Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Massy returned at the end of 1944. Brother and sister resumed their life together. They never uttered the name of the former stayer. But one evening, the saddler found his sister in tears, and in the end she confessed that she had not stopped thinking of Margay for a single day since she had left him: it was neither pity nor remorse that was torturing her, but love, a love a thousand times more powerful than the repulsion the face of her loved one inspired.

  Next morning there was a ring at the bell, and a wonderfully handsome man stood in the doorway: it was Margay, returned from monstrosity.

  Lino Margay had not only become handsome, he had grown rich. When he had resolved to leave the country, he had left it to fate to decide his final destination; he had opened an atlas and had stuck a pin in a map of the world without looking: fate, after falling a few times into the ocean waves, had in the end indicated South America, and Margay joined a Greek freighter, the Stephanitos, bound for Buenos Aires, as a cargo hand; during the long crossing he had befriended an old sailor of Italian extraction, Mario Ferri, known as Ferri the Eyetie.

  Before the First World War, Ferri the Eyetie ran a small nightclub in Paris called Le Chéops, at 94 Rue des Acacias, which fronted for a clandestine gambling den known to habitués under the name of The Octagon because of the shape of the chips they used there. But Ferri’s real business was of a different order: he was one of the ringleaders of the group of political agitators who went by the name of Panarchists, and the police, although they knew with certainty that Le Chéops concealed a gaming den known by the name of The Octagon, did not know that this same Octagon was only a cover for one of the Panarchists’ headquarters. After the night of 21 January 1911 when the movement was beheaded and two hundred of its most active militants were gaoled, including its three historical leaders, Purkinje, Martinotti, and Barbenoire, Ferri the Eyetie was one of the few officials to escape the Police Chief’s dragnet, but being denounced, then spotted, then hunted, all he could do, after going to ground in Beauce for a few months, was to lead a wandering life that took him without respite from one end of the planet to the other and obliged him, in order to survive, to ply the most various trades, from dog-clipper to election agent, from mountain guide to miller.

  Margay had no precise plans. Ferri, though well over fifty, had ideas enough for two, and placed all his hope in a notorious gangster he knew in Buenos Aires, Rosendo Juarez, alias “The Thumper”. Rosendo the Thumper was one of the men who walked tall in Villa Santa Rita. A guy with a real knack with a shiv, and what’s more he was one of Don Nicolas Paredes’s men, and he was one of Morel’s men, and he sure was a real big guy. Scarcely had they landed than Ferri and Margay called on the Thumper and put themselves at his command. Which they had cause to regret, for the first job he gave them to do – a straightforward drug delivery – got them arrested, very probably on Thumper’s own orders. Ferri the Eyetie was clobbered with a ten-year gaol sentence, and died a few months into it. Lino Margay, who had not been carrying any weapons, got off with three years.

  Lino Margay – Lino the Dribbler, or Lino Prickface, as they called him at the time – realised in clink that his obscene ugliness inspired in everyone, cops and gangsters alike, feelings of pity and trust. On seeing him, people wanted to know his story, and when he’d told it, they told him theirs. Lino Margay discovered in this way that he had an astonishing memory: when he left prison, in June 1942, there was nothing he didn’t know about the pedigrees of three-quarters of the South American underworld. Not only did he know their criminal records in detail, but he knew all the particulars of their tastes, their weaknesses, their favourite weapons, their specialities, their prices, their hide-outs, how to get in touch with them, etc. In a word, he was ideally equipped to become the impresario of the lower depths of Latin America.

  He settled in Mexico in a former bookshop on the corner of Corrientes and Takahuano. Officially he was a pawnbroker, but, since he was convinced of the effectiveness of the double cover as formerly practised by Ferri the Eyetie, he let it be known that he was actually more of a fence. In fact, the gangsters who came to consult him from all over Latin America, including bigger and bigger bosses, rarely came to entrust valuable goods to him: henceforth he was known under the respectful nickname of “El Fichero” (The Index), for Lino Margay had become the New World’s mobsters’ who’s who: he knew everything about everyone, he knew who was doing what, when, where, and for whom, he knew that this Cuban smuggler was looking for a bodyguard, that that Lima gang needed a good gunslinger, that Barrett had hired a killer called Razza to hit his rival Ramon, or that the safe of the Hotel Sierra Bella at Port-au-Prince contained a diamond rivière valued at five hundred thousand dollars and for which a Texan was ready to put three hundred thousand down in cash.

  His discretion was exemplary, his efficiency was guaranteed, and his commission was reasonable: between two and five per cent of the final product of the operation.

  Lino Margay made his fortune rapidly. By the end of 1944 he had accumulated enough money to go to the United States to try to get surgery: he had heard that a doctor in Pasadena, California, had just developed a proteolytic graft technique which allowed scar tissue to regrow without leaving any marks. The process, unfortunately, had only been tested satisfactorily on small animals and on fragments of human skin that were not innervated. It had never been applied to such a shattered expanse – or one of such long standing – as Margay’s face, and a positive result seemed so remote and unlikely that the surgeon refused to undertake the experiment. But Margay had nothing to lose: the specialist was forced to operate on the former champion with the encouragement of four bruisers toting submachine guns.

  The operation was a miraculous success. Lino Margay could finally return to France and find the woman he had always loved. A few days later, he took her off to a luxurious property he had had built near Coppet, by Lake Geneva, where there is every reason to suppose that he proceeded, on an even larger scale, with his lucrative activities.

  Massy stayed a few more weeks in Paris, then sold his saddlery and retired to Saint-Quentin to finish his days in peace.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  Lift Machinery, 2

  SOMETIMES HE IMAGINED the building as an iceberg whose visible tip included the main floors and eaves and whose submerged mass began below the first level of cellars: stairs with resounding steps going down in spirals; long tiled corridors, their luminous globes encased in wire netting, their iron doors stencilled with warnings and skulls; goods lifts with riveted walls; air vents equipped with huge, motionless fans; metal-lined canvas fire hoses as thick as tree trunks, connected to yellow stopcocks a yard in diameter; cylindrical wells drilled into solid rock; concrete tunnels capped with regularly spaced skylights of frosted glass; recesses; storerooms; bunkers; strongrooms with armour-plated doors.

  Lower down there would come a gasping of machinery, in depths momentarily glimmering with red light. Narrow conduits would debouch on vast enclosed spaces, on subterranean halls high as cathedrals, their vaults clustered with chains, pulleys, cables, pipes, conduits, joists, with movable platforms attached to jacks bright with grease, with frames of tubing and steel sections that formed gigantic scaffoldings, at whose summits men clad in asbestos, their faces shielded by trapezial visors, filled the air with the vivid flashes of arc lamps.

  Lower still would come silos and sheds; cold-storage rooms; ripening rooms; mail-sorting offices; shunting stations with their switching posts; steam locomotives pulling railway trucks, flat wagons, sealed cars, container cars, tank cars; platforms stacked high with goods – cords of tropical wood, bales of tea, bags of rice, pyramids of brick and through-stone, rolls of barbed wire, extruded steel wire, angle irons, ingots, bags of cement, drums, hogsheads, cordage, jerry cans, tanks of butane.

  And still further down: mountains of sand, gravel, coke, slag, and track ballast; concrete mixers; ash heaps; mine shafts glowing with orange light; reservoirs; gasworks; steam generators; derricks; pu
mps; high-tension pylons; transformers; vats; boilers bristling with nozzles, levers, and dials;

  dockyards crowded with gangways, gantries, and cranes, with winches winding ropes taut as tendons, displacing stacks of veneer, aeroplane engines, concert grands, bags of fertiliser, bushels of feed, billiard tables, combine harvesters, ball bearings, cases of soap, tubs of asphalt, office furniture, typewriters, bicycles;

  still lower: systems of locks and docking basins; canals lined with strings of barges loaded with wheat and cotton; highway terminals crisscrossed by trailer trucks; corrals full of black horses pawing the ground; pens of bleating sheep and fattened cattle; hills of crates overflowing with fruits and vegetables; columns of cheese wheels, hard and soft; perspectives of glassy-eyed animals split in two and slung from butcher hooks; piles of vases, pots, and wicker-covered flasks; cargoes of watermelons; cans of olive oil; tubs of fish in brine; giant bakeries where bare-chested baker boys in white trousers withdraw from their ovens burning-hot trays lined with thousands of raisin buns; interminable kitchens where out of cauldrons as big as steam turbines hundreds of portions of greasy stew are ladled into giant rectangular pans;

  and lower still, mine galleries with blind ageing horses drawing carts filled with ore and slow processions of helmeted miners; and oozing passageways, reinforced with waterlogged timbers, that lead down glistening steps to slapping blackish water; flint-bottomed boats, punts weighted with empty barrels sailing across a lightless lake, bestridden by phosphorescent creatures shuffling indefatigably from shore to shore with hampers of dirty laundry, complete sets of dishware, knapsacks, cardboard boxes fastened with bits of string; wherries filled with sickly indoor plants, alabaster bas-reliefs, plaster casts of Beethoven, Neo-Gothic armchairs, Chinese vases, tapestry cartoons depicting Henri III and his minions playing cup-and-ball, counterpoise lamps still trailing lengths of flypaper, garden furniture, baskets of oranges, empty birdcages, bedspreads, thermos flasks;

  further down, another maze of ducts, pipes, and flues; drains winding among main and lateral sewers; narrow canals edged with black stone parapets; unrailinged stairs above precipitous voids; a whole inextricable geography of stalls, backyards, porches, pavements, blind alleys, and arcades, a whole subterranean city organised vertically into neighbourhoods, districts, and zones: the tanners’ quarter with its unbearable stench, its faltering machines fitted with sagging drive belts, its stacks of pelts and leathers, its vats brimming with brownish substances; the scrapyards littered with mantelpieces of marble and stucco, with bidets, bathtubs, rusty radiators, statues of startled nymphs, standing lamps, and park benches; the quarter of those who deal in waste metal, the quarter of ragpickers and flea merchants, with its jumbles of old clothes, its stripped-down baby carriages, its bales of surplus fatigues, worn shirts, army belts and Ranger boots, its dentist’s chairs, its provisions of old newspapers, lensless glasses, key rings, braces, musical table mats, light bulbs, laryngoscopes, retorts, flasks with lateral nozzles, and various types of glassware; the wine market and its mountains of demijohns and broken bottles, its staved-in tuns, its cisterns, vats, and racks; the streetcleaners’ quarter full of overturned dustbins spilling out cheese rinds, wax paper, fish bones, dishwater, left-over spaghetti, used bandages, its heaps of refuse endlessly shoved from one place to the next by slimy bulldozers, its unhinged dishwashers, its hydraulic pumps, cathode-ray tubes, old radios, its sofas losing their stuffing; and the quarter of government offices, whose staff headquarters swarms with military personnel in impeccably ironed shirts moving little flags across maps of the world, its tiled morgues peopled with nostalgic hoods and the open-eyed bodies of the doomed, its record offices filled with bureaucrats in grey smocks who day after day look up birth, marriage, and death certificates, its telephone exchanges and their mile-long rows of polyglot operators, its machine room full of crackling telexes and computers that spew forth by the second reams of statistics, payrolls, inventories, balance sheets, receipts, and no-information statements, its paper-shredders and incinerators endlessly devouring quantities of out-of-date forms, brown folders stuffed with press clippings, account books bound in black linen with pages covered in delicate violet handwriting;

  and at the very bottom, a world of caverns whose walls are black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts, of eyeless beings who drag animal carcasses behind them, of demoniacal monsters with bodies of birds, swine, and fish, of dried-out corpses and yellow-skinned skeletons arrayed in attitudes of the living, of forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  Marcia, 6

  DAVID MARCIA IS in his bedroom. He is a man of about thirty, with a fattish face. He is lying fully dressed on his bed, having taken off only his shoes. He is wearing a tartan cashmere sweater, black socks, and a petrol-blue pair of gaberdine trousers. On his right wrist he wears a silver chain-like bracelet. He is thumbing through an issue of Pariscop which is marking the relaunch of The Birds at the Ambassadeurs cinema by carrying on its cover a photograph of Alfred Hitchcock, the director, looking through a barely open eye at a crow which is perched on his shoulder and seems to be laughing out loud.

  The bedroom is small and summarily furnished: the bed, a bedside table, a wing chair. On the night table there is an English paperback edition of William Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on a Flying Trapeze, a bottle of fruit juice, and a lamp with a pedestal made from a cylinder of rough glass half-filled with multicoloured pebbles whence emerge a few tufts of aloe. Against the rear wall, on a china mantelpiece bearing a large mirror, stands a bronze statuette representing a little girl scything hay. The right-hand wall is covered with cork tiles, intended to sound-proof the room from next door, the bedroom of Léon Marcia, whose insomnia constrains him to interminable nocturnal comings and goings. The left-hand wall is hung with embossed paper and decorated with two framed prints: one is a large map of the town and citadel of Namur and its environs, with an indication of the fortifications carried out during the siege of 1746; the other is an illustration of Twenty Years After, depicting the escape of the Duke of Beaufort: the Duke has just taken two daggers, a rope ladder, and a choke-pear (which Grimaud is stuffing into La Ramée’s mouth) from the pie they had been camouflaged in.

  David Marcia came back to live with his parents not long ago. He had left home when he turned professional motorcyclist, and had gone to live at Vincennes in a rented villa possessing a large garage where he spent his days messing about with his machines. In those days he was an orderly, conscientious lad entirely consumed by his passion for motorcycle racing. But his accident turned him into a whimsical fellow, a daydreamer who poured into muddle-headed projects all the money he got from his insurance, totalling nearly one hundred million old francs.

  First he tried to switch to car racing, and drove in several rallies; but one day, near Saint-Cyr, he killed two children who ran out of a level-crossing keeper’s cottage, and he lost his licence for good.

  * * *

  He then became a record producer: during his stay in hospital he had met a self-taught musician, Marcel Gougenheim, alias Gougou, whose ambition it was to have a big jazz band like there used to be in France in the days of Ray Ventura, Alix Combelle, and Jacques Hélian. David Marcia realised it was vain to hope to earn a living from a big band: even the really small groups couldn’t manage, and, more and more frequently, the Casino de Paris and the Folies-Bergères would engage just the soloists and provide them with backing on tape; but Marcia thought a record would do well, and he decided to finance the project. Gougou hired forty players or so, and rehearsals started in a suburban theatre. The band had an excellent sound which Gougou’s Woody Herman-style arrangements brought out fantastically well. But Gougou had a terrible defect: he was a chronic perfectionist, and after every run-through of a piece he would always find a detail that wasn’t good
enough, something too slow here, a tiny muff there. Rehearsals, scheduled to take three weeks, went on for nine before David Marcia decided to cut his losses.

  Then he got interested in a holiday village in Tunisia, in the Kerkennah islands. It was the only one of all these projects which might have come off: the Kerkennah islands were less overrun than Djerba but offered holiday-makers the same kind of facilities, and the village was well equipped: you could do horse-riding as well as sailing, and then water-skiing and underwater fishing, coarse fishing and camel rides, pottery sessions, spinning lessons and basket-weaving classes, body language and autogenous fitness training courses. The village was connected with a travel agency providing it with customers for almost eight months a year, and David Marcia became site manager; for the first few months it all went pretty well, until the day when he hired as drama-course director an actor by the name of Boris Kosciuszko.

  Boris Kosciuszko was a man of about fifty, tall and spare, with an angular mien, protruding cheekbones, and smouldering eves. His theory was that Racine, Corneille, Molière, and Shakespeare were second-rate playwrights who had been fraudulently elevated to the rank of genius by sheep-brained directors devoid of imagination. Real theatre, he decreed, was Wenceslas, by Rotrou, Manlius Capitolinus, by Lafosse, Maisonneuve’s Roxelane et Mustapha, Longchamps’ Lovelorn Seducer; the real playwrights were Colin d’Harleville, Dufresny, Picard, Lautier, Favart, Destouches; he knew dozens and dozens of that ilk, went into imperturbable ecstasies over the hidden beauties of Iphigenia by Guimond de la Touche, Népomucène Lemercier’s Agamemnon, Alfieri’s Orestes, Lefranc de Pompignan’s Dido, and ponderously stressed the clumsy way such similar or related subjects had been handled by the so-called Great Classic Authors. The educated audiences of the Revolution and Empire periods – Stendhal being the leading light amongst them – put Voltaire’s Zaïre on the same level as Shakespeare’s Othello, or Crébillon’s Rhadamniste on a par with Le Cid, and they hadn’t been wrong; up to the middle of the nineteenth century, the two Corneilles were published together, and the works of the elder, Thomas, were appreciated quite as much as those of the younger, Pierre. But the introduction of compulsory non-Catholic schooling and bureaucratic centralism, from the Second Empire and Third Republic on, had smothered these energetic, fulsome writers and imposed the skimpy, feeble order which bore the pompous name of classicism.