Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  They did not see each other again for the next ten years, but wrote twice a week to each other in increasingly amorous terms. Elzbieta soon managed to persuade her parents to let her learn French and Arabic because she would be going to live in Tunisia with her husband Boubaker. Things were more difficult for him, and for months he strove to convince his father, who had always terrified him, that he had not the slightest wish to be disrespectful, that he would remain faithful to the traditions of Islam and to the teachings of the Koran, and that just because he was going to marry a Westerner did not mean he would dress in European clothes or live in the French quarter.

  The toughest problem was to obtain all the authorisations needed for Elzbieta to come to Tunisia. It took more than eighteen months of administrative hassles on both Tunisian and Polish sides. There was a treaty of co-operation between Poland and Tunisia, which allowed for Tunisian students to go to Poland to study engineering, and for Polish dentists, agronomists, and vets to work in Tunisia for the Ministries of Health and Agriculture. But Elzbieta was neither a dentist nor an agronomist nor a vet, and for a whole year every application she submitted for a visa, whatever explanation she added to it, was sent back with a note saying: “Does not correspond to criteria laid down in treaty referred to above.” What Elzbieta had to do in the end, through a singularly contorted sequence of steps, was to bypass the official channels and tell her story to an Under-Secretary of State so that, barely six months later, she was finally appointed to a post as translator/interpreter at the Polish Consulate in Tunis – with the administration finally taking account of the fact that she had degrees in Arabic and French.

  She landed at Tunis-Carthage airport on the first of June nineteen sixty-six. There was a glaring sun. She was radiant with happiness, with liberty, with love. She looked for her fiancé amongst the crowd of Tunisians waving expansively to passengers from the balcony, but could not see him. They had sent each other photographs many times, showing him playing football, or in swimming trunks on Salammbo’s beach, or wearing a djellaba and embroidered babouches beside his father, a head shorter than he was, showing her skiing at Zakopane, or vaulting a horse. She was sure she would recognise him, but nonetheless held back for an instant when she did set eyes on him: he was in the arrivals hall, just behind the immigration desk, and the first thing she said to him was:

  – But you haven’t grown at all!

  When they had met, at Parçay-les-Pins, they were the same height; but whereas he had grown only another eight or ten inches, she had put on at least twenty: she was five foot ten and he was not quite five foot two; she was a sunflower in midsummer, he was dry and shrivelled like an old lemon left on the kitchen shelf.

  The first thing Boubaker did was to take her to see his father. He was a public scribe and calligrapher. He worked in a minute hut in the medina; he sold satchels, key-pouches, and pencils, but his customers mostly came to have him write in their names on degree and diploma certificates, or to copy out holy sayings on parchments they would frame. Elzbieta first set eyes on him sitting cross-legged with a plank on his lap, wearing spectacles with lenses as thick as bottle-glass, sharpening his quill with a ponderous air. He was a short, thin man with very drawn features, a greenish complexion, shifty eyes, and a hideous smile, ill at ease and taciturn with women. In two years he barely spoke three words to his daughter-in-law.

  The first year was the worst; Elzbieta and Boubaker spent it in the father’s house, in the Arab quarter. They had their own room, which was a space just large enough for their bed, but without any light, separated from the brothers-in-law’s bedrooms by flimsy partitions through which she felt that she was being not only overheard, but watched. They were not even able to eat together; he ate with his father and elder brothers; she had to wait on them silently and return to the kitchen with the women and children, where her mother-in-law smothered her with kisses and caresses and sweets as well as distressing her with lamentations on the shape of her belly and her buttocks and almost obscene questions on the kind of love-making her husband provided or requested.

  The second year, after she had borne a son, who was named Mahmoud, she rebelled and took Boubaker off in her rebellion. They rented a three-roomed flat at 15, Rue de Turquie, in the European quarter, three cold, high-ceilinged rooms with frightful furniture. Once or twice they were invited round by some of Boubaker’s European colleagues; once or twice she gave dull dinner parties for wishy-washy foreign-aid volunteers; the rest of the time she had to argue for weeks to go out together to a restaurant; every time, he sought an excuse for staying at home or for going out alone.

  He was persistently and inquisitively jealous: every evening, on coming home from the Consulate, she had to tell him every detail of her day and list all the men she had seen, state how long they had been in her office, what they had said, what she had answered, where she had lunched, and why she spent so long on the telephone to this girlfriend or that, etc. And when they did happen to walk together in the street, and men turned their heads as the blonde beauty went by, as soon as they got home Boubaker would give her terrible rows, as if she were to blame for the blondeness of her hair, for the whiteness of her skin, for the azure of her eyes. She felt he would have liked to imprison her, to remove her for ever from the sight of other people, to keep her for his own eyes only, for his silent and feverish admiration alone.

  It took her two years to get the full measure of the gap between the dreams they had cherished for a decade and the mean reality of her future life. She began to hate her husband, transferred to her son all the love she had felt, and decided to run away with him. With the complicity of some of her compatriots she managed to leave Tunisia clandestinely, on board a Lithuanian ship which landed her at Naples whence she reached France overland.

  Fate determined that her arrival in Paris coincided with the height of the student revolt in May ’68. In that great wave of intoxication and joy she had a fleeting and passionate affair with a young American folk singer, who left Paris on the night the police reoccupied the Odéon theatre. Shortly after that she found this room: it had belonged to Germaine, Bartlebooth’s seamstress, who retired that year and who was not replaced.

  For the first months she hid, fearing Boubaker might break in one day and reclaim his son. Later she learnt that he had given in to his father’s exhortations and been married by a matchmaker to a widowed mother of four, and had gone back to live in the medina.

  She began a simple and almost monkish existence, centred entirely on her son. To earn a living she found a job in an export-import business trading with Arab companies and for which she translated users’ manuals, administrative regulations, and technical specifications. But the business soon went bankrupt and since then she has lived on short-term contracts from the CNRS research council, for whose Bulletin signalétique she abstracts articles in Arabic and Polish, and makes up the pittance they pay her by doing housework.

  She was straightaway the darling of the whole building. Even Bartlebooth, her landlord, whose indifference to everything going on in the building had always seemed to everyone to be a fact of life, took a shine to her. Several times, before his morbid passion had condemned him to ever stricter solitude, he invited her to dinner. Once – and this is something he had never done for anyone, and would never do again – he showed her the puzzle he was reassembling that fortnight: it was a fishing port on Vancouver Island, a place called Hammertown, all white with snow, with a few low houses and some fishermen in fur-lined jackets hauling a long, pale hull along the shore.

  Apart from the friends she has made in the apartment house, Elzbieta knows almost no one in Paris. She has lost touch with Poland and doesn’t mix with Poles in exile. Only one visits her regularly, a rather old man with empty eyes, a walking stick, and an eternal white flannel scarf. This man, who seems past caring about anything, was, she says, the most popular clown in Warsaw before the war, and it is he who is portrayed on the poster on her wall. She met him three years ago in A
nna de Noailles Square, where she was watching her son play in the sand pit. He sat down on the same bench, and she noticed he was reading a Polish edition of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Filles du feu – Sylwia i inne opowiadania. They became friends. He comes for dinner twice a month at her flat. As he has not a single tooth left, she feeds him on hot milk and custard.

  He doesn’t live in Paris, but in a small village called Nivillers, in the Department of Oise, near Beauvais, in a one-storey house, long and low, with windows made of small panes of coloured glass. That is where Mahmoud, who is now nine years old, has just gone for his holidays.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Gratiolet, 1

  THE PENULTIMATE DESCENDANT of the building’s original owner lives with his daughter on the seventh floor, in two former maid’s rooms converted into a small but comfortable dwelling.

  Olivier Gratiolet sits reading at a collapsible table covered with a green cloth. His daughter Isabelle, aged thirteen, is kneeling on the parquet floor: she is building a house of cards as fragile as it is ambitious. Opposite them, on a television screen which neither is watching, a female announcer, set against a hideous science-fiction background – shiny metal panels adorned with jingoistic insignia – and sheathed in something intended to suggest a space suit, points out the evening’s programmes written on a signboard whose hexagonal outline is supposed to represent the bounds of the French Republic: at eight thirty, Yellow Thread, a detective fantasy by Stewart Venter: at the beginning of the century, a bold jewel-thief takes refuge on a timber-raft floating down the Yellow River, and at ten o’clock, This Golden Serp in the Field of Stars, a chamber opera by Philoxanthe Schapska, adapted from Victor Hugo’s Booz endormi, world premiere inaugurating the Besançon Festival.

  The book Olivier Gratiolet is reading is a history of anatomy, an outsize volume open flat on the table at a full-page reproduction of a plate by Zorzi da Castelfranco, a disciple of Mondino di Luzzi, with the description on the facing page which François Béroalde de Verville made of it a century and a half later in his Tableau des riches inventions couvertes du voile des feintes amoureuses qui sont représentées dans l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili:

  The corpse has not been reduced to a skeleton but the remaining flesh is impregnated with soil which forms a dry and, as it were, cardboard-like magma. nonetheless in some places bones are partially extant: sternum, collarbones, kneecaps, tibias. overall complexion is yellow brown on the front side, the back side is blackish and dark grey, humid and full of worms. head leaning to left shoulder, skull covered in white hair impregnated with soil and fragments of winding sheet. eyebrows hairless; the lower jaw presents two teeth, yellow and semi-transparent. brain and cephalic fluid occupy approximately two thirds of the skull cavity but it is no longer possible to identify the various organs comprising the encephalum. dura mater is extant as a membrane of bluish colour; as if it were in almost a normal condition, there is no spine marrow left. cervical vertebrae are visible though partly covered by a thin ochre layer. the saponified soft internal parts of the larynx can be found at the level of the sixth vertebrum. the two sides of the chest seem empty except for containing a little soil and some small flies. they are blackish, smoky and carbonised. the abdomen is collapsed, covered in soil and chrysalids; the abdominal organs have shrunk and are not identifiable; the genital organs are destroyed to the point that sex cannot be established. the upper limbs have been placed on the sides of the body in such a way as to put arms and forearms and hands together. The left hand seems whole, grey mixed with brown. The right hand is darker and several of its bones have already separated, lower limbs are apparently intact. the short bones are no spongier than in normal state but are drier on the inside.

  Olivier owes his first name to his grandfather Gérard’s twin brother who was killed on 26 September 1914 at Perthes-lèz-Hurlus, in the Champagne region, in rearguard action following the first Battle of the Marne.

  Of the four Gratiolet children, Gérard was the one who inherited the farms in Berry; he sold off almost half of them, just as his brother Emile sold off the building bit by bit, in attempting to rescue his other brother Ferdinand and, a little later, Ferdinand’s widow. Gérard had two sons, the younger of whom, Henri, remained a bachelor. On his father’s death in 1934 he took over the farm. He tried to modernise his equipment and his methods, mortgaged himself to buy machinery, and on his death in 1938 – he died from a horse-kick – left so many debts that his elder brother Louis, Olivier’s father, preferred simply to refuse the inheritance rather than lumber himself with a business which would take years to become profitable.

  Louis had been to college at Vierzon and at Tours and had entered the Woods & Water Department. As soon as war broke out, and although he was only twenty-one, he was put in charge of the Saint-Trojan nature reserve on the Isle of Oléron, one of the first such projects in France, in which, as on the Sept-Iles archipelago off Perros-Guirec where a reserve had been established in 1912, every possible measure was to be taken to protect and preserve local fauna and flora. Louis thus settled on Oléron, where he married France Lidron, the daughter of a craftsman blacksmith, a bizarre old character who had begun to swamp the island with consistently hideous wrought-iron railings and decorative gilded bronze, and whose fortunes never flagged thereafter. Olivier was born in 1920 and grew up on beaches that were in those days usually deserted, and went to board at the Rochefort Lycée when he was ten. He hated boarding and he hated school, and spent all week at the back of the class in deepest gloom, dreaming of riding his horse on Sunday. He had to repeat fourth year and failed his school certificate four times before his father gave up trying to get him through and resigned himself to seeing his son get a job as a stable lad at a breeder’s near Saint-Jean-d’Angély. He liked the work and might have made his way in it, but less than two years later war broke out: Olivier was called up, taken prisoner at Arras in May 1940, and sent to a stalag at Hof, in Franconia. He spent two years there. On 18 April 1942, Marc, the son of Ferdinand, who had passed the agrégation in philosophy in the same year that his father went bankrupt and absconded, and who had since then worked in branches of the France–Germany Committee, was appointed to the staff of Fernand de Brinon, the new Secretary of State in the second Laval administration of Vichy France. Louis wrote to him asking for his help, and one month later obtained without difficulty the release of Marc’s uncle’s son from captivity.

  Olivier settled in Paris. François, his father’s other cousin, who, together with his wife Marthe, still owned about half the flats in the building and was manager of the co-ownership association, got him a three-roomed flat, underneath the one he lived in himself (the one where the Grifalconis would live in years to come). Olivier spent the rest of the war years there, going down to the cellar to listen to Des Français parlent aux Français on the BBC and producing and distributing, with the help of Marthe and François, a news sheet for several resistance groups, a kind of daily letter giving news from London and coded messages.

  Olivier’s father Louis died in 1943, of brucellosis. The following year Marc was assassinated in obscure circumstances. Hélène Brodin, the last of Juste’s children, died in 1947. When Marthe and François perished in the fire at the Rueil Palace cinema, Olivier became the last surviving Gratiolet.

  * * *

  A

  GENEALOGICAL TREE

  OF THE GRATIOLET FAMILY

  CAN BE FOUND HERE

  * * *

  Olivier took his role of landlord and trustee very seriously, but a few years later war once again pursued him: called up again and sent to Algeria in 1956, a landmine exploded under him and his leg had to be amputated above the knee. At the military hospital at Chambéry, where he was treated, he fell in love with his nurse, Arlette Criolat, and, although she was ten years his junior, married her. They went to live with the young woman’s father, who was a horse trader: Olivier took over his accounting and found once again his old vocation.

  His convalescence was
long and costly. He was given an experimental prototype of an entire artificial limb, a veritable anatomophysiological model of a leg, incorporating all the latest developments in muscular neurophysiology and fitted with servo systems allowing self-reciprocating contractions and extensions. After many months of practice, Olivier succeeded in mastering his contraption sufficiently to walk without a stick and even, on one occasion, with tears in his eyes, to ride a horse.

  Even if he was forced to sell off his inherited apartments one by one, leaving himself in the end with only two maid’s rooms, those were certainly the best years of his life, a quiet life in which short return trips to the capital were interspersed with long stays on his father-in-law’s farm, in the middle of waterlogged meadows, in a low, well-lit house full of flowers and the smell of dubbin. It was there that Isabelle was born, in 1962, and her earliest memory has her riding with her father in a trap drawn by a little grey-dappled white horse.

  On Christmas Eve, 1965, in a sudden fit of dementia, Arlette’s father strangled his daughter and hanged himself. The next day Olivier came to settle in Paris with Isabelle. He didn’t look for work, found ways of managing on his war-wounded pension, devoted himself to Isabelle, cooking her meals, mending her clothes, teaching her to read and do sums.

  Today it is Isabelle’s turn to care for her father, who is now often sick. She does the shopping, beats the eggs for the omelettes, scours the pots, keeps house. She is a thin little girl with a sad face and gloomy eyes who spends hours in front of her mirror whispering frightful stories to herself.

  Olivier hardly moves any more. His leg hurts him now, and he can’t afford to have its complex machinery adjusted. He spends most of his time sitting in his wing chair, dressed in pyjama trousers and an old check bed jacket, sipping little glasses of liqueur all day long, despite Dr Dinteville’s formal prohibition. In an attempt to increase his meagre income ever so slightly he draws (atrocious) picture puzzles which he sends in to a sort of weekly magazine specialising in what is pompously called mental gymnastics; they pay him generously – when they take his pieces – at a rate of fifteen francs per item. The last one shows a river; on the prow of a boat is a seated woman lavishly clad and surrounded by sacks of gold and half-open chests spilling over with jewels; in place of her head is the letter “S”; standing at the stern, a male figure wearing a count’s coronet is the ferryman; on his cape the letters “ENTEMENT” are embroidered. The solution: “Contentement passe richesse”, a French proverb meaning “Happiness is worth more than money”.