Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  The second is a work by the American artist Organ Trapp, whom Hutting introduced to the Altamonts ten years or so ago on Corfu. It shows a gas station at Sheridan, Wyoming, in full detail: a green garbage can, very black, very whitewalled tyres for sale, bright cans of motor oil, a red icebox with assorted drinks.

  The third work of art is a drawing signed Priou and entitled The Joiner in Rue du Champ-de-Mars: a young lad of twenty or so, wearing a secondhand sweater and trousers held up by string, warms himself at a brazier burning wood shavings.

  Beneath Organ Trapp’s picture is a little table with two levels: on the lower shelf lies a chessboard with the pieces set in the position following the eighteenth black move in the match played in Berlin in 1852 between Anderssen and Dufresne, just before Anderssen began his brilliant play for mate which gave the game the nickname “Evergreen”:

  On the upper shelf there is a white telephone and a vase with a trapezial profile overflowing with gladioli and chrysanthemums.

  Cyrille Altamont now almost never uses the desk, for he has transferred all the books and all the things he needs or is fond of to the official flat that he is provided with in Geneva. There remain in this now almost always empty room only dead and frozen things, furniture with neat drawers and, in the locked bookcase, never-opened books: the Grand Larousse Universel, a nineteenth-century encyclopaedia bound in green morocco, the complete works of La Fontaine, Musset, minor poets, and Maupassant in the standard Pléiade editions; bound sets of reviews: Preuves, Encounter, Merkur, La Nef, Icarus, Diogène, Le Mercure de France, and some artbooks and collectors’ editions, including a romantic Midsummer Night’s Dream with etchings by Helena Richmond, Venus in Furs by Sacher Masoch in a mink presentation case on which the tide characters seem to have been branded with a red-hot iron, and the manuscript score of Incertum, opus 74 by Pierre Block, for voice and percussion, bound in buffalo hide with bone and ivory encrustations.

  They are just putting the last touches to the room for the reception. Two butlers all clad in black spread a big white tablecloth over the desk. Framed in the doorway, a waiter in shirtsleeves is waiting to come in, as soon as they have finished, to lay the contents of his two baskets on the table: bottles of fruit juice and two octahedral bowls in blue porcelain filled with rice salad garnished with olives, anchovies, hard-boiled eggs, shrimps, and tomatoes.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Bartlebooth, 2

  BARTLEBOOTH’S DINING ROOM is now virtually never used. It is an austere, rectangular room with a dark parquet floor, long raised-velvet curtains, and a large Brazilian rosewood table covered with a damask cloth. On the long sideboard standing at the back of the room there are eight round tins, each bearing an effigy of King Farouk.

  * * *

  Whilst staying in Cape São Vicente, in the south of Portugal, in late nineteen thirty-seven, shortly before beginning his long tour of Africa, Bartlebooth made the acquaintance of an importer from Lisbon who, on learning that the Englishman planned to travel to Alexandria in the near future, entrusted him with an electric heater which he asked him to be so kind as to deliver to his Egyptian agent, a certain Farîd Abu Talif. Bartlebooth carefully copied the trader’s name and address into his diary; on arrival in Egypt towards the end of spring 1938, he enquired after this reputable businessman and had the gift from Portugal taken over to him. Though the temperature was already far too mild for anyone to really need an electric heater, Farîd Abu Talif was so happy with his present that he asked Bartlebooth to give his Portuguese friend, for trial and approval, eight tins of coffee which he had put through a process he called “ionisation”, a treatment designed, so he explained, to make it retain its aroma virtually indefinitely. Though Bartlebooth made it absolutely clear that he would certainly not have occasion to see the importer again for some seventeen years, the Egyptian insisted, adding that the result of the trial would be all the more convincing if die coffee still kept some of its flavour after all that time.

  In the years that followed, the tins caused endless trouble. At each border crossing Bartlebooth and Smautf had to open the tins and let suspicious customs officers sniff their contents, taste the grains on the tips of their tongues, and sometimes even brew up a cup of coffee with them to make sure they weren’t some new kind of drug. By the end of nineteen forty-three, the tins were empty – and by then rather dented – but Smautf would not let Bartlebooth throw them away; he used them to keep various kinds of small change in, or for the rare seashells he happened to find on beaches, and on their return to France he put them, as a memento of their long voyage, on the dining-room sideboard, where Bartlebooth let them stay.

  Each of Winckler’s puzzles was a new, unique, and irreplaceable adventure for Bartlebooth. Each time, when he broke the seal that locked Madame Hourcade’s black box and spread out on his tablecloth, under the shadowless light of his scialytic lamp, the seven hundred and fifty little pieces of wood that his watercolour had become, it seemed to him that all the experience he had accumulated over five or ten or fifteen years would be of no use, but this time, like every other time, he would have to deal with difficulties he could not even begin to guess at.

  Each time he vowed to proceed methodically and with discipline, not to rush in headlong, not to try to recover straight away in his fragmented watercolour some detail or other which he thought he could still remember properly: this time he was not going to let his passion or his dreams or his impatience get the better of him, but would build up his puzzle with Cartesian rigour: divide up the problems the better to solve them, deal with them one by one, ruling out improbable combinations, placing the pieces as would a chess player constructing an unanswerable and ineluctable gambit: he was going to begin by turning all pieces face-up, then he would take out all those possessing a straight-line edge, and with them he was going to assemble the frame of the jigsaw. Then he would study all the other pieces, systematically, one by one, taking them in his hand, turning them round and round every possible way; he would extract the pieces which held some more apparent design or detail, and sort the remainder by colour and within each colour-group by shade, and so even before beginning to slot the centre pieces in he would have scored in advance three-quarters of his victory over the snares laid by Winckler. The rest would be just a matter of patience.

  The main problem was to stay neutral, objective, and above all flexible, that is to say free of preconceptions. But that was exactly where Gaspard Winckler laid his traps. As Bartlebooth grew more familiar with these little slivers of wood, he began to see them in specific ways, giving prominence to a particular angle, as if the pieces were being polarised, or vectorised, or were solidifying into a perceptual model which, with irresistible seductiveness, assimilated them to familiar images, familiar shapes, familiar contours: a hat, a fish, an amazingly accurate bird with a long tail, a long curved beak with a swelling at the base, just like one he remembered seeing in Australia; or again, it would be the exact outline of Australia, or of Africa, or of England, or of the Iberian peninsula, the heel of Italy etc. Gaspard Winckler enjoyed making lots of pieces like that, and Bartlebooth often found – as in children’s solid-wood puzzles – that he had a whole menagerie, a python, a mountain cat, and two fully formed elephants, one of the African (long-eared) variety, the other Indian, or a Charlie Chaplin (bowler hat, stick, and bandy legs), a long-nosed profile of Cyrano de Bergerac, a gnome, a witch, a lady in a wimple, a saxophone, a coffee table, a roast chicken, a lobster, a champagne bottle, the dancing girl on the front of Gitane cigarette packs or the winged helmet of Gauloises, a hand, a tibia, a fleur-de-lys, various fruits, or an alphabet, almost entire, with pieces shaped like J, K, L, M, W, Z, X, Y, and T.

  Sometimes three or four or five of the pieces would fit together with disconcerting ease; then everything would get stuck: the missing piece would look to Bartlebooth like a kind of black India with Ceylon undetached (it was precisely a little harbour on the Coromandel coast that this watercolour happened to depict). It wa
sn’t until many hours – if not many days – later that Bartlebooth would notice that the matching piece was not black but more nearly light grey – a discontinuity of colour which ought to have been foreseeable had Bartlebooth not let himself get carried away, so to speak, by his excitement – and that it was shaped exactly like what he had persisted in calling “perfidious Albion” from the start, provided that the miniature Britain underwent a clockwise rotation of ninety degrees. Of course the empty space no more looked like India than the piece which fitted it exactly looked like Britain: what mattered, in this instance, was that for as long as he carried on seeing a bird, a bloke, a badge, a spiked helmet, an HMV dog, or a Winston Churchill in this or that piece, he was quite unable to discover how the piece would slot into the others without being, very precisely, reversed, revolved, decentred, desymbolised: in a word, de-formed.

  Gaspard Winckler’s illusions were essentially based on this principle: to oblige Bartlebooth to furnish the gaps with apparently anodine, obvious, easily named shapes – for instance, a gap for a piece with two sides necessarily forming a right angle, irrespective of the rest of its configuration – whilst at the same time pushing his perception of the pieces which would fit into the blanks in a completely different direction. As on the caricature by W. H. Hill which represents simultaneously a young and an old woman, the ear, cheek, and necklace of the young one being, respectively, an eye, the nose, and the mouth of the old one, the old woman being seen close-up in profile and the young one’s bust being seen at three-quarters angle from the rear, Bartlebooth, in order to find that admittedly almost, but actually not quite, right angle, had to stop seeing it as the apex of a triangle, that is to say he had to switch his perception, see otherwise what the other had provided to mislead his eyes, and – for instance – work out that the yellow-tinged approximate Africa he had been fingering without knowing where to put it fitted precisely into the gap he thought would take that dull mauve four-leafed-clover shape which he couldn’t find anywhere. The solution was obvious, as obvious as it had seemed insoluble for as long as he hadn’t solved it, just as in a crossword-puzzle clue – like Robert Scipion’s sublime “du vieux avec du neuf” in eleven letters – you hunt every other place for the answer that is very precisely stated in the clue itself, the whole labour consisting precisely in performing the displacement which gives the puzzle piece or the clue its meaning and thereby renders any explanation tiresome and unnecessary.

  In Bartlebooth’s particular case, the problem was complicated by the fact that he was the author of the original watercolours. He had taken care to destroy his drafts and sketches and had obviously not taken any photos or notes, but before beginning to paint he had stared at those seafront scenes with sufficiently close attention that twenty years later he had only to read the little legends that Gaspard Winckler stuck on the inside lids of the boxes – “Isle of Skye, Scotland, March 1936”, or “Hammamet, Tunisia, February 1938” – and a memory would resurface of a sailor in a bright-yellow sweater and a tam o’shanter, or of the red-and-gold splodge of a Berber woman washing wool by the seashore, or of a cloud over a faraway hill, as airy as a bird: not a memory of the thing itself–for it was only too obvious that these memories had only existed to become, first, watercolours, then puzzles, then nothing again – but a memory of an image, of a touch with a pencil, of a line of erasure, of a stroke of his brush.

  Bartlebooth sought such special signs almost every time. But it was illusory to put any trust in them: sometimes, Gaspard Winckler managed to make them disappear; that little red and yellow splodge, for instance, he had cut into a multitude of pieces from which the yellow and the red seemed inexplicably absent, drowned, dismembered into those minute overflows, those almost microscopic splashes, those little errors of the brush and rag which the eye absolutely could not see when the painting was looked at in its finished state, but which the puzzle-maker’s patient saw-strokes had managed to exploit and exaggerate; more often, and much more cunningly, as if he had guessed that this exact shape was incrusted in Bartlebooth’s memory, he would leave the detail just as it was, in a single piece, a cloud, a contour, a coloured spot which, deprived of any surround, became unusable, merely a monochrome, uniform cut-out, with no way of guessing what it might be surrounded by.

  Winckler’s tricks began with the edge-pieces, long before these advanced stages were reached. Like standard jigsaws, his puzzles had narrow white straight-edged borders, and custom and sense dictated that the puzzler should begin, as in go, with the edges.

  It was equally true that one day Bartlebooth – exactly like that go-player who placed his first blot in the middle of the board and bewildered his opponent for long enough to win the game – seized by a sudden intuition, began one of his puzzles from the centre – a yellow sunset staining and reflected in the Pacific (not far from Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, California, November 1948) – and finished it off in three days instead of two weeks. But he wasted almost a whole month, later on, when he thought he could use the same stratagem a second time.

  The blue glue Gaspard Winckler used sometimes spread a little, outside the edge of the intercalated white sheet which provided the border of the puzzle, making an almost imperceptible bluish fringe. For several years Bartlebooth used that fringe as a kind of guarantee: if two pieces which seemed to fit together perfectly had fringes which did not match, he held back from slotting them in; on the other hand, he was tempted, if their bluish fringes were perfectly continuous, to juxtapose pieces which at first sight should never have been associated with each other, and it often turned out a little later that they did in fact go well together.

  It was only when this habit had been acquired and had grown sufficiently ingrained that it would be unpleasant to give it up that Bartlebooth realised that these “happy chances” could themselves perfectly well be booby traps, and that the puzzle-maker had allowed this tiny trace to serve as a clue – or rather, as a bait – on a hundred jigsaws or so only in order to mislead him the more later on.

  For Gaspard Winckler, that was merely an elementary subterfuge, a limbering-up exercise. Two or three times it perplexed Bartlebooth for a few hours, but had no longer-lasting effects. But it was fairly typical of the spirit in which Gaspard Winckler designed his puzzles, and of how he aimed to arouse new confusion each time in Bartlebooth. The most rigorous methodology, an index of the seven hundred and fifty pieces, the use of computers or of any other scientific or objective system would not have had much point in this instance. Gaspard Winckler had clearly conceived of the manufacture of these five hundred puzzles as a single entity, as a gigantic five-hundred-piece puzzle of which each piece was a puzzle of seven hundred and fifty pieces, and it was evident that the solution of each of these puzzles called for a different approach, a different cast of mind, a different method, and a different system.

  Sometimes Bartlebooth discovered the solution instinctively, like the time he began for no apparent reason in the centre, for instance; sometimes, too, he deduced the solution from the preceding puzzles; but most often he looked for the answer for three days on end, feeling acutely that he was a complete imbecile: he hadn’t even finished the border, fifteen tiny Scandinavias put together at the outset formed only the dark silhouette of a cloaked man climbing three steps to a jetty, half turning to face the painter (Launceston, Tasmania, October 1952), and for several hours he hadn’t fitted in a single further piece.

  Bartlebooth found the very essence of his passion in this feeling of being stuck: a kind of torpor, a sort of repetitious boredom, a veiled befuddlement in search of a shapeless something whose outlines he could barely manage to mumble in his mind: a spout that would fit that little concave rent, a thing like that, a nasty yellow sticking-out thing, a bit with a slightly rounded indentation, some orange dots, that little chunk of Africa, the wee chip of an Adriatic coast: mere muddled muttering, background noises to a wretched madman’s obsessive and sterile musings.

  And then, after hours of such g
loomy inertia, sometimes Bartlebooth would suddenly fly into frightful rages, which could be as terrible and as inexplicable as Gaspard Winckler’s tempers at his games of backgammon with Morellet at Riri’s. This man, who in the eyes of all the inhabitants of the building was the very symbol of British phlegm, of discretion, courtesy, politeness, of exquisite urbanity, a man who had never been heard to raise his voice, would on these occasions let fly with such violence that it seemed he had been concentrating all of it inside himself for years. One evening he hit a marble-topped low table with his fist and split it in two with a single blow. Another time, when Smautf was unwise enough to come in, as he did every morning, with breakfast – two soft-boiled eggs, orange juice, three pieces of toast, tea with milk, some letters, and three dailies: Le Monde, The Times, and the Herald – Bartlebooth sent the tray flying with such force that the teapot, propelled more or less vertically at the speed of a tennis service, shattered the thick glass of the scialytic lamp before smashing into a thousand fragments which showered onto the puzzle (Okinawa, Japan, October 1951). It took Bartlebooth eight days to recover all seven hundred and fifty puzzle pieces, undamaged by the scalding tea thanks to Gaspard Winckler’s protective glaze, but this burst of temper turned out to be far from useless, since, in the course of re-sorting the pieces, Bartlebooth finally found out how they fitted together.