Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  * * *

  One might have expected such a character to impress Gertrude. But Madame Moreau’s robust cook had seen plenty before and didn’t have Burgundian blood in her veins for nothing. After three days in service, and in spite of the very strict regulations Lord Ashtray’s head secretary had handed her on arrival, she went to see her new employer. He was in the music room, listening to one of the final rehearsals of the opera he intended to have performed for the next week’s guests, a lost work by Monpou (Hippolyte) entitled Ahasverus. Esther and five choristers, inexplicably dressed as mountain climbers, were just starting on the chorus which closes Act II

  When Israel went out of Egypt

  when Gertrude burst in. Without noticing the disturbance she had caused, she threw her apron in Lord Ashtray’s face and told him the ingredients she was supplied with were revolting, and there was no question of her doing the cooking with them.

  Lord Ashtray was especially keen to keep his cook as he had almost not tasted her cooking. To retain her, he accepted without demur that she should do her buying herself, wherever she wanted to.

  That is why Gertrude now comes once a week, on Wednesdays, to Rue Legendre and fills a small truck with butter, fresh-laid eggs, milk, fresh cream, green vegetables, fowl, and various spices; she takes the opportunity, if she has any spare time, to visit her former mistress and to have a cup of tea with Madame Trévins.

  She has come to France today not for shopping – in any case she would not have been able to do it on a Monday – but to go to Bordeaux for her granddaughter’s wedding; she is to marry an assistant inspector of weights and measures.

  Gertrude is seated between her two former neighbours. She is a woman of about fifty, plump, red-faced, with chubby hands; she wears a black moiré silk top and a matching green tweed jacket and skirt which don’t suit her at all. On her left lapel she has pinned a cameo representing a virginal young lady with a delicate profile. It was a present from the Soviet vice-minister for foreign trade, in thanks for a red meal invented especially for him:

  Salmon Roes

  Cold Borshch

  Crayfish Cocktail

  Fillet of Beef Carpaccio

  Verona Salad

  Steamed Edam

  Salad of Three Red Fruits

  Blackcurrant Charlotte

  Pepper Vodka

  Bouzy Rouge

  CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

  Basement, 5

  CELLARS. THE MARQUISEAUX’ cellar.

  In the foreground can be seen a sectioned stack made of metal angle pieces containing cases of champagne with coloured stick-on labels depicting an old man holding out a narrow flûte to a nobleman in seventeenth-century dress followed by a large retinue: a tiny caption specifies that he is Dom Pérignon, cellarer at the abbey of Hautvillers, near Epernay, who, having discovered a way of making the wine of the Champagne region effervescent, is giving the result of his invention to Colbert to taste. Above these are cases of Stanley’s Delight whisky: the label shows an explorer of white race, wearing a pith helmet but dressed in Scottish national dress: a predominantly yellow and red kilt, a broad tartan over his shoulder, a studded leather belt supporting a fringed sporran, and a small dirk slipped into his sock-top; he strides at the head of a column of 9 blacks each carrying on his head a case of Stanley’s Delight with a label depicting the same scene.

  In the background, to the rear, various objects and pieces of furniture that had belonged to the Echard parents: a rusty birdcage, a collapsible bidet, an old handbag with a chased clip incrusted with a topaz, a low table, and a jute sack spilling over with school exercise books, homework on squared paper, filing cards, file paper, spiral notebooks, kraft-paper dustcovers, press cuttings stuck on loose sheets, postcards (one showing the German Consulate at Melbourne), letters, and sixty-odd copies of a slim cyclostyled brochure entitled

  CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES RELATING TO THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER IN HIS BUNKER ON APRIL 30,1945

  **

  first part: France

  *

  by

  Marcelin ECHARD

  sometime Head of Stack

  at the Central Library, XVlllth arrdt., Paris

  Of all Marcelin Echard’s monumental labours over the last fifteen years of his life, only this brochure was ever published. In it, the author subjects to harsh scrutiny every press announcement, statement, communiqué, book, etc. in the French language referring to Hitler’s suicide, and demonstrates that they all derive from an implicit belief based on dispatches of unknown origin. The following six brochures, which got no further than card-index form, were to comb in the same critical spirit all the English, American, Russian, German, Italian, and other sources. After thus proving that it was not proven that Adolf Hitler (and Eva Braun) had died in their bunker on the thirtieth of April 1945, the author would have compiled a subsequent bibliography, as exhaustive as the first one, listing all the documentary evidence suggesting that Hitler had survived. Then, in a final work to be called Hitler’s Punishment. A Philosophical, Political, and Ideological Analysis, Echard, shedding the strict objectivity of the Bibliographer to ride the faster steed of the Historian, would have got down to a study of the decisive impact of this survival on world history from 1945 to the present, in which he would have demonstrated how the infiltration of the highest echelons of national and supranational governmental spheres by individuals attached to Nazi ideals and manipulated by Hitler (John Foster Dulles, Cabot Lodge, Gromyko, Trygve Lie, Singhman Rhee, Attlee, Tito, Beria, Sir Stafford Cripps, Bao Daï, MacArthur, Coude du Foresto, Schuman, Bernadotte, Evita Perón, Gary Davis, Einstein, Humphrey, and Maurice Thorez, to mention only a few) had allowed the conciliatory and pacifist spirit laid out of the Yalta Conference to be sabotaged and had fomented an international crisis, a run-up to the Third World War which only the sang-froid of the Four Powers had managed to avert in February 1951.

  Cellars. Madame Marcia’s cellar.

  An unbelievable tangle of furniture, objects, and trinkets, a jumble even more inextricable, it would appear, than the muddle reigning in the back room of her store.

  Here and there a few more identifiable objects can be made out amongst the bric-a-brac: a goniometer, a type of articulated wooden protractor, said to have belonged to the astronomer Nicolas Kratzer; a marinette (the mariner’s mate), a magnetised needle pointing to the north and supported by two straws floating on water in a half-full phial, a primitive instrument from which the compass proper, equipped with dial, did not emerge until three centuries later; a ship’s desk, of English make, fully collapsible, presenting a whole assortment of drawers and flaps; a page from an old herbarium with several specimens of hawkweed (lobed hawkweed, Hieracium pilosella, Hieracium aurantiacium, etc.) under a glass plate; an old peanut dispenser, still half-full, with a glass case inscribed with “EXTRA DELICIOUS GOURMET BRAND”; several coffee grinders; seventeen small gold fish with Sanskrit inscriptions; a whole stock of walking sticks and umbrellas; siphons; a weathervane topped by a pretty rusty rooster, a metal washhouse sign, an old tobacconist’s carrot-shaped sign; several rectangular, painted biscuit tins: one has an imitation of Gérard’s Cupid and Psyche; on another, a Venetian fiesta: masked figures dressed as marquises and marchionesses standing on a floodlit palazzo terrace cheer a brilliantly decorated gondola; in the foreground, perched on one of those painted wooden posts at which watercraft tie up, a little monkey looks on; on a third tin, entitled Rêverie, you can see a young couple sitting on a stone bench in a landscape of great trees and lawns; the young woman wears a white dress and a large pink hat and leans her head on the shoulder of her companion, a melancholy young man dressed in a fieldmouse–grey tuxedo and a frilly shirt; finally, on the shelving, there is a whole stack of old toys: children’s musical instruments, saxophone, vibraphone, a tympani set consisting of a tom-tom drum and high-hat cymbals; building blocks, ludo, Pope Joan, petits-chevaux, and a dolls’ bakery with a tin counter and cast-iron display cases with minuscule ri
ng, round, and stick loaves. The baker’s wife stands behind the counter, giving change to a lady with a little girl munching a croissant. To the left you can see the baker and his lad shovelling kneaded dough into the mouth of an oven whence painted flames emerge.

  CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

  Louvet, 3

  THE LOUVETS’ KITCHEN. On the floor is a greenish mottled linoleum; on the walls, a washable flowery wallpaper. Along the whole right-hand wall stand “space-saving” devices on either side of a worktop: a waste-grinder sink, hotplates, a rotisserie, a fridge-freezer, a washing machine, and a dishwasher. A range of pots and pans, shelves and cupboards complete this model fitted kitchen. In the centre of the room stands a small oval table in Spanish rustic style with metal trim, surrounded by four rush-seated chairs. On the table there is a porcelain plate-warmer decorated with a picture of the three-master Henriette, under the command of Captain Louis Guion, entering Marseilles harbour (after an original watercolour by Antoine Roux senior, 1818), and two photographs in a twin leather mount: one depicts an old bishop giving his ring to be kissed by a very beautiful woman, dressed as a Greuze peasant, kneeling at his feet; the other, a small sepia print, portrays a young captain in the uniform of the Spanish–American war, with earnest candid eyes beneath a high, fine brow, and a full-lipped, sensitive mouth beneath the dark silky moustache.

  Some years ago the Louvets had a big party in their flat and made such a racket that around three in the morning Madame Trévins, Madame Altamont, Madame de Beaumont, and even Madame Marcia, who after all does not usually bother about such things, having knocked at the revellers’ door to no avail, ended up phoning the police. Two officers were dispatched to the scene, soon to be joined by an official locksmith, who let them in.

  The kitchen was where they found the bulk of the guests, a dozen or so of them, improvising a concert of contemporary music conducted by the master of the house. He was dressed in a green-and-grey-striped dressing gown, with leather babouches on his feet and a conical lampshade for a hat, and sat astride a straw-seated chair, beating time with his left arm raised and his erect right index finger close to his lips, as he repeated, roughly every second and a half, trying to stop himself laughing: “softly softly catchee monkey, softee softee catchly monkly, softly softly catchee monkly”, etc.

  The musicians, slumped on a sofa which had no reason to be where it was or wallowing on cushions, performed to the conductor’s gesticulations either by banging forks, ladles, and knives on diverse kitchen utensils, or by mimicking more or less successfully the sound of some instrument with their mouths. The most infuriating noises were those emitted by Madame Louvet, who sat in a veritable puddle banging two bottles of bubbly cider together until one or the other of the corks popped. Two guests seemed to be ignoring Louvet’s instructions and were making their own contribution to the concert: one was playing continually with one of those toys known as “Jack-in-the-box”, a golliwog head mounted on a powerful spring, which jumps out of the wooden cube in which it is loaded whenever opened; the other was slurping as noisily as he could a soup plate full of the kind of cottage cheese known in France as “silk-worker’s brains”.

  The rest of the flat was virtually empty. There was no one in the living room, where a Françoise Hardy record (C’est à l’amour auquel je pense) carried on turning on the gramophone turntable. In the entrance hall, snuggled into a heap of coats and macintoshes, a ten-year-old child was fast asleep, still holding in his hands Contat and Rybalka’s bulky essay on Les Ecrits de Sartre, open at page 88, concerning the original performance of The Flies at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre, then called Théâtre de la Cité, on 3 June 1943. In the bathroom, two men indulged in the game known to American schoolkids as tick-tack-toe and to the Japanese as go-moku: they were playing without paper or pencil, directly on the floor tiles, respectively using as playing tokens the remains of some Hungarian-brand cigarettes from an overflowing ashtray and wilted petals torn from a bouquet of red tulips.

  Apart from causing this nocturnal disturbance, the Louvets have not been very noticeable. He works in some bauxite (or maybe wolfram) business, and they are often away.

  END OF PART FIVE

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

  Third Floor Right, 3

  THE THIRD ROOM in this ghost flat is empty. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the skirting boards, and the doors are painted in black gloss. There is no furniture.

  On the back wall hang twenty-one engraved steel plates of identical dimensions and uniformly rimmed with matt black metal beads. The steel plates are arranged in three rows of seven, one above the other; the leftmost on the top row depicts ants carrying a large crumb of gingerbread; the rightmost on the bottom row portrays a young woman squatting on a shingle beach, studying a stone bearing a fossil imprint; the nineteen intermediate etchings depict respectively:

  a girl stringing cork stoppers to make a curtain;

  a carpet-layer kneeling on a floor, taking measurements with a folding yardstick;

  a starving composer in a garret feverishly scribbling an opera the title of which, The White Wave, is legible;

  a prostitute with an ash-blonde kiss curl facing a gentleman wearing an Inverness cape;

  three Peruvian Indians sitting on their heels, their bodies almost entirely hidden by their grey rough-cloth ponchos and with old felt hats pulled over their eyes, chewing coca;

  a man in a nightcap, straight out of Labiche’s Italian Straw Hat, taking a mustard foot-bath whilst leafing through the annual accounts for 1969 of the Upper Dogon Railway Company;

  three women in a courtroom, at the witness box; one wears a low-corsaged opal dress, and elbow-length ivory gloves, a sable-trimmed brick-quilted dolman, a comb of brilliants and a panache of osprey in her hair; the second: a cap and coat of seal coney, wrapped up to the nose, scanning the scene through tortoiseshell quizzing glasses; the third in amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspur-red, waistcoat, musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up, and hunting crop;

  a portrait of Etienne Cabet, who founded a newspaper entitled Le Populaire, wrote the Voyage en Icarie, and attempted unsuccessfully to set up a communist colony in Iowa before his death in 1856;

  two men in tuxedos sitting at a flimsy table playing cards; close scrutiny would show that the cards depict the same scenes as those depicted on the etchings;

  a kind of long-tailed devil hauling a big round tray covered in mortar to the top of a ladder;

  an Albanian brigand at the feet of a vamp draped in a white kimono with black polka dots;

  a worker perched on the top of a scaffold, cleaning a great crystal chandelier;

  an astrologer in a pointed hat and a long black robe spangled with silver-foil stars, pretending to look up through an obviously hollow tube;

  a corps de ballet curtseying before a lord in the uniform of a colonel in the Hussars – silver-braided with dolman and boars’-hair sabretache;

  pupils giving a gold watch to Claude Bernard, the physiologist, on his forty-seventh birthday;

  a besmocked porter with his leather straps and regulation numberplate carrying two cabin trunks;

  an old lady dressed in the fashions of the 1880s – lace coif, mittens on her hands – proffering fine grey apples on a large oval wicker tray;

  a watercolourist with his easel on a little bridge over a narrow channel lined with oystermen’s huts;

  a handicapped beggar offering a cheap horoscope to the sole customer on a café terrace: it is a printed sheet bearing under the title The Lilac a branch of lilac as a background to two rings encircling respectively a ram and a crescent moon pointing to the right.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

  On the Stairs, 12

  Draft Inventory of some of the things found on the stairs over the years

  (second and final instalment)

  25 A SET of “Fact Sheets” on dairy farming in the Poitou-Charentes region,

  a macintosh bearing the bran
d name “Caliban” made in London by Hemmings & Condell,

  six varnished cork glass-mats portraying the sights of Paris: the Elysée palace, Parliament House, the Senate Building, Notre-Dame, the Law Courts, and the Invalides,

  a necklace made from the spine of an alosa,

  a photograph taken by a second-rate professional of a naked baby lying prone on a sky-blue tasselled nylon cushion,

  a rectangular piece of card, about the size of a visiting card, printed on one side: Have you ever seen the Devil with a nightcap on? and on the other side: No! I’ve never seen the Devil with a nightcap on!

  a programme for the Caméra cinema, 70 Rue de l’Assomption, Paris 16, for the month of February 1960:

  3 – 9 : The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, BY LUIS BUNUEL

  10 – 16 : JACQUES DEMY FESTIVAL: Le Bel Indifférent, ADAPTED FROM COCTEAU, AND Lola, WITH ANOUK AIMEE.