Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  On the other side, to the right of the easy chairs, an austere metal music stand, equipped with two articulated extensions with ends designed to hold candles, displays a stunning print probably intended to accompany an ancient volume on natural history, depicting on the left-hand side a peacock in profile, a stiff and sharp-edged outline with the plumage bunched into an almost dull, blurred mass, with only a large, white-rimmed eye and an erect crest giving it a touch of life, and, on the right, the same beast seen in his pride, face-on, an exuberant mass of shimmering, sparkling, flashing, flaming colour beside which a Gothic stained-glass window looks like a pale imitation.

  The rear wall is bare, setting off a light cherrywood wall panel and an embroidered silk hanging.

  Finally, in the window, four objects, discreetly illuminated by unseen spotlights, appear to be attached to each other by a multitude of imperceptible threads.

  The first one, leftmost from where we are looking, is a medieval pietà, a painted wood carving, almost life-size, mounted on a sandstone dais: a Madonna with gathered brows and a wry, wailing mouth, and a Man of Sorrows with crudely emphasised anatomy, great blobs of coagulated blood welling from the wound in his side and the nail-prints in hands and feet. It was thought to be of Rhenish origin, dating from the fourteenth century, and to illustrate the exaggerated realism of the period as well as its taste for the macabre.

  The second object stands on a little lyre-shaped easel. It is a study by Carmontelle – a charcoal sketch touched up with pastels – for his portrait of Mozart as a child; it differs in several details from the finished portrait now in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris: Leopold Mozart is standing not behind his son’s chair, but on this side of it, at three-quarters angle so as to be able to supervise the child whilst also reading the score; as for Maria-Anna, she is seen not in profile behind the harpsichord, but full-face, in front of the harpsichord, partly obscuring the score which the child prodigy is sight-reading; it is not difficult to imagine Leopold asking the artist to make the changes seen in the definitive version, as they do not impinge on the son’s central position, but give the father a less secondary place.

  The third object is a large sheet of parchment in an ebony frame, placed diagonally on a stand which cannot be seen. The upper half of the sheet bears a very fine copy of a Persian miniature; as day breaks, a young prince on his palace balcony gazes at the sleeping princess at whose feet he is kneeling. On the lower half of the sheet, six lines of verse from Ibn Zaydûn are written out in elegant copperplate:

  And I should live in the anxiety of not knowing

  Whether the Master of my Fate

  Proving less indulgent than Sultan Shahriyar

  In the morning when I broke off my tale

  Would consent to a further reprieve of my sentence

  And permit me to resume my story next evening

  The last object is a fifteenth-century Spanish suit of armour, all of its pieces finally welded together by rust.

  Madame Marcia’s real specialism concerns that kind of clockwork automata called animated watches. Unlike other automata or musical boxes disguised as candy boxes, walking-stick handles, comfit boxes, perfume phials, etc., animated watches are not, generally speaking, miracles of craftsmanship. But their rarity is what gives them all their value. Whilst animated carriage clocks, such as Jack-o’-the-clocks, and animated case clocks, such as Swiss-chalet cuckoo clocks, have always been very common, it is extremely rare to come across an even moderately old watch – be it a fob watch, a turnip watch, or a hunter – in which the indication of the hours and minutes is the pretext for a clockwork picture.

  The first to appear were in fact merely miniature Jack-o’-the-clocks in which one or two characters of minimal depth came out to strike the hours on virtually flat bells.

  Then came lubricious watches, thus designated by watchmakers who, though they agreed to manufacture them, refused to sell them on site, that is to say in Geneva. Entrusted to the agents of the East India Company for trading in America or the Orient, they rarely got to their destinations: they were customarily traded in European ports, and this clandestine commerce quickly grew so intense that the watches became unobtainable. Barely a few hundred were made subsequently, and sixty or so at the most have survived. A single American watchmaker owns more than two-thirds of them. The sketchy specifications he has given of the contents of his collection – he has never given anyone permission to see or to photograph any one of his watches – suggest that the makers did not make much effort to display imagination: on thirty-nine of the forty-two watches that he possesses, the scene depicted is the same: heterosexual copulation between two members of the human species, both adult, belonging to the same race (white, or, as people also say, Caucasian); the male is prone on top of a supine woman (the so-called “missionary” position). Seconds are marked by a hip-movement of the male, whose pelvis moves back and forth once a second; the female marks the minutes with her left arm (visible shoulder) and the hours with her right arm (hidden shoulder). The fortieth watch is identical to the first thirty-nine, except that it was painted after manufacture, making the female a black woman. It belonged to a slave trader called Silas Buckley. The forty-first, of much more delicate construction, represents Leda and the Swan: the bird beats its wings every second to mark the rhythms of their amorous frolic. The forty-second, rumoured to have belonged to the nobleman Andréa de Nerciat, is supposed to illustrate a scene from his famous work Lolotte, or My Noviciate: a young man, disguised as a serving wench, is debagged and buggered by a man whose dress, as it opens, half-reveals an improbably oversized sexual organ; the two figures are standing, the man behind the maid, who leans on a doorpost. The specification given by the watchmaker unfortunately fails to state how the hours and seconds are marked.

  Madame Marcia herself only owns eight watches of this kind, but that doesn’t prevent her collection from being much more varied: apart from an antique Jack-o’-the-clocks representing two blacksmiths taking turns to hammer an anvil and a “lubricious” watch analogous to those in the American’s collection, all her pieces are Victorian or Edwardian period toys whose clockwork mechanisms have miraculously remained in working order:

  – a butcher chopping a leg of lamb on a block;

  – two Spanish dancers: one marks the hours with her castanet-clacking arm, the other marks the seconds by lowering her fan;

  – an athletic clown perched on a sort of vaulting horse, contorting himself so that his rigidly stretched legs mark the hours, whilst his head nods to the seconds;

  – two soldiers, one making semaphore signals (hours), the other, at the ready, saluting each second;

  – a man’s head with a long, thin moustache serving as the hands of the watch; seconds are marked by his eyes moving right to left, left to right.

  As for the oldest piece in this brief collection, it could have come straight out of Le Bon Petit Diable, that Victorian children’s storybook by the Comtesse de Ségur: a horrible old hag, spanking a little boy.

  Although he has always refused to have anything to do with this store, it was nonetheless Léon Marcia who gave his wife the idea of specialising to such a degree; although every major city in the world has experts on automata, toys, and watches, there was no one dealing with the specific field of animated watches. In fact it was by chance that Madame Marcia has come in time to own eight of them; she is not herself a collector in the slightest, and is quite willing to sell items she has lived with for years, never doubting she will find others of which she will grow just as fond. Her role is much more focused, and consists of finding such watches, tracing their histories, authenticating them, and putting their collectors in touch with each other. Ten years or so ago, whilst on a trip to Scotland, she stopped over at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and came across Forbes’s painting, A Rat Behind the Arras, in the City Gallery. She had a full-sized photograph made of it and on her return to France undertook an examination of it under a magnifying glass, so as to check whether Lady F
orthright had any of this kind of watch in her collection. The result being negative, she gave the reproduction to Caroline Echard as a present on the occasion of her marriage to Philippe Marquiseaux.

  The picture did not correspond to any of the desiderata the young marrieds had put on their wedding list. This hanged coachman and dumbfounded Lady gave the gift a rather morbid air, and it was hard to see how it could convey wishes for a happy future. But maybe that was exactly what Madame Marcia wished to convey to Caroline, who had broken off with David two years before.

  Caroline was the same age as David, the two having been born within two months of each other; they had learnt to walk together, had made mud pies in the same park, and had sat side by side at nursery school, then at junior school. Madame Marcia adored and adulated Caroline as a little girl, then began to detest her as she grew out of plaits and gingham dresses. She began to call her a silly goose and to tease her son for letting her twist him round her little finger. She was relieved when they broke it off, but for David it was obviously more painful.

  At that time he was an athletic lad, puffing with pride in his fully silk-lined red leather motorbike gear, with a golden beetle embroidered on the back. His bike was then a modest Suzuki 125, and one cannot entirely dismiss the theory that that little goose of a Caroline Echard went for someone else – not Philippe Marquiseaux, but someone called Bertrand Gourguechon, whom she dropped immediately – because he had a 250cc Norton.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, the growth of David Marcia’s emotional scar tissue can be gauged by the increasing cubic capacity of his machines: Yamaha 250, Kawasaki 350, Honda 450, Kawasaki Mach III 500, a four-cylinder Honda 750, Guzzi 750, a water-cooled Suzuki 750, BSA A75 750, Laverda SF 750, BMW 900, Kawasaki 1000.

  He had turned professional several years before the day – 4 June 1971 – when, riding the last-named bike, he skidded on a slick of oil a few minutes before the start of the 35th Gold Cup at Montlhéry. He was lucky enough not to fall badly, and broke only his collarbone and his right wrist, but this accident sufficed to rule him out of competitive riding for good.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Basement, 2

  CELLARS. THE RORSCHACHS’ cellar.

  Floorboards salvaged from the conversion of the duplex have been screwed to the wall, becoming makeshift shelving. On them are to be found remnants of wallpaper with vaguely fish-like semi-abstract patterns, paint pots of all sizes and shades, a few dozen grey boxfiles labelled ARCHIVES, the residue of some official function or other at TV Programme Control.

  Indistinct objects – bags of plaster, jerry cans, burst trunks? – strew the floor. Some more identifiable objects can be made out: cartons of washing powder, a rusty stool.

  A bottle rack, wire, plastic-coated, is placed to the left of the slatted door. The lower level of the rack holds five bottles of fruit brandies: kirsch, apricot, quetsch, plum, raspberry. On one of the middle rows there is the score – in Russian – of Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Pushkin’s Golden Cockerel, and a probably popular novel entitled Spice, or the Revenge of the Louvain Locksmith, with a cover depicting a girl handing a bag of gold to a judge. On the top row, a lidless octagonal tin containing a few novelty chessmen made of plastic, crudely imitating Chinese ivory pieces: the knight is a kind of Dragon, the king a seated Buddha.

  Cellars. Dinteville’s cellar.

  A remover’s packing case spills over with piles of books which only left the cellar of the doctor’s previous house at Lavaur (Department of Tarn) to be put in this one. Amongst them, A History of the World War by Captain Liddell Hart, with pages one to twenty-two missing, some pages from Béhier & Hardy’s Elementary Treatise on Internal Pathology, a Greek grammar, an issue dating from 1905 of the Annals of Ear and Larynx Diseases, and an offprint of Meyer-Steineg’s article on “Das medizinische System der Methodiker”, Jenaer med.-histor. Beiträge fasc. 7/8, 1916.

  On the old waiting-room sofa whose formerly green canvas upholstery is now split and rotting away, an imitation-marble plaque has been put: originally rectangular, now broken, it reads: CONSULTING R

  Somewhere on a plank, beside cracked jars, dented bowls, unlabelled phials, lies Dr Dinteville’s earliest medical souvenir: a square box full of small, rusty nails. He kept it in his consulting room for a long time and has never been able to decide to get rid of it.

  When Dinteville settled in Lavaur, one of his first patients was a fairground juggler who a few weeks previously had swallowed one of his knives. Dinteville didn’t know what to do, didn’t dare operate, and gave him an emetic just in case: the patient brought up a heap of little nails. Dinteville was so bewildered that he wanted to write a paper on the case. But the few colleagues to whom he told the story advised him against it. Even if they themselves had sometimes heard tales of similar cases and stories of swallowed pins turning around in the œsophagus or the stomach of their own accord so as not to perforate the intestine, they were convinced that this case was a put-up job.

  Near the cellar door a skeleton hangs dismally from a nail in the wall. Dinteville bought it when he was a student. It was nicknamed Horatio, in memory of Nelson, since its right arm was missing. He is still fitted out with a black blindfold over the right eye socket, a tattered waistcoat, and a paper bicorne.

  When Dinteville got his practice, he made a bet that he would put Horatio on a seat in his waiting room. But when the day arrived he preferred to lose his bet rather than his patients.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  On the Stairs, 9

  Draft inventory of some of the things found on the stairs over the years

  SEVERAL PHOTOS, INCLUDING one of a fifteen-year-old girl wearing a black swimsuit bottom and a white knitwear sweater, kneeling on a beach,

  a radio alarm clock obviously destined for the mender’s, in a plastic bag from the Nicolas company,

  a black shoe decorated with jewels,

  a slipper made of gilded goatskin,

  a box of Géraudel cough pastilles,

  a muzzle,

  a Russian-leather cigarette case,

  straps,

  various notebooks and appointment books,

  a cubic lampshade in bronze-coloured metallic paper, in a bag originating in a record shop in Rue Jacob,

  a milk bottle in a bag from Bernard the butcher’s,

  a romantic engraving depicting Rastignac at the Père-Lachaise cemetery, in a bag from Weston’s shoeshop,

  a (humorous?) printed card announcing the engagement of Eleuthère de Grandair and the Marquis of Grandpré,

  a rectangular, 21cm x 27cm sheet of paper on which the genealogical tree of the Romanov family had been carefully drawn and framed with a frieze of broken lines,

  Pride and Prejudice, a novel by Jane Austen, in the Tauschnitz edition, opened at page 86,

  a cardboard box from the pastry shop “Aux Délices de Louis XV”, now empty but having manifestly once contained blueberry tarts,

  a copy of Bouvard and Ratinet’s logarithmic tables, in poor condition, with the stamp: Lycée de Toulouse, and a name: P. Roucher, written in red ink, on the flyleaf,

  a kitchen knife,

  a little metal mouse, with a shoelace for a tail, on wheels, that could be wound up with a flat key,

  a bobbin of sky-blue thread,

  a novelty necklace,

  a crumpled copy of Jazz Review containing an interview by Hubert Damisch with Jay Jay Johnson, the trombone-player, and an article by the drummer Al Levitt about his first stay in Paris in the mid-fifties,

  a travelling chess set, in synthetic leather, with magnetic pieces,

  a pair of tights, brand name “Mitoufle”,

  a carnival mask representing Mickey Mouse,

  several paper flowers, paper hats, and some confetti,

  a sheet of paper covered in childish drawings, in the gaps of which a laborious first draft of a second year Latin prose composition is fitted: dicitur formicas offeri granas fromenti in buca Midae pueri in somno eius.
Deinde suus pater arandum, aquila se posuit in iugum et araculum oraculus nuntiavit Midam futurus esse rex. Quidam scit Midam electum esse regum Phrygiae et [illegible word] latum reges suis leonis.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Altamont, 4

  CYRILLE ALTAMONT’S STUDY: a highly polished herringbone parquet floor, a wallpaper with a pattern of large red and gold vine leaves, and furniture constituting a very fine, heavy, cosy Regency suite: a nine-drawer kneehole desk, in mahogany, with the working surface covered in dark imitation leather, a rocking swivel chair in leather-padded ebony, horseshoe shaped, and a little reclining seat, something like a Recamier, in rosewood, with cast-iron claw feet. Against the right-hand wall, a large glass-fronted bookcase with a swan-neck pediment. Opposite, a large harbour chart on cloth-backed paper, framed in wooden beads, a slightly yellowing reproduction of

  On the rear wall to the left of the door giving onto the entrance hall are three pictures of almost identical dimensions: the first is a portrait, by Morrell d’Hoaxville, an English painter of the last century, of the brothers Dunn, two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects – palæopedology and æolian harps respectively. Herbert Dunn, the æolian harp specialist, is on the left: he is a man of tall stature, thin, wearing a black worsted suit, a red beard trimmed to frame his face, and rimless oval spectacles. Jeremy Dunn, the palæopedologist, is a rotund little man, portrayed in his working clothes, that is to say equipped for an expedition in the field, with a good military haversack, a surveyor’s chain, a file, crowbars, a compass, and three hammers stuck in his belt, plus a staff taller than he is, with a long iron spike and a handle gripped with upstretched hand.