Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  When they got back, summonses and final demands were heaped on the doormat. Gas and electricity were cut off, and then, on the building manager’s application, valuers came to prepare the bankruptcy auction of their furniture.

  That was when the incredible happened: at the very moment they were pasting a yellow notice on the main door of the building announcing that a roup sale of furniture formerly the property of Réol, M and L (fine modern bedroom suite, large case clock, Louis XIII–style dresser, etc.) would be held on the fourth day following, Réol, on going in to work, discovered that he had been appointed deputy head of department and that his salary would rise from one thousand nine hundred to two thousand seven hundred francs a month. At a stroke, the Réol couple’s total monthly repayments became to all intents and purposes smaller than one quarter of their net income, and the MATRASCO accounts office could legally unfreeze the very same day a special grant-in-aid totalling five thousand francs. Although in order to stave off the confiscation Réol was obliged to pay hefty bailiffs’ and valuers’ fees, he was in a position to put himself on the right side of the gas and electricity companies and of the building manager within forty-eight hours.

  Three months later they paid off the last instalment on the bedroom suite and had almost no trouble at all, the following year, in paying back Louise’s parents and Mademoiselle Crespi and redeeming their watches, jewels, television, and camera.

  Today, three years on, Réol is head of department, and the hard-won bedroom suite has lost none of its splendour. Standing on the violet nylon carpet, the bed, set against the middle of the rear wall, is an extra-low carcass sheathed in a material just like suede, amber in colour, with a “master saddler” finish of a strap with a bronze buckle, and a white acrylic fur bedspread. It stands flanked on both sides by a pair of matching bedside tables with brushed-steel surfaces and built-in adjustable spotlights and SW-LW radio alarm. Against the right-hand wall there is a chest of drawers-cum-dressing table, standing on a semi-elliptical metal pedestal, trimmed in hide-style suedette, with two drawers and a special tray for storing bottles, a large seventy-eight-centimetre mirror, and a matching pouf. Against the left-hand wall stands a large four-door mirror-fronted wardrobe on a matt anodised aluminium plinth with a strip-light under the pelmet and a frieze upholstered, like the side panels, in a material matching the rest of the suite.

  Four objects more recently acquired have been incorporated into the original furniture. The first is a white telephone, on one of the bedside tables. The second, hanging over the bed, is a large rectangular print in a bottle-green leather frame: it portrays a small seaside square: two boys are sitting on the harbour wall playing dice. On the steps of a monument a man is reading a newspaper in the shadow of a sword-wielding hero. A girl is filling her tub at the fountain. A fruit-seller is lying beside his scales. Through the empty window and door openings of a tavern, two men can be seen drinking their wine in the depths.

  The third object, between the bedroom door and the dressing table, is a crib in which a newborn babe sleeps on his stomach, clenching his fists;

  and the fourth is a photographic enlargement, fixed to the wooden door with four drawing pins: it portrays the four Réols: Louise, in a flowery dress, holds their elder son by the hand, and Maurice, with his white shirtsleeves rolled above his elbows, holds in arms outstretched towards the camera a naked baby, as though he wants to demonstrate that it is a perfect model, without a blemish.

  CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

  Bartlebooth, 5

  Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère

  BARTLEBOOTH’S STUDY IS a rectangular room whose walls are lined with dark wooden bookshelves; most of them are now empty, but 61 black boxes still remain, all identically tied with grey ribbon sealed with wax, stacked together on the last three shelves on the rear wall, to the right of the padded door giving on to the entrance hall, on whose lintel has hung for many, many years an Indian puppet with a big wooden head which seems to be watching over this austere and neutral space through its big, slit eyes like an enigmatic and almost disturbing guardian.

  In the centre of the room, a scialytic lamp, held up by a whole system of cords and pulleys distributing its huge weight over the whole area, illumines with its unfaltering light a large square table draped with a black cloth in the middle of which an almost completed puzzle is laid out. It depicts a little port in the Dardanelles at the mouth of the river which the Ancient Greeks called Maiandros, the Meander.

  * * *

  The shore is a chalky, arid strip of sand, sparsely dotted with gorse and dwarf trees; in the left foreground, the shoreline widens into a creek cluttered with dozens and dozens of black-hulled fishing boats whose flimsy rigging merges into an inextricable tangle of vertical and diagonal lines. In the middle distance, a mass of coloured spots picks out vines, seedbeds, yellow fields of mustard, black gardens of magnolia trees, red stone quarries on the shoulders of gentle slopes. Further behind, over the whole right-hand side of the watercolour, far inland, the ruins of an ancient city loom with surprising sharpness: preserved by a miracle for centuries and centuries beneath layers of silt deposited by the sinuous stream, the marble and ashlar flags of the recently excavated thoroughfares, dwellings, and temples trace out the city’s ground plan quite perfectly: it is a crisscross of extremely narrow streets, a life-size model of an exemplary labyrinth made of blind alleys, backyards, crossroads, side streets, which girdle the remains of a huge and sumptuous acropolis surrounded by the remnants of pillars, crumbling arcades, gaping stairways opening onto collapsed balconies, just as if, in the heart of this now almost fossilised maze, this unforeseeable vista had been purposely concealed, in the manner of those palaces in oriental tales whither mysterious agents convey by night a person who, brought back home before daybreak, can never find his way back to the magic dwelling which he ends up believing he visited only in a dream. A stormy, crepuscular sky, full of dark-red scudding clouds, dominates this immobile and leaden landscape from which all trace of life seems to have been banished.

  Bartlebooth is seated at his table, in his great-uncle Sherwood’s armchair, a swivelling and rocking Napoleon III armchair in mahogany and lie-de-vin leather. To his right, on the top of a little drawer-desk, stands a dark-green lacquered tray bearing a crackled porcelain teapot, a cup and a saucer, a jug of milk, a silver egg-cup with its egg untouched, and a white napkin rolled in a whorled napkin ring, said to have been designed by Gaudi for the refectory of the College of Saint Theresa of Jesus; to his left, in the revolving bookcase beside which James Sherwood had his photograph taken long ago, lies an unsorted pile of miscellaneous books and objects: Berghaus’s World Atlas; the Dictionary of Geography by Meissas and Michelot; a photograph portraying Bartlebooth at the age of thirty or so mountaineering in Switzerland, wearing ventilated snow-goggles, with alpenstock, mittens, and a wool cap pulled over his ears; a detective novel called Dog Days; an octagonal mirror with a frame inlaid with mother-of-pearl; a wooden Chinese puzzle in the shape of a star-faced dodecahedron; a French translation of Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg in a two-volume edition bound in fine grey cloth with gold-leaf titles on black labels; a walking stick with a secret compartment in the top concealing a diamond-studded watch; a tiny full-length portrait of a long-faced Renaissance man wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a long fur coat; an ivory billiard ball; an incomplete set of the works of Walter Scott in English, in magnificent bindings embossed with the arms of the Chisholm clan; and two Epinal woodcuts, one of Napoleon I inspecting the Oberkampf manufactory in 1806 and unpinning his own Legion of Honour cross to attach it to the spinner’s lapel, the other a very free version of The Ems Telegram in which the artist, flouting all verisimilitude, has brought together in the same scene all the main actors in the affair, showing Bismarck, with his mastiffs lying at his feet, using a pair of scissors to edit the message which Councillor Abeken has handed him, whilst at the other end of the room Kaiser Wilhelm I indicates with an insolent smile t
o Ambassador Benedetti, who bows his head at the affront, that the audience granted him is now closed.

  Bartlebooth is seated at his puzzle. He is a thin, old man, almost fleshless, with a bald head, a waxy complexion, blank eyes, dressed in a washy blue wool dressing gown tied at the waist with a grey cord. His feet, in goat-kid moccasins, rest on a fringe-edged silk rug; his head is very slightly tipped back, his mouth is half open, and his right hand grips the armrest of his chair whilst his left hand, lying on the table in a not very natural way, in not far short of a contorted position, holds between thumb and index finger the very last piece of the puzzle.

  It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it will soon be eight o’clock in the evening. Madame Berger is back from her surgery and is making a meal, and Poker Dice slumbers on a fluffy sky-blue bedspread; Madame Altamont is putting on her make-up in front of her husband, who has just come in from Geneva; the Réols have just finished dinner, and Olivia Norvell is about to leave on her fifty-sixth world tour; Kléber is playing patience, and Hélène is mending the right sleeve of Smautf’s jacket, and Véronique Altamont is looking at an old photograph of her mother, and Madame Trévins is showing Madame Moreau a postcard coming from the village where they were born.

  It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it will soon be eight o’clock in the evening. Cinoc, in his kitchen, opens a tin of pilchards in spice whilst looking up an index of obsolete words; Dr Dinteville finishes examining an old woman; on Cyrille Altamont’s deserted desk two butlers spread a white tablecloth; in the service-entrance corridor five delivery men pass a lady who has come to search for her cat; Isabelle Gratiolet builds a precarious house of cards beside her father as he reads a treatise on anatomy.

  It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it will soon be eight o’clock in the evening. Joseph Nieto and Ethel Rogers are about to go down to the Altamonts’; on the stairs, porters have come for Olivia Norvell’s trunks, and a woman from an estate agency is coming to have a late look at the flat Gaspard Winckler used to occupy, and a displeased Hermann Fugger comes back out of the Altamonts’, and two similarly dressed doorstep salesmen pass by on the fourth-floor landing, and the blind tuner’s grandson waits for his grandfather, sitting on the stairs reading of the adventures of Carel van Loorens, and Gilbert Berger takes down the dustbins as he wonders how to solve the complicated puzzle of his serial novel; in the entrance hall Ursula Sobieski looks for Bartlebooth’s name on the list of occupants, and Gertrude, who has returned to drop in on her former mistress, stops for a minute to say good day to Madame Albin and Madame de Beaumont’s home help; right at the top the Plassaerts do their accounts, and their son sorts out once more his collection of illustrated blotters, and Geneviève Foulerot takes a bath before collecting her baby from the concierge, who looks after him, and “Hortense” listens to music on headphones whilst waiting for the Marquiseaux, and Madame Marcia in her bedroom opens a jar of malosol cucumbers, and Béatrice Breidel has her classmates in, and her sister Anne tries out another way of slimming.

  It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and in a moment it will be eight o’clock in the evening; the workers converting Morellet’s old room are knocking off; Madame de Beaumont is resting on her bed before dinner; Léon Marcia remembers the lecture Jean Richepin came to give at his sanatorium; in Madame de Beaumont’s drawing room two sated kittens sleep deeply.

  It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it is eight o’clock in the evening. Seated at his jigsaw puzzle, Bartlebooth has just died. On the tablecloth, somewhere in the crepuscular sky of the four hundred and thirty-ninth puzzle, the black hole of the sole piece not yet filled in has the almost perfect shape of an X. But the ironical thing, which could have been foreseen long ago, is that the piece the dead man holds between his fingers is shaped like a W.

  END OF THE SIXTH AND LAST PART

  Epilogue

  SERGE VALÈNE DIED a few weeks later, during the mid-August bank holiday. It was nearly a month since he had left his room. The death of his old pupil and the disappearance of Smautf, who had left the building the very next day, had dealt him a terrible blow. He hardly took any food any more, lost his words, left sentences hanging. Madame Nochère, Elzbieta Orlowska, and Mademoiselle Crespi took turns caring for him, went up to see him two or three times a day, made him a bowl of clear soup, tidied up his bedclothes and pillows, did his laundry, helped him wash and change, and took him to the lavatory at the end of the corridor.

  The building was virtually empty. Several of the people who usually didn’t go on holiday, or had stopped going on holidays, were away that year: Madame de Beaumont had been invited to be honorary president at the Alban Berg Festival held in Berlin to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the 40th anniversary of his death (and of the Concerto in Memory of an Angel) and the 50th anniversary of the world première of Wozzeck; Cinoc, overcoming his fear of flying and of US Immigration, which he thought still happened on Ellis Island, had finally responded to the invitations he had been getting for years from two distant cousins, a Nick Linhaus who owned a nightclub (The Nemo Club) at Dempledorf (Nebraska), and a Bobby Hallowell, a police doctor at Santa Monica (California); Léon Marcia had let his wife and son drag him off to a rented villa near Divonne-les-Bains; and Olivier Gratiolet, despite the very poor state of his leg, had insisted on spending three weeks with his daughter on the Isle of Oléron. Even those who had stayed on at Rue Simon-Crubellier for the month of August took advantage of the long weekend of the fifteenth to get away from Paris for three days: the Pizzicagnolis went to Deauville and took Jane Sutton with them; Elzbieta Orlowska went to see her son at Nivillers, and Madame Nochère left to go to her daughter’s wedding at Amiens.

  On Friday the fourteenth of August, the only people left in the building were Madame Moreau, attended day and night by her nurse and Madame Trévins, Mademoiselle Crespi, Madame Albin, and Valène. And when Mademoiselle Crespi went up towards the end of the morning to take the aged artist two boiled eggs and a cup of tea, she found him dead.

  He was resting on his bed, fully dressed, peaceful and puffy, with his arms crossed on his chest. A large square canvas with sides over six feet long stood by the window, halving the small area of the maid’s room in which he had spent the largest part of his life. The canvas was practically blank: a few charcoal lines had been carefully drawn, dividing it up into regular square boxes, the sketch of a cross-section of a block of flats which no figure, now, would ever come to inhabit.

  END

  Paris, 1969–78

  11 RUE SIMON-CRUBELLIER

  Names of previous occupants are given in italics.

  APPENDICES

  Alphabetical Checklist of Some of the Stories Narrated in this Manual

  (Numbers refer to the chapter in which the story occurs, generally for the first time, but not necessarily in full)

  Mark Twain’s Tale, 94.

  The Count of Gleichen’s Tale, 10.

  The Emperor’s Messenger’s Tale, 78.

  The German Chemist’s Tale, 62.

  The Polish Beauty’s Tale, 57.

  The Puzzle-Maker’s Tale, 8.

  The Puzzle-Maker’s Wife’s Tale, 53.

  The Russian Singer’s Tale, 6.

  The Swedish Diplomat’s Tale, 31.

  The Tale of Five Sisters who all made it, 89.

  The Tale of Four Young Folk stuck in the lift, 38.

  The Tale of Freischutz the Dachshund, 59.

  The Tale of “Hortense”, 41.

  The Tale of Johann Sigismond Küsser, 7.

  The Tale of Lady Forthright and her coachman, 4.

  The Tale of Lomonosov’s admirer, 60.

  The Tale of the Acrobat who did not want to get off his trapeze ever again, 13.

  The Tale of the Actor who faked his own death, 34.

  The Tale of the Archaeologist who trusted legends too much, 2.

  The Tale of the A
rgentinian Airman, 55.

  The Tale of the Art Critic looking for the masterpiece, 87.

  The Tale of the Australian Actress, 79.

  The Tale of the Ballerina who had an abortion, 88.

  The Tale of the Banker’s Daughter who wanted to be an actress, 55.

  The Tale of the Black Boxer who never won a match, 40.

  The Tale of the Building’s Senior Citizen, 20.

  The Tale of the Burgundian Cook, 90.

  The Tale of the Captain who explored New Guinea, 80.

  The Tale of the Chambermaid who had a son of father unknown, 83.

  The Tale of the Cheated Doctor, 96.

  The Tale of the Clown from Warsaw, 57.

  The Tale of the Curio Dealer and her watches, 66.

  The Tale of the Deported Schoolboy, 43.

  The Tale of the Designer who had to dismantle the kitchen he was so proud of, 65.

  The Tale of the Director who scorned the classics, 75.

  The Tale of the Doctor whose patient was poisoned by order of William Randolph Hearst, 59.

  The Tale of the Eccentric American Lady, 55.

  The Tale of the Ex-Vet who fell in love with a mustachioed Marseillaise, 85.

  The Tale of the Fair Italian and the teacher of physics and chemistry, 27.

  The Tale of the Fiancée captured by Barbary pirates, 78.

  The Tale of the Former Fighter in the International Brigade, 45.

  The Tale of the Frustrated Botanist, 72.

  The Tale of the German Industrialist with a passion for cooking, 36.

  The Tale of the Girl who ran away, 31.