Life

by Perec, Georges

  Meanwhile, the “aged scholar” had died. Monsieur Jérôme tried in vain to interest the Ministry of Education, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the VIth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Collège de France, as well as some fifteen other public and private bodies, in the history of the Spanish Church in the seventeenth century – more turbulent than you might think – and tried also, but equally unsuccessfully, to find a publisher. After receiving his forty-sixth absolute and categorical refusal, Monsieur Jérôme took his manuscript – more than twelve hundred pages of incredibly close-spaced handwriting – and went to burn it in the courtyard of the Sorbonne, which incidentally cost him a night in a police station.

  These brushes with publishers were not, however, entirely useless. A little later, one of them offered him translation work from English. It concerned children’s books, the kind of little books called “primers” in English-speaking countries and in which you still quite often find things like

  Icky licky micky sticky!

  I’m a tiny tiny thing

  Ever flying in the spring

  Round and round a ring-a-ring

  Long ago I was a king

  Now I do this kind of thing

  On the wing, on the wing!

  Bing!

  and they obviously had to be adapted in translation so as to fit the everyday characteristics of French life.

  This was the wherewithal which allowed Monsieur Jérôme to eke out an existence until his death. It didn’t take much work, and he spent most of his time in his bedroom, stretched out on an old bottle-green moleskin settee, wearing the same machine-patterned pullover or a greyish flannel undervest, with his head leaning on the only thing he had brought back from his Hindu years: a patch – scarcely bigger than a pocket handkerchief – of a once sumptuous cloth, with a purple field, embroidered with silver thread.

  All around him the floor would be strewn with detective novels and Kleenex (he had a constantly dripping nose); he consumed easily two or three detective novels a day and prided himself on having read and being able to remember all one hundred and eighty-three titles in the Fingerprint series and at least two hundred titles in the Mask collection. He liked only detective stories with a mystery to solve, the good old pre-war English and American detective novels with locked rooms and perfect alibis, with a slight preference for mildly incongruous titles: The Ploughman Killer, or The Corpse Will Play for You on the Piano, or The Agnate Will Be Angry.

  He read extremely fast – a habit and a technique he had kept from the Ecole Normale – but never for a long stretch. He would stop often, stay lying down doing nothing, and close his eyes. He would push his thick tortoiseshell spectacles up over his balding forehead; he would put the detective novel at the foot of the settee after marking his page with a postcard depicting a globe whose turned-wood stand made it look like a spinning top. It was one of the first known globes, the one which Johannes Schoener, a cartographer who was a friend of Copernicus, had made at Bamberg in 1520, and which was kept at the Library in Nuremberg.

  He never told anyone what had happened to him. He practically never talked about his travels. One day, Monsieur Riri asked him what was the most amazing thing he had seen in his life: he replied, a Maharajah sitting at a table all incrusted with ivory, dining with his three lieutenants. No one said anything, and the three fierce men of war seemed, in front of their leader, like little children. Another time, without anyone asking him anything at all, he said that the most beautiful, the most dazzling thing he had seen in the world was a ceiling divided into octagonal sections, decorated in gold and silver, and more exquisitely worked than any jewel.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Dinteville, 2

  DR DINTEVILLE’S WAITING room. A quite spacious room, rectangular, with a herringbone woodblock floor and leather-padded doors. Against the rear wall, a large sofa upholstered in blue velvet; more or less everywhere, armchairs, lyre-back chairs, nesting tables with various magazines and periodicals spread out on them: on the cover of one of them can be seen a photograph of Franco on his deathbed watched over by four kneeling monks who look as though they have come straight out of a painting by La Tour; against the right-hand wall, a leather-padded writing desk on which stands a Napoleon III papier mâché pen-stand with small tortoiseshell inlays and fine gilt arabesques and, under its glass dome, a dead burnished clock with its hands stopped at ten minutes to two.

  There are two people in the waiting room. One is an extremely thin old man, a retired teacher of French who still gives tuition by correspondence, and who whilst waiting his turn is correcting a pile of scripts with a pencil sharpened to a fine point. On the script he is about to examine, the essay title can be read:

  In Hell, Raskolnikov meets Meursault (“The Outsider”). Imagine a dialogue between them using material from both novels.

  The other person is not sick: he is a telephone salesman whom Dr Dinteville has summoned at the end of his day to show him the new models of telephone answering machines. He is leafing through one of the publications strewn over the side-table next to which he is sitting: a horticulturalist’s catalogue with a cover depicting the garden of the Suzaku temple at Kyoto.

  There are several pictures on the walls. One of them in particular attracts attention, less for its pseudo “naïve” manner than for its size – almost ten feet by six – and its subject: it shows in minute, almost laborious detail the inside of a café: in the centre, leaning his elbow on the bar, a bespectacled young man bites into a ham sandwich (with butter and a lot of mustard) whilst drinking half a pint of beer. Behind him stands a pinball machine representing a tawdry Spain – or Mexico – with a woman fanning herself betwen the four counters. The same bespectacled young man – the technique was abundantly used in medieval painting – is also busy at the pinball machine, and victoriously so, since his counter shows a score of 67,000 and only 20,000 points are needed to win a free game. Four children stand like a row of onions beside the machine, with their eyes at the height of the ball, and watch his exploits with jubilation: three lads with mottled jumpers and berets, looking just like the traditional image of the Paris urchin, and a girl wearing round her neck a string of plaited black thread on which hangs a single red ball, holding a peach in her left hand. In the foreground, just behind the café window on which large white letters spell out backwards

  two men are playing tarot: one of them is putting down the card showing a man armed with a stick, carrying a knapsack, and followed by a dog, the character called the Fool, that is to say the Joker. To the left, behind the counter, the proprietor, an obese man in shirtsleeves with check braces, is looking guardedly at a poster which a timid-looking girl is probaby asking him to put in the window: at the top, it depicts a long metallic horn, very pointed, pierced with several holes; in the centre, it announces the world premiere in the Church of Saint Saturnin at Champigny on Saturday, 19 December 1960 at 8:45 p.m. of Malakhitès, opus 35, for fifteen brasses, voice, and percussion, by Morris Schmetterling, to be performed by the New Brass Ensemble of Michigan State University at East Lansing, conducted by the composer. At the very bottom, it shows a map of Champigny-sur-Marne with directions from various Paris exits – Porte de Vincennes, Porte de Picpus, Porte de Bercy.

  Dr Dinteville is the quartier’s general practitioner. He holds his surgery every morning and evening and spends all afternoons on home calls to his patients. People don’t like him much, thinking he lacks warmth, but they appreciate his efficiency and punctuality and stay with him.

  For a long time the doctor has nourished a secret passion: he would like to leave his name to a cooking recipe: he wavers between “Crab Salad à la Dinteville”, “Crab Salad Dinteville” or, more enigmatically, “Dinteville Salad”.

  For six servings: three live crabs – or three maias (spider crabs) or six small tourteau crabs; half a pound of pasta shells; a small Stilton cheese; 2 oz. butter; a small glass of cognac; a tablespoon of horseradish sauce;
a few drops of Worcester sauce; fresh mint leaves; three dill seeds. For the court-bouillon: sea salt, peppercorns, 1 onion. For the mayonnaise: one egg yolk, strong mustard, salt, pepper, olive oil, vinegar, paprika, a teaspoon of tomato double-concentrate.

  1 Using a large pot three-quarters full of cold water, make a court-bouillon with sea salt, 5 white peppercorns, 1 peeled onion sliced in two. Boil for 10 minutes. Leave to cool. Immerse the shellfish in the lukewarm court-bouillon. Bring back to boil, lower heat, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes. Take out the shellfish and leave to cool.

  2 Bring the court-bouillon back to the boil. Sprinkle the pasta shells into it. Stir and boil for 7 minutes. The pasta must stay firm. Drain the pasta shells, rinse quickly in cold water, and put to the side with a drop of olive oil to prevent sticking.

  3 Mix in a mortar with a pestle or wooden spatula the Stilton, moistened with a little of the cognac and Worcester sauce, with the butter and horseradish sauce. Pound well to obtain a creamy but not too liquid consistency.

  4 Detach the legs and claws of the cooled shellfish. Empty the flesh out of them into a large bowl. Crack the shells, remove the central cartilage, drain, empty out the flesh and soft parts. Chop into large pieces and add the crushed dill seeds and the mint leaves chopped very fine.

  5 Make a very stiff mayonnaise. Colour it with the paprika and tomato double-concentrate.

  6 Place the pasta shells in a large salad bowl and stir in very gently the chopped shellfish, the Stilton, and the mayonnaise. Decorate as desired with chiffonade of lettuce, radishes, prawn, cucumber, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, olives, orange quarters, etc. Serve very cool.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Servants’ Quarters, 8

  Madame Albin

  AN ATTIC ROOM under the eaves in between Morellet’s old room and that of Madame Orlowska. It is deserted, inhabited only by a goldfish in its spherical bowl. The tenant, Madame Albin, though she is seriously ill, has gone, as she goes every day, to pray on her husband’s grave.

  Like Monsieur Jérôme, Madame Albin returned to live in Rue Simon-Crubellier after a long absence. Shortly after her marriage, not to the soldier Raymond Albin, her first fiancé, whom she let a few weeks after the lift incident, but to a typographer named René Albin, unrelated to the other except by homonym, she left France for Damascus where her husband had found work at a major printing press. Their aim was to earn enough money as quickly as possible so as to be able to return to France and set themselves up on their own account.

  The French Protectorate aided their ambitions or, more exactly, speeded up their progress, through a system of interest-free loans, designed to develop investment in the colonies, which allowed them to establish a small factory producing schoolbooks and which quickly grew to a substantial size. When the war broke out, the Albins reckoned it was wiser to stay in Syria, where their publishing business was increasingly prosperous, and in 1945, as they were getting ready to sell up and return to France with their fortune made, assured of a more than comfortable income, anti-French riots erupted which together with the stern measures taken against them reduced all their efforts to naught overnight: their publishing house had become a symbol of the French presence in Syria and was burnt down by the Nationalists; a few days later, Franco-British troops shelled the city and destroyed the luxury hotel the Albins had built and into which they had put more than three-quarters of their fortune.

  René Albin died of a cardiac arrest on the night of the shelling. Flora herself was repatriated in 1946. She brought her husband’s remains back with her and had him buried at Juvisy. Thanks to the concierge, Madame Claveau, with whom she had kept in touch, she managed to get her old room back.

  Then began for Madame Albin an endless rigmarole of court cases which she lost one after another and which swallowed up the few million old francs she had left, her jewels, her silver, and her carpets: she lost versus the French Republic, she lost versus the Crown of the British Empire, she lost versus the Republic of Syria, she lost versus the City of Damascus, she lost versus all the insurance and reinsurance companies she took to court. All she obtained was a civilian war-victim’s pension and, as the printing works she had founded with her husband had been nationalised, a compensation payment converted into an annuity: that gives her a net monthly income after tax of four hundred and eighty francs, or precisely 16 francs a day.

  Madame Albin is one of those tall, dry, and bony women who look as though they have come out of Germaine Acremant’s Those Ladies in Green Hats. She goes to the cemetery every day: she leaves her flat around two o’clock, takes the number 84 bus from Courcelles, gets off it at Orsay station, then catches the train to Juvisy-sur-Orge, and gets back to Rue Simon-Crubellier around six-thirty or seven o’clock; she spends the rest of her time shut in her room.

  She keeps her room impeccably tidy: the small floortiles are meticulously polished, and she asks visitors to walk on shoe-slippers made of sackcloth; her two armchairs have nylon dustcovers.

  * * *

  On her table, her mantelpiece, and her two low tables there are objects wrapped in old pages from the only paper she enjoys reading, France-Dimanche. It is a great honour to be permitted to see these objects; she never unwraps them all at once, and rarely shows more than two or three of them to any single person. Valène, for example, was allowed to admire a purplewood chess set with inlaid mother-of-pearl, and a rebab, or two-string Arab violin, reputed to date from the sixteenth century; to Mademoiselle Crespi she showed – without explaining where it came from or its connections with her life in Syria – a Chinese erotic print depicting a supine woman being pleasured by six little wrinkle-faced gnomes; Jane Sutton, whom she does not like because she is English, was allowed to see only four postcards similarly without any apparent relevance to Madame Albin’s biography: a cockfight in Borneo; Samoyeds bundled in furs, driving sledges drawn by reindeer through the snowy wastes of Siberia; a young Moroccan woman, in a costume of striped silk, with trappings in the shape of chains, bracelets, and rings, her swelling breasts half bared, with dilated nostrils, the eyes full of animal life, the features in play as she shows her white teeth in a laugh; and a Greek peasant wearing a kind of big beret, a red shirt, and a grey jacket, pushing a hand-plough. But to Madame Orlowska, who, like her, had lived in the Muslim world, she showed the most precious things she possessed: an open-work copper lamp with little oval cutouts in the shape of legendary flowers, from the Ummayad mosque where Saladin is buried, and a hand-coloured photograph of the grand hotel she had built: a big square courtyard, surrounded on three sides by buildings painted white with broad horizontal stripes of red, green, blue, and black; an enormous clump of oleander with all its flowers in full bloom, red blotches on green; on the coloured marble paving in the centre of the courtyard, there gambols a small, black-eyed, dainty-hoofed gazelle.

  Madame Albin is beginning to lose her memory and maybe also her reason; people along the corridor began to realise when she started knocking on their doors in the evenings to warn them of unseen threats which she called the black shirts or sometimes harkis or even on occasions the OAS; another time she began to unwrap one of her packages to show its contents to Smautf and Smautf noticed she had wrapped up a small carton of orange juice as if it had been one of her precious mementos. One morning a few months ago she forgot to put in her false teeth, which she leaves overnight in a glass of water; she has not worn them again since then; the prosthesis lies in its glass on the bedside table, covered in a kind of aquatic moss whence minute yellow flowers occasionally emerge.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  On the Stairs, 7

  AT THE VERY top of the stairs.

  On the right, the door of the flat that Gaspard Winckler lived in; on the left, the lift shaft; at the end, the glazed door giving onto the small staircase leading to the servants’ quarters. A broken pane has been replaced by a page of Détective on which can be read: “Five Minors Took Turns to Satisfy the Campsite Manageress”, above a photograph of the
said manageress, a woman of about fifty, wearing a flowery hat and a white overcoat beneath which she may well be supposed stark naked.

  To begin with, the two attic floors were occupied only by servants. They weren’t allowed to use the main staircase; they had to come in and go out by the servants’ door at the left-hand side of the building and use the servants’ stairs which on each floor gave onto kitchens or pantries and on the top two floors onto two long corridors leading to their attic rooms. The glazed door at the top of the main stairs was to be used only on the very exceptional occasions when a master or a mistress might need to go into one of his or her servant’s rooms, for instance to “inspect his (or her) belongings”, that is to say to check that he or she wasn’t carrying off a silver teaspoon or a pair of candlesticks on being dismissed, or to take up to old Victoire on her deathbed a cup of herb tea or the last rites.

  At the end of the 1914 war, this sacrosanct rule which neither masters nor servants would have dreamt of transgressing began to bend, largely because the maids’ rooms and attics were less and less exclusively reserved for the use of servants. The example was set by Monsieur Hardy, an olive-oil merchant from Marseilles, who lived on the second floor left, in the apartment later to be occupied by the Appenzzells and then the Altamonts. He rented one of his servants’ rooms to Henri Fresnel: Henri Fresnel was in some sense a serving man, since he was chef at the restaurant Monsieur Hardy had just opened in Paris to show off the freshness and quality of his produce (The Famous Bouillabaisse, 99 Rue de Richelieu, next to the Restaurant du Grand U, at that time a celebrated gathering place of politicians and journalists), but he – Monsieur Fresnel – didn’t serve in the building, and it was therefore with a perfectly clear conscience that he used the glazed door of the masters’ staircase to come down. The second was Valène: Monsieur Colomb, a queer old fish, publisher of specialised almanacs (The Race-Goer’s Almanac, The Coin-Collector’s Almanac, The Music-Lover’s Almanac, The Oyster-Breeder’s …, etc.), father of Rodolphe, the trapeze artist currently in vogue at the Nouveau-Cirque, and a distant friend of Valène’s parents, rented him his servant’s room for a few francs, often paid back by way of an order for work for one of his almanacs; he had no use for the room since Gervaise, his housekeeper, had slept for ages in one of the rooms in his flat on the third floor right, beneath the Echards. And then when some years later this glazed door that was only supposed to be used in exceptional circumstances was opened daily by the young Bartlebooth on his way up to his watercolour lesson with Valène, it became apparent that it was no longer possible to judge membership of social class by a person’s position with respect to this glazed door, just as in the preceding generation it had become similarly impossible to establish class membership on notions even as deep-rooted as those of ground floor, mezzanine, and noble storey.