Life

by Perec, Georges

  Innumerable records, with and without their sleeves, are spread around the room, mostly dance records, but with a few surprising variations included, such as: The Marches and Fanfares of the 2nd Armoured Division, The Ploughman and His Children, told in Cockney by Pierre Devaux, An Evening in Paris with Tom Lehrer, May ’68 at the Sorbonne, La Tempesta di Mare, concerto in Eb major, op. 8, No. 5, by Antonio Vivaldi, performed on the synthesiser by Léonie Prouillot; and absolutely everywhere dismembered cartons, hurriedly opened packaging, pieces of string, and gold-painted ribbon with curly spiral ends, showing that the party was given to celebrate the birthday of one or the other of the two girls, and that her friends have done her proud: amongst other things, and not counting the comestible solids and liquids brought as gifts by some of the guests, she received as presents: a small musical-box device which we can safely presume plays Happy Birthday To You; an ink drawing by Thorwaldsson depicting a Norwegian groom in his wedding outfit: short jacket with close-set silver buttons, starched shirt with straight corolla, waistcoat with silk-braided border, tight trousers brought in at the knee in bunches of woolly tassels, a soft hat, yellowish boots, and at his waist, in its leather sheath, his Dolknif or Scandinavian knife, which the true Norseman always carries; a tiny box of English watercolours – from which we may deduce that the girl enjoys painting; an old-fashioned poster showing a barman with mischievous eyes holding a long clay pipe and pouring himself a glass of Hulstkamp geneva (which he’s already raised to his lips on a smaller poster behind him, incorrectly mirroring the larger one in which it’s set), whilst crowds prepare to invade the tavern with three men – one in a straw boater, one in a felt hat, one in a top hat – jostling at the door; another drawing, by a certain William Falsten, an American cartoonist of the early years of this century, entitled The Punishment, showing a boy lying in bed thinking of the wonderful cake his family is sharing – this mental image being realised in a cloud-bubble above his head – and which he has not been allowed to taste, owing to some silly behaviour; and lastly, presents from jokers with a mildly morbid sense of humour, various trick items including a flick-knife that springs open at the slightest touch, and a frightful imitation of a big black spider.

  We can deduce from the general appearance of the room that the party was lavish, perhaps even grandiose, but that it did not turn riotous: there are a few spilt glasses, a few scorch-marks made by cigarettes on cushions and carpets, quite a few grease and wine stains, but no really irreparable damage has been done, except for one torn parchment lampshade, one pot of strong mustard spilt on Yvette Horner’s golden disc, and a bottle of vodka broken in a plantpot containing a fragile papyrus, which will surely not recover.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Marquiseaux, 2

  IT IS A bathroom. The floor and the walls are laid with glazed ochre-yellow hexagonal tiles. A man and a woman are kneeling in the bath, which is half-full of water. They are both about thirty years old. The man has placed his hands on the woman’s waist, and he is licking her left breast whilst she, with slightly arched back, clasps her companion’s sex organ in her right hand and caresses her own with her left. A third character is present at this scene: a young cat, black with bronze flecks and a white spot under the neck, is stretched out on the rim of the bath and seems to express utter astonishment in his yellow-green gaze. He wears a plaited leather collar bearing the regulation nameplate – Petit Pouce – with his RSPCA registration number, and the telephone number of his owners, Philippe and Caroline Marquiseaux; not their Paris number, since it would be most unlikely for Petit Pouce ever to go out of the flat and get lost in Paris, but the number of their country house: Jouy-en-Josas (Yvelines) 50.

  Caroline Marquiseaux is the Echards’ daughter and has taken over their flat. In 1966, when she had just turned twenty, she married Philippe Marquiseaux, whom she’d met a few months earlier at the Sorbonne, where both of them were history students. Marquiseaux was from Compiègne and lived in Paris in a minute room in Rue Cujas. The newly-weds thus moved into the room in which Caroline had grown up, whilst her parents kept their bedroom and the lounge-dining room. Within a few weeks, all four found such cohabitation unbearable.

  The first skirmishes broke out over the bathroom: Philippe, Madame Echard would howl in her sourest voice, preferably when the windows were wide open so that the whole building could hear properly, Philippe spends hours in the WC and purposely leaves the lavatory pan in a mess for others to clean up after him; the Echards, Philippe riposted, quite intentionally forgot their false teeth in toothmugs he and Caroline were supposed to use. Monsieur Echard would intervene as peacemaker and succeeded in preventing such conflicts from escalating beyond verbal insults and offensive allusions, and a bearable status quo was established on the basis of some gestures of good will on both sides and some agreed measures to facilitate shared domesticity: a timetable for the use of sanitary facilities, rigid separation of space, elaborate differentiation of towels, face cloths, and bathroom accessories.

  But if Monsieur Echard – a retired librarian with a bee in his bonnet about collecting evidence that Hitler was still alive – was bonhomie itself, his wife was an untamed shrew whose endless recriminations at mealtimes caused hostilities to be re-engaged: every evening the old woman harangued her son-in-law, on a different, made-up pretext almost every time: he would be late, or he would come to table without washing his hands, he hadn’t earned what was on his plate but that wouldn’t stop him being particular, my word no, he really ought to help Caroline now and again to lay the table or wash the dishes, etc. Usually Philippe bore this incessant nagging with phlegm, and sometimes even tried to joke about it; for example, one evening he brought his mother-in-law a present, a cactus, “as it so suits your character, mother dear”, but one Sunday, towards the end of lunch, for which she had made the dish he most detested – French toast – and which she was trying to force him to eat, he lost control of himself, seized the cake-slice from his mother-in-law’s grasp and with it banged her head a few times. Then he packed his cases calmly and went back to Compiègne.

  Caroline persuaded him to come back: if he stayed at Compiègne he would jeopardise not just his marriage but also his studies and his chance of competing for a Teaching Scholarship which, if he did land one, would allow them to have their own flat the very next year.

  Philippe allowed himself to be talked round, and Madame Echard, yielding to her husband’s and daughter’s intercessions, also agreed to tolerate for a while longer the presence of her son-in-law under her own roof. But soon her natural nastiness reasserted itself, and a hail of harangues and prohibitions rained down on the young couple: no using the bathroom after eight in the morning, no going in the kitchen except to do the washing up, no using the telephone, no visitors, no coming in after ten in the evening, no listening to the radio, etc.

  Caroline and Philippe bore these rigorous conditions heroically. In truth they didn’t have any option: the miserly allowance Philippe got from his father – a wealthy trader who disapproved of his son’s marriage – and the few pennies Caroline’s father secretly slipped into her hand added up to barely enough to pay for their daily travel to the Latin Quarter and for meal tickets in the student cafeteria: sitting on a café terrasse, going to the cinema, buying a copy of Le Monde were, in those days, almost luxurious events for the two of them, and in order to buy Caroline a woollen overcoat which a very cold February rendered indispensable, Philippe had to decide to sell the only really precious object he’d ever owned to an antique dealer in Rue de Lille: it was a XVIIth-century mandola on the belly of which were etched the silhouettes of Harlequin and Columbine in domino costumes.

  This hard life lasted nearly two years. According to her mood, Madame Echard was by turns sympathetic, going so far as to ask her daughter if she would like a cup of tea, and bad-tempered, laying injury upon annoyance, for example switching off the hot water precisely at the moment Philippe went to shave, or turning up the volume on her television to maximum f
rom morning to night on the days the two young ones were studying at home for an oral examination, or having combination padlocks fitted to all the cupboards on the pretext that her stocks of sugar, dry biscuits, and toilet paper were being plundered systematically.

  The conclusion of these hard years of apprenticeship was as sudden as it was unexpected. One day Madame Echard choked on a fish bone; Monsieur Echard, who’d been waiting for that day for ten years, retired to a tiny shack he had put up near Arles; a month later Monsieur Marquiseaux killed himself in a car accident and left his son a comfortable inheritance. Philippe hadn’t got his scholarship, but he’d completed his first degree and was planning to do research for a doctorate – Wetland Allotments and Arable Farming in Picardy Under Louis XV – but gave it up gladly and with two friends founded an advertising agency which is now a flourishing business, specialising in selling not detergents but music hall stars: The Trapezes, James Charity, Arthur Rainbow, “Hortense”, The Beast, Heptaedra Illimited – to mention only some – are amongst the best runners from his stable.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Beaumont, 3

  MADAME DE BEAUMONT IS in her bedroom, sitting in her Louis XV-style bed, propped up by four pillows in finely embroidered slips. She is an old woman of seventy-five with a lined face, snowy white hair, and grey eyes. She is wearing a white silk bedjacket and on her left ring finger has a ring whose stone is a topaz cut into a lozenge. A folio artbook, entitled Ars vanitatis, lies open on her lap at a full-page reproduction of one of the celebrated Vanities of the Strasbourg school: a skull set amongst attributes symbolising the five senses, not at all the canonical symbols in this instance, but easily recognisable: taste is represented not by a fattened goose or a fresh-killed hare, but by a ham hanging from a rafter, and a fine white porcelain tea-urn takes the place of the standard glass of wine; touch is figured by dice and by an alabaster pyramid topped with a diamond-shaped cut-glass stopper; hearing by a small finger-stopped (not valve-stopped) trumpet of the sort used for sounding flourishes; sight, which is also, in the symbolic system of these kinds of pictures, the perception of inexorable time, is figured by the skull itself and, in dramatic contrast, by a wall-clock in a fretwork case; and lastly, smell is suggested not by the traditional bunches of roses or pinks, but by a succulent, a sort of dwarf anthurium whose biannual inflorescences give off a strong smell of myrrh.

  An inspector from Rethel was given the task of elucidating the events that had led to the double murder at Chaumont-Porcien. He took barely a week to complete his investigation, and succeeded only in deepening the mystery surrounding this murky business. It was established that the murderer had not broken into the Breidels’ bungalow, but had probably entered by the back door, which was almost never locked, even at night, and that he had left in the same way, locking the door behind him. The murder weapon was a razor or, to be more precise, a scalpel with a replaceable blade, which the murderer had no doubt brought with him and in any case taken away, since there was no trace of it in the house; nor were there any fingerprints or other clues. The crime had taken place in the night of the Sunday; the exact time could not be ascertained. Nobody had heard a thing. No shout, no noise. It was very probable that François and Elizabeth were killed in their sleep so quickly that they didn’t have time to resist: the murderer slit their throats with such dexterity that one of the first police hypotheses was that the criminal must have been either a professional killer, or a meat butcher, or a surgeon.

  Obviously, all these points proved that the crime had been carefully premeditated. But nobody, at Chaumont-Porcien or anywhere else, could imagine why anyone would have wanted to murder somebody like François Breidel or his wife. They had settled in the village a little more than a year before; it wasn’t known exactly where they came from; maybe from the South, but nobody knew for certain and it seemed that before settling down they had led a rather nomadic life. The interrogations of the Breidel parents, at Arlon, and of Véra de Beaumont, produced no new information: like Madame de Beaumont, the Breidel parents had lost touch with their child many years earlier. Appeals for information, with photographs of the two victims, were posted widely in France and abroad, but they too led to nothing.

  For a few weeks the public paid enthusiastic attention to this mystery, which was taken up by dozens of amateur Maigrets and journalists scraping around for a story. The double crime was turned into a far-flung twist of the Bazooka affair, with some commentators claiming Breidel had been one of Kovacs’s strong-arm men; the story was mixed up with the FLN by some, with the Main Rouge anarchists by others, and also with the right-wing Rexists, and even with an obscure story of pretenders to the throne of France, since amongst Elizabeth’s alleged ancestors there was a certain Sosthène de Beaumont who was none other than a legitimatised bastard son of the Duc de Berry. Then, as the investigation began to peter out, the police and the gossip-columnists, the armchair Holmeses and the inquisitive onlookers began to tire of the business. Without a shred of plausible evidence, the coroner’s verdict was that the crime had been “committed by a tramp or lunatic, such as are still too often to be found in suburban areas and on the outskirts of our villages”.

  Outraged by a judgement which told her nothing of what she felt she had a right to know about her daughter’s fate, Madame de Beaumont asked her lawyer, Léon Salini, whose liking for criminal cases was well known to her, to reopen the investigation.

  For many months Véra de Beaumont had almost no news at all from Salini. From time to time she received laconic postcards informing her that he had not given up hope and was pursuing his enquiries in Hamburg, Brussels, Marseilles, Venice, etc. Finally on 7 May 1960 Salini came back to see her: “Everyone,” he said, “from the police on, has grasped that the Breidels were murdered for something they did or for something that happened in the past. But up to now no one has been able to uncover any clue at all which would direct their enquiries in one direction rather than another. The life of the Breidel couple seems to have been absolutely uneventful, in spite of the itching feet they seem to have had in the first year of their marriage. They met in June 1957 at Bagnols-sur-Cèze and married six weeks later; he was working at Marcoule, she had recently been hired as a waitress in the restaurant where he took his evening meal. His life as a bachelor also left no gaps for mysteries. At Arlon, the small town he had taken his leave from four years earlier, he was thought of as a good workman, a foreman in the making, potentially good enough to set up his own small business; to find work he had to translate himself to Germany, to the Saar actually, and went to Neuweiler, a small village near Saarbrücken; then he went to Château d’Oex in Switzerland, and from there to Marcoule, where he was working on a villa being built for one of the engineers at the reactor site. In none of these places did anything sufficiently serious happen to him that might motivate his murder five years later. Apparently the only incident he was involved in was a brawl with soldiers after a dance.

  “Things are completely different for Elizabeth. From the moment she left you in 1946 until her arrival at Bagnols-sur-Cèze in 1957, her life is a blank, a complete unknown blank, except for the fact that she introduced herself to the restaurant manageress under the name of Elizabeth Ledinant. The official investigation established those facts anyway, and the police tried desperately to find out what Elizabeth might have been up to over those eleven years. They hunted through hundreds and hundreds of files. But they found nothing.

  “So I reopened the investigation with nothing to go on. My working hypothesis, or more precisely my initial scenario, was this: many years before her marriage Elizabeth had committed some heinous fault and was forced to flee and hide. The fact that she finally got married shows that she thought she was at last completely free of the man or woman whose vengeance she had had reason to fear. But two years later, nonetheless, that vengeance strikes her down.

  “Overall my reasoning was coherent; but the gaps had to be filled in. I conjectured that if the problem were to be sol
uble, then the heinous fault must have left at least one extant trace, and I decided to comb systematically all the daily newspapers from 1946 to 1957. It’s a tiresome task, but in no sense an impossible one. I hired five students to work at the Bibliothèque Nationale listing all the articles and fillers dealing – explicitly or implicitly – with a woman between fifteen and thirty years of age. For every news story that fitted this criterion, I conducted further investigations. Thus I examined several hundred cases corresponding to stage one of my scenario; for example, a certain Emile D., driving a royal-blue Mercedes with a young blonde in the passenger seat, ran over and killed an Australian camper trying to hitch a lift between Parentis and Mimizan; or again, during a brawl in a Montpellier bar, a prostitute using the name of Véra slashed the face of a man called Lucien Campen, alias Monsieur Lulu, with broken bottle-glass; that story appealed to me, especially because of the name Véra, which would have illuminated your daughter’s personality in a quite disturbing way. But unfortunately for me, Monsieur Lulu turned out to be in prison, and Véra alive and well and running a haberdashery at Palinsac. As for the first story, that one also came up short: Emile D. had been arrested, convicted, and given a heavy fine and a three months’ suspended prison sentence; the identity of his travelling companion had been kept out of the papers in order to avoid a scandal, as she was the lawful wife of a cabinet minister in office at the time.