Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Against the left-hand wall, on the mantel of a veined marble fireplace, stand two lamps on pedestals made from brass shell-casings on either side of a tall glass cloche sitting over a bouquet of flowers of which each petal is a leaf of beaten gold.

  Along almost the entire length of the back wall hangs a very worn tapestry whose colours have faded entirely. It probably depicts the three Magi, as there are three figures, one kneeling, the others standing, only one of which remains more or less intact, wearing a long robe with slit sleeves. A sword hangs at his waist, and in his left hand he holds a kind of gift box; he has black hair and a curious hat, somewhere between a beret, a tricorn, a crown, and a bonnet, decorated with a medallion.

  In the foreground, a little to the right and sideways onto the window, Véronique Altamont is sitting at a leather-clad desk decorated with gilt arabesques on which several books are displayed: a novel by Georges Bernanos, Joy; The Lilliputian Village, a children’s book on whose cover you can see some miniature houses, a fire station, a town hall with its clock, and wide-eyed, freckle-faced kids whom long-bearded dwarves serve with slices of bread and butter and big glasses of milk; Espingole’s Dictionary of Medieval French and Latin Abbreviations, Exercises in Medieval Diplomatic and Palaeography by Toustain and Tassin, opened at facsimile pages of medieval texts. On the left-hand page, a model rental contract:

  Connue chose soit à tous ceuz qui ces lettres varront et oiront que li ceuz de Menoalville doit a ceuz di Leglise Dauteri trois sols de tolois à randre chascun an a dict terme …

  On the right-hand page, an extract from The True Story of Philemo and Bauci by Garin de Garlande – a very free adaptation of Ovid’s legend in which the author, a twelfth-century monk from Valenciennes, imagines that Zeus and Mercury were not content merely to provoke a flood to punish the Phrygians who had refused them hospitality, but also sent legions of fierce beasts which, on his return to his hut, now transformed into a temple, Philemon describes to Baucis:

  I saw three hundred and nine pelicans. Item, six thousand and sixteen Seleucid birds marching in battalia and picking up straggling grasshoppers in cornfields. Item, some cynamolgs, argatiles, caprimulgi, thynnunculi, onocrotals or bitterns, with their wide swallows, stymphalides, harpies, panthers, dorcasses, or bucks, cemades, cynocephalises, marmosets, or monkeys, presteres, bugles, tarands, musimons, byturoses, ophyri, screech owls, goblins, fairies, and griffins.

  In the midst of these books there is a stiff canvas folder, dark brown in colour, fastened by two elastic bands, with a rectangular self-adhesive label on which the following title has been carefully written in a copperplate hand:

  Memories

  towards the history of my own

  Childhood

  by Veronique Marceline gilbert Altamont + gardel

  Véronique is an overgrown sixteen-year-old with very pale skin, extremely blonde hair, an unappealing face, and a rather sullen appearance. She is wearing a long white dress with lace cuffs, whose low-cut neck shows her shoulders and prominent collarbone. She is examining attentively a small, lined, cracked snapshot of two dancers, one of whom is none other than Madame Altamont, twenty-five years younger. The dancers are doing their barre exercises under the supervision of their teacher, a thin man with a birdlike head, bright eyes, a scraggy neck, and bony hands; he is barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only long underpants and a long knitted scarf over his shoulder, and in his left hand he carries a tall, silver-knobbed walking stick.

  Madame Altamont, née Blanche Gardel, was at the age of nineteen a dancer with a company called Ballets Frère, founded and run not by two brothers, as you might have expected from the name, but by two cousins: Frère, who ran the business side, negotiated contracts, and organised tours, and Maximilien Riccetti (whose real name was Max Riquet), the artistic director, choreographer, and star dancer. The company stuck to the purest classical style – tutus, pointes, entrechats, jetés-battus, performing Giselle, Swan Lake, pas de deux, and suites en blanc – and did the rounds of the festivals in the Paris suburbs: the Musical Nights at Chatou, the Artistic Saturdays at La Hacquinière, Son et Lumière at Arpajon, the Festival of Livry-Gargan, etc. Since the company was entitled to a minuscule subsidy from the Education Ministry, the Ballets Frère also performed in schools and introduced the top forms to the art of the ballet, giving demonstrations in the gym or refectory, where Jean-Jacques Frère would give an undemanding running commentary peppered with hoary puns and vulgar innuendos.

  Jean-Jacques Frère was a paunchy little man, always game for a laugh, and would have been quite happy to settle for this second-rate existence in which he had all the opportunity he wanted for squeezing ballerinas’ buttocks and ogling schoolgirls. But Riccetti had greater aspirations and ached to show the world just how exceptionally talented he was. And when that moment came, as he used to say to Blanche, whom he loved almost as passionately as himself, then his deserved fame would reflect on them both, and they would become the most beautiful dancing couple ever seen.

  The long-hoped-for opportunity arose one day in November 1949. Count della Marsa, a wealthy Venetian patron of the ballet, decided to commission a certain René Becquerloux (rumour had it that the name served to mask the count himself) to write a fantaisie-bouffe in the manner of Lulli under the title of The Dizzy Fits of Psyche for the next international festival at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and entrusted the production to the Ballets Frère, whom he had had occasion to appreciate the previous year at the Musical Hours of Moret-sur-Loing.

  A few weeks later Blanche found that she was pregnant and that the due date would fall almost exactly on the opening night of the festival. The only solution was to have an abortion; but when she told Riccetti, the dancer flew into an indescribable rage and forbade her to sacrifice the irreplaceable being he was about to bring into the world for the mere sake of a night of fame.

  Blanche hesitated. She was violently in love with Riccetti, and their love fed on their joint dreams of greatness; but between an unwanted child (and there would always be plenty of time to have another one) and the role she had always hankered after, the choice was obvious. She asked the opinion of Jean-Jacques Frère, for whom she felt genuine affection despite his vulgarity, and who, she knew, was also fond of her. Although he didn’t come down on one side or the other, the company director made a few scabrous allusions to back-street angel-makers juggling with knitting needles and to parsley sprigs strewn on the chequered oilcloth of kitchen tables, and then advised her at least to go to Switzerland, Britain, or Denmark, where some clinics provided voluntary termination in less hair-raising surroundings. And that was how Blanche Gardel made up her mind to seek help and assistance from one of her childhood friends, who had moved to England. She turned to Cyrille Altamont, who had just graduated from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration and was doing a tour of duty at the French Embassy in London.

  Cyrille was ten years older than Blanche. The parents of the two children had had country houses at Neauphle-le-Château, and in the years before the war Blanche and Cyrille had spent many a happy summer there amidst great swarms of cousins, boys and girls alike, all of them well-turned-out teacher’s pets from Paris who had to learn afresh each year how to climb trees, suck raw eggs, and fetch the milk and the curds still dripping with whey from the local farm.

  Blanche was one of the youngest and Cyrille one of the oldest of the bunch. When, at the end of September, on the eve of their dispersal for the new school year, the children gave the grown-ups a show that they had rehearsed in the deepest secrecy for a fortnight, Blanche would do a turn as a little ballerina and Cyrille would accompany her on the violin.

  The war put an end to these high spots of childhood. Blanche and Cyrille didn’t see each other again until she was a gorgeous girl of sixteen whose pigtails were no longer for pulling and he wore – if only briefly – the glorious halo of a lieutenant: he had seen action in the Ardennes and had just won places at Polytechnique and at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration at the sa
me examination session. In the following three years, Cyrille took Blanche to dances several times and wooed her assiduously, but in vain, for she persisted in a silent passion for the three star dancers of the Ballets de Paris – Jean Babilée, Jean Guélis, and Roland Petit – until she fell into the arms of Maximilien Riccetti.

  Cyrille Altamont agreed easily that Blanche was right to want an abortion and offered his help. Two days later, after a purely formal visit to a Harley Street doctor, for whose benefit Cyrille masqueraded as Blanche’s husband, the young civil servant drove the ballerina to a clinic in the northern suburbs of London, housed in a cottage that looked identical to all the cottages around it. He picked her up, as agreed, the next morning, and accompanied her to Victoria Station, where Blanche boarded the Silver Arrow for Paris.

  She telephoned him later that night, begging him to come to her rescue. On her return home, she had found Jean-Jacques Frère and two police inspectors sitting around her dining-room table finishing off a bottle of Calvados. They told her that Maximilien had hanged himself the night before. In the brief note he had left to account for his act, he had written only that he could never live with the idea that Blanche had killed his child.

  Blanche Gardel married Cyrille Altamont eighteen months later, in April 1951. In May, they moved into the flat in Rue Simon-Crubellier. But Cyrille never really lived there, because a few weeks later he was appointed to a post in Geneva and settled there. Since then, he only comes to Paris for short periods, and even then he usually stays at a hotel.

  Véronique was born in 1959, and it was in the first place to clarify the circumstances of her own birth that at the age of eight or nine she began her investigation into her parents. At an age when children enjoy telling themselves that they’re foundlings, or the son or daughter of a king swapped over in the cradle, or a baby left by a back door and picked up by travelling players or gypsies, Véronique made up convoluted adventures to explain why her mother never took off her wrist and left hand a thin strip of black gauze, and also to account for the ever-absent man who called himself her father and whom she hated so much that for years she crossed out systematically the name of Altamont on her school identity card and on all her exercise books, writing in over it her mother’s maiden name.

  Then, with almost mesmerised fascination, painfully, painstakingly, obsessively, she tried to reconstruct the history of her own family. One day, when at last she answered Véronique’s question, her mother said that she kept the cloth strip as a mark of mourning for a man who had meant a lot to her. Véronique thought that she must be that man’s daughter and that Altamont was punishing her mother for having loved another before him. Later on, she found as a bookmark at page 73 of The Age of Reason the photograph of her mother practising at the barre with another ballerina under the direction of Maximilien, and she assumed that he was her real father. That day she took out a new folder and decided to confide secretly to it everything related to her history and to her parents’ lives, and she began a systematic search of all her mother’s cupboards and drawers. It was all too neatly kept, and there seemed to be no traces left of her life as a ballerina. One day, nonetheless, beneath a neat stack of bills and receipts, Véronique at last came across some old letters from schoolmates, cousins, long-lost friends, mentioning memories of past holidays, cycle rides, afternoon teas, seaside jaunts, fancy-dress balls, and plays at the Children’s Theatre. Another time, she unearthed a programme of the Ballets Frère’s performance at the Parents’ Evening at the Lycée Hoche at Versailles, which listed an excerpt from Coppelia performed by Maximilien Riccetti and Blanche Gardel. On yet another occasion, whilst on holiday at her maternal grandmother’s, who had long since sold Neauphle and moved to Grimaud on the Côte d’Azur, she laid her hands on a box labelled The Little Dancer: it contained sixty metres of film shot on a Pathé Baby. Véronique managed to get it screened and saw her mother as a tiny ballerina in a tutu, accompanied on the violin by a gawky, spotty scarecrow who was just recognisable as Cyrille. Then a few months ago, one day in November 1974, she found in her mother’s wastepaper basket a letter from Cyrille, and on reading it grasped that Maximilien had died ten years before she was born and that the truth was the exact opposite of what she thought.

  I was in London a few days ago and I couldn’t help taking a ride to that distant suburb where I took you, twenty-five years ago almost to the day. The clinic is still there, at 130 Crescent Gardens, but now it’s a three-storey block, quite modern. The rest of the scenery has hardly changed from what I remember. I relived the day I spent in those outskirts whilst you were being operated on. I never told you about the day I spent. I wanted to see you at the end of the afternoon, when you came round, so it wasn’t worth going back into London, better to stay in the area even if it meant wasting a few hours in a pub or a cinema. It was barely ten a.m. when I left you. I wandered for more than half an hour in streets lined with semidetached cottages so similar to each other that you might have thought there was really only one, reflected in some huge system of mirrors – they all had the same doors painted dark green, with shiny brass knockers and boot-scrapers, the same manufactured lace curtains in their bay windows, the same pots of aspidistra in the landing window. In the end I managed to find what was presumably the shopping centre: a few apparently uninhabited shops, a Woolworth’s, a cinema called The Odeon, obviously, and a pub proudly named The Unicorn and Castle, and unfortunately shut. I went and sat in the only place that gave any apparent sign of life, a kind of milk-bar housed in a long wooden caravan and run by three spinsters. I was served a cup of revolting tea and butterless toast (I wouldn’t eat their margarine) with orange marmalade that tasted of tin.

  Then I bought the newspapers and went to read them in a little park set beside a statue representing a gentleman sitting cross-legged, with an ironical expression on his face, and holding in his left hand a sheet of paper (of stone, of course) copiously furled in on itself at each end, and in his right hand a goose quill. Since he reminded me of Voltaire, I reckoned it must have been Pope; but it was in fact a certain William Warburton, 1698–1779, writer and priest, and the author, according to the inscription carved on the pedestal, of a Divine Legation of Moses.

  Towards noon the pub finally opened its doors and I went in to drink a few beers whilst eating anchovy paste and Cheshire cheese sandwiches. I stayed there until two o’clock, sitting at the bar, hunched over my glass, beside two brothers-in-law who both worked for the Local Authority. One was an assistant accountant at the gasworks, the other an office manager in the retirement pensions department. They were ingurgitating a rather repulsive stew as they related to each other in an atrocious cockney accent some interminable family story involving a sister living in Canada, a niece who was a nurse in Egypt and another married in Nottingham, an enigmatic O’Brien whose first name was Bobby, and a Mrs Bridgett who ran a bed-and-breakfast at Margate, on the Thames Estuary.

  At two, I left the pub to go to the cinema. I remember that the programme consisted of two full-length films and several shorts, newsreels, and cartoons. I’ve forgotten what the feature films were called; they were both equally bland. The first was the umpteenth story about RAF officers tunnelling their way out of a POW camp. The second was intended to be a comedy; it was set in the nineteenth century and began with a fat, gout-ridden rich man refusing his daughter’s hand to a weedy young man since the latter weedy young man had no money and no prospects. I never learnt how the weedy young man managed to grow rich and prove to his future father-in-law that he was brighter than he looked, because I fell asleep after fifteen minutes. Two usherettes woke me quite roughly. The house-lights were up, I was the only audience left. Completely dazed, I couldn’t understand a word of what the usherettes were shouting, and it was only when I got to the street that I realised I had forgotten my newspapers, my coat, my umbrella, and my gloves. Fortunately one of the usherettes caught me up and handed them back to me.

  It was a dark night. It was half past five. It
was drizzling. I returned to the clinic but they wouldn’t let me see you. They only said that everything was all right, that you were asleep; and that I should call to collect you the next day at eleven a.m.

  I caught the bus back into London, through vast and soulless suburbs, past thousand upon thousand home sweet homes, where thousand upon thousand men and women just back from their factories and offices were simultaneously raising the tea cosy from the teapot, pouring the tea into the cup, lacing it with a touch of milk, grasping with fingertips the slice of toast that had just popped out of the automatic toaster, and spreading it with Bovril. I had a feeling of total unreality, as if I were on another planet, in another world – a world of cottonwool, misty, wet, run through with yellow lights verging on orange. And suddenly I thought of you, of what was happening to you, of the cruel irony which meant that in order to help you suppress a child that was not mine we were pretending for a few hours to be husband and wife by saying not that you were Madame Altamont but that I was Monsieur Gardel.

  It was half past seven when the bus got to its terminus at Charing Cross. I drank a whisky in a pub called The Greens, then went to the cinema again. This time I saw a film you had mentioned, Red Shoes, directed by Michael Powell, with Moira Shearer and choreography by Léonide Massine. I can’t remember the story, but only one of the dances, in which a newspaper thrown away and blown by the wind turns disturbingly into a dancer. I came out of the cinema at about ten o’clock. Though I almost never drink spirits and feel ill on a single glass, I had an irresistible desire to get drunk.