Portrait of a Man

by Georges Perec

  He’d been standing a bit like an idiot right in the middle of the salon when he saw her come into the hallway and then hesitate at the door, presumably because she had just noticed his presence, before turning firmly towards Rufus with Juliette in her wake (the latter seeming somewhat overwhelmed by events) – What did he do? He’d not stirred. He’d taken advantage of the fact that he was in relative shadow, as far from the flaming hearth as he was from the lamps at the bar, to keep quite still. Impassive. The one thing not to do. The last thing he should have done. Not the slightest movement. The reflex of dignity. What did dignity have to do with it? The best way to turn something that, an instant before, might still have seemed a mere misunderstanding into an insurmountable obstacle. Why had he suddenly turned to stone? Since he’d been expecting her for an hour or more while nonetheless pretending to get Rufus and Juliette to confirm that she wasn’t coming, it was downright hypocritical of him to pretend to be surprised and stand stock still like a circus dog! Was he nailed or screwed to the floor? His strange posture in the middle of the room with a glass in his hand, dignified and attentive, draped in his dignity, striving to mislead by adopting the stiff and abstracted pose of a drunk, but not being very good at it he paid more attention to his own heartbeat, not daring to look anywhere, not daring even to finish his drink. He could have said something, or shouted, or screamed. He could have gone up to her. He might have done anything he chose. But he didn’t. Not a twitch. He didn’t even frown, blink, or breathe in.

  His arm raised, the glint of the blade. He’d collapsed in a heap, drowning in his own blood. Stout, flabby, a healthy complexion. Then flopping down the stairs in his stained shirt and a bloody towel round his neck, like a slowly deflating red balloon …

  You know nothing. You thought you were a champion. You thought it had happened. Your heady moment to have the world in your arms. You’re a dolt, you can barely draw a circle, you’re a wimp. What’s happened serves you right. That’ll teach you how big your boots are! What did it all add up to? Took yourself for an Antonello, did you? But you’re barely good enough to make a proper gesso duro. We thought we were the greatest forger auf der Erde, did we? We thought it would be kind of fun to make a real period piece, a cute little Renaissance portrait, did we? So we said to ourselves why not let’s have a go mate it’s better than twiddling thumbs. Indeed it is. But a wee Condottiere can’t be pinned down just like that. The other guy had been around for a while. He knew how things stacked up. Had a few tricks up his sleeve. But you’re as witless as a day-old chick with cotton wool between its ears, and you’ve got no experience either. A nothingburger.

  Something murky. What was murky? Something he still couldn’t understand. A connection, a link. A link in the chain. Altenberg, Geneva, Split, Sarajevo, Belgrade. Then Paris. Then Rufus. Then Madera? Meanwhile? The evening of the reception, or the day before, or the day after. At first, nothing. Nothing to report. Days dragged on. Then came facts, a story, a fate, a caricature of fate. To end with this obviousness, this bloody heap, Madera’s corpse, and blood trickling between the feet of the chair …

  Escape, of course, but why? What’s in the way? Some plaster, some bricks, not much stone, and then some packed earth. How many feet? A man-sized hole, just beneath the level of the basement window. How many hours? The same image crosses your mind like a sudden and brutal slap: Rufus bursting into the studio to find you right here, slumped on your bed surrounded by cigarette butts, half hidden in a cloud of smoke … Otto had made a call. Was Rufus out? What would he be doing in his hotel room at four in the afternoon? Otto will call again this evening … You’ve still got a chance. A few hours … Enough time to get the right tools …

  Wherever it may be, one day a telephone will crackle and a far distant voice will come through, there’ll be the sound of footsteps, the knock on your door, three soft taps, there’ll be a hand on your shoulder, somewhere, sometime, in the metro, on a beach, in the street, at a station. A day, a month, a year will have gone by, hundreds or thousands of miles will have been travelled, and someone will suddenly hail you, come up to you, will meet your gaze for an instant and then vanish. Night train. Empty compartment. Fuzzy images. You’ll be lying on your bunk, no way out. Who will get you first – Rufus, or the police? One and then the other? A fine piece of melodrama, an avenging finger pointed at you – that’s him we’ve got him keep it up lads go to it – then banner headlines in huge type. In court today. Read all about it. Eight columns wide. Headless corpse found in alley. You shall show my head to the people. Second by second. The carriage shudders over the fish-plates. Every sixty feet? Every thirty feet? You’re fleeing. Fleeing at 120 kilometres an hour. You’re in an empty train rushing along at 120 kilometres an hour. You’re sitting in a facing seat by the window. Wan lights flicker now and then on the other side of the cold pane. Where are you going? Genoa, Rome, Munich. Anywhere. What are you running away from? The whole world knows you are on the run, you’re standing still, the moon on the horizon is keeping up with you. Anywhere as long as it’s out of this world. You won’t make it.

  He was cold. The cigarette he’d tossed on the floor was burning itself out. A wisp of smoke rose vertically almost to meet his eye, then broke into irregular whorls that wobbled for a few seconds and then dispersed as if blown by an invisible puff from nowhere, maybe a draught from the window.

  Truth. Nothing but the. I killed Madera. I killed Anatole. I killed Anatole Madera. The killer of Anatole Madera was me. I did murder. Murdered Anatole Madera. Everyone murdered Madera. Madera is a man. Man is mortal. Madera is mortal. Madera is dead. Madera had to die. Madera was going to die. All I did was speed things up a bit. He was under sentence. He was ill. His doctor reckoned he had only a few years of life left. If you can call that a life. My word, did he live in pain. He wasn’t feeling very well that afternoon. He had a lot on his mind. If I hadn’t done anything maybe he would have died in any case. He would have gone out like a candle just by blowing himself out. He would have committed suicide …

  “I don’t think that’ll be a problem.” What did he know about it, in the first place, and why had he said it? The surroundings in that lounge, the potential effect of the lighting, the bar, the fire in the hearth. They both had a glass in their hands. And at a stroke the whole world, his whole world, materialised around him. After a long period of solitude the past suddenly became present, he was abruptly immersed in all that was most familiar to him, reduced to the dimensions of a lounge: everyone was there in the off-kilter lighting made of jagged leaps of reddish flames in the hearth and the excessively muted, over-intimate and artificial glow from the bar. Jérôme. Rufus and Juliette, Mila. Anna and Nicolas. And Geneviève. And Madera, supremely detestable, with teeth that gleamed when he smiled. Winter suit. A ballroom dancer’s black-and-white shoes. At that point perhaps he should have been wary, should have thought calmly and methodically to try to understand what it all meant, what was henceforth impossible. He could see the full, stark, unaltered story of his last twelve years just by looking in those eight smiling faces. Coincidences or plots? Did he need to go beyond the smiles, further than twelve years back? To find a chink in the wall, a logical connection. An equation: there had been this, then there was that. To make the world coherent once again, or for the first time, a reassuring world, so much more reassuring than all this flux and vagueness. When was that? When was it supposed to be? Was it one evening in the abominable heat of Sarajevo, in loneliness all the more absurd for being accepted? An afternoon looking at the Condottiere? There would be a sign, and he could already see the complicated workings of a machine set in motion: a switch clicks, a needle points, a filament breaks, and valves open … Would that do the trick? Had it done the trick? The oldest story in the world. His arm raised, the glint of a blade. Was that all it took for Madera to collapse with his throat slit?

  Now I’m lying on this bed, I haven’t shifted for maybe an hour. I’m not expecting anything. But I do want to live. Everybody wants
to live. All the same I do maybe have enough time left to get up, get to work, dig a hole, and escape. Couldn’t be easier. Couldn’t be harder. What’s difficult about it … ? Otto is now on the other side of the door and pacing up and down. He might have got through to Rufus, he might have told him …

  Might you be a coward? You are going to die. To die or tomorrow. You’re going to die very slowly. From fear. Thou shalt rot. To be scraped off the floor with a teaspoon, swept up, vacuumed away and disposed of in the waste. You like that. It amuses you.

  You’d like to look in the mirror and make faces. You’d like to wait until it’s all over without lifting a finger, without doing a thing, you’d like it to be just a bad dream so you can rewind and go back a day, a month or a year. You wait. He hangs around outside your door. He’s stupid and obedient, that’s fine. Good dog. Guard dog. You could try to bribe him. You go up to the door and raise your voice. Herr Otto Schnabel, would you like to earn ten thousand dollars for nothing? My dear dear Otto, ten thousand dollars, all yours. Ten thousand dollars and three cents? Ten thousand times ten thousand. A billion dollars? A big pack of chewing gum. An alien outfit with all the accessories. A machine gun with dum-dum bullets. A stuffed elephant. Come on, Otto, show some willing. Make a gesture. You want an ottomobile. An ottomatic. A nelly copter. You want a nellycopter. Without propellors. A nellyjet.

  You. You, the world’s greatest art forger. The grinning joker, inside art. You think that’s funny. You think waiting is a hoot. You’ve had enough, you’re fed up with it. At the end of your tether. What about tomorrow? And the day after? And the day after that? And the day after the day after? You can’t build the world from enlargements. You can’t conquer the world with side-angle lighting. You can’t lay out the world on a restored panel. You took a gamble and you lost. So what?

  Aware of your own misery. And the runner-up is: Winckler, Gaspard, for his remarkable rendition of The Swan. Wearing gown, toga, and a crown of laurels, you grumble and grouse as you climb the four steps to the podium …

  He stares at a blank spot on the wall. Tomorrow, tomorrow perhaps. Tomorrow dawn, or death. Or life. Or both, or neither, an intermediate state, a status quo. Why don’t you drop in on me in my purgatory, the other side of no man’s land …

  Go looking. Go and look, of course. Look for light, for daylight on the other side. The other side of the mountain … The always fatal outcome of repetitious movements of the hand, the same skilfully adjusted dose of colour, the same trap set once again beyond overweening ambition? To strive for a chef d’œuvre. The ambition of Tintoretto and Titian resuscitated, risen from the ashes. Monumental ambition? Monumental mistake. Antonellus Messaneus me pinxit. Without the look, the certainty, or the confidence. A tin-pot portrait of a man. A mere princeling, a pasty-faced cad, a hairless and miserly coward. A Condottiere who’d taken the wrong turn, a miserable bit-part actor who’d not had time to learn his lines. And what about him? What was he doing mixed up in that – he, the one and only, the prince of forgers and forger of princes, with his fine nose and his eagle eye, his poison voice and magic hand. He who thought he could draw on the purest spring and summon from his ultra-modern easel the supreme quintessence of Italian art and the indisputable apogee of the Renaissance? Was he master of the universe? Meister Gaspard Winckler! Why shouldn’t you laugh out loud? Señor Gaspard Winkleropoulos, alias El Greco. The world in his right hand. A walking art gallery!

  You’ve killed a man, you have, don’t you see. You committed murder. You think it’s easy. Well, it’s not. You think that committing murder has a meaning. Well, it doesn’t. You think it’s easy to paint a Condottiere. Well, it’s not. Nothing is easy. Nothing is quick. Everything is wrong. You could not but get it wrong. You could only ever end up like this. Caught in your own trap, by your own folly, by your own lies …

  *

  My future all of a sudden is laid out before me in time and space. Just these few yards still to cross. Just these few hours still to get through. It all comes down to this. This is where it all comes to a halt, where it all comes to a stop. It’s the edge and the threshold. It has to be crossed, and then anything can happen. The minute I get through the wall of this room maybe everything will begin to have a meaning again: my past, my present and my future. But first thousands upon thousands of meaningless gestures have to be performed one by one. Raise the arm, lower the arm. Until the earth shakes. Until the wall bursts and night shines forth in starry splendour. It’s simple. The simplest thing in the world. Raise the arm, arm raised, like …

  Gather your strength, try to summon it all up for a single push so as to begin living again, take this first step and be something other than a man lying on a bed playing at being dead in his own grave, the man you’re staring at as if he were somebody else. Why is it so easy? Why is it so hard? You don’t move. What’s the point of having a conscience? You killed a man. That’s serious. Very. Not a thing you should do. Madera hadn’t hurt you. Why did you kill Madera? No motives. He was fat and alive, he puffed like a sea-lion, he was ugly, he was heavy, he wandered around the laboratory, dangerously, right behind you, saying nothing, not looking at you; he hovered around the easel with his hands behind his back and his lips slightly parted, wheezing from asthma; he would go away and slam the door and you could hear his steps echoing in the stairwell, under the arch, and for a long time after that as you got back to painting with slightly unsteady hands, feeling outraged without knowing why, almost in a panic from the presence of that man, that mass of breathless fat that prowled around for a few minutes and disappeared and then returned just as hostile and mistrustful, making you feel as flustered as a schoolboy who’d been caught out, caught red-handed, sitting too far back in your chair, your brush hanging idly in your hand and an absent look on your face, looking at that never-endingly unfinished portrait of another evil and aggressive visage as if it were the most obvious symbol of the whole adventure. Was that the reason why Madera died? Was that also the reason why you killed him?

  Imprisoned, obviously. As in the Belgrade studio, long before. What was he waiting for in order to return? What was he really after? He had read Geneviève’s letter. “It seems to me sometimes that I understand you completely, absolutely, from top to bottom. I have to say that’s a pity, and also that I hope I’m wrong: if I am wrong then you must come back very quickly, as quickly as you can; if you put it off, then it can only mean I’m right, and you’d have to admit that everything that might have brought us together has lost all meaning.” That last sentence had made his eyes prickle as he sought desperately, for the fourth, fifth and eighth time to tell Geneviève why he was not yet able to go back to Paris. He crossed out words, crumpled up the paper and threw it away, started again … “You have to wait three more days, because one of the specialists from the Commission has just discovered in the National Library in Sarajevo a virtually unknown manuscript about Roman remains in the lower part of Split, in close proximity to the site of the eastern wall of Diocletian’s Palace, which suggests very strongly that excavations were undertaken on the site in 1908 with no results, and that is very serious …”

  Very serious. His eyes wandered desolately from one canvas to the other. Dear Geneviève. I cannot come back yet because. You’ll have to wait another day or two. You have to carry on waiting because. He recalled that in that exact moment when the crossed-out words – the tiny, utterly futile sentences he could not manage to put together because the whole was just as meaningless as the parts – jumped out at him like a swarm of poisonous sea-lice, in that same exact moment when out of his too-empty studio came the implacable, ironical and fleeting image of a prison, that same moment when as the crumpled sheets piled up on the floor there came to him the painful awareness of a blatant deception – the discovery of that disastrous manuscript was a grotesque invention – at that exact same moment his gaze wandered beyond the wide-open window to a place four hundred metres away on the other side of Bezistan, beneath the friendly, warm-looking great
red star of Borba that lit up the dark night, where the supposed consolation of a good booze-up awaited him in the press bar, the only place open so late. Could it be? Was it only now that this memory took on its full meaning, or had he been fully aware of it at the time? Had he deliberately agreed to seek refuge in a straightforward binge that would prevent him facing up to that letter for twelve hours or more? He’d picked up the phone, gone through his address book to find the right person to wake at 4.00 a.m. to go with him, lead him in his desperate quest for slivovitz, he’d found a suitable friend, an Italian journalist who might be at his hotel, he’d called the hotel …

  His hands more than his memory recalled the movements that one by one, in apparently incorruptible and anonymous innocence had begun to dismantle, undermine and demolish the impressive construction of his sanctuary. 2-3-0-1-9 Hotel Moskva, someone gabbled. Molim. Donnez-moi Mr Bartolomea Spolverini. Please could you call up Mr Spolverini. Bitte ich will sprechen zu Herr Spolverini. Certainly, sir. Clunks and clicks. Ringing in the far distance, the sound of footsteps, orders given curtly. Certainly, sir. The far-off, spiteful voice pregnant with innocent danger. Waiting. Second by second. Kilometres of cable weaving all round the earth … Dear Geneviève. Dear Geneviève I? I am going to drink instead of packing and catching the plane. Full stop. Tomorrow he will be dead drunk lying fully dressed in an unmade bed among Streten’s canvases, instead of being at Orly on a bright September day. Dear Geneviève. Paris, France. Waiting. Hands on the receiver, one of them gripping the earpiece, the other just touching it, held like a loudspeaker as if to mask the vileness of the conversation he was about to have, to hide the weakness under the words, the frankly excessive dismay, the self-confessed powerlessness, in all its tergiversation, to fabricate anything beyond a fictitious treasure … What’s the point of being aware?