Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  The final reckoning brings six people together in Madame Rorschach’s bathroom:

  Madame Pizzicagnoli, holding a pocket dictionary and exclaiming in a voice made tremulous and ear-shattering by anger, “Io non vi capisco! Una stanza ammobligliata! Ich versteh Sie nich! I am in a hurry! Moi, ne comprendre! Ho fretta! Je présée! My tailor is rich”;

  the girl from the agency, a young woman in a white alpaca two-piece, fanning herself with her ferret gloves;

  the bureau’s boss, frantically hunting for an ashtray in which to deposit his three-quarters chewed-up cigar;

  the building manager, leafing through the co-ownership rule book, trying to remember whether there was anything in it anywhere about safety standards for bathroom water-heaters;

  a plumber from a breakdown service called to an emergency, no one knows why or by whom, winding up his wristwatch whilst waiting to be told to go away;

  and Madame Pizzicagnoli’s little boy, a tot of four and a half in a sailor suit, quite unperturbed by the hubbub around him, kneeling on the marble flagstones, playing tirelessly with a clockwork rabbit which bangs a drum and blows a trumpet to the tune of Colonel Bogey.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

  Bartlebooth, 4

  THE GREAT DRAWING room of Bartlebooth’s flat, a huge square room with pale-blue wallpaper, contains what is left of the furniture, objects, and knickknacks with which Priscilla had liked to surround herself in her town house at 65 Boulevard Malesherbes: a divan and four armchairs all in carved and gilded wood, upholstered with an old Gobelins tapestry depicting on a yellow latticed ground archways with flourishes laden with foliage, fruit, and flowers adorned with birds on the wing – doves, parrots, parakeets, etc.; a large four-leafed Beauvais tapestry screen, with arabesque designs and, lower down, costumed monkeys in the style of Gillot; a large seven-drawer chiffonier, a Louis XVI period piece, in mahogany with coloured-wood mouldings and piping; on its veined marble top stand two ten-branched candelabras, a silver trencher, a little shagreen writing case with two gold-stoppered inkpots, a golden penholder, a gold erasing knife and a gold spatula, a carved-crystal seal, and a tiny little rectangular fly-box of gold machined and enamelled in blue; on the big black stone mantelpiece, a pendulum clock of white marble and chased gold with a dial, marked Hoguet, à Paris, held up by two kneeling, bearded men; on each side of the clock, two porcelain pharmacy jars in Chantilly pâte tendre; the right-hand one bears the inscription Ther. Vieille, the left-hand one Gomme Gutte; finally, on a little oval rosewood table with a white marble top stand three Saxony porcelains: one represents Venus and a cupid seated in a flower-decked chariot drawn by swans; the other two are allegorical figures of Africa and America: Africa is personified by a Negro boy sitting on a lion; America is a plumed woman riding side-saddle on a crocodile and clutching a horn of plenty to her left breast; a parrot sits on her right hand.

  Several pictures are hanging on the walls; the most awe-inspiring is to the right of the fireplace; it is a Groziano, a gloomy, harsh Descent from the Cross; to the left, a seascape by F. H. Mans, Fishing Boats Coming in to a Dutch Beach; on the rear wall, over the big divan, a cartoon study for Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, two large engravings by Le Bas of Chardin’s L’Enfant au toton and Le Valet d’auberge; a miniature of a priest with a face all puffed up with pride and contentment; a mythological scene by Eugène Lami depicting Bacchus, Pan, and Silenus accompanied by hordes of satyrs, aegipanes, agripanes, sylvans, fauns, lemurs, lares, elves, and hobgoblins; a landscape entitled The Mysterious Island, signed L. N. Montalescot: it portrays a seashore the left-hand half of which presents a pleasant prospect with a beach and a forest behind, the other half, all rocky walls broken up into towers and only a single entrance in them, suggesting an invulnerable fortress; and a watercolour by Wainewright, the painter, collector, and critic who was a friend of Sir Thomas Lawrence and one of the most famous “Bloods” of his day, and who, it was learnt after he died, had murdered eight people out of dilettantism; the watercolour is called The Carter: the carter is seated on a bench in front of a whitewashed wall. He is tall and broad, wears brown canvas trousers tucked into crackled boots, a grey open-neck shirt, and a gaily coloured neckerchief; on his right arm he wears a studded leather wristband; a tapestry bag hangs over his left shoulder; his plaited rope whip, with its tip separating out into several rough tails, lies to his right, alongside a jug and a round loaf.

  The divans and armchairs are draped in transparent nylon dust covers. For ten years at least, this room has been used only as an exception. The last time Bartlebooth came into it was four months ago, when the developments that occurred in the Beyssandre affair forced him to have recourse to Rémi Rorschach.

  In the early 1970s two major hotel chains – MARVEL HOUSES INCORPORATED and INTERNATIONAL HOSTELLERIE – decided to join forces so as to compete more effectively with the two rapidly expanding young giants of the hotel industry: Holiday Inn and Sheraton. Marvel Houses Inc. was a North American firm well-established in the Caribbean and in South America; as for International Hostellerie, it was a holding company registered in Zürich and managed funds originating in the Arab Emirates.

  The top management of the two companies met for the first time at Nassau, in the Bahamas, in February 1970. Their joint analysis of the world situation convinced them that the only way to stem the rise of their two rivals was to invent a style of tourist hotel without any equivalent anywhere else in the world: “a conception of hotel management,” declared the chairman of Marvel Houses, “based not on rabid exploitation of the kiddy cult [clapping], nor yet on management subservience to charge-account shysters [more clapping], but on respect for three fundamental values: leisure, relaxation, and culture [continuous applause]”.

  Several subsequent meetings at the head offices of the two companies over the following months filled in the outline which the chairman of Marvel Houses had sketched so brilliantly. When one of the directors of International Hostellerie made the witty point that the registered names of both firms had the same number of letters, 24, the publicity offices of both outfits seized on the idea and proposed a selection of twenty-four strategic sites in twenty-four countries where they could locate twenty-four hotel complexes of a totally new kind; with supreme sophistication, the list of the twenty-four selected sites displayed, from top to bottom and side by side, the registered names of the two parent companies (fig. 1).

  In November 1970, the chairmen and managing directors assembled in Kuwait to sign a joint document which stipulated that Marvel Houses Incorporated and International Hostellerie would jointly establish twin subsidiary companies: a hotel investment company, to be called Marvel Houses International; and a hotel service banking company, dubbed Incorporated Hostellerie. These companies, duly endowed with capital by the two parent firms, would be responsible for designing, organising, and completing construction of the twenty-four hotel complexes in the places hereinafter specified. The chairman and managing director of International Hostellerie became chairman and managing director of Marvel Houses International, and deputy chairman of Incorporated Hostellerie; whilst the chairman and managing director of Marvel Houses Incorporated became chairman and managing director of Incorporated Hostellerie, and deputy chairman of Marvel Houses International. The registered office of Incorporated Hostellerie, with specific responsibility for the financial management of the operation, was set up in Kuwait itself; as for Marvel Houses International, destined to take on site preparation and supervision, it was registered, for tax purposes, in Puerto Rico.

  The total budget of the operation was well over a billion dollars – more than five hundred thousand francs per hotel room. The aim was to create hotel centres with a degree of luxury unmatched by anything but the centres’ own self-contained autonomy. In fact, the key idea of the promoters was that, whilst it is admissible for a hotel – that special locus of relaxation, leisure and culture – to be sited in a climatic zone suited to some specific demand (for warmth when it is co
ld elsewhere, for pure air, for snow, for iodine, etc.) and in proximity to a place with a particular avocation in tourist terms (sea bathing, skiing, spa waters, museums, cities, curiosities, natural features [reserves, etc.] or artificial attractions [Venice, Matmata, Disney World, etc.], etc.), it was by no means necessary that it should be so located. A good hotel, they believed, was one where a client can go out if he wants, and not go out if going out is a burden for him. Consequently, the primary characteristic of the hotels Marvel Houses International planned to build was that they would include intra muros everything that a demanding, wealthy, and lazy clientele could wish to see or to do without having to go outside, which could not fail to be their wish in the case of the majority of North American, Arab, and Japanese visitors who feel obliged to do Europe and its cultural treasures from end to end but who do not for all that necessarily have any wish to foot-slog along miles of museum corridors or to be carted uncomfortably around the lung-damaging traffic jams of Saint-Sulpice or Place Saint-Gilles.

  This idea had been fundamental to modern tourist-hotel management for many years: it had given rise to the creation of private beaches, to the increasing privatisation of seashores and ski slopes, and to the rapid development of entirely artificial clubs, villages, and holiday centres having no essential relationship with their physical and human environments. But in their plan, Marvel Houses took this idea to a spectacular degree of systematisation: clients of any one of the new Marvel Hostelleries would have at their disposal not only their beach, their tennis court, their heated pool, eighteen-hole golf course, riding stable, sauna, marina, casino, nightclub, boutiques, bars, newsstands, cigarette shop, travel agency, and bank, as in any run-of-the-mill four-star, but they would also have access to their very own ski slope, chairlift, skating rink, sea bed, surf waves, safari, giant aquarium, art gallery, Roman ruins, battlefield, pyramid, Romanesque church, Arab market, desert fort, cantina, Plaza de Toros, prehistoric cave, Bierstube, street party, Balinese dancers, etc., etc., etc., and so on and so forth.

  To achieve such truly dizzying availability, which alone would justify the rates they envisaged charging, Marvel Houses International employed three concurrent stratagems: the first was to find isolated sites, or sites that could easily be made isolated, offering abundant tourist facilities that were not yet fully exploited; it is significant, in this connection, that five of the twenty-four sites selected – Alnwick, Ennis, Ottok, Soria, Vence – were in the immediate proximity of national parks; that five others were on islands: Aeroe, Anafi, Eimeo, Oland, and Pemba; and that the operation also called for the creation of two artificial islands, one off Osaka in the Osaka-Wan, the other facing Inhakea off the coast of Mozambique, as well as the conversion of an entire lake, Lake Trout, in Ontario, where it was planned to build a totally sub-aqua leisure centre.

  * * *

  MIRAJ India

  ANAFI Greece (Cyclades)

  ARTIGAS Uruguay

  VENCE France

  ERBIL Iraq

  ALNWICK England

  HALLE Belgium

  OTTOK Austria (Illyria)

  HUIXTLA Mexico

  SORIA Spain (Old Castile)

  ENNIS Eire

  SAFAD Israel

  ILION Turkey (Troy)

  INHAKEA Mozambique

  COIRE Switzerland (Chur)

  OSAKA Japan

  ARTESIA USA (New Mexico)

  PEMBA Tanzania

  OLAND Sweden

  ORLANDO USA (Disney World1)

  AEROE Denmark

  TROUT Canada

  EIMEO Tahiti archipelago

  DELFT Holland

  * * *

  Figure 1. Site locations of Marvel Houses International & Incorporated Hostellerie’s 24 hotel complexes.

  The second stratagem was to offer local, regional, and national authorities, in the places where Marvel Houses International wished to build, the full cost of constructing “culture parks”, against an eighty-year concession (the original forecasts showed that in most cases costs would be recouped in five years and three months, and become genuinely profitable for the remaining seventy-five years); such “culture parks” would either be built from scratch, or would encompass existing remains and buildings, as for example at Ennis, in Eire, a few miles from Shannon International Airport, where the ruins of a thirteenth-century abbey would be included within the hotel perimeter; or they would be integrated into existing structures, as at Delft, where Marvel Houses made the city an offer to save a whole neighbourhood of the old town and to revive Old Delft with potters, weavers, carvers, and blacksmiths living in, dressed in traditional costumes, working by candlelight.

  Marvel Houses International’s third stratagem was to plan to make their attractions profitable by developing – at least for the European sites, which comprised half of the total project – the possibilities for rotating features from one site to another; but this idea, initially designed only for staff (Balinese dancers, ragamuffins for the street parties, Tyrolean waitresses, bullfighters, ringside fans, sports instructors, snake-charmers, foot-jugglers, etc.), soon came to be applied to the equipment itself and resulted in what no doubt constituted the true originality of the entire project: the pure and simple negation of space.

  Indeed, comparisons of fixed investments and running costs soon demonstrated that it would cost more to build sea beds, mountains, castles, canyons, rock-art caves, and the Pyramids twenty-four times over than to transport gratis any customer wishing to ski on the August bank holiday whilst in Halle, or to go tiger-hunting when in deepest Spain.

  Thus the notion of a standard contract was born: for a minimum stay of four days of twenty-four hours, each night could be spent, at no extra charge, in any one of the hotels in the chain. Each new customer would be given on arrival a kind of calendar offering some seven hundred and fifty tourist and cultural events, each one having a specified weighting in hours, and the customer would be free to tick off as many as his envisaged length of stay at Marvel Houses entitled him to, the management guaranteeing to meet ninety per cent of the desiderata at no extra charge. To take a simplified example, if a client checking in at Safad ticks off in any old order events such as: skiing, taking the waters at a chalybeate spa, a tour of the Kasbah at Ouarzazate, a Swiss wine and cheese tasting, a canasta tournament, a tour of the Hermitage, a sauerkraut dinner, a tour of the château at Champs-sur-Marne, a concert given by the Des Moines Philharmonic conducted by Laszlo Birnbaum, a tour of the Bétharram caves (You travel right through a mountain wonderland lit by 4,500 electric bulbs! Its huge wealth of stalactites and the wonderfully varied wall paintings are enhanced by a ride in a gondola that takes you back to Venice the Fair! Nature’s most Unique creation!), etc., the hotel management, after linking into the company’s huge mainframe, will immediately plan transport to Coire (Switzerland) where glacier skiing, the Swiss wine and cheese tasting (Valteline wines), the chalybeate spring water, and the canasta tournament will be laid on, and then another transit from Coire to Vence, for the reconstruction of the Bétharram caves (You travel right through a mountain wonderland, etc.). The sauerkraut dinner could take place at Safad itself, as could the touring of the gallery and the château, provided by slide lectures which allow the traveller, comfortably seated in a club armchair, to discover, with the assistance of an intelligent commentary putting things in a proper perspective, the artistic marvels of every period and every land. On the other hand, the management would not provide transfer to Artesia, where a fabulous replica of the Ouarzazate Kasbah was located, nor to Orlando–Disney World, where the Des Moines Philharmonic had been hired for the season, unless the customer signed up for an extra week, and as a possible substitute would suggest a tour of genuine Safad synagogues (at Safad), an evening with the Bregenzer Kammerorchester conducted by Hal Montgomery, with the soloist Virginia Fredericksburg (Corelli, Vivaldi, Gabriel Pierné) (at Vence), or a lecture by Professor Strossi, of Clermont-Ferrand University, on Marshall McLuhan and the Third Copernican Revolut
ion (at Coire).

  It goes without saying that the directors of Marvel Houses would always do their best to equip each of their twenty-four culture parks with all the features promised. Where they ran into a major obstacle, they would restrict this or that feature to a single site and replace it everywhere else by a quality replica: so there would be, for instance, only one Bétharram cave, and the other caves elsewhere would be more like those found at Lascaux or Les Eyzies, maybe less spectacular but just as moving and intellectually stimulating. This flexible and well-thought-out policy was the key to unlimitedly ambitious projects, and by late 1971 architects and planners had achieved veritable miracles, on paper at least: Exeter College, Oxford, was to be dismantled, shipped over stone by stone, and rebuilt in Mozambique, the Château de Chambord to be reconstituted at Osaka, the Ouarzazate medina rebuilt at Artesia, the Seven Wonders of the World (I:15 scale model) at Pemba, London Bridge at Trout, and Darius’ Palace in Persepolis replicated at Huixtla (Mexico), where the full glory of the Persian kings would be restored down to the smallest detail, including the authentic number of slaves, chariots, horses, and palaces, the beauty of their concubines, and their sumptuous concerts. It would have been a pity to consider reduplicating these masterpieces, given the degree to which the system’s originality was based on the geographical uniqueness of such wonders, combined with the lucky customer’s ability to have immediate enjoyment of them all.