Life

by Perec, Georges

  The fashion for happenings which began to invade Paris towards the end of that period gradually robbed these society events of their principal interest. The journalists and photographers who had been assiduous attenders at the start came to find them just a bit old hat and to prefer wilder sprees at which Mr X would have a ball munching light bulbs whilst A. N. Other systematically dismantled the central heating system and Muggins slashed his wrists so as to write poetry in his own blood. Moreover Hutting made no effort to keep them: he had eventually seen that he was largely bored at his parties and that they had never done anything for him. In 1961, on his return from a stay in New York that he had prolonged more than was his custom, he informed his friends that he was giving up the weekly gatherings whose predictability had made them wearisome, and that it was time to invent something else.

  Since then, the great studio has almost always been empty. But, maybe out of superstition, Hutting has left plenty of equipment in it and, on a steel easel lit by four ceiling spots, a large canvas, entitled Eurydice, which he likes to say is and always will be unfinished.

  The canvas portrays an empty room, painted grey, virtually empty of furniture. In the centre, a metallic grey desk on which lie a handbag, a bottle of milk, a diary, and a book open at the twin portraits of Racine and Shakespeare1. On the rear wall there hangs a picture of a landscape with a setting sun. To the side, a door ajar, through which, one surmises, Eurydice, just a few seconds before, has disappeared for ever.

  1 It may be useful to mention in connection with this that Franz Hutting’s maternal great-grandfather, Johannes Martenssen, professor of French literature at the University of Copenhagen, was the Danish translator of Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare (Købnhavn, Gjoerup Publishers, 1860).

  CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

  Réol, 2

  SHORTLY AFTER MOVING into Rue Simon-Crubellier, the Réols set their hearts on a modern bedroom suite which they had seen in the department store where Louise Réol worked as an invoice clerk. The bed alone cost 3,234 francs. With its bedspread, bedside tables, dressing table, matching pouf, and mirrored wardrobe, the suite came to over eleven thousand francs. The store management gave its employee a preferential credit arrangement with no deposit and twenty-four months to pay; interest on the loan was charged at a rate of 13.65%, but taking account of the arrangement fee, the life-insurance premium, and the capital repayments, the Réols found they had a monthly outgoing of nine hundred and forty-one francs and thirty-two centimes, deducted at source from Louise Réol’s pay cheque. That represented nigh on one-third of the couple’s income, and it soon became clear they could not survive decently on those terms. Maurice Réol, who was a junior executive officer at MATRASCO (Maritime Transportation Assurance Company) thus resolved to ask his head of department for a raise.

  MATRASCO was a company suffering from elephantiasis whose acronym no longer corresponded more than marginally to its activities, which had become ever more numerous and polymorphous. For his part, Réol was responsible for producing a comparative report each month on the number of policies and the amount of the premiums written for public bodies in the Northern area of France. These reports, like those which Réol’s colleagues of equivalent rank produced on different geographical or economic areas (insurances written for farmers, for traders, for the professions, etc., in West-Central France, the Rhône-alps region, Brittany, etc.) were fed into the quarterly reports of the “Statistics and Forecasts” section which Réol’s head of department, a certain Armand Faucillon, submitted to the managing directors on the second Thursday of March, June, September, and December.

  In principle Réol saw his head of department every day between eleven and eleven thirty during what was called the Executive Conference, but that, obviously, was not a setting in which he could hope to approach him to talk over his particular problem. Anyway the head of department usually got his deputy head of department to deputise for him and only chaired the Executive Conference in person when the drafting of the quarterly reports began to be an urgent business, that is to say from the second Monday in March, June, September, and December.

  So one morning when, quite exceptionally, Armand Faucillon was present at the Executive Conference, Maurice Réol made up his mind to ask for an appointment to see him. “Sort it out with Miss Yolande”, was the head of department’s cheery reply. Miss Yolande was the keeper of the head of department’s two appointment books, one being a diary of small size, for his personal appointments, and the other an office desk diary; and one of Miss Yolande’s trickiest tasks was of course to avoid mistaking one diary for the other, and not to put down two appointments for the same time.

  Armand Faucillon was undoubtedly a very busy man, for Miss Yolande could not give Réol an appointment with him for six weeks: in that period the head of department had to go to Marly-le-Roi for the annual meeting of heads of department of the Northern Zone, and on his return would have to deal with corrections and revisions to the March quarterly report. Then, as every year, on the day after the directors’ meeting on the second Thursday in March, he would be off for a ten-day skiing holiday. An appointment was fixed therefore for 30 March at eleven thirty, after the Executive Conference. It was a good day and a good time, for everyone in the department knew that Faucillon had his on days and his off times: on Mondays, like everyone else, he was in a bad mood; on Fridays, like everyone else’s, his mind wandered; and on Thursdays, he had to attend a seminar run by one of the Computer Centre engineers on “Computing and Business Management”, and he needed the whole day to reread the notes he had tried to take at the previous week’s seminar. And in addition, of course, there was no talking to him about anything at all before ten in the morning or after four in the afternoon.

  Unfortunately for Réol, his head of department broke his leg on his winter sports vacation and did not return to the office until the eighth of April. Meanwhile the Board had appointed him to the Joint Committee which was to visit North Africa to study the unresolved dispute between the Company and its former Algerian partners. On his return on the twenty-eighth of April, the head of department cancelled all the appointments he could get away with cancelling and locked himself up for three days with Miss Yolande to draft the talk to go with a show of the slides he had brought back (“Many-splendoured Mzab: Ouargla, Touggourt, Ghardaïa”). Then he went off for the weekend, a weekend that stretched since May Day fell on a Saturday and as was customary in cases of this kind managerial staff in the company could take either the Friday or the Monday as an extra day off. The head of department thus returned on Tuesday, the fourth of May and made a brief appearance at the Executive Conference to invite members of his staff and their spouses to a slide talk he had organised for the following evening at eight p.m. in Rm. 42. He had a kind word for Réol and reminded him they were due to meet. Réol went straight to see Miss Yolande and obtained an appointment for Thursday the day after next (as the Computer Centre engineer was on a course in Manchester, the compulsory seminar was in temporary abeyance).

  The slide show was not a great success. The audience was sparse, and the noise of the projector rendered the lecturer’s voice inaudible; and he kept on losing the thread of his long sentences. Then, when the head of department, after showing a palm grove, had said the next slide would be of sand dunes and camels, the screen lit up with a shot of Robert Lamoureux playing in Sacha Guitry’s Let’s Have a Dream, followed by a slide of Héléna Bossis in the premiere of Sartre’s The Respectable P …, then Jules Berry, Yves Deniaud, and Saturnin Fabre wearing the full ceremonial garb of members of the French Academy, in a mid-twenties light comedy entitled The Immortals, pretty much based on The Men Who Wear Green. The head of department lost his temper and put the houselights back on, at which point it was realised that the projectionist who had sorted out the slide cartridges had been dealing both with Faucillon’s talk and with one to be given the next day by a famous theatre critic on “The French Stage High and Low”. The incident was quickly put right,
but the only company bigwig who had consented to come out for the talk, the director of the “Overseas” department, took advantage of it to slip away, using a business dinner as an excuse. In any case, the head of department was somewhat out of sorts next day, and when Réol went to see him and laid out his problem, he reminded him almost curtly that proposals for salary increases were looked at in November by Personnel Management, and it was out of the question to consider any such request any earlier.

  After going over his problem in his head from every possible angle, Réol reached the conclusion that he had committed a huge blunder: instead of requesting a pay raise straight on, he should have asked to be included in the Young Couples’ Assistance Scheme which the company’s welfare department ran to help households become owner-occupiers, rehabilitate or modernise their principal dwelling, or acquire capital equipment. The welfare officer, whom Réol was able to see as early as the twelfth of May, told him that such assistance would be perfectly possible in his case, provided the Réols were indeed married. But in fact, although they had been living together for over four years by then, they had never bothered to get officially conjugated, as they say, and had never had any intention of so doing, even after the birth of their son.

  So they got married, in early June, as simply as possible, since, meanwhile, their material circumstances had gone steadily downhill: their wedding feast, with their two witnesses as their only guests, took place in the setting of a city centre self-service eatery, and their wedding rings were made of tin.

  Preparation work for the directors’ meeting on the second Thursday in June kept Réol too busy to get all the papers together that were needed for his submission for assistance from the welfare scheme. It was not finally ready until Wednesday, 7 July. And from noon on Friday, 16 July, until 8:45 a.m. on Monday, 16 August, MATRASCO shut down for the summer break without anything having been yet decided on Réol’s case.

  There was no question of the Réols going on holiday; whilst their little boy spent the whole summer at Laval at his maternal grandparents’ house, the Réols, thanks to their neighbour Berger, who put in a word for them with one of his colleagues, were hired for a month, respectively as a dishwasher and as cigarette and novelty salesgirl (ashtrays, cravats depicting the Eiffel Tower and Moulin- Rouge, Ooh-là-là dolls, streetlamp cigarette lighters marked “Rue de la Paix”, glass hemispheres with the Sacré-Cœur in a snowstorm, etc.) in an establishment which called itself La Renaissance: it was a restaurant serving Bulgarian-style Chinese food, located between Pigalle and Montmartre, where thrice a night there landed a coach-load of Paris-by-Nighters who, for seventy-five francs no extras, got a tour of floodlit Paris, a dinner at La Renaissance (“its Bohemian charm, its exotic menu”) and a massed charge through four cabarets, The Two Hemispheres (“Striptease and Folk; the essence of naughty Paris”), The Tangerine Dream (serviced by a pair of belly dancers, Zazoua and Aziza), King Wenceslas (“with its vaulted cellars, its medieval ambience, its minstrels, and its ancient ribald folksongs”) and finally the Villa d’Ouest (“a showplace of elegant depravity – Spanish nobles, Russian tycoons, and fancy sports of every land crossed the world to ride in”), before being dumped back at their hotels, bespattered with sweetened champagne, dubious spirits, and greyish zakuski.

  * * *

  On returning to MATRASCO Réol found a nasty surprise awaiting him: the welfare department, finding itself overburdened with submissions, had just decided that henceforth it would consider only those requests coming to it through the proper channels and countersigned by the director of the department to which the applicant was attached. Réol dropped his submission onto Miss Yolande’s desk and begged her to do all in her power to get the head of department to scrawl three lines of balanced appreciation on it over his initials.

  But the head of department never signed things without due consideration, and moreover, he would say as a joke on himself, he often had cramp in his writing finger. For the moment, the priority was to get the September quarterly report ready, a report to which, for reasons he alone knew, he seemed to attach especial importance. And he made Réol do his report three times over, reproving him each time for taking the figures too pessimistically instead of highlighting the progress that had been made.

  Repressing his fury, Réol resigned himself to another two or three weeks’ wait; their situation was more and more precarious, they were six months in arrears with the rent, and owed the grocer four hundred francs. A stroke of luck at least enabled them to enroll their son at the municipal nursery, relieving them of the thirty or fifty francs’ daily expenditure which the nanny had cost them up to then.

  The head of department was away all of October: he was on a study tour of West Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland. In November, a viral ear infection obliged him to stop work for three weeks.

  In despair, Réol gave up hoping he would ever get his request through. Between the first of March and the thirtieth of November, the head of department had managed to absent himself for four full months, and Réol worked out that what with long weekends, convenience days, inconvenience days, deputised days, business trips and travel recovery leave, courses, seminars, and other days out, he had been to his office less than one hundred times in nine months. Not to mention his three-hour lunch breaks or his dashing away at five forty so as not to miss the train at six-o-three. There was no reason for that to change. But on Monday the sixth of December the head of department was appointed Deputy Director of the Overseas Dept and in the joy of his promotion finally returned Réol’s submission with his approval. Fifteen days later the welfare aid was granted.

  It was then that the Company’s accounts department noticed that the level of repayments made by the Réol couple for the purchase of their bedroom suite exceeded the official ceiling for home- improvement loans: twenty-five per cent of net income after deduction of outgoings arising from the principal dwelling. The credit the Réols had been given was therefore illegal, and the Company had no right to guarantee it!

  By the end of year one, therefore, Réol had obtained no raise and no welfare assistance, and he had to begin all over again with a new head of department.

  The new man, who came straight from graduation at a top college with bees in his bonnet about computers and market research, held a meeting of all staff on his first day and informed them that the work of the “Statistics and Forecasts” department was based on obsolete, not to say medieval, methods, that it was not feasible to think you could have a reliable middle- or long-term strategy on information assembled only every quarter, and that henceforth, under his leadership, they would proceed to make daily estimates using specified socio-economic sampling techniques so as to have at all times an ongoing model of the firm’s activities on which to ground any forecasts. Two programmers from the Computer Centre did the necessary, and after a few weeks Réol and his colleagues found themselves swamped by rolls of print-out from which it emerged more or less evidently that eighteen per cent of Normandy farmers opted for Formula A whilst forty-eight point four of the shopkeepers in the South Coast–Pyrenees region claimed to be happy with Formula B. The “Statistics and Forecasts” department, accustomed as it was to a more classical methodology whereby policies subscribed and cancelled were marked by making little five-barred gates (down strokes for one, two, three, four, and the fifth diagonally across the others), quickly grasped that if it did not wish to be completely sunk it had to take steps, and began a work-to-rule which consisted of bombarding the new head of department, the two computer persons, and the computer itself with questions of greater and lesser degrees of relevance. The computers coped, the two computer persons managed, but the new head of department eventually snapped and seven weeks later asked for a transfer.

  This episode, which has gone down in the Company’s annals as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, did nothing to improve Réol’s affairs. He had managed to borrow two thousand francs from his in-laws to pay off his rent arrears, but debts were piling
up on all sides, and he was more and more at a loss for a solution. It was no use for him and Louise to build up overtime, to do Sunday and Bank Holiday duties, to take on work at home (addressing envelopes, copying out commercial address lists, knitting, etc.); the gap between their resources and their needs kept on getting wider. In February and March they began to take things to the pawnshop: their wristwatches; Louise’s jewels; their television set; and Maurice’s camera, a Konica automatic reflex with zoom lens and electronic flash, which was the apple of Maurice’s eye. In April, the manager again threatened to evict them, and they were forced to seek another private loan. Relatives and friends declined, and they were saved at the last minute by Mademoiselle Crespi, who withdrew three thousand francs which she had been saving at the Savings Bank for her funeral expenses.

  With no right of appeal against the decision made by the welfare department, with no head of department to support a fresh request for a raise, since the former deputy head was now acting head and was far too frightened of losing his job to take the slightest initiative, Réol had no prospect whatsoever. On 15 July, Louise and he decided that they had had enough, that they would not cough up another penny, that creditors could recover whatever they liked, that they would not do anything to stop that happening. And they set off for a holiday in Yugoslavia.

  When they got back, summonses and final demands were heaped on the doormat. Gas and electricity were cut off, and then, on the building manager’s application, valuers came to prepare the bankruptcy auction of their furniture.