Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Marriage between the two idols of the young was called for, and it was celebrated with all requisite pomp on 26 January 1946, Australia’s National Day. Over forty-five thousand people attended the nuptial blessing in Melbourne’s great stadium by Cardinal Fringilli, who was at the time the ecumenical vicar apostolic of Australasia and Antarctica. Then the public, paying ten Australian dollars per person (about five pounds sterling), was permitted to enter the young couple’s new home and to process before the gifts sent in from all over the world: the President of the United States had given them the Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, bound in buffalo hide; Mrs Plattner, a Brisbane typist, had sent a picture of the happy couple made entirely out of typewriter characters; The Olivia Fan Club of Tasmania had sent seventy-one tame white mice trained to group themselves into the letters making up the name Olivia; and the Ministry of Defence had sent a narwhal’s horn longer than the one Sir Martin Frobisher presented to Queen Elizabeth on his return from Labrador. For ten dollars more, you could even go into the nuptial chamber to admire the conjugal bed carved out of the trunk of a sequoia, a joint gift from the Wood and Allied Industries’ Trades Association and the National Union of Foresters and Woodcutters. Finally, that evening, at a huge reception, Bing Crosby was brought by special plane from Hollywood to sing a version of the Wedding March composed in honour of the newly-weds by one of Ernst Krenek’s best pupils.

  That was her first marriage. It lasted twelve days. Rorschach was her fifth husband. In between, she married in succession a young actor whom she’d seen in the part of a moustached Austrian officer in a frogged dolman, who left her four months later for an Italian boy who’d sold them a rose in a restaurant in Bruges; an English lord who never left his dog, a small curly-haired spaniel named Scrambled Eggs; and a paralysed industrialist from Racine, Wisconsin (between Chicago and Milwaukee), who ran his foundries from the terrace of his villa, sitting in his wheelchair, his lap piled high with newspapers from all over the world that came in the morning post.

  It was in Davos in February 1958, a few weeks after her fourth divorce, that she met Rémi Rorschach in circumstances worthy of a classical American comedy. She was in a bookshop looking for a book on the Rich Hours of the Duc de Berry, of which she had seen some reproductions the previous evening on a television programme. Of course the only available copy had just been bought, and the lucky customer, a man of mature years but obviously still sprightly, was just then paying for it at the cash desk. Olivia went up to him without hesitating, introduced herself, and offered to buy the book back. The man, who was none other than Rorschach, refused, but they agreed in the end to share it between them.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  Bartlebooth, 3

  TWO PAPERS READ at the IIIrd Congress of the International Union of Historical Sciences, held in October 1887 in Edinburgh, under the joint auspices of the Royal Historical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, caused a sensation in international scholarly circles and, for a few weeks, aroused wide public interest.

  The first of these papers was read in German by Professor Zapfenschuppe of Strasbourg University. It was entitled Untersuchungen über die Taufe Amerikas. Whilst studying archives retrieved from the cellar of the Bishop’s Palace at Saint-Dié, the author had discovered a collection of old books which, beyond any possible doubt, came from the famous printing press founded in 1495 by Germain Lud. Amongst these books he found an atlas to which many sixteenth-century texts referred, but of which no single copy had previously been known to exist: namely, the famous Cosmographiae introductio cum quibusdam geometriae ac astronomiae principiis ad eam rem necessariis insuper quattuor Americii, Vespucii navigationes by Martin Waldseemüller, called Hylacomilus, the best known of the cartographers of the School of Saint-Dié. It was in this cordiform atlas that the new world discovered by Christopher Columbus, and which he himself called West India, first appeared under the designation TERRA AMERICI VEL AMERICA, and the date given on this copy – 1507 – finally put an end to three centuries of bitter controversy concerning Amerigo Vespucci: some held him to be a man of sincerity, a scrupulous and upright explorer who had never dreamt of having a continent named after him one day and never knew that it had been so named, or they believed that he only learnt of it on his deathbed (there are indeed many romantic prints – including one by Tony Johannot – showing the explorer as an old man passing away in Seville, in 1512, amidst his loved ones, with one hand on an open atlas held out to him by a man kneeling in tears at his bedside, for him to see once before he dies the word AMERICA unfurling across the new continent); but others viewed him as a buccaneer of the same breed as the Pinzón Brothers, trying, like them, at every turn to displace Columbus and to steal the glory of his discoveries. Thanks to Professor Zapfenschuppe, it was now proven that the custom of calling the new lands America had been established during Vespucci’s lifetime. Vespucci had certainly been told this, even if he fails to allude to it in his letters and journals: the fact that he never disputed the appellation, and its persistent usage, suggest very strongly indeed that Vespucci must have been not at all displeased in the end to leave his name to a continent which he believed in good faith he had done more to “discover” than had the Genoese adventurer who, when all was said and done, did no more than explore a few offshore islands, taking cognisance of the mainland itself only much later on, on his third voyage, in 1498–1500, when he reached the mouth of the Orinoco and finally realised that the huge scale of such a hydrographic system was definitive proof of the existence of a vast, unknown hinterland.

  * * *

  But the second paper was even more sensational. It was called New Insights into Early Denominations of America and was read by a Spanish archivist, Juan Mariano de Zaccaria, who was working in Havana, at the Maestranza Donation, on a collection of almost two thousand maps, a number of which came from Santa Catalina after the fort there was dismantled; amongst these, he had come across a planisphere dated 1503 on which the new continent was explicitly designated by the name TERRA COLUMBIA!

  When the aged Lord Lowager Colquhoun of Darroch, permanent Secretary of the Caledonian Society, whose imperturbable phlegm was never so valued as on this occasion when he was in the chair, had managed to quieten down the exclamations of amazement, excitement, disbelief, and delight which shook the austere dome of the Senate Room in Old College, and had brought the session back to a relative state of order more conducive to the dignity, impartiality, and objectivity which should always be the appanage of true scholarship, Zaccaria was able to proceed with his paper, and he passed around the electrified audience a photograph of the whole planisphere, as well as an enlargement of a (fairly damaged) fragment where the letters

  were printed along a few inches of the edge of an approximate but undeniably recognisable representation of a large portion of the New World: Central America, the West Indies, and the coastline of Venezuela and Guyana.

  Zaccaria was the hero of the day, and correspondents from The Scotsman, The Scottish Daily Mail, The Scottish Daily Express (Glasgow), the Aberdeen Press and Journal, and not forgetting The Times and the Daily Mail, of course, took it upon themselves to spread the news throughout the world. But a few weeks later, when Zaccaria was back in Havana putting the finishing touches to the article he had promised to give the American Journal of Cartography, in which a full reproduction of the precious document was to be inserted on a “special fold-out leaf”, he received a letter emanating from a certain Florentin Gilet-Burnachs, curator of the Municipal Museum at Dieppe: chance had it that he had opened an issue of Le Moniteur Universel and had read its detailed account of the Edinburgh congress and especially of Zaccaria’s paper, including a description of the damaged fragment on which the Cuban archivist had based his claim that the New World was named COLUMBIA in 1503.

  Florentin Gilet-Burnachs, who quoted in passing a sentence from someone called Monsieur de Cuverville (“enthusiasm is no state of mind for a historian”), and who of cou
rse fully appreciated the brilliance of Zaccaria’s paper, wondered nonetheless whether the revelation – not to say revolution – it contained should not be subjected to a thoroughgoing critique. Obviously it was very tempting to read

  as

  and this reading gave voice to a widely shared feeling: unearthing a map where the West Indies were dubbed COLUMBIA, geographers and historians felt they were making amends for an historical error; for centuries, the West had resented Amerigo Vespucci’s usurpation of the name which Christopher Columbus ought to have given to the lands he had been the first to explore: by applauding Zaccaria, the congress had meant to rehabilitate the Genoese seafarer and thus bring four centuries of injustice to an end.

  However, the curator continued, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, dozens of navigators, from the Cabots to the Cabrals, from Gomes to Verrezano, sought the westward route to the Indies and – he was coming to the point – there was a deep-rooted tradition in Dieppe, still flourishing in the late eighteenth century, which attributed the discovery of “America” to a local seaman, Jean Cousin, called Cousin the Bold, who was supposed to have reached the West Indies in 1487–1488, five years before the man from Genoa. The Municipal Museum at Dieppe, having inherited a selection of the maps made by order of the shipowner Jean Ango, which had given the Dieppe school of cartography (including mapmakers like Desceliers and Nicolas Desliens) its reputation as one of the best of the sixteenth century, possessed a map dated 1521 – markedly later, that is, than Zaccaria’s map from the Maestranza Donation – on which the Gulf of Honduras – Christopher Columbus’s “deep gulf” – was called MARE CONSO, clearly an abbreviation of MARE CONSOBRINIA, a Latin translation of “the sea of the cousin”, Cousin’s Sea (and not MARE CONSOLATRIX, as Lebrun-Brettil had stupidly claimed).

  Therefore, Florentin Gilet-Burnachs went on mercilessly, the

  which Zaccaria had read as

  could be read much more plausibly, given the spacing of the three final letters, as

  By way of conclusion, the curator suggested that Zaccaria should take pains to establish the provenance of the 1503 map. If it was of Portuguese, Spanish, Genoese, or Venetian origin, then the

  could indeed be a designation of Columbus, despite the fact that he himself had imposed the usage INDIA. In any case it would not refer to Jean Cousin, whose fame went no further than Dieppe itself, and who had for rivals, even in the nearby ports of Le Tréport, Saint-Valéry-en-Caux, Fécamp, Etretat, and Honfleur, sailors just as bold as he was, and all busy at finding new routes. But if, on the other hand, the map was of the Dieppe school – that could be easily checked, all Dieppe maps having a monogram decorated with lowercase d at the centre of one of the mariner’s cards – then it was TERRA CONSOBRINIA that was meant.

  Finally, Gilet-Burnachs wrote in a postscript, if the monogram was two Rs intertwined, that would mean that the planisphere was the work of Renaud Régnier, one of the earliest cartographers of the Dieppe school, who was believed to have accompanied Cousin on one of his voyages. The selfsame Renaud Régnier had drawn a map of the coast of North America some years later, around 1520, and by an extraordinary coincidence had given the name of TERRA MARIA to the territory which, on account of Henriette-Marie, the daughter of Henri IV of France and wife of Charles I of England, would be baptised MARYLAND one hundred years later.

  Zaccaria was an honest geographer. He could have ignored Gilet-Burnachs’s letter, or he could have taken covert advantage of the generally poor condition of the planisphere to destroy any signs of its possible origin and then declare to the Dieppe curator that his was a Spanish map, and that therefore the latter’s critique would not stand. But instead of doing that, he ascertained conscientiously that it was indeed a map by Renaud Régnier, informed his correspondent, and offered to co-author a correction with him which would close the debate on this thorny toponymic problem. The joint article appeared in 1888, in the journal Onomastica, but it caused infinitely less of a stir than his paper at the IIIrd Congress.

  It remained the case nonetheless that the 1503 planisphere was the only map on which the continent now known as America was called Cousinia. This singular fact came to the ears of James Sherwood, who succeeded in purchasing this unique map a year later from the Rector of Havana University, for an undisclosed sum. And that is how the map is to be found today on one of the walls of Bartlebooth’s bedroom.

  It was not because it was unique that Bartlebooth, as a child, grew attached to this map, which he could look at in the great hall of the manor house where he grew up, but because it possessed another feature also: the map’s north is not at the top, but at the bottom. This difference of orientation, much commoner in the period than is often realised, fascinated Bartlebooth to the highest degree: representations rotated not always by one hundred and eighty degrees, but sometimes by ninety or forty-five, completely subvert habitual perceptions of space; the outline of Europe, for instance, a shape familiar to anyone who has been even only to junior school, when swung round ninety degrees to the right, with the west at the top, begins to look like Denmark. And in this minimal switch lay hidden the very image of his jigsaw-puzzle mind.

  Bartlebooth was never a collector in the usual sense of the word, but nonetheless, in the early thirties, he looked out or had others look out for similar maps. He has two of that kind in his bedroom. One, which he got at an auction at Hôtel Drouot, is a fine impression of the Imperium Japonicum … descriptum ab Hadriano Relando, part of the Atlas published by Reinier Otten of Amsterdam; specialists rate the map very highly, not because north is to the right, but because the names of the sixty-six imperial provinces are given for the first time in Japanese ideograms with their transcriptions in Latin characters.

  The other one is even more curious: it is a map of the Pacific of the kind used by the coastal tribes of the Gulf of Papua: it consists of an extremely dense network of bamboo sticks indicating the currents and prevailing winds of the sea; here and there, in seemingly random distribution, seashells (cowries) are set to represent islands and reefs. In terms of the universal standards of modern-day cartography, this “map” would seem to be an aberration: at first sight it provides neither an orientation, nor a scale, nor an identification of distances, nor a representation of relief; but, in fact, it appears that it serves its purpose incomparably well, just as, Bartlebooth explained one day, a diagram of the London Underground is quite impossible to match with a map of London but is sufficiently simple and obvious to be used without any trouble at all when you want to go from A to B by tube.

  This map of the Pacific had been brought back by Captain Barton, who had studied the migrations of one of these New Guinea tribes at the end of the last century: he had looked at the Motu of Port Moresby, whose voyages bring to mind the Kula of the Trobriand Islanders. When he got back to London, Barton presented his trophy to the Bank of Australia, which had part-sponsored his expedition. The bank exhibited it for a while in a reception room at its main office, then, in its turn, donated it to the National Foundation for the Development of the Southern Hemisphere, a semi-private agency aiming at recruiting emigrants for New Zealand and Australia. The Foundation went into liquidation at the end of the nineteen twenties, and the map, offered for sale by the official liquidator, was eventually brough to the attention of Bartlebooth, who bought it.

  The rest of the room is almost devoid of furniture: it is a bright room, painted white, with thick cambric curtains and an ordinary bed: an English-made bedstead of brass, with a flowery printed cotton spread, and two Empire bedside tables. On the left-hand table stands a lamp with a base shaped like an artichoke and an octagonal pewter plate bearing two lumps of sugar, a glass, a spoon, a crystal water jug with a pine-cone stopper; on the right-hand table, a small rectangular pendulum clock whose mahogany case is inlaid with ebony and gilded metal, a monogrammed silver cup, and a photograph in an oval frame portraying three of Bartlebooth’s grandparents – James’s brother William Sherwood, his wife Emily, and
James Aloysius Bartlebooth – all in formal dress, standing behind Priscilla and Jonathan, the newly-weds being seated at each other’s side in the midst of a profusion of baskets of flowers and ribbon bows. On the lower shelf lies a large desk diary bound in black leather. On the cover the words DESK DIARY 1952 and ALLIANCE BUILDING SOCIETY in large gold-leaf upper-case lettering stand above a crest, of gules with chevrons, bees, and yellow bezant, adorned with a phylactery bearing the motto DOMUS ARX CERTISSIMA, the English translation of which is given immediately below: The surest stronghold is the home.

  It would be tiresome to draw up a list of all the cracks and contradictions which appeared in Bartlebooth’s plan. For if, in the end, as we shall now soon see, the programme the Englishman had set himself gave way under Beyssandre’s resolute onslaught as well as Winckler’s far more hidden and subtle attack, Bartlebooth’s failure must be ascribed in the first place to his own inability to respond to those onslaughts at the appropriate time.

  It is not a matter here of minor faults of the kind which never endangered the system Bartlebooth aimed to build, even if such blemishes did sometimes exacerbate the system’s excessively rigid tyranny and the exasperation it caused. For instance, when Bartlebooth decided he would paint five hundred watercolours in twenty years, he chose the figures because they were round numbers; he would have done better to pick four hundred and eighty, which would have made two a month; or, at the limit, five hundred and twenty, that is to say one every fortnight. But to get to exactly five hundred, he was sometimes obliged to paint two a month except for one month when he would paint three, or alternatively to do one approximately every two and a quarter weeks. Added to the variability of his travels, this was a factor which compromised the temporal regularity of his plan, but only to a small degree: in general, Gaspard Winckler received a watercolour approximately every fortnight, for there were of course in practice minor variations of up to a few days and occasionally even a few weeks; but these, similarly, did not bring into question the overall organisation of the task Bartlebooth had set himself, any more than did the minor delays he got into when reassembling the puzzles and which meant that very often the watercolours, on being sent back to the places where they had been painted, were “erased” not precisely twenty years after, but roughly twenty years after, twenty years plus a few days after.