Life

by Perec, Georges

  The fourth is a caricature by Blanchard, entitled When Hens Grow Teeth … It shows General Boulanger and the member of parliament Charles Floquet shaking hands.

  The fifth and last is a watercolour under the tide of The Handkerchief, which illustrates a classic scene of Parisian life: in the Rue de Rivoli a fashionable young lady drops her handkerchief and a young man in morning dress – narrow moustache, monocle, patent-leather shoes, a pink in his buttonhole, etc. – rushes to pick it up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Altamont, 2

  THE ALTAMONTS’ DINING room, like all the other street-facing rooms in the flat, has been specially set up for the great reception that will be held there shortly.

  It is an octagonal room, the four diagonal wall-sections of which hide a great number of cupboards. The floor is laid with glazed red hexagonal tiles, the walls are lined with cork paper. At the rear, there is the door to the kitchens, where three white shapes are bustling. To the right, double doors open wide onto the reception rooms. On the left, along the wall, four barrels of wine are set on wooden X-bar stands. In the middle, beneath a chandelier with an opaline bowl hanging on three gilded cast-iron chains, stands a table made out of a cylindrical block of lava from Pompeii, on which sits a six-sided smoked-glass table-top laden with little saucers, decorated in Chinese style, holding various snacks: fillets of marinated fish, shrimps, olives, cashew nuts, smoked sprats, stuffed vine leaves, canapés topped with salmon, asparagus tips, slices of egg, tomato, red tongue, anchovies, as well as miniature quiches, dwarf pizzas, and cheese sticks.

  An evening paper has been spread beneath the barrels, no doubt for fear the wine might drip. On one of the pages you can see a crossword puzzle, the same as the one Madame Moreau’s nurse had; on this one, though the grid has not been filled in completely, progress has nonetheless been made.

  Before the war, long before the Altamonts made a dining room out of it, this was the room where Marcel Appenzzell came to live for his short time in Paris.

  * * *

  Trained in the school of Malinowski, Marcel Appenzzell wanted to take his master’s teaching to its logical conclusion, and resolved to share the life of the tribe he would study so completely as to merge himself into it. In 1932, when he was twenty-three, he left, alone, for Sumatra. Laden with minimal baggage as free as he could make it of the instruments, weapons, and utensils of Western civilisation and consisting largely of traditional gifts – tobacco, rice, tea, necklaces – he hired a Malay guide called Soelli and began the ascent by canoe of the River Alritam, the black river. On the first days they passed some rubber tappers, and some men floating huge tropical-wood tree trunks downstream. After that they were completely alone.

  The aim of their expedition was a mysterious people whom the Malays called the Anadalams, or Orang-Kubus, or just Kubus. Orang-Kubus means “they who defend themselves”, and Anadalams means “the Sons of the Interior”. Whilst almost all of Sumatra’s population is settled near the coastline, the Kubus live in the heart of the island, in one of the most inhospitable regions of the world, a tropical forest full of leech-infested swamps. But many legends, documents, and remains seem to indicate that the Kubus were once masters of the island, before being conquered by invaders from Java and going into the heart of the jungle in search of their last retreat.

  One year earlier Soelli had managed to establish contact with a Kubu tribe in a village built not far from the river. He reached it with Appenzzell after three weeks on the river and on foot. But the village – five huts on stilts – was deserted. Appenzzell managed to persuade Soelli to carry on upriver. They found no other village, and after eight days Soelli decided to go back down to the coast. Appenzzell insisted on staying and in the end gave Soelli the canoe and almost all the equipment before plunging, almost empty-handed, into the forest.

  Soelli informed the Dutch authorities when he reached the coast. Several search parties were set up, but they found nothing.

  Appenzzell reappeared five years and eleven months later. A team of mineral surveyors travelling in a motor launch found him on the banks of the Musi, more than four hundred miles from his starting point. He weighed four and a half stone and was dressed only in a kind of trousers made of dozens of bits of cloth sewn together and held up by yellow braces that looked intact but had lost all their elasticity. He was brought back to Palembang and, after a short stay in the hospital, repatriated, not to Vienna, where he had been born, but to Paris, where his mother had settled in the meanwhile.

  The return journey lasted a month and gave him a chance to recover. At the start an invalid, barely able to move or feed himself, he had virtually lost the use of words and uttered only inarticulate grunts or, during the bouts of fever which gripped him every three to five days, long delirious strings; but bit by bit he recovered most of his physical and mental abilities, learnt again how to sit in a chair, how to use a knife and a fork, how to do his hair and how to shave (after the ship’s barber had rid him of nine-tenths of his hair and the whole of his beard), to wear a shirt, a detachable collar, a tie, and even – though this was certainly the hardest, for his feet resembled deeply fissured lumps of horn – how to put on shoes. When he landed at Marseilles his mother, who had come to meet him, was able to recognise him without too much trouble after all.

  Before his departure Appenzzell had been an assistant professor of ethnography at Graz (Steiermark). He was Jewish; the Anschluss had been proclaimed a few months earlier and it led to the application of a numerus clausus in all Austrian universities. Even his salary, which they’d carried on paying throughout his years of fieldwork, was frozen. Through the good offices of Malinowski, to whom he wrote, he met Marcel Mauss, who allowed him to give a course at the Institute of Ethnology in Paris on the Anadalams’ way of life.

  Marcel Appenzzell brought no articles, no documents, no notes, nothing at all, back from those 71 months, and he virtually refused to talk about them, on the pretext that he needed to keep his memories, impressions, and analyses whole and entire for his first lecture. He gave himself six months to sort his material out. To start with, he worked quickly, with pleasure, almost with ardour. But soon he began to slow down, to hesitate, to cross things out. When his mother came into his room she found him, most often, not at his desk but sitting straight-backed on the edge of his bed, hands on his knees, staring sightlessly at a wasp worrying a windowpane, or gazing as if he were trying to find some lost thread in the fringed grey-brown linen towel with its double black-brown border hanging on a nail behind the door.

  A few days before his first lecture – the title, The Anadalams of Sumatra. A Preliminary Approach, had been announced in various papers and journals, but Appenzzell hadn’t yet handed in to the Institute office the forty-line abstract for The Year’s Work in Sociology – the young ethnologist burnt all he had written, put a few things in a suitcase, and left, leaving a laconic note for his mother informing her he was going back to Sumatra and did not feel he had the right to divulge anything at all concerning the Orang-Kubus.

  A slim notebook partly filled in with mostly incomprehensible notes had escaped the burning. Some students at the Institute of Ethnology struggled to decipher it and, with the help of the few letters Appenzzell had sent Malinowski and others, alongside information from Sumatra and the accounts of people to whom Appenzzell had, exceptionally, let slip some detail of his adventures, they managed to piece together the main outline of what had happened to him and to rough out a crude picture of the mysterious “Sons of the Interior”.

  After a march of many days Appenzzell had finally found a Kubu village, a dozen huts on stilts set in a circle around the edge of a small clearing. The village had looked deserted at first glance, then he’d noticed several old men, lying on mats under the awnings of their huts, looking at him. He’d gone forward, greeted them with the Malayan gesture of stroking their fingers before placing his right hand on his heart, and put a gift-offering in front of each – a little bag of tea or tob
acco. But they didn’t answer, didn’t nod their heads, didn’t touch the gifts.

  A little later dogs began to bark and the village filled with men, women, and children. The men were armed with spears, but were not threatening. Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to notice he was there.

  Appenzzell spent several days in the village without succeeding in making contact with its laconic inhabitants. He exhausted his small supply of tea and tobacco to no effect; no Kubu – not even a child – ever took a single one of these little bags which the daily storm made useless by each evening. The best he could do was to watch how the Kubus lived and to begin to commit what he saw to writing.

  His main observation, as he described it briefly to Malinowski, confirms that the Orang-Kubus are indeed the descendants of a developed civilisation which was expelled from its lands and plunged into the forest, where it regressed. Thus the Kubus had steel tips on their spears and silver rings on their fingers, though they had lost all knowledge of metalworking. As for their language, it was quite close to the coastal tongues, and Appenzzell could understand it without major difficulty. What struck him especially was that they used a very restricted vocabulary, no larger than a few dozen words, and he wondered if the Kubus, in the image of their distant neighbours the Papuans, didn’t voluntarily impoverish their vocabulary, deleting words each time a death occurred in the village. One consequence of this demise was that the same word came to refer to an ever-increasing number of objects. Thus the Malay word for “hunting”, Pekee, meant indifferently to hunt, to walk, to carry, spear, gazelle, antelope, peccary, my’am – a type of very hot spice used lavishly in meat dishes – as well as forest, tomorrow, dawn, etc. Similarly Sinuya, a word which Appenzzell put alongside the Malay usi, “banana”, and nuya, “coconut”, meant to eat, meal, soup, gourd, spatula, plait, evening, house, pot, fire, silex (the Kubus made fire by rubbing two flints), fibula, comb, hair, hoja’ (a hair-dye made from coconut milk mixed with various soils and plants), etc. Of all the characteristics of the Kubus, these linguistic habits are the best known, because Appenzzell described them in detail in a long letter to the Swedish philologist Hambo Taskerson, whom he’d known in Vienna, and who was working at that time in Copenhagen, with Hjelmslev and Brøndal. He pointed out in an aside that these characteristics could perfectly well apply to a Western carpenter using tools with precise names – gauge, tonguing plane, moulding plane, jointer, mortise, jack plane, rabbet, etc. – but asking his apprentice to pass them to him by saying just: “Gimme the thingummy”.

  On the fourth day, when Appenzzell woke in the morning, the village had been abandoned. The shacks were empty. The whole population had gone; men, women, children, dogs, even the old men who normally didn’t budge from their mats had all gone and taken their meagre stock of yams, their three goats, their sinuya and their pekee.

  Appenzzell took more than two months to catch up with them. This time their shacks had been hurriedly built beside a stagnant, mosquito-infested pool. The Kubus didn’t speak or respond to his advances any more than they had the first time; one day, he saw two men trying to raise a great tree trunk felled by lightning, and went up to lend them a hand; but he’d hardly touched the tree before the two men dropped it and moved away. Next day, the village was once again deserted.

  For nearly five years, Appenzzell pursued them obstinately. Each time he barely caught up with them before they moved on again, plunging into more and more uninhabitable areas, rebuilding their villages ever more shakily. For a long time Appenzzell pondered on the function of this migratory behaviour. The Kubus were not nomadic, and since they did not grow crops on burn-baited land, they had no reason to move on so frequently; nor could it be accounted for by hunting or gathering requirements. Was it a religious ritual, or something to do with initiation rites, or magic connected with life or death? There was nothing to support any of these theories; Kubu rituals, if they existed, were impenetrably discreet, and there was nothing that seemed to connect these departures which were for Appenzzell, each time, quite unforeseeable.

  However, the truth, the cruel and obvious truth, finally dawned. It is admirably summarised at the end of the letter Appenzzell wrote to his mother from Rangoon about five months after leaving:

  However irksome are the discomfitures which a man who has given himself body and soul to the profession of ethnography may encounter in his attempt to grasp the deeper nature of Man in concrete terms – or, in other words, to apprehend the minimal sociality defining the human condition by conquering the heteroclite evidence of diverse cultures – and although an ethnographer may not aspire to more than the discovery of relative truths (since it is vain to hope to reach any final truth), the worst difficulty I have had to encounter was not at all of that kind: I wanted to go to the absolute limit of the primitive; had I not got all I wanted in these graceful Natives whom no one had seen before me, who would perhaps not be seen again after me? At the end of an exhilarating search, I had my savages, I asked for nothing more than to be one of them, to share their days, their pains, their rituals. Alas! they didn’t want to have me, they were not prepared to teach me their customs and beliefs! They had no use whatever for the gifts I laid beside them, no use at all for the help I thought I could give! It was because of me that they abandoned their villages and it was only to discourage me, to convince me there was no point in my persevering, that they chose increasingly inhospitable sites, imposing ever more terrible living conditions on themselves to show me they would rather face tigers and volcanoes, swamps, suffocating fog, elephants, poisonous spiders, than men. I think I know a good deal about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying….

  Marcel Appenzzell wrote no further letter. The search his mother undertook in order to find him was fruitless. Very soon war came and put a stop to it. Madame Appenzzell obstinately stayed on in Paris even after her name had appeared on a list of Jews not wearing the yellow star, published in the weekly Au Pilori. One evening the hand of a sympathiser slipped a note under her door warning her that she would be arrested next day at dawn. She succeeded in getting to Le Mans that night and from there crossed into the free zone and joined the Resistance. She was killed in June 1944 near Vassieux-en-Vercors.

  The Altamonts – Madame Altamont is Madame Appenzzel’s second cousin – took over the flat in the early nineteen fifties. They were then a young couple. Today, she is forty-five and he is fifty-five. They have a daughter of seventeen, Véronique, who paints watercolours and plays the piano. Monsieur Altamont is an international expert, virtually always away from Paris, and it even seems that this great reception is being held on the occasion of his annual return.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Bartlebooth, 1

  AN ANTECHAMBER, IN Bartlebooth’s flat.

  It’s an almost empty room, furnished with but a few straw-seated chairs, a pair of three-legged stools with red, fringed flat cushions, and a long, straight-backed bench-seat in greenish imitation-leather upholstery of the sort you used to see in railway-station waiting rooms.

  The walls are painted white, the floor is laid with a thick plastic covering. On a large cork square fixed to the rear wall, several postcards have been pinned: the battlefield of the Pyramids, the fish market at Dumyât, the old whalers’ quay at Nantucket, the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, the Hudson’s Bay Company building at Winnipeg, sunset at Cape Cod, the Bronze Pavilion in the Summer Palace in Peking, a reproduction of a drawing showing Pisanello offering four gold medals on a cushioned tray to Lionel d’Este, as well as an announcement edged in black:

  * * *

  Your presence is requested at the burial of

  GASPARD WINCKLER

  who passed away on 29 October 1973, in Paris in his 63rd year

  The funeral will take place on 3 November 1973 and will leave the Bichat Hospital Morgue, 170 Boulevard Ney, Paris 17, at 10 a.m.

  NO FLOWERS OR WREATHS

  * * *

  Bartlebooth’s three servants st
ay in this antechamber, awaiting their master’s problematical summonses on the bell. Smautf is standing near the window with one arm in the air, whilst Hélène, the maid, is restitching the seam that has come undone in the armpit of the right-hand sleeve of his jacket. Kléber, the chauffeur, sits on one of the chairs. He is not wearing his livery, but broad-belted cord trousers and a white woollen polo-neck sweater. He has just laid out on the green leather bench-seat a pack of fifty-two playing cards, face up, in four rows, and he is about to play a game of patience in which you first remove the four aces and then sort the pack into its four colour-suites by using the spaces made by the removal of the aces. Beside the cards lies an open book: it is an American novel by George Bretzlee, entitled The Wanderers: its action takes place in New York jazz circles in the early nineteen fifties.

  Smautf, as we know, has been Bartlebooth’s servant for fifty years. Kléber was hired as chauffeur in 1955 when Bartlebooth and Smautf returned from their world tour, at the same time as Madame Adèle was engaged as cook, Simone as the kitchen maid, Léonard as the wine steward-cum-butler, Germaine as the laundress, as well as an odd-job man, Louis, and a footman, Thomas. In those days Bartlebooth went out a lot, and also liked to entertain, giving very well-thought-of dinner parties; he would also invite distant relatives to stay, as well as people whose acquaintance he had made in the course of his travels.