Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  17 – 23 : Don’t Give Up the Ship, BY GORDON DOUGLAS, WITH JERRY LEWIS.

  24 – March 1 : CONTEMPORARY HUNGARIAN CINEMA: A FILM A DAY; ON 26 FEBRUARY, THE WORLD PREMIERE ATTENDED BY THE DIRECTOR OF Nem szükséges, hogy kilépj a házból, BY GABOR PELOS.

  a packet of nappy pins,

  a well-worn copy of If You’re So Funny Why Don’t You Laugh?, a collection of three thousand puns by Jean-Paul Grousset, opened at the chapter entitled ‘At the Printer’s’;

  See Naples and Didot

  There’s nothing a printer can’t justify

  Good morning, serif!

  Inset information is worth its weight in bold

  a goldfish in a plastic bag half-full of water, hung on Madame de Beaumont’s doorhandle,

  a weekly season ticket for the inner circle (PC) rail line,

  a small, square, black Bakelite powder box with white dots, with an undamaged mirror but missing powder and puff,

  an educational postcard in the Great American Writers series, N° 57: Mark Twain

  Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in 1835 at Florida, Missouri. He lost his father at the age of twelve. He was apprenticed to a printer and became a pilot on the Mississippi where he gained the nickname Mark Twain (an expression meaning literally “mark twice”, calling on the sailor to measure the draught of water with a plumbline). He was subsequently a soldier, a miner in Nevada, a gold digger, and a journalist. He travelled to Polynesia, Europe, and the Mediterranean, visited the Holy Land, and, disguised as an Afghani, went on pilgrimage to the holy cities of Arabia. He died at Reading (Connecticut) in 1910, and his death coincided with the reappearance of Halley’s Comet, which had also marked his birth. A few years before, he read in a newspaper that he had died and cabled the editor straightaway with the message: NEWS OF MY DEATH HIGHLY EXAGGERATED! Nonetheless, money worries, the death of his wife and of one of his daughters, and the mental illness of his other daughter, darkened the last years of this humorist and gave his later works an unaccustomed gravity. Principal works: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867), The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1875), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur (1889), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), What is Man? (1906), The Mysterious Stranger (1916).

  seven marble lozenges, four black and three white, laid out on the third-floor landing so as to make the position called Ko or Eternity in the game of go:

  a cylindrical box, wrapped in paper from The Gay Musketeers toy and games shop, 95a Avenue de Friedland, Paris; the packaging depicted, as was only right and proper, Aramis, d’Artagnan, Athos, and Porthos crossing their brandished swords (“All for one and one for all!”). The packet carried no indication of an addressee when Madame Nochère found it on the doormat of the then empty flat occupied later by Geneviève Foulerot. After checking that the anonymous packet did not make any suspicious ticking noises, Madame Nochère opened it and found it contained several hundred little bits of gilded wood and imitation tortoiseshell plastic which, when appropriately assembled, were supposed to constitute a faithful reproduction at one-third life-size of the water clock presented to Charlemagne by Haroun al-Rashid. None of the inhabitants of the building claimed the object. Madame Nochère took it back to the shop. The sales ladies recalled that they had sold this rare and expensive scale model to a ten-year-old child; they had been very surprised to see him pay for it with one-hundred-franc notes. The enquiry was carried no further, and the puzzle was never solved.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

  Rorschach, 6

  ON THE BEDSIDE table in Rémi Rorschach’s bedroom there is an antique lamp with a base made of a silvered-metal candle-trimmer; a cylindrical cigarette lighter; a tiny polished-steel alarm clock; and, in an over-elaborate wooden frame, four photographs of Olivia Norveil.

  In the first image, taken at the time of her first marriage, Olivia makes her appearance dressed in pirate’s trousers and a no doubt blue and white horizontally striped jersey, wearing a middy’s cap and holding a deck-swab in her hand which it would have been pointless, no doubt, to ask her to use.

  In the second she is wallowing on a lawn, flat on her front, beside another young woman; Olivia is wearing a flowery dress and rice-straw hat, her companion is in Bermudas and big sunglasses with frames made to look like Michaelmas daisies; at the bottom of the snap, the words Greetings from the Appalachians are written above the signature: Bea.

  The third photograph shows Olivia dressed up as a Renaissance princess: a brocade robe, a big cloak with fleur-de-lys motifs, a diadem; Olivia is posing in front of flats on which technicians are using jumbo staplers to fix up shiny panels decorated with heraldic emblems; the photograph dates from the period when Olivia Norveil had given up all filming, even semi-advertising shorts, and was hoping to go back to stage acting: she decided to use the alimony paid her by her second husband to back a show in which she would be the star, and her choice alighted upon Love’s Labour’s Lost; reserving the role of the daughter of the King of France for herself, she handed the production over to a young man with romantic airs, a man bubbling with ideas and inventions, by the name of Vivian Belt, whom she had met a few days before in London. Critics turned up their noses; a snide and witless diary-columnist wondered if the noise of the seats hitting the backrests was part of the sound effects. The production ran for only three nights, but Olivia consoled herself by marrying Vivian, whom she had meantime discovered to be wealthy and a Lord, and about whom she had not yet discovered that he went to bed and took his bath with his curly-haired spaniel.

  The fourth photograph was taken in Rome, in full noonday sun at the height of the summer, in front of Stazione Termini: Rémi Rorschach and Olivia are going by on a Vespa scooter; he is driving, wearing a light short-sleeved shirt and white trousers, shod in white rope-soled espadrilles, his eyes shaded by black spectacles in circular gold frames like those American army officers used to wear; she is in shorts, an embroidered blouse, and slave sandals, and hangs on to him with her right arm round his waist whilst waving to invisible admirers with a grand gesture of her left hand.

  Rémi Rorschach’s bedroom is impeccably tidy, made up as if its occupant were coming to sleep there that very night. But it will stay empty. No one will enter it again, ever, leaving aside Jane Sutton who will come, every morning, for a few minutes, to air the room and throw onto the large Moroccan beaten-brass tray the producer’s mail, all those professional publications he subscribed to – French Cinematography, Film Technician, Film and Sound, TV News, Le Nouveau Film Français, Film Daily, Image et Son, etc. – all those papers he liked nothing better than to flick through while muttering curses as he ate his breakfast, and which henceforth will heap up with uncut wrappers, amassing their out-of-date box-office listings to the end. The bedroom is already a dead man’s room, and furniture, objects, and knickknacks already seem to be awaiting this coming death with polished indifference, standing in their proper places, properly clean, fixed for all time in impersonal silence: the bedspread turned down perfectly; the little Empire-style claw-foot low table; the olivewood bowl still holding a few foreign coins, pfennigs, pennies, groschen; and a packet of matches presented by Fribourg and Treyer, Tobacconists & Cigar Merchants, 34, Haymarket, London SW1; the very fine cut-glass tumbler; the burnt-coffee dressing gown, hanging on a turned-wood coatstand; and, to the right of the bed, the copper and mahogany clothes horse with its curved jacket hanger, its patent trouser press giving a permanent crease, its belt strap, its fold-away tie-rack and honeycomb tidy tray into which every evening Rémi Rorschach conscientiously emptied his key-pouch and his small change from his jacket pocket and tidied away his cuff links, his handkerchief, his wallet, his pocket diary, his chronometer watch, and his pen.

  This now dead room was the lounge-dining room of almost four gen
erations of Gratiolets: Juste, Emile, François, and Olivier lived here from the end of the eighteen eighties to the early nineteen fifties.

  The concessions for Rue Simon-Crubellier were first allocated after 1875 on land belonging, for one part, to a timber merchant named Samuel Simon and, for the other part, to a Norbert Crubellier, a hirer of hansom cabs. Their immediate neighbours – Guyot Roussel, the animal-painter Godefroy Jadin, and De Chazelles, the nephew and heir of Madame de Rumford, who was none other than Lavoisier’s widow – had begun to build long before, taking advantage of the construction permits allocated to the area surrounding the Monceau Gardens, which were to make the neighbourhood an area favoured by the artists and painters of the period. But Simon and Crubellier did not believe in the residential future of a suburb still largely given over to small trades, full of washhouses, dye works, workshops, warehouses, storerooms of all kinds, factories and small plant, such as Monduit and Béchet’s Foundry at 25 Rue de Chazelles, where the restoration work on the Vendôme column was carried out and where, from 1883, Bartholdi’s gigantic Liberty would rise, section by section, with a head and arms reaching higher than the roofs of the surrounding buildings for over a year. So Simon was content to fence his land and claimed there would always be time to parcel it out for building when there was a demand for it, and on his land Crubellier put up a few clapboard huts where he had his worst cabs botched up; the neighbourhood was almost completely built up before the two landowners finally grasped where their true interests lay and decided to cut the road which has borne their name ever since.

  Juste Gratiolet had been doing business with Simon for some time already, and he immediately put himself down for a parcel of land. The same architect, Lubin Auzère, sometime winner of the celebrated Prix de Rome, built all the blocks on the odd-numbered side, the even side being entrusted to his son, Noël: they were both decent architects, but without imagination, who built virtually identical blocks: ashlar façades, the rear side having wooden facing panels, with balconies on the second and fifth floors and two floors of attics, one under the eaves.

  Juste Gratiolet himself lived in the building very little. He preferred his farm in Berry and, for stays in Paris, a bungalow he rented at Levallois. Nonetheless, he reserved some of the apartments for himself and for his children. He fitted out his own dwelling with extreme simplicity: a bedroom with an alcove, a dining room with a fireplace – these two rooms floorboarded in the English style, thanks to the grooving machine he had just patented – and a big kitchen floored with hexagonal tiles which created an illusion of cubes that could be looked at from two different angles. There was piped water in the kitchen; gas and electricity were not put in until much later.

  No one in the building ever knew Juste Gratiolet, but several tenants – Mademoiselle Crespi, Madame Albin, Valène – remember his son Emile very clearly. He was a man with a harsh look and a worried face, which is hardly surprising if you think of the troubles he had as the eldest of the four Gratiolet children. He was only known to have two pleasures in life: playing the pipes – he had been a member of the city pipe and drum band at Levallois, but all he could remember how to play was Le Gai Laboureur, which tended to get on his audience’s nerves – and listening to the radio: the only luxury he ever allowed himself in all his life was the purchase of an ultramodern wireless set: beside the dial bearing the exotic and mysterious names of broadcasting stations – Hilversum, Sottens, Allouis, Vatican, Kerguélen, Monte Ceneri, Bergen, Tromsö, Bari, Tangiers, Falun, Horby, Beromünster, Puzzoli, Muscat, Amara – a disc lit up, and four orthogonal beams coming from a luminous centre point shrank as the set tuned in progressively to the required wavelength, until they were nothing more than an ultrathin cross.

  François, the son of Emile and Jeanne, was not a very jovial man either; a long-limbed creature with a thin nose and short sight, who suffered premature balding and gave off an impression of sometimes almost poignant melancholy. Unable to live solely on the income the building produced, he took a job as an accountant with a wholesale tripe dealer. He sat in a glass-walled office overlooking the shop and entered his columns of figures with no distraction other than watching butchers in bloody aprons doling out heaps of calves’ heads, lungs, spleens, ruffles, tongues, and necks. He, for his part, hated offal, and found its smell so fetid that he almost fainted every morning when he had to cross the main hall to get to his office. These daily trials certainly did nothing to improve his humour, but for some years allowed those in the building who liked kidneys, livers, and sweetbreads to obtain top-class supplies at rock-bottom prices.

  None of the Gratiolet furniture remains in the two-roomed flat Olivier has converted for himself and his daughter on the seventh floor. For lack of space in the first place, and then for need of money, he disposed of the furniture piece by piece, as well as the carpets, the tableware, and the trinkets. The four things he sold last were four large drawings which Marthe, François’s wife, had inherited from a distant cousin, an enterprising Swiss who had made a fortune during the First World War by buying carloads of garlic and bargefuls of condensed milk and reselling trainloads of onions and holds full of Gruyère cream cheese, orange concentrate, and pharmaceutical products.

  The first drawing, signed Perpignani, was called The Dancer with Gold Coins: the dancer, a Berber girl wearing brightly coloured clothing, with a snake tattooed on her right forearm, dances amongst the gold coins thrown by the crowd around her;

  the second was a meticulous copy of The Crusaders’ Entry at Constantinople, signed by someone called Florentin Dufay, who is known to have been a regular visitor to Delacroix’s studio for a while, but who left very few works;

  the third was a large landscape after the taste of Hubert Robert: in the background, Roman ruins; in the foreground, to the right, young girls, one of whom carries on her head a large, almost flat basket full of Agen plums;

  the fourth and last was a study in pastels by Joseph Ducreux for his portrait of the violinist Beppo. This virtuoso, who was extremely popular throughout the Revolutionary period (“I shalla playa violina”, he replied when he was asked, during the Terror, how he intended to serve the Nation), had come to France at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI. His ambition then was to be appointed King’s Violinist, but Louis Guéné was the one chosen. Racked by jealousy, Beppo dreamt of outshining his rival in everything: on learning that François Dumont had just painted a miniature on ivory portraying Guéné, Beppo rushed to Joseph Ducreux and commissioned his own portrait. The painter accepted, but it soon turned out that this fiery instrumentalist was incapable of holding a pose for more than a few seconds; the miniaturist tried to work in the presence of this voluble and excitable model who kept interrupting him every minute, but soon decided he would rather quit, and there remains from the commission only this preparatory sketch in which the unkempt Beppo, with his eyes upturned, holding his violin firmly and with his bow at the ready, is apparently striving to look even more inspired than his enemy.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

  Dinteville, 3

  THE BATHROOM ADJACENT to Dr Dinteville’s bedroom. At the rear, through a half-open door, you can see a bed with a tartan cover, a black, varnished wooden chest of drawers, and an upright piano with an open score on its music stand: a transcription of Hans Neusiedler’s Dances. At the foot of the bed lies a pair of clogs; on the chest of drawers, a bulky work in a white leather binding, Alexandre Dumas’s Great Dictionary of Cooking, and, in a glass bowl, crystallography models, minutely sculpted pieces of wood representing some of the holohedral and hemihedral shapes of crystalline systems: the straight prism on a hexagonal base; the oblique prism on a rhombus base; the pointed cube; the cubo-octahedron; the cubo-dodecahedron; the rhomboid dodecahedron; the pyramidal hexagonal prism. Above the bed hangs a picture signed D. Bidou: it portrays a very young girl, lying in a meadow, flat on her front, shelling peas; beside her, a little dog – a long-eared, long-nosed Artois beagle – sits panting, with the look of a go
od dog.

  The bathroom floor has hexagonal tiles; the walls have rectangular white tiles up to shoulder height, the remainder being hung with a light yellow washable wallpaper with sea-green stripes. Beside the bath, which is half hidden by a rather dirty white nylon shower curtain, stands a wrought-iron jardinière containing a few sickly sprouts of a green plant with delicately yellow-veined leaves. On the washbasin splashback various accessories and toiletries can be seen: a razor of the cut-throat variety, in a shark-skin sheath, a nailbrush, a pumice stone, and a bottle of hair-restorer on the label of which a hirsute, guffawing, and big-bellied Falstaff character displays advantageously an exaggeratedly bushy red beard beneath the gaze, more astounded than amused, of two merry wives whose bosoms spill out of slack-laced corsages. On the towel rail beside the sink a dark-blue pyjama trouser has been carelessly thrown.

  Dr Dinteville received an absolutely standard upbringing and education: a boring, properly looked-after childhood with a touch of something sinister as well as something shameful, medical school at Caen, medics’ pranks, military service at the Navy Hospital at Toulon, a thesis written up at top speed by ill-paid hack students on Dyspneic Frequencies in Fallot’s Tetralogy. Etiological Considerations on Seven Observations, a few locum jobs until, in the late nineteen fifties, he took over a general practice which his predecessor had served for forty-seven years without a break.

  Dinteville was not an ambitious man, and he was quite content with the notion of becoming just a good small-town doctor, a man everyone in the little place would call Good Old Dr Dinteville just as they had called his predecessor Good Old Dr Raffin, and whose patients would be relieved just to hear him say “Say Aah”. But about two years after he moved to Lavaur, a chance discovery altered the tranquil course of his life. One day, as he was taking up to the loft some old volumes of La Presse Médicale which good old Dr Raffin had judged desirable to keep and which he himself couldn’t allow to be thrown away – as if there were still things to be learned from these volumes with their collapsed bindings, going back to the twenties and thirties – Dinteville found in a trunk of old family papers a nicely bound booklet in 16° format entitled De structura renum, and whose author was one of his ancestors, Rigaud de Dinteville, surgeon ordinary to the Princess Palatine, a man famous for his skill in operations on gallstones, which he did with a little blunt-pointed knife of his own invention. Summoning the remnants of his school Latin, Dinteville skimmed through the work and found sufficiently interesting things in it to bring it down to his office, together with an old edition of Gaffiot’s Latin dictionary.