Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Boris Kosciuszko’s enthusiasm was apparently infectious, for a few weeks later David Marcia announced in the press the launching of the Kerkennah Festival, intended, the release specified, to “safeguard and promote the rescued treasures of the theatre”. Four plays were programmed: Jason, by Alexandre Hardy, Inès de Castro, by Lamotte-Houdar, a one-act verse comedy by Boissy, entitled The Chatterbox, all directed by Boris Kosciuszko, and The Laird of Polisy, a tragedy by Malte d’Istillerie in which Talma had made his name, directed by Henri Agustoni, from Switzerland. Various other events were planned, including an international symposium, the subject of which – the myth of the classical unities – constituted a bold manifesto in itself.

  David Marcia did not economise on resources, reckoning that the success of the Festival would rebound on the reputation of his holiday village. With support from various agencies and institutions, he put up an open-air, eight-hundred-seat auditorium and tripled the number of chalets so as to provide accommodation for all the actors and spectators.

  Crowds of actors came – a score were required just to play Jason – and there was similarly a flood of designers, costumiers, lighting men, critics, and professors; on the other hand, there were few paying spectators, and several performances were cancelled or abandoned because of the violent storms which frequently break out in this area in midsummer: at the Festival’s end, David Marcia worked out that total receipts were 98 dinars, whereas the whole operation had cost him nearly 30,000.

  That was how David Marcia managed to get rid of his small fortune in three years. He then returned to live in Rue Simon-Crubellier. To begin with, it was to be a temporary solution, and he looked around unenthusiastically for a trade and a flat, until his mother, out of a soft heart, gave him one half of her shop, together with any profits he might make from it. The work is not too tiring for him, and the income he makes goes to support his latest craze – games of chance, and in particular roulette, at which, nearly every evening, he loses between three hundred and fifty and one thousand francs.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  Basement, 4

  CELLARS. MADAME DE Beaumont’s cellar.

  Old things: a lamp with a brass stand and a very chipped semicircular shade of pale-green opaline, formerly a desk lamp; the remains of a teapot; coat hangers. Souvenirs of voyages and holidays: a dried starfish, two tiny dolls dressed as a Serbian couple, a small vase decorated with a view of Etretat; then shoe-boxes brimful of post-cards and love letters in elastic bands that have gone loose now; a pharmaceutical prospectus

  children’s books with pages missing and torn corners: Tales of Grandma Goose, The History of France in Riddles, open at a drawing of a kind of scalpel, a lettuce, and a rat: the riddle’s solution (Lancette, laitue, rat = “L’An VII les tuera”, Year VII will kill them), the book explains, is aimed at the Directoire government, despite the fact that the latter was overthrown on 18 Brumaire, Year VIII; school exercise books; diaries; photograph albums in raised leather, black baize, green silk, with on almost every page the glue-marks of triangular corners, unstuck long ago, plotting the shapes of now empty frames; photographs, dog-eared, yellowing, and crackled photographs: a photograph of Elizabeth at sixteen, at Lédignan, riding with her grandmother (who was already nearly ninety) in a little trap drawn by a very shaggy pony; a photograph of Elizabeth, small and badly focused, hugging François Breidel amidst a tableful of men in boilersuits; photographs of Anne and Béatrice: in one, Anne is eight, Béatrice seven; they are sitting in a meadow, beneath a little fir tree; Béatrice is holding close to her chest a little black, curly-haired dog; Anne, beside her, with a serious, almost grave look, is wearing a man’s hat: it belonged to their uncle Armand Breidel, at whose house they spent their holidays that year; in another snap from the same period, Anne is arranging wild flowers in a vase; Béatrice is lying in a hammock, reading The Adventures of Babar; the little dog is not visible; in a third photo, taken later, they are in fancy dress, with two other little girls, in Madame Altamont’s beautifully oak-panelled boudoir, at a party given for the latter’s daughter’s birthday. Madame de Beaumont and Madame Altamont hated each other; Madame de Beaumont considered Cyrille Altamont a nincompoop and said that he reminded her of her husband Fernand and that Cyrille was one of those people who thought you only had to be ambitious to become bright. But Véronique Altamont and Béatrice, who were the same age, liked each other a lot, and Madame Altamont was obliged to invite the Breidel girls: Anne is dressed up as the Empress Eugénie and Béatrice as a shepherdess; the third little girl, the smallest, is Isabelle Gratiolet, dressed as a squaw; the fourth, Véronique, looks adorable in a nobleman’s outfit: she has a powdered wig with her pigtail in a bow, a lace ruff, a short green cutaway jacket, mauve breeches, a sword at her side, and long white hide spats up to her thighs; photographs of the wedding of Fernand de Beaumont and Véra Orlova, on the twenty-sixth of November 1926, in the reception rooms at the Hôtel Crillon: the fashionable crowd, family, friends – Count Orfanik, Ivan Bunin, Florent Schmitt, Arthur Schnabel, etc. – the wedding cake, the happy couple, with him holding her outstretched hand in his, standing in front of heaps of roses strewn on the luxurious, fitted carpet with its blue pattern; photographs of the excavations at Oviedo: one of them, probably taken by Fernand de Beaumont himself, since he doesn’t appear in it, shows the team at siesta time – a dozen slim, tanned students with sprouts of beards on their faces, wearing short s down to their knees and greyish vests; they are under a big canvas awning which protects them from the sun’s rays but not from its heat; four are playing bridge, three are asleep or drowsing, another one is writing a letter, yet another is using a tiny bit of pencil to solve a crossword puzzle, and another is diligently sewing a button back onto a much-patched pea jacket; another snapshot shows Fernand de Beaumont with Bartlebooth, on the latter’s visit to the archaeologist in January 1935. The two men pose standing side by side, smiling, screwing up their eyes against the sun. Bartlebooth is wearing knickerbockers, a check sweater, and a cravat. Beaumont, looking very short by comparison, is dressed in a fairly crumpled grey worsted suit, a black tie, and a double-breasted waistcoat decorated with a silver watch-chain. Smautf didn’t take this snap since he is in it, in the background, washing the big two-tone Chenard & Walker, with Fawcett’s help.

  Despite the difference in their ages – Bartlebooth was then thirty-five, whilst the archaeologist was nearly sixty – the two men were great friends. They had been introduced at a reception at the British Embassy and had realised in talking to each other that they lived in the same building – though to tell the truth, Beaumont was hardly ever there, and Bartlebooth had only just moved in – and then, above all, that they shared a taste for early German music: Heinrich Finck, Breitengasser, Agricola. But what united them most, perhaps, beyond this shared taste, was the peremptory and confident way the archaeologist asserted a theory all his colleagues unanimously considered to be the least plausible, in which Bartlebooth found something of the sort that fascinated him, and which encouraged him also in his own project. In any event, it was Fernand de Beaumont’s presence at Oviedo that made Bartlebooth choose the nearby port of Gijón to paint the first of his seascapes.

  When Fernand de Beaumont took his own life, on the twelfth of November 1935, Bartlebooth was at sea in the Mediterranean and had just painted his twenty-first watercolour, in the little Corsican port of Propriano. He heard the news on the radio and managed to get back to the mainland in time to attend his poor friend’s funeral, at Lédignan.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Louvet, 2

  THE LOUVETS’ BEDROOM: a sisal mat brought back from the Philippines, a 1930s dressing table entirely covered with tiny mirrors, a double bed covered with a printed spread of romantic inspiration, depicting a classical, pastoral scene: the nymph Io suckling her son Epaphos under the gentle protection of the god Mercury.

  On the bedside table stands a so-called “pineapple” lamp (the body of the fruit is a blue marble
– or, rather, imitation-marble – egg, the leaves and the remainder of the base are made of silvered metal); beside it, a grey phone fitted with an automatic answering device, and a photograph of Louvet, in a bamboo frame: he is seen barefoot, in grey denim trousers, with a bright-red nylon jacket open wide and revealing his hairy torso, strapped in the stern of a powerful outboard, very old-man-and-the-sea-like; he is leaning hard over, almost on his back, as he strives to pull from the water a sort of tuna of apparently remarkable size.

  On the walls there are four pictures and a glass display case. The display case contains a collection of self-assembled scale models of antique military machines: battering-rams, the vinea which Alexander made use of at the siege of Tyre, the catapulta of the Syrians, which threw monstrous stones so many hundred feet, balistac, pyroboli, scorpio which cast thousands of javelins, and flaming mirrors – such as Archimedes’ mirror, which ignited whole fleets in an instant – and columns armed with scythes carried on the backs of wild elephants.

  The first picture is a facsimile of an advertising poster from the early 1900s: three figures are resting in a bower: a young man in white trousers and blue blazer, with a boater on his head and a silver-topped stick under his arm, holds a box of cigars in his hand, a pretty, painted box decorated with designs showing a globe, several medals, and an exhibition hall surrounded by unfurled, gold-bedecked flags. Another young man similarly dressed sits on a wickerwork pouf: with his hands in his trouser pockets and his black-shod feet stretched out in front of him, he holds between his lips, where it droops slightly, a long dull-grey cigar still in the early stage of combustion, that is to say with ash still intact on the end; beside him, on a round table with a polka-dot cloth, are some folded newspapers, a phonograph with an enormous loudspeaker which he appears to be listening to attentively, and a liqueur case, open, fitted with five gilt-capped flasks. A young woman, a rather mysterious blonde, wearing a thin and loose-fitting dress, is pouring the sixth flask, full of a uniformly brown liquid, into three stem glasses. At the very bottom, on the right, in thick yellow sunk characters, in the face known as “Auriol Champlevé”, much used in the last century, are written the words

  POR LARRANAGA 89 cls

  The second picture portrays a bouquet of wild clematis, also known as Old Man’s Beard because beggars used to use it to treat minor facial sores.

  The last two pictures are allegedly humorous caricatures of poor artistic quality representing very well-worn jokes. The first is entitled No Money? No Swiss: it depicts a mountaineer lost in the Alps, rescued by a Saint Bernard carrying what appears to be a little cask of life-saving rum, with a red cross painted on it. But the climber is amazed to find no rum in the cask: it is in fact a collecting box, with a caption beneath its coin-slot: Give Generously to the Red Cross!

  The other cartoon is called The Right Recipe: in a grotesquely depicted restaurant an angry customer points to a hair in his soup. The head waiter, just as angry, has called out the chef to explain, but the latter puts his finger to his lips: “Ssh, or they’ll all be wanting one now!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

  On The Stairs, 10

  FOR FORTY YEARS now the piano-tuner has been coming to Madame de Beaumont’s twice a year, in June and December, and this is the fifth time he has brought along his grandson, who though he’s not yet ten years old takes his role as guide very seriously. But the last time, the boy knocked over a jardinière of dieffenbachia, so this time Madame Lafuente won’t let him in.

  The piano-tuner’s grandson is therefore sitting on the stairs waiting for his grandfather. He is wearing short navy-blue cotton trousers and a jerkin of “parachute material”, that is to say sky-blue shiny nylon, with a complement of decorative badges: a pylon giving off four streaks of lightning and concentric circles, the symbol of radiotelegraphy; a pair of compasses, a magnetic compass, and a stopwatch, the supposed symbols respectively of geographers, surveyors, and explorers; the figure 77 written in red letters in a yellow triangle; the outline of a cobbler mending a heavy mountain boot; a hand refusing a glass of spirits with the legend beneath: “No thanks, I’m driving”.

  The little boy is reading a biographical novel about Carel van Loorens entitled The Emperor’s Messenger in Le Journal de Tintin.

  Carel van Loorens was one of the oddest minds of his time. He was born in Holland but had himself naturalised French out of love for the philosophes; he lived in Persia, Arabia, China, and the two Americas; he spoke a dozen or more languages fluently. With his obviously outstanding but dissipated mind, which he seemed unable to devote to any single discipline for more than a couple of years, he undertook in the course of his life wildly different activities, practising as a surgeon just as happily and speedily as he did as a surveyor, setting up in Lahore a cannon foundry, founding in Shiraz a veterinary school, teaching physiology at Bologna, mathematics at Halle, and astronomy at Barcelona (where he dared to put forward the hypothesis that Méchain had made an error in calculating the length of the metre), smuggling guns for Wolfe Tone, or, as an organ-builder, imagining how to replace the coupler registers by lever-switches, as would in fact be done a century later. As a result of this systematic versatility, in the course of his life Carel van Loorens came to ask himself several interesting questions and got started several times on provisional answers which were lacking neither in elegance nor even, on occasions, in brilliance, but almost every time he failed to write up his results in a remotely comprehensible manner. After his death, mostly undecipherable notes were found in his study, dealing variously with archaeology, Egyptology, typography (plan for a universal alphabet), linguistics (letter to Humboldt on the language of the Ouarsenis: it was obviously only a draft; in any case, Humboldt doesn’t mention it), medicine, politics (draft for a democratic regime taking account of the separation not only of the three powers of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary but – with disquieting foresight – of a fourth power also which he dubbed publicitary [from publicist, journalist], in other words the power of information, numerical algebra (note on Goldbach’s problem, proposing that any number n be the sum of K primes), physiology (hypotheses concerning the hibernation of marmots, the pneumatic body of birds, the voluntary breath-holding of hippopotami, etc.), optics, physics, chemistry (critique of Lavoisier’s theories of acids, draft classification of the elements), together with several ideas for inventions, in most cases falling short of full development by very little: a steerable hobby-horse similar to the draisienne, but twenty years earlier; a material he baptised “pellette”, a kind of artificial leather composed of a strong canvas base coated with a mixture of powdered cork, linseed oil, glues, and resins; or a “solar forge”, made of an assembly of metal plates, polished like mirrors, focused convergently on a hearth-point.

  In 1805, Carel van Loorens sought money to finance an expedition to find the source or sources of the Nile, a project many had thought of but which no one had been able to carry out before then. He turned to Napoleon I, whom he had already met a few years before when, as a general too popular by half for the taste of the Directoire, who sent him to Egypt in order to keep him well away, the future Emperor of the French had gathered around him some of the best scholars of his time to accompany him on the campaign.

  Napoleon had set himself a difficult diplomatic problem: the largest part of the French navy had just been sunk at Trafalgar, and, anxious to find a means of stemming the formidable maritime hegemony of the British, the Emperor thought of hiring the services of the most famous of the Barbary corsairs, the one they called Hokab el-Ouakt, the Eagle of the Instant.

  Hokab el-Ouakt commanded a veritable fleet of eleven galliots whose perfectly co-ordinated actions made him the master of a good portion of the Mediterranean. But though he had no reason to love the British, who had held Gibraltar for nearly a hundred years and Malta for five, and thus had increasingly threatened the activities of the Barbary corsairs, he had no reason to like the French any better, since they, like the
Spaniards, the Dutch, the Genoese, and the Venetians, had never thought twice before shelling Algiers.

  In any case, the first problem was to contact the Eagle, since, in his concern to protect himself from assassination, he had himself permanently escorted by eighteen deaf-mute bodyguards whose sole standing order was to kill anyone coming within three paces of their master.

  So it was when he was wondering where to find the rare bird who could bring off such difficult negotiations, which looked so discouraging at the outset, that the Emperor gave an audience to Carel van Loorens; and on receiving him had to say to himself that fortune had once again smiled on him. Van Loorens, he knew, spoke perfect Arabic; and in Egypt he had had occasion to appreciate his intelligence, his quick mind and his decisiveness, his sense of diplomacy, and his courage. Without hesitation Napoleon agreed to fund the entire cost of an expedition to the sources of the Nile, in return for Loorens undertaking to get a message to Hokab el-Ouakt in Algiers.