Life

by Perec, Georges

  It was a fairly traditional Mephisto, almost a conventional one. He didn’t have horns, or a long cloven tail, or goat’s hooves, but a greenish face, dark eyes set deep in their sockets, bushy, very black eyebrows, a thin moustache, and a Napoleon III goatee. He was wearing a somewhat indeterminate costume: what could mainly be seen was an immaculate lace ruff and a dark-red waistcoat, the remainder being masked by a big black cape whose flame-red silk lining gleamed in the firelight.

  Mephistopheles didn’t say a word. All he did was bow his head very slowly whilst placing his right hand on his left shoulder. Then he put his hand out over the hearth, now burning with flames that seemed almost unearthly and giving off strongly scented smoke, and signalled the applicant to come forward. The man rose and went to stand next to Mephistopheles, on the other side of the fire. The Devil handed him a parchment folded in four, bearing a dozen or so incomprehensible signs; then he grasped the man’s left hand and pricked his thumb with a steel needle, bringing forth a bead of blood which he placed onto the pact; on the opposite corner he swiftly signed his own mark with his left index finger, apparently covered with greasy soot, a signature resembling a large, three-fingered hand. Then he tore the sheet in two, put one half in his waistcoat pocket, and handed the other to the man with a low bow.

  Ingeborg gave a strident scream. There was a noise of paper being crumpled, and the blinding glare of lightning flashed through the room, accompanied by a roll of thunder and an intense smell of sulphur. Thick, acrid smoke formed all around the fireplace. Mephistopheles had disappeared, and on turning round the man once again saw Ingeborg sitting in her armchair; in front of her there was no trace of the pentangle.

  Despite the exaggerated precautions she took, and in spite of the rigid, somewhat overstylised aspect of the performance, it does indeed seem that this apparition matched what the man had expected, for not only did he pay up the promised sum without a grumble, but a month later, still without revealing his identity, he let Ingeborg know that one of his friends, living in France, had a keen wish to partake of a ceremony identical to the one he had been honoured to witness, and that the friend was disposed to give her five million French francs and in addition to meet her travelling costs and her expenses in Paris.

  That is how Ingeborg and Blunt came to France. But unfortunately for them they did not come alone. Three days before they were to leave, Aurelio Lopez, whose affairs had taken a turn for the worse, joined them in Ankara and demanded to go with them. They were unable to refuse. All three settled in the big flat on the first floor. It had been agreed already that Blunt would never show himself. As for Aurelio, they decided that, rather than their taking on a maid and a butler, he would serve, under the name of Carlos, as chauffeur, bodyguard, and groom.

  In the space of a little over two years, Ingeborg had the Devil appear 82 times for fees eventually rising to twenty, twenty-five, and once even thirty million (old) francs. The list of her customers included six members of parliament (of whom three in fact became ministers, and only one an Under-Secretary of State), seven top civil servants, eleven company directors, six officers of the rank of general or above, two professors at the Medical Faculty, various sportsmen, several top clothes designers, restaurant owners, a newspaper editor, and even a cardinal, the other applicants coming from the worlds of the arts, literature, and especially show business. All were men, with the exception of one black operatic singer whose ambition was to play the role of Desdemona: shortly after signing her pact with the Devil, she brought her dreams to reality thanks to a “negative” production which caused a scandal but ensured notoriety for the singer and the director: Otello’s role was played by a white man, all the other parts were played by black artists (or whites in black make-up), with costumes and sets similarly “inverted”, where everything light or white (the handkerchief and the pillow, for instance, to quote just those two indispensable props) became dark or black, and vice versa.

  No one ever expressed a doubt about the “reality” of the apparition or the authenticity of the pact. Once only, one of their customers was amazed to have kept his shadow and to be able still to see his reflection in mirrors, and Ingeborg had to persuade him that this was a privilege Mephistopheles had granted to avoid his being “recognised and burnt alive in foro publico”.

  As far as Ingeborg and Blunt could tell, the effect of the pact was almost always beneficial: the certain belief in omnipotence was usually enough to make those who had sold their souls to the Devil accomplish what they expected of themselves. In any case, the couple had no problem in recruiting applicants. Barely three months after their arrival in Paris, Ingeborg had to start turning down the offers that were flooding in, charging applicants higher and higher rates, setting longer and longer waiting lists and more and more rigorous preparatory tasks. At her death, her “order book” was full for more than a year ahead, there were over thirty applicants on her waiting list, and four of them committed suicide when they learnt of her death.

  The apparition scenario never differed very much from what it had been in Ankara, except that, from quite early on, the seances no longer started in darkness. The cone-shaped torches were replaced by heavy-looking floor-standing black cylinders surmounted by large spherical glass bulbs giving off a bright blue light which dimmed imperceptibly, allowing the applicant time to see for himself that the room was empty apart from the young woman and himself and that all exits were hermetically sealed. The couple brought their existing trick techniques to perfection – lighting adjustment and flame control, the sound-proofing required for thunder effects, remote ignition of the ferrocerium tablets which produced sparks, the manipulation of iron filings and magnets – and introduced some others, in particular the use of certain siphenapteroid insects endowed with a phospherescent power giving them a glowing green hue, and the use of special perfumes and incenses which, mixed with the smell of the lilies and tuberoses which permanently impregnated the place, created sensations favourable to manifestations of the supernatural. These ingredients would never have been adequate to persuade anyone ever so slightly sceptical, but people who had accepted Ingeborg’s terms and endured the preliminary ordeals came, on the evening of their pact, ready to be convinced.

  Unfortunately, their professional success did not free Ingeborg and Blunt from Carlos’s continuing blackmail. Ingeborg was supposed to speak only Danish and some Upper Friesian dialect by means of which she conversed with Mephistopheles, and so it was the Filipino who negotiated with applicants, and he kept for himself the entirety of the colossal sums they paid him. His surveillance never ceased, and when he went out to buy things he forced the former officer and his wife to strip and put their clothes under lock and key, having no intention of letting go of this veritable goose with the golden eggs.

  In 1953, the Armistice of Panmunjon raised their hopes of an imminent amnesty which would allow them to be free of this unbearable servitude. But a few weeks later, Carlos, with a triumphant smile on his face, handed them an already long-published issue of the Louisville Courier and Journal (Kentucky): the mother of one of the soldiers Lieutenant Stanley had had under his command had expressed surprise at the absence of Blunt Stanley’s name from the list of prisoners released by the North Koreans. The Army had been alerted to this and had decided to reopen the case. Although not yet giving a final verdict, the investigators were at that point prepared to hint that they could no longer exclude the possibility that Lieutenant Stanley might have been a deserter and a traitor.

  Several months later, Ingeborg succeeded in persuading her husband that he had to kill Carlos, so that they might flee. One evening in April 1954, Blunt managed to evade the Filipino’s vigilance and throttled him with a pair of braces.

  They searched the flat and found the hiding hole where Carlos kept more than seven hundred million old francs, in banknotes of every denomination and in jewels. They hurriedly filled two suitcases and prepared to leave: they were planning to go to Hamburg, where several people had alrea
dy suggested Ingeborg should set up her diabolical business. But, just before going out, Blunt automatically looked out of the window and through the shutters saw two men apparently watching the building; and he panicked. It was obviously not possible for Carlos’s threats to have been carried out already, only a few seconds after his murder, but Blunt, who had not left the flat even once ever since he had moved in, imagined that the Filipino had been having them watched for ages and violently reproached his wife for not having noticed.

  It was during this altercation, Stanley claimed, that Ingeborg, who was holding a small pistol in her hand, had been killed accidentally.

  Blunt Stanley was tried in France on charges of premeditated murder, homicide by inadvertence, public exploitation of occult powers (articles 405 and 479 of the Penal Code), and fraud. He was then extradited, taken back to the United States, tried by court martial on a charge of high treason, and sentenced to death. But he was granted presidential clemency, and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

  The rumour spread rapidly that he possessed supernatural powers and that he was able to communicate – and to commune – with infernal forces. Almost all the warders and prisoners at Abigoz penitentiary (Iowa), as well as numerous policemen and several judges and politicians, asked him to intercede on their behalf with one devil or another on some particular problem or another. They had to install a special visiting booth so he could receive wealthy individuals from every corner of the United States who requested an audience with him. The less wealthy, instead of consulting him, and for a fee of fifty dollars, could touch his prison number, 1758064176, which is also the number of Devils in Hell, since there are 6 demoniacal legions each of 66 cohorts each of 666 companies each comprising 6,666 Devils. For a mere ten dollars, you could buy one of his fluidic needles (old steel pick-up needles). For numerous communities, congregations, and faiths, Blunt Stanley has become today the reincarnation of the Evil One, and several fanatics have come to Iowa to commit indictable offences with the sole purpose of being imprisoned at Abigoz so as to attempt to murder him; but, with the complicity of the warders, he has managed to set up a bodyguard consisting of other prisoners, who have, up to now, protected him effectively. According to the satirical journal Nationwide Bilge, he must be one of the ten richest lifers in the world.

  It was only in May nineteen sixty, when the mystery of Chaumont-Porcien was clarified, that it was realised that the two men who were in fact watching the building were the two detectives Sven Ericsson had hired to tail Véra de Beaumont.

  Madame Moreau decided to turn this room, where Lorelei made Mephisto appear and where the twin murder occurred, into her kitchen. The designer Henry Fleury devised an avant-garde outfit which he loudly proclaimed would be the prototype for the kitchens of the twenty-first century: a culinary laboratory a generation ahead of its time, equipped with the most sophisticated technology, fitted with microwave ovens, invisible automatic hotplates, remote-controlled domestic robots capable of carrying out complex food preparation and cooking programmes. All these ultramodern devices were cleverly integrated into antique-style cupboards, Second Empire ranges in enamelled cast iron, and antique bread bins. Behind brass-hinged polished oak doors hid electric slicers, electronic grinders, ultrasound chip-pans, infrared toasters, totally transistorised electro-mechanical blenders, regulators, mixers, and peelers; but on coming in all you could see were walls tiled in Old Delft style, unbleached cotton tea towels, old Roberval weighing scales, pitchers with little pink flowers on them, pharmacy jars, big check tablecloths, rustic dressers with Mayenne linen fringes, bearing little pastry moulds, pewter measuring cups, brass pots, and cast-iron cocottes, and, on the floor, a spectacular pattern of tiles, an alternation of white, grey, and ochre rectangles, some decorated with lozenge motifs, a faithful reproduction of the floor of the chapel in a monastery at Bethlehem.

  Madame Moreau’s cook, a sturdy Burgundian hailing from Paray-le-Monial and answering to the first name of Gertrude, was not going to be taken in by such gross trickery, and informed her mistress immediately that she would not ever cook anything in a kitchen like that, where nothing was in its proper place and nothing worked the way she knew. She insisted on having a window, a stone sink, a real gas cooker with rings, a deep frying pan, a chopping block, and especially a scullery to put her empty bottles in, for her cheese wickers, crates, potato bags, her buckets for washing vegetables, and her salad bowl.

  Madame Moreau sided with her cook. Fleury, smarting, had to have his experimental equipment removed, break up the floor, dismantle the plumbing and electrical circuitry, and move the partitions.

  Of the weathered old junk from French kitchens of times gone by, Gertrude has kept the pieces she might use – a rolling pin, the scales, the salt box, the kettles, cocottes, fish poachers, pot ladles, and butchering knives – and has had the rest put down in the cellar. She brought up from her homeland some of the utensils and accessories she could not have done without: her coffee grinder and her tea-egg, a flat strainer, a conical strainer, a potato masher, a bain-marie, and the box in which she has always kept her vanilla pods, her cinnamon sticks, her cloves, her saffron, her silver balls, and her angelica, an old biscuit box made of tin, square in shape, on the lid of which you can see a little girl munching the corner of her petit-beurre.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  Marcia, 4

  JUST AS SHE treats the furniture and objects which she trades as her own property, so Madame Marcia treats her customers as friends. lndependently of the business she does with them (in which she often reveals herself to be particularly tough), she has succeeded in creating ties with most of her clients which go far beyond strictly business relations: they take each other out to tea, invite each other to dinner, play bridge together, go to the Opera, visit exhibitions, lend each other books, exchange recipes, and even go on cruises together in the Greek islands, or to summer schools at the Prado.

  Her shop has no proper name. A plain inscription in small white cursive is fixed over the doorhandle.

  C. Marcia Antiques

  On the two small shop windows, there are several stickers announcing even more discreetly that this or that credit card is accepted, and that night surveillance is provided for the shop by a specialist service bureau.

  The shop proper consists of two rooms communicating by a narrow passageway. The first room, the one you come into, is mainly devoted to small items, trinkets, curios, scientific instruments, lamps, jugs, boxes, porcelain, bisque ware, fashion plates, accessory furniture, etc., which, even if they are of high value, are all things which a customer can hasten off with once he has made a purchase. David Marcia, today twenty-nine years old, has been in charge of this part of the shop since 1971, when his accident in the 35th Gold Cup brought his days in motorcycle racing to an end.

  Madame Marcia herself, whilst being in overall control of the store, is concerned more particularly with the second room, the one we are now in, the rear of the shopfront, which communicates directly with the back room and is devoted primarily to large pieces, to drawing-room suites, farm tables, refectory tables flanked by long benches, four-poster beds, and solicitors’ filing cabinets. Madame Marcia usually spends her afternoons here, where she has installed her office – a small three-drawer walnut table, late eighteenth century, on which she has placed two grey metal card-index cases, one listing the regular customers whose tastes she knows and whom she regularly invites to come to see her latest acquisitions, the other containing the details of all the articles that have passed through her hands and of each of which she has tried to write the history, with its origin, its features, and its fate. A black telephone, a notepad, a tortoiseshell propelling pencil, a minute conical paperweight with a base less than an inch in diameter but whose small size does not prevent it from weighing three “troy ounces”, that is to say 93 grammes, and a Gallé soliflor containing a purple moonflower, a variety of everlasting flower also called Star of the Nile, combine to clutter the table’s nar
row top.

  Compared to the back room, or even to her bedroom, this room holds relatively few pieces of furniture; the season is certainly a poor one for business, but Madame Marcia, on principle, has never sold a lot of items simultaneously. Her back room, her cellar, and the rooms of her own flat give her plenty of opportunity to rotate her stock, without her being obliged to overload the room where she displays the pieces she wants to sell at a particular time and which she would rather show in a setting specifically designed for them. One of the reasons for the incessant circulation she inflicts on her furniture stems directly from her desire to show the pieces to their best advantage, which makes her change her displays more often than she would were she a window dresser in a department store.

  Her latest acquisition, the centrepiece of the current arrangement of the room, is a late nineteenth-century lounge suite found in a family hotel in Davos where a Hungarian pupil of Nietzsche’s is said to have spent some time: baroque easy chairs with little pads on the arms grouped about a small metal-bound table, behind which stands a sofa in the same style with velvet cushions. Around these rather heavy Austro-Hungarian, Ludwig-of-Bavarianish wedding-cake pieces, Madame Marcia has arranged items which either match their baroque contortions or provide a contrast of primitive or rustic strangeness, or of icy perfection: to the left of the table, a rosewood low table on which three finely chased antique clocks are placed, together with a very pretty leaf-shaped teaspoon, a few illuminated books with enamel-incrusted bindings and metal hasps, and a particularly fine skrimshander, a trinket made by whalers to fill long hours of enforced idleness, representing a look-out perched in the rigging, carved from a sperm-whale tooth.