Life

by Perec, Georges

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Berger, 1

  THE BERGERS’ DINING room. An almost square room, with a woodblock floor. In the centre, a round table on which two places have been set, alongside a metal lozenge-shaped dishstand, a soup pot, with the handle of a silver-plated ladle protruding from under its chipped lid, a white plate with a garlic sausage cut in two, garnished with mustard-flavoured sauce, and a Camembert with a label depicting a veteran of the Old Guard. Against the rear wall, a sideboard of indeterminate style bearing a lamp with a cube of opaline for a pedestal, and a bottle of Pastis 51, a single red apple on a pewter plate, and an evening paper with its banner headline clearly visible: PON1A CALLS FOR EXEMPLARY PUNISHMENT. Above the sideboard a painting has been hung, depicting an oriental landscape with weirdly twisted trees, a group of natives wearing tall conical hats, and junks on the horizon. It was supposed to have been painted by Charles Berger’s great-grandfather, a professional NCO who was thought to have fought in the Tonkin campaign.

  Lise Berger is alone in the dining room. She is a woman of about forty whose chubbiness verges quite distinctly on corpulence, not to say obesity. She is finishing laying the table for herself and her son – whom she’d sent down to empty the dustbin and buy the bread – and is putting a bottle of orange juice and a can of Munich Spatenbräu beer on the table.

  Her husband, Charles, is a restaurant waiter. He is a jovial and rotund fellow, and the two of them make a plump pair of schmeckers with a taste for sausages, sauerkraut, a glass of white wine, and a nice cold can, the kind of couple you are more or less bound to come upon in your compartment whenever you catch a train.

  For several years Charles worked in a nightclub portentously called Igitur, a kind of “poetic” restaurant where a performer, pretending to be some kind of spiritual son of Antonin Artaud, presented in a laborious drone a depressing anthology in which he included quite shamelessly all his own works, enlisting, in order to make them less unpalatable, the inadequate assistance of Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, René Descartes, Marco Polo, Gérard de Nerval, François-René de Chateaubriand, and Jules Verne. But it didn’t stop the restaurant from eventually going bankrupt.

  Charles Berger is now at the Villa d’Ouest, a nightclub-restaurant near Porte Maillot on the west side of the city (whence its name), which presents a drag show and belongs to a man who formerly ran a team of door-to-door salesmen, going by the name of Désiré or, even more cosily, Didi. He’s an ageless, unlined man who sports a toupee, has a fondness for beauty spots, chunky rings, bangles, and chain bracelets, and a penchant for spotless white flannel three-piece suits, with check breast-pocket handkerchiefs, crepe-de-Chine cravats, and suede shoes in mauve or violet hues.

  Didi goes in for the “artistic” pose, that is to say he justifies his stinginess and pettiness with remarks of the sort: “You can’t get anything done without bending the rules”, or “If you want to be up to achieving your ambitions you have to be prepared to behave like a shit, expose yourself to risks, compromise yourself, go back on your word, behave like any artist taking the housekeeping money to buy paints”.

  Didi doesn’t expose himself to risk that much, except on stage, and compromises himself as little as possible, but he is without doubt a shit, detested both by his performers and his staff. The waiters have nicknamed him “French veg” since the day, long past, when he ordered them, if a customer asked for an extra portion or serving of French fries – or any other garnish – to put it on the bill as a separate vegetable.

  The food he serves is execrable. Under highfalutin names – Clear Vegetable Julienne with Vintage Sherry, Shrimp Pancake Rolls in Aspic, Chaud-froid of Bunting Souvaroff, Crayfish in Caraway Sigalas-Rabaud, Sweetbread Soufflé Excellence, Isard Vol-au-Vent in Amontillado, Prawns in Balaton Paprika, Exeter Ediles Dessert, Fresh Figs Fregoli, etc. – he serves pre-cooked, pre-cut portions delivered every morning by a wholesale delicatessen and which a pseudo-chef in a toque pretends to prepare, for instance heating in little copper pots gravy made of hot water, Oxo, and a dash of ketchup.

  Fortunately customers don’t flock to the Villa d’Ouest for its food. Meals are served at a gallop before the two shows at eleven and two in the morning, and people who can’t get to sleep after it do not put their discomfort down to the suspicious, wobbling gelatin coating that they ingested but to the intense excitement experienced during the show. For the Villa d’Ouest is packed out from the first of January to the thirty-first of December, and diplomats, businessmen, political celebrities, and stars of stage and screen crush into the place to see shows of outstanding quality and in particular to see the two great stars who play with the company, “Domino” and “Belle de May”: the unmatchable “Domino” who, in front of a set made of sparkling aluminium panels, does a stunning impression of Marilyn Monroe in that unforgettable sequence from How to Marry a Millionaire where her reflection is reflected in a thousand mirrors, itself in fact a remake of the most celebrated shot in The Lady from Shanghai; and the fabulous “Belle de May”, who metamorphoses in three flutters of her eyelids into Charles Trénet.

  For Charles Berger, the work is much the same as what he did in his previous restaurant or what he would do in virtually any other establishment; it is probably rather easier, since all the meals are pretty well identical, all are served at the same time, and the job is markedly better paid. The only thing that is really different is that at the end of the second service, just before two a.m., after serving the coffee, the champagne, and the liqueurs, after moving tables and chairs so that as many people as possible can see, the four waiters, in their short waistcoats, their long aprons, carrying their white napkins and silver trays, have to get up on stage, line up in front of the red curtain, and, at a sign from the pianist, kick up their legs and sing as loud and as flat as possible, but all together:

  Now you’ve had your di, di, di-dinner

  You have to say thanks, yes you have-ter

  To your friend and mine, to the mister

  Who’s gonna show, yes he is sir,

  Oh yes sir! oh yes sir!

  The best show in town, yes no less, sir!

  upon which three showgirls spring from the tiny wings and open the show.

  The waiters come on at seven p.m., when they dine together, then get the tables ready, put on the tablecloths and lay out the cutlery, get out the ice-buckets, arrange the glassware, the ashtrays, paper napkins, saltcellars, peppermills, toothpicks, and the samples of Désiré toilet water which are presented on the house as a welcome gift to customers. At four a.m., at the end of the second show, when the last of the audience is leaving after a final drink, they have supper with the performers, then clear and tidy the tables, fold the tablecloths, and leave, just as the cleaning lady arrives to empty the ashtrays, air the room, and do the Hoovering.

  Charles gets home around six thirty. He makes coffee for Lise, wakes her by switching on the radio, and goes to bed as she gets up, gets washed and dressed, wakes Gilbert, smartens him up, and drives him to school on her way to work.

  Charles, for his part, sleeps until two thirty, reheats a cup of coffee, lies in for a bit before shaving and dressing. Then he goes to fetch Gilbert from school. On his way back he shops at the market and buys a newspaper. He only just has time to skim through it. At six thirty he sets off on foot for the Villa d’Ouest, and on his way downstairs usually passes Lise on her way up.

  Lise works in a health centre near Porte d’Orléans. She is a speech therapist and gives remedial help to children with stammers. She has Mondays off, and since the Villa d’Ouest is closed on Sunday nights, Lise and Charles manage to have some time together each week from Sunday morning to Monday evening.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Altamont, 3

  MADAME ALTAMONT’S BOUDOIR. A dark and intimate room with oak woodwork, silk hangings, and heavy grey velvet curtains. Against the left-hand wall, between two doors, stands a tobacco-coloured divan on which a silky long-haired King Charles
spaniel lies. Above the divan hangs a large hyperrealist canvas portraying a steaming plate of spaghetti and packet of Van Houten cocoa. In front of the divan is a low table on which are various silver trinkets, amongst them a little box of weights, of the sort that moneychangers and assayers used to use, a circular box in which the cylindrical measures stack inside each other, in the manner of Russian dolls, and three piles of books, surmounted respectively by René Hardy’s Bitter Victory (Livre de Poche), Dialogues with 33 Variations by Ludwig van Beethoven on a Theme of Diabelli by Michel Butor (Gallimard), and Le Cheval d’Orgueil by Pierre-Jakez Hélias (Plon, collection Terre humaine). Against the rear wall, beneath two prayermats decorated with black and ochre arabesques typical of Bantu esparto ware, is a Louis XIII chiffonier. On it stands a large, brass-rimmed oval mirror before which Madame Altamont sits, using a slender make-up stick to put kohl over her eyelashes and lids. She is a woman of about forty-five who has kept her beauty, with an impeccable bearing, a bony face, protruding cheekbones, and stern eyes. She is wearing only a brassiere and black lace panties. A narrow strip of black gauze is wrapped around her right hand.

  Monsieur Altamont is also in the room. Wearing a broad check coat, he is standing by the window and reading a typewritten letter with a look of complete indifference. Beside him stands a metal sculpture probably representing a giant cup-and-ball: a V-shaped pedestal bearing a sphere on its top.

  Cyrille Altamont completed his studies simultaneously at Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and at the age of thirty-one became permanent secretary and trustee of BIDREM (Banque Internationale pour le Développement des Ressources Energétiques et Minières), the International Development Bank for Energy and Mining Resources, an organisation sponsored by various public and private institutions, having its headquarters in Geneva, and responsible for funding all types of research and development touching on the exploitation of underground resources, including the awarding of grants to laboratories and of bursaries to researchers, the organisation of symposia, expert assessment, and, where appropriate, dissemination of new drilling methods, extraction devices, treatment processes, and transportation modes.

  Cyrille Altamont is a long-legged man aged fifty-five, dressed in good English suiting and florid linen; with thinnish canary-yellow hair, blue eyes set close together, a close-clipped, straw-coloured moustache, and carefully manicured hands. In his own sphere he passes for a very energetic, cautious, and coldly practical man of business. But that didn’t prevent him from behaving, on one occasion at least, with a lack of foresight which subsequently turned out to be disastrous for his bank.

  In the early nineteen sixties, Altamont received a visit from a man with thin hair and poor teeth, Wehsal by name. Wehsal was at that time professor of organic chemistry at Green River University, Ohio, but during the Second World War he had been director of the mineral chemistry laboratory at the Chemische Akademie at Mannheim. In nineteen forty-five he was one of the men whom the Americans confronted with the following alternative: he could either agree to work for them, emigrate to the United States, and accept an interesting appointment, or be tried as an accessory to War Crimes and be sentenced to many years in prison. This operation, known as Operation Paperclip, hardly left much choice to men like Wehsal, and he was one of maybe two thousand scientists – the best known of them, even now, being Wernher von Braun – who set off en route to America together with several tons of scientific archives.

  Wehsal was persuaded that, thanks to the war effort, German science and technology had made prodigious advances in many areas. Some techniques and methods had been made public since then: for instance, it was known that the fuel used to power V2s was potato alcohol; similarly, details had been released on the use of copper and tin in judicious proportion which had allowed the manufacture of field batteries found nearly twenty years later in perfect working order in the middle of the desert on tanks abandoned by Rommel.

  But most of these discoveries had been kept secret; Wehsal hated the Americans, and he was sure that they were incapable of finding the answers for themselves and that they would not know how to use them effectively even if they were told. Whilst waiting for a rebirth of the Third Reich to give him the opportunity to apply such front-end research, Wehsal decided to rescue and preserve the scientific and technological heritage of Germany.

  Wehsal’s own specialism was in the field of carbon hydrogenation, that is to say petroleum synthesis; the principle was straightforward: theoretically, all that was needed was to combine a hydrogen ion and a molecule of carbon monoxide (CO) to produce petroleum molecules. The process could be performed using a carbon base, but it could be applied equally well to a lignite or peat base, and it was for that very reason that the German war industry had taken a formidable interest in the problem: Hitler’s war machine effectively required supplies of petroleum which the country did not possess amongst its own subterranean resources, and it thus had to rely on synthetic fuels extracted from the huge deposits of lignite in Prussia and the no less colossal reserves of Polish peat.

  Wehsal was perfectly familiar with the programme of experiments concerning this metamorphosis, for it was he who had devised the process at the theoretical level, but he knew almost nothing about the technology of some of the crucial intermediate stages, in particular, details of the quantities required and the duration of activity of the catalysts, the extraction of sulphuric deposits, and storage precautions.

  So Wehsal set out to contact all his former colleagues, now dispersed all over North America. He steered clear of the sauerkraut clubs, the Sudeten Circles, the Sons of Aachen, and other set-ups fronting for organisations of old Nazis, which he knew were almost always infiltrated by informers, but, by using periods of leave and corridor conversations at congresses and conferences, he managed to find 72 of them. Many didn’t want anything to do with his project: Professor Thaddeus, the magnetic-storm specialist, and Davidoff, the fragmentation specialist, would not say anything; and even less could be said by Dr Kolliker, the atomic scientist who had lost his arms and legs when his lab was bombed but who was considered to have the subtlest brain of his age, although he was, in addition, both deaf and dumb: permanently surrounded by four bodyguards and assisted by a specialist engineer who had been through intensive training for the sole purpose of lip-reading the invalid’s equations, which he then wrote on a blackboard, Kolliker had developed a prototype of the strategic ballistic missile, the forerunner of Berman’s classical Atlas rocket. Many others, at the Americans’ instigation, had switched disciplines entirely, and had assimilated themselves to the American way of life to such an extent that they didn’t want to remember what they had done for the Vaterland, or refused to talk about it. Some went so far as to denounce Wehsal to the FBI, which was quite pointless as the FBI had not ever ceased for a second its surveillance of all these recent immigrants, and two of its agents tailed Wehsal on each of his trips, wondering what he could be looking for; in the end they summoned him for questioning and, when he confessed that he was trying to recover the secret of turning lignite into petrol, they released him, since they really could not see anything basically anti-American about such an enterprise.

  In time Wehsal nonetheless achieved his aim. In Washington he laid his hands on a bundle of archives which the federal government had had studied and had judged to be without interest: in it he found the description of the containers used for the transportation and storage of synthetic petrol. And three of his seventy-two former compatriots agreed to provide him with the answers he was after.

  Wehsal wanted to return to Europe. He contacted BIDREM and, in exchange for appointment to the post of engineering consultant, he offered to reveal to Cyrille Altamont all the secrets relating to the hydrogenation of carbon and the industrial production of synthetic fuel. And, as an added bonus, he went on with a black-toothed grin, a method for making sugar from sawdust. By way of proof, he handed Altamont a few typescript sheets covered with formulae and figure
s: the overall equations of the transformation and – the only secret to be truly disclosed – the names, specifications, required quantities, and duration of activity of the mineral oxides to be used as catalysts.

  The fantastic leap forward that the war was supposed to have fostered in science, and the secrets behind Germany’s military superiority, did not interest Cyrille Altamont overmuch: he put that sort of thing in the same basket as the stories in the popular press about hidden SS treasure and the Loch Ness monster, but he was sufficiently conscientious at least to have a technical assessment made of the methods Wehsal was proposing. Most of his scientific advisers mocked the obsolete, burdensome, and clumsy techniques: in effect, you could have run rockets on vodka, just as the French had run their motor cars in wartime on charcoal gas; petrol could be made from lignite or from peat, and even from dead leaves, old rags, or potato peel: but it would be so expensive and would require such a monstrous plant that it was infinitely preferable to carry on using good old black gold from the ground. As for making sugar from sawdust, it was entirely devoid of interest, as the experts unanimously forecast that in the medium term sawdust would be a far more precious commodity than sugar.

  Altamont filed Wehsal’s documents and dropped the whole matter and for many years used the anecdote as a typical illustration of scientific stupidity.

  Two years ago, towards the end of the first great oil crisis, BIDREM decided to sponsor research on synthetic fuels “based on graphites, anthracites, coal, lignite, peat, bitumen, resins, and organic salts”: it has invested in such research more than a hundred times the amount Wehsal would have cost had the bank employed him. Altamont tried several times to get in touch with the chemist again; in the end he found out he had been arrested in November 1973, a few days after the OPEC meeting in Kuwait at which the decision was made to reduce deliveries of crude to most consumer countries by at least a quarter. Charged with attempting to pass “strategic” secrets to a foreign power – specifically, Rhodesia – Wehsal had hanged himself in his cell.