil and casks of anchovies to the exclusion of all else, would not give him the means to build on it, Henri Fresnel decided to go it alone, and with the help of his young bride Alice – who put her dowry into it – he opened his own restaurant in Rue des Mathurins, near the Madeleine. They called it La Belle Alouette. Fresnel manned the hotplates, Alice managed the dining room: they stayed open late at night, to attract the actors, journalists, night birds, and high-lifers who thronged the area, and their reasonable prices combined with the very high quality of their cuisine soon meant that they had to turn customers away, and the light-coloured wood panelling of their small dining room soon began to sport autographed snapshots of music hall stars, leading actors, and boxing champions.

  Everything went swimmingly, and the Fresnels were soon planning for the future, thinking of having a baby and of leaving their cramped flatlet. But one morning in nineteen twenty-nine, when Alice was six months pregnant, Henri disappeared, leaving his wife a laconic note explaining that he was dying of boredom in his kitchen and was off to make his long-cherished dream come true: to be an actor!

  Alice Fresnel reacted to this news with surprising calm: the very same day she hired a chef, and with uncommon energy she took over the running of the business, letting go only for the time it took to deliver a chubby-cheeked baby boy whom she baptised Ghislain and put out to a wet-nurse straight away. As for her husband, she made no effort to find him.

  She saw him again forty years later. In the meantime, the restaurant had gone downhill and been sold; Ghislain had grown up and gone into the army, and Alice lived on in her room on the income from her savings, poaching a turbot on the side-plate of her enamelled cooker, or simmering a stew or a blanquette or a hotpot which filled the servants’ staircase with delicious smells, and with which she provided feasts for some of her neighbours.

  Henri Fresnel had given it all up not for an actress – as Alice had always believed – but really for acting. Like one of those Strolling Players of Molière’s time, who came in the pouring rain to the gates of a dilapidated castle and sought shelter from a ragged squire who would join the errant band next morning, Henri had set off on the road with four companions in misfortune who had failed drama school and despaired of ever getting a part: two twins, Isidore and Lucas, a pair of strong, tall men from the Jura who did swashbucklers and young male leads, a girl hailing from Toulon who played the innocent, and a distinctly butch contralto who was in fact the youngest member of the troupe. Isidore and Lucas drove the two trucks that had been converted into caravans and set up the stage, Henri did the cooking, the accounts, and the directing, fresh-faced Lucette designed, made, and above all darned the costumes, and buxom Charlotte did everything else: washing up, cleaning the caravans, shopping, combing and ironing needed at the last minute, etc. They had two painted canvas sets: one depicted a palace with a perspective effect and did indiscriminately for Racine, Molière, Labiche, Feydeau, Coward, and Courteline; the other, rescued from a church guild, showed a Bethlehem nativity scene: the addition of two plywood trees and a few artificial flowers turned it into the Enchanted Forest where the troupe played its greatest success, The Force of Destiny, a post-romantic drama with no connection whatsoever with Verdi, a play which had made the fortunes of the Boulevard theatres and of six generations of repertory managers: the Queen (Lucette) comes across a cruel brigand (Isidore) hanging in the sun from an instrument of torture. She takes pity on him, goes up to him, brings him water, notices he is a handsome and likable young man. She frees him under cover of darkness and tells him to flee disguised as a tramp and to await her arrival in the royal coach in the depths of the woods. But at that point a magnificent Amazon (Charlotte, in a gilt-painted cardboard helmet) leading an army (Lucas and Fresnel) arraigns her:

  – O Queen of the Night, the man you have freed belongs unto me: Prepare yourself to fight; the war against the armies of light will last in the midst of the trees of the forest till dawn!

  (Exeunt omnes. Lights down. Silence. Thunder. Trumpets sound.)

  And then the two Queens reappear on stage wearing plumed helmets, jewel-incrusted armour, and gauntlets, holding long lances and cardboard shields decorated respectively with a flaming sun and a crescent moon on a starry background, and riding two legendary beasts, one a relative of the dragon (Fresnel), the other cognate to the camel (Isidore and Lucas), with coats cut and sewn by a Hungarian tailor in Avenue du Maine.

  With only a handful of other paltry props – an X-shaped stool for a throne, an old mattress and three cushions, a black-painted score cupboard, door and window openings made of old orange boxes which a piece of patched green baize could turn into that desk with its silver-gilt rims, piled high with books and papers, at which a contemplative cardinal – who is not Richelieu but his ghost Mazarin (Fresnel) – decides to have brought out of the Bastille an aged prisoner who is none other than Rochefort (Isidore) and entrusts this mission to a lieutenant of the Black Musketeers who is none other than D’Artagnan (Lucas) – and with costumes altered a thousand times, repaired and resurrected with bits of wire, Sellotape, and safety pins, with two rust
y spotlights they took turns to operate and which failed fifty per cent of the time, they produced historical dramas, comedies of manners, the classics, bourgeois tragedies, modern melodramas, vaudevilles, farces, Punch-and-Judy shows, hasty adaptations of sentimental novels like Les Misérables or Pinocchio – in which Fresnel played Jiminy Cricket in an old tuxedo purportedly painted to depict the body of a cicada, and with two clockwork springs sticking out of corks glued to his forehead, representing the antennae.

  They played in school yards and playgrounds, in village squares at unlikely locations in the heart of the Cévennes or the hills of Provence, pulling off nightly prodigious feats of imagination and improvisation, swapping six roles and twelve costumes in a single play, before an audience of ten adults drowsing in their Sunday best and fifteen youngsters with galoshes on their feet, berets on their heads, and warm knitted scarves around their necks, who nudged and spluttered when they saw the leading lady’s pink knickers through the rents in her skirt.

  Rain interrupted their plays, the trucks wouldn’t start, a bottle of cooking oil got spilled a few minutes before Monsieur Jourdain was due to go on in the only remotely presentable seventeenth-century costume they possessed – a sky-blue velvet jacket with a flower-embroidered doublet and lace cuffs – and obscene abscesses sprouted on the heroines’ bosoms, but they did not lose heart for three years. Then, in the space of a few days, everything fell apart: Lucas and Isidore ran off in the middle of the night with one of the trucks and the week’s takings, which, for once, had not been disastrous; two days later Lucette got herself abducted by a scurrilous surveyor who had been chasing her to no avail for the previous three months. Charlotte and Fresnel stuck together for another fortnight, attempting to perform their repertoire of plays two-handed and yielding to the fallacious illusion that they would be able to rebuild their troupe once they reached a large town. They ended up at Lyons and separated by mutual agreement. Charlotte went back to her Swiss banking family, for whom acting was a sin; Fresnel joined a troupe of tumblers leaving for Spain: a snake-man permanently dressed in a thin scaly leotard who contorted his way under a burning panel twelve inches off the ground, and a couple of female dwarves (one of whom was actually a man) who did a Siamese-twin act with banjo, castanets, and ditties. As for Fresnel, he became Mister Mephisto the Magician, the soothsayer and healer acclaimed by all the crowned heads of Europe. Wearing a red tuxedo with a pink in his buttonhole, with a top hat on his head and a diamond-topped walking stick in his hand, he would put on a slight Russian accent and take a full set of Tarot cards out of a tall, narrow, lidless, old-leather box, and lay out eight of them on a table in a rectangle; using an ivory spatula, he would sprinkle them with a blue powder which was nothing more than ground galena but which he called Galen’s Dust and to which he granted certain organo-therapeutic properties effecting cures for all past, present, and future afflictions, but especially recommended for the extraction of teeth, migraines and cephalalgias, menstrual pain, arthritis, arthrosis, neuralgia, cramps, convulsions, colic and kidney stones, and such other ills as he might select as appropriate to the place, the time of year, and the specific audience addressed.