Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Fortunately, it was more usual for Bartlebooth, at the end of such hours of waiting, having gone through every stage of controlled anxiety and exasperation, to reach a kind of ecstasy, a stasis, a sort of utterly oriental stupor, akin, perhaps, to the state archers strive to reach: profound oblivion of the body and the target, a mental void, a completely blank, receptive, and flexible mind, an attentiveness that remained total, but which was disengaged from the vicissitudes of being, from the contingent details of the puzzle and its maker’s snares. In moments like that Bartlebooth could see without looking how the delicate outlines of the jigsawed wood slotted very precisely into each other, and taking two pieces he had ignored until then or which perhaps he had sworn could not possibly join, he was able to fit them together in one go.

  This intimation of grace would sometimes last for several minutes, which made Bartlebooth feel as if he had second sight: he could perceive everything, understand everything, he could have seen grass grow, lightning strike a tree, erosion grind down a mountain like a pyramid very gradually worn away by the gentle brushing of a bird’s wing: he would juxtapose the pieces at full speed, without error, espying, beneath all the details and subterfuges intended to obscure them, this minute claw or that imperceptible red thread or a black-edged notch, which all ought to have indicated the solution from the start, had he but had eyes to see: in a few instants, borne along by such exalted and heady self-assurance, a situation that hadn’t shifted for hours or days, a situation that he could no longer even imagine untying, would be altered beyond recognition: whole areas would join up, sky and sea would recover their correct locations, tree trunks would turn back into branches, vague birds back into the shadows of seaweed.

  These privileged instants were as rare as they were intoxicating, as fleeting as they were seemingly effective. Bartlebooth would soon revert to being a sandbag, a lifeless lump chained to his worktable, a blank-eyed subnormal, unable to see, waiting hours without knowing what he was waiting for.

  He did not feel hunger or thirst, or heat or cold; he could stay awake for more than forty hours doing nothing apart from taking the remaining unassembled pieces one by one, staring at them, turning them around, and putting them back without even trying to fit them, as if any try whatsoever was destined to fail inexorably. One time he stayed up for 62 hours at a stretch – from eight a.m. on the Wednesday until ten p.m. on the Friday – in front of an uncompleted puzzle depicting the seashore at Elsinore: a grey fringe between a grey sea and a grey sky.

  Another time, in nineteen sixty-six, he joined up in the first three hours more than three-quarters of that fortnight’s puzzle: the little seaside resort of Rippleson, near Blawick, in Florida. Then, over the following fortnight, he tried in vain to complete it: he had before him a short stretch of almost empty beach, with a restaurant at the beginning of the promenade and granite rocks at the end; far to the left three fishermen were landing a rowing boat with kelp-brown nets, and directly under the pavement an elderly woman wearing a polka-dot dress and having for headgear a cocked newspaper sat knitting on the shingle; beside her a little girl wearing a seashell necklace was eating dried bananas, lying flat on her stomach on a sisal mat; far to the right a beachboy in old fatigues was collecting up parasols and deckchairs; in the distance, a trapeze-shaped sail and two black islets broke the horizon. Some rippling wavelets and a chunk of billowing sky were missing: two hundred pieces of identical blue with minute white variations, each one needing more than two hours’ labour to find its place.

  That was one of the few occasions when two weeks were not long enough to finish a puzzle. Customarily, the alternation of excitement and apathy, of exaltation and despair, of feverish expectancy and fleeting certainties, meant that the puzzle would be completed within the prescribed schedule, moving towards its ineluctable goal, where, when all the problems had been solved, there was in the end only a decent, somewhat pedantic watercolour depicting a seaport. Step by step, in frustration or with enthusiasm, he came to satisfy his urge, but by satisfying it caused it to expire, leaving himself with no recourse but to open a fresh black box.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Moreau, 4

  THE OLD-STYLE KITCHEN originally equipped with the ultramodern devices that Madame Moreau’s cook soon had replaced was intended to contrast, in Henry Fleury’s plan, with the great formal dining room, done in uncompromisingly avant-garde style, designed as a rigorously geometrical, impeccably formal model of icy sophistication where grand dinner parties would take on the aura of unique ceremonies.

  To begin with, the dining room had been a heavy, cluttered, over-furnished place with a woodblock floor laid in a complicated pattern, a tall blue ceramic stove, walls with superabundant cornices and mouldings, skirting boards made to look like veined marble, a nine-branched counterpoise ceiling light equipped with 81 pendants, a rectangular oak table accompanied by twelve embroidered velvet chairs and at either end two light mahogany armchairs with X-shaped open-work backs, a bottom half of a Breton-style dresser which had always held a Second Empire liqueur-stand made of papier-mâché next to a smoker’s set (with a cigarette box portraying Cézanne’s Card Players, a petrol lighter looking quite like an oil lamp, and a few ashtrays depicting a club, a diamond, a heart, and a spade, respectively) and a silver fruit bowl full of oranges, over all of which hung a tapestry representing an imaginary landscape; between the windows, over a coco weddelliana (an indoor palm with decorative foliage), was a large, dark canvas, showing a man in judge’s robes sitting on a high throne whose gilding dominated the whole painting.

  Henry Fleury shared the widely held view that the tasting of food is conditioned not only by the specific colours of the foods tasted but also by the surroundings. Lengthy research and several experiments convinced him that the colour white, by virtue of its neutrality, “blankness”, and luminosity, was the one which would best bring out the flavour of ingredients.

  That was the basis on which he reorganised Madame Moreau’s dining room from top to bottom: he eliminated the furniture, dismantled the chandelier, stripped off the skirting boards, and hid the mouldings and plaster roses behind a false ceiling made of sparkling white laminated panels, fitted in places with pristine spotlights, positioned so that their beams converged on the centre of the room. The walls were painted in brilliant white gloss, and a similarly white plastic covering was put on the crusty old parquet floor. All the doors were bricked up except the one giving onto the entrance hall – originally a double door with glass panes, replaced by two sliding panels controlled by a hidden photo-electric cell. As for the windows they were concealed behind tall plywood panels sheathed in white synthetic leather.

  Apart from table and chairs, no furniture and no accessories were allowed in the room, not even a switch or an electric cable. All crockery and tableware was to be kept in cupboards installed outside the room, in the entrance hall, where a serving table was also set for plate-warmers and carving boards.

  In the centre of this spotless, shadowless, and perfectly smooth white space, Fleury placed his table: a monumental marble slab, absolutely white, cut to an octagon, with bevelled edges, standing on a cylindrical pedestal one yard in diameter. Eight moulded plastic chairs, also white, completed the furniture.

  The white line stopped there. The china, designed by the Italian stylist Titorelli, was done in pastel shades – ivory, pale yellow, sea green, blushing pink, pale mauve, salmon, light grey, turquoise, etc. – which were selected according to the characteristics of the dishes to be served, themselves selected according to a basic colour which the table linen and waiters’ attire would also match.

  For the decade during which her health allowed her to carry on entertaining, Madame Moreau held a dinner party roughly once a month. The first one was a yellow dinner: Burgundy cheesecake, quenelles of pike in Dutch style, quails stewed in saffron, sweetcorn salad, lemon and guava sorbets, accompanied by sherry, Château-Chalon, Château-Carbonneux, and cold Sauternes punch. The last one she
gave, in 1970, was a black meal served on plates of polished slate; it included caviar, obviously, and also squid Tarragon style, saddle of baby Cumberland boar, truffle salad, and blueberry cheesecake; it was more difficult to select the wines for this final repast: the caviar was served with vodka in basalt goblets, and the squid with a retsina wine which was a very dark red indeed, but for the saddle of boar the butler got away with two bottles of Château-Ducru-Beaucaillou 1955 decanted for the occasion into adequately black Bohemian crystal.

  Madame Moreau herself hardly touched the dishes she had served to her guests. She was subject to an ever stricter diet which in the end allowed her only raw fish roes, chicken breasts, cooked Edam, and dried figs. Usually she had her meal before her guests, alone or in the company of Madame Trévins. That did not prevent her conducting her parties with the same energy that she showed in her daytime work, of which these dinners were in any case no more than a necessary extension: she planned the parties with minute care, drawing up her guest-list as one would draw up a battle plan; she invariably brought together seven people, amongst whom there would be: one individual with a more or less official function (ministerial private secretary, consultant to the public accounts committee, associate member of the Conseil d’Etat, official liquidator, etc.); an artist or writer; one or two members of her own team, but never Madame Trévins, who hated this kind of festivity and preferred to stay in her room, rereading her book on such evenings; and the French or foreign businessman she was dealing with at the time and in whose honour the dinner was being held. Two or three well-chosen wives made up the complement around the dinner table.

  One of the most memorable of these dinners was given for someone who had been in this building many times on other accounts: Hermann Fugger, the German businessman who was a friend of the Altamonts and Hutting, and some of whose camping equipment Madame Moreau was to market in France: that evening, knowing of Fugger’s repressed passion for cooking, she put on a pink meal – ham au Vertus in aspic, koulibiaca of salmon in aurora sauce, wild duck with vineyard peach, pink champagne, etc. – and she brought to her table, along with one of her closest colleagues, who ran the “hypermarket” division of her business, a good-food columnist, a flour-miller turned oven-ready foodpack manufacturer, and a Moselle wine-grower, the latter two guests flanked by wives as crazy about good food as their husbands. Leaving Flourens’s piglet and the other pre-dinner talking points out of it for once, these guests concentrated all conversation on the joys of food, old recipes, bygone chefs, white-butter-sauce like mother used to make it, and suchlike taste bud topics.

  Henry Fleury’s dining room was of course only ever used for prestige dinners of this kind. The rest of the time, including when she was still in good health and enjoyed a sturdy appetite, Madame Moreau ate with Madame Trévins in one or the other’s bedroom. It was their only moment of relaxation each day; they would chat interminably about Saint-Mouezy, bringing back memories they never tired of hearing.

  In her mind’s eye she could see the arrival of the old moonshiner, who came from Buzançais, with his red copper still drawn by a little black mare answering to the name of Belle; and the toothpuller with his red bonnet and his multicoloured leaflets; and the bagpipe-player who accompanied him, blowing his pipes as hard and as out of tune as he could so as to cover the cries of the unfortunate patients. She would relive the fear that had haunted her of not being allowed dessert and being put on bread and water for three days when the schoolma’am gave her a bad mark; she would retrieve the fright she had had on finding a big black spider underneath a pot her mother had asked her to scour; and her intense wonderment on seeing an aeroplane for the first time in her life, one morning in 1915, a biplane which emerged from the fog and landed in a field; out of it climbed a leather-jacketed young man as handsome as a Greek god, with big, pale eyes and long, slim hands in his thick sheepskin gloves. He was a Welsh airman who had got lost in the fog trying to get to the castle at Corbenic. In the plane there were several maps which he studied fruitlessly. She couldn’t help him, any more than could the villagers to whom she led him.

  Or from even further back, from as far back as she could remember, there rose the fascination she had felt as a little girl every time she saw her grandfather shaving: he would sit down, usually around seven in the morning, after a frugal breakfast, and with a serious air make up his lather with a very soft brush in a bowl of very hot water, a lather so thick and white and firm that even after more than seventy-five years it still made her mouth water.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  Basement, 3

  CELLARS. BARTLEBOOTH’S CELLAR.

  In Bartlebooth’s cellar there is some left-over coal on top of which still lies a black enamelled metal scuttle with a wooden grip fitted on its wire handle, a bicycle hanging on a butcher’s hook, now unoccupied bottle racks, and his four travelling chests, four curved chests covered in tarred canvas, braced with wooden slats, with brass corners and hasps, and lined throughout with a sheet of zinc to ensure waterproofing.

  Bartlebooth ordered them from Asprey’s, in London, and had them filled with everything that might be needed or useful or reassuring or just nice to have throughout the duration of his long voyage around the world.

  The first opens out into a spacious hanging cupboard, and contained a complete wardrobe of clothes suited to every climatic condition and to the various circumstances of social life, just like those cut-out cardboard costume collections in which children dress fashion dolls: it went from fur boots to patent-leather shoes, from oilskins to tails, from balaclavas to bow ties, and from pith helmets to toppers.

  The second trunk held all the various pieces of painting and drawing equipment required for the watercolours, the parcels made in advance to be sent to Gaspard Winckler, various guidebooks and maps, toiletries and maintenance supplies which could be thought occasionally difficult to obtain in the antipodes, a first-aid kit, the famous tins of “ionised coffee”, and some instruments: a camera, binoculars, a portable typewriter.

  The third still contains everything that might have been needed if a tempest or a typhoon or a tidal wave or a cyclone or a mutiny of the crew had shipwrecked Bartlebooth and Smautf and they had had to drift on a raft, land on a desert island, and survive. Its content simply repeats in modernised form those of the trunk which Captain Nemo attached to floats made of empty barrels and had washed up on shore for the good-hearted colonisers of Lincoln Island, the exact nomenclature of which was copied down on a page of Gédéon Spilett’s notebook and which, together with two admittedly almost full-page illustrations, now occupies pages 223 to 226 of Jules Verne’s L’Ile mystérieuse in the Hetzel edition.

  The fourth, and last, which was intended for lesser disasters, contains – in a perfect state of preservation, and miraculously packed in such a small space – a six-place tent with all its accessories and equipment, from the standard canvas water-carrier down to a handy foot-pump (brand new at the time, since it had won a prize at the preceding Inventors’ Exhibition), and including a ground-sheet, a roof liner, stainless steel pegs, spare ropes, duvets, inflatable mattresses, storm lanterns, pellet-burning camp cookers, Thermos flasks, stacking cutlery, a travelling iron, an alarm clock, a patent “anosmic” ashtray allowing the inveterate smoker to indulge his vice without disturbing his neighbour, and a fully folding table which would require approximately two hours, if two men got down to it, to be assembled – or dismantled – by means of tiny eight-sided box spanners.

  The third and fourth trunks were virtually never used. Bartlebooth’s natural taste for British comfort and the more or less unlimited resources at his disposal in those days allowed him to choose almost every time a suitably equipped residence – a grand hotel, an embassy, a house belonging to a wealthy individual – where his sherry would be served on a silver tray and the water for shaving would be eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit, and not eighty-four.

  When he really couldn’t find accommodation to suit him in the environs of
the site chosen for that fortnight’s watercolour, Bartlebooth would resign himself to camping. That happened a score of times in all, amongst other places in Angola, near Moçamedes, in Peru, near Lambayeque, on the southern tip of the Californian peninsula (that is to say in Mexico), and on various Pacific and Oceanian islands, where he could just as well have slept in the open without obliging Smautf to get out, to set up, and, above all, a few days later, to pack away all the equipment, in an immutable order in which every item had to be folded and placed in accordance with the instructions for use attached to the trunk, which otherwise could never have been made to shut again.

  Bartlebooth never talked very much about his travels, and for some years now he hasn’t spoken of them at all. Smautf, for his part, quite enjoys recounting them, but his memory lets him down with increasing frequency. During all those peripatetic years he kept a kind of notebook in which he noted his daily occupations (alongside prodigiously lengthy calculations calculating he no longer knew what). He had a rather curious hand, in which the strokes of his t’s appeared to be underlining the words in the preceding line and the dots on his i’s appeared to be punctuating the sentence above; and on the other hand the line below was interspersed with the tails and flourishes of the words above. The result of it is today far from always clear, particularly as Smautf was convinced that rereading a single word which had then summarised the whole scene perfectly would be enough to reawaken his integral memory of it, like those dreams that return all of a sudden as soon as you recall a single element: and so he noted down things in a far from explicit manner. For instance, the entry for 10 August 1939 – Takaungu, Kenya – reads as follows: