Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep

by Georges Perec

  LATER YOU LEAVE PARIS; you do not set off at random, you go to your parents' house in the countryside near Auxerre. It's a rather dead little village, where your parents live in retirement. You spent a few years there as a child, and a few vacations. The ruins of a castle stand atop a hill at the foot of which the village has grown up. Apparently, a beatific hermit once lived in a nearby cave which is now open to visitors. In the square, near the church, there is a tree reputed to be several hundred years old.

  You stay there for several months. At mealtimes you listen to the news and the quiz programmes on the radio. In the evenings you play belote with your father, who wins. You go to bed very early, before your parents, at nine o'clock. Sometimes you read all through the night. You have rediscovered in your room, in the loft, hidden away in linen cupboards, the books you read when you were fifteen, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Jack London, and the piles of detective novels that you brought with you on each of your previous visits. You re-read them carefully, without skipping a line, as if you had completely forgotten them, as if you had never really read them.

  You hardly say a word to your parents, you scarcely see them outside of meal-times. In the morning you lounge around in bed. You can hear them moving about the house, going up- and downstairs, coughing, opening drawers. Your father is sawing wood. A grocery van sounds its horn near the gate. A dog barks, birds sing, the church bells ring. Lying in your high bed with the feather quilt pulled right up to your chin, you study the ceiling joists, a tiny spider with a grey, almost white abdomen, is spinning its web in the corner of a beam.

  You sit down at the kitchen table with its waxed tablecloth. Your mother pours you a bowl of white coffee, and pushes the bread, the jam and the butter towards you. You eat in silence. She talks to you about her kidney problems, your father, the neighbours, the village. Madame Thevenon has sold her farm in return for an annuity. The Moreaus' dog has died. Work on the new motorway has already begun.

  You go down into the village to run a few errands for your mother, to buy tobacco for your father and cigarettes for yourself. The farmers have deserted what was once a sizeable village. Trains used to stop here, there was a solicitor, a market; only two agricultural holdings remain. Nowadays the village is inhabited by retired people and city folk who come for the weekend and a month each summer, doubling or tripling the winter population.

  You walk past the restored houses: shutters repainted in apple-green, adorned with wrought-iron fleurs-de-lys, antique dealers' carriage-lamps, ornamental gardens, grottoes where no deities reside, a weekenders' paradise. Lawyers, grocers and civil servants trim the hedges, rake the gravel paths, fuss over their borders and feed the goldfish. The square is dotted with clusters of mopeds and scooters belonging to the youngsters. The café-tabac is full of people.

  Every afternoon you go for a walk. You stick to the road at first, and then, beyond a disused quarry, you plunge into the forest. You pick up a branch that you roughly strip of its twigs. You walk beside fields of ripe wheat. You lop the heads off weeds with great clumsy swipes of your stick. You do not know the names of the trees, nor of the flowers, the plants, the clouds. You sit down on top of a hill from where you can survey the whole village: your parents' house, somewhat on the outskirts, with its three roofs of different colours, the castle on about the same level as your eyes, the viaduct that used to carry the railway line, the laundry, the post office. On the white road far below, a huge lorry moves away like a galleon leaving port. A solitary peasant, in the middle of his field, guides a plough pulled by a dappled horse.

  Bird-song rings out: chirps, roulades, raucous cries. The great trees tremble. Nature is there and it beckons you lovingly. You chew on blades of grass that you quickly spit out: you are not really inspired by the landscape, or moved by the tranquillity of the fields, you are neither irritated nor soothed by the silence of the countryside. You are only occasionally fascinated by an insect, a stone, a fallen leaf, a tree: sometimes you spend hours contemplating a tree, describing it, dissecting it: the roots, the trunk, the branches, the leaves, every leaf, every rib of every leaf, every branch again, and the unending play of the indifferent shapes that your eager gaze solicits or conjures up: a face, a town, a maze or a path, coats of arms and cavalcades. As your perception gets sharper, more patient and more versatile, the tree shatters and then reforms, a thousand shades of green, a thousand leaves, identical and yet all different. You think that you could spend your whole life in front of a tree, never exhausting it and never understanding it, because there is nothing for you to understand, just something to look at: when all is said and done, all you can say about this tree is that it is a tree; all this tree can say to you is that it is a tree, a root, then a trunk, then branches, then leaves. You can't expect to extract any other truth from it. The tree has no moral to offer you, no message to impart.

  Its strength, its majesty, its life - if you still hope to draw some meaning, some courage, from these outworn metaphors - are only ever images, neat illustrations, as useless as the tranquillity of the fields, as the still waters which, reputedly, run deep, or the courage of the little paths that don't climb very high but do so all alone, or the smiling hillsides upon which bunches of grapes ripen in the sun.

  And that is why the tree fascinates you, or astounds you, or calms you: because of the unsuspected and unimpeachable obviousness of the bark, the branches and the leaves. That is why, perhaps, you never go walking with a dog, because the dog looks at you, pleads with you, speaks to you. Its eyes brimming with tears of gratitude, its servile expression, its canine frolicking, constantly force you to confer on it the ignoble status of pet. You cannot remain neutral in the company of a dog any more than in the company of a man. But you will never hold a conversation with a tree. You cannot live in the company of a dog, because the dog is constantly calling upon you to make it live, to feed it, to stroke it, to be a man for it, to be its master, to be the god roaring the name - dog - that will make it instantly grovel on the ground. But the tree asks nothing of you. You can be the God of the dogs, God of the cats, God of the poor, all you need is a leash, a little tenderness, a little money, but you will never be master of the tree. All you can ever wish for is to become a tree in your turn.

  It is not that you hate men, why would you hate them? Why would you hate yourself? If only membership of the human race were not accompanied by this insufferable din, if only these few pathetic steps taken into the animal kingdom did not have to be bought at the cost of this perpetual, nauseous dyspepsia of words, projects, great departures! But it is too high a price to pay for opposable thumbs, an erect stature, the incomplete rotation of the head on the shoulders: this cauldron, this furnace, this grill which is life, these thousands of summonses, incitements, warnings, thrills, depressions, this enveloping atmosphere of obligations, this eternal machine for producing, crushing, swallowing up, overcoming obstacles, starting afresh and without respite, this insidious terror which seeks to control every day, every hour of your meagre existence!

  You have hardly started living, and yet all is said, all is done. You are only twenty-five, but your path is already mapped out for you. The roles are prepared, and the labels: from the potty of your infancy to the bath-chair of your old age, all the seats are ready and waiting their turn. Your adventures have been so thoroughly described that the most violent revolt would not make anyone turn a hair. Step into the street and knock people's hats off, smear your head with filth, go bare-foot, publish manifestos, shoot at some passing usurper or other, but it won't make any difference: in the dormitory of the asylum your bed is already made up, your place is already laid at the table of the poètes maudits; Rimbaud's drunken boat, what a paltry wonder: Abyssinia is a fairground attraction, a package trip. Everything is arranged, everything is prepared in the minutest detail: the surges of emotion, the frosty irony, the heartbreak, the fullness, the exoticism, the great adventure, the despair. You won't sell your soul to the devil, you won't go clad in sandals to thro
w yourself into the crater of Mount Etna, you won't destroy the seventh wonder of the world. Everything is ready for your death: the bullet that will end your days was cast long ago, the weeping women who will follow your casket have already been appointed.

  Why climb to the peak of the highest hills when you would only have to come back down again, and, when you are down, how would you avoid spending the rest of your life telling the story of how you got up there? Why should you keep up the pretence of living? Why should you carry on? Don't you already know everything that will happen to you? Haven't you already been all that you were meant to be: the worthy son of your mother and father, the brave little boy scout, the good pupil who could have done better, the childhood friend, the distant cousin, the handsome soldier, the impoverished young man? Just a little more effort, not even a little more effort, just a few more years, and you will be the middle manager, the esteemed colleague. Good husband, good father, good citizen. War veteran. One by one, you will climb, like a frog, the rungs on the ladder of success. You'll be able to choose, from an extensive and varied range, the personality that best befits your aspirations, it will be carefully tailored to measure: will you be decorated? cultured? an epicure? a physician of body and soul? an animal lover? will you devote your spare time to massacring, on an out-of-tune piano, innocent sonatas that never did you any harm? Or will you smoke a pipe in your rocking chair, telling yourself that, all in all, life's been good to you?

  No. You prefer to be the missing piece of the puzzle. You're getting out while the going's good. You're not stacking any odds in your favour or putting any eggs in any baskets. You're putting the cart before the horse, you're throwing the helve after the hatchet, you're counting your chickens before they're hatched and eating the calf in the belly of the cow, you're drinking your liquid assets, taking French leave, you are leaving and you are not looking back.

  You won't listen to any more sound advice. You won't ask for any remedies. You will go your own way, you will look to the trees, the water, the stones, the sky, your face, the clouds, the ceiling, the void.

  You remain near the tree. You don't even ask the rush of the wind in the leaves to become your oracle.

  The rain comes. You stay indoors, you hardly set foot outside your room. You read aloud, all day long, following the lines of text with your finger, like a child or an old man, until the words lose their meaning, until the simplest phrase becomes cock-eyed and chaotic. Evening comes. You don't switch on the light and you remain motionless, sitting at the little table by the window with the book in your hands but no longer reading, listening distractedly to the sounds of the house, the creaking of the beams and the floorboards, your father's coughing, the cast-iron hotplates being fitted onto the wood-fired stove, the noise of the rain in the zinc valleys, a car passing, far away, the seven o'clock bus sounding its horn as it rounds the turning near the hill.

  The summer visitors have all departed. The holiday homes are closed up. When you go into the village, the occasional dog barks at you as you walk past. Tattered posters, on the church square, by the town hall, the post-office, the laundry, are still advertising auction sales, dances, village fetes held long ago.

  You still go for the odd walk. You tread the same old paths. You cross ploughed fields which leave thick layers of clay sticking to the soles of your boots. You get bogged down in the ruts in the pathways. The sky is grey. The views are obscured by blankets of mist. Smoke rises from a few chimneys. You are cold despite your lined pea-jacket, your boots, your gloves; you clumsily attempt to light a cigarette.

  You venture further afield, towards other villages, across the fields and through the woods. You sit at the long wooden table of a grocery store-cum-bar where you are the only customer. You are served a cup of Bovril or an insipid coffee. Dozens of flies blacken the fly-paper that still hangs in a spiral from the enamelled lampshade. An uninterested cat is warming itself by the cast-iron stove. You study the shelves of tins, the packs of washing powder, the aprons, the exercise-books, the already out-of-date newspapers, the candy-pink postcards on which chubby soldiers give voice to the elevated sentiments inspired in them by some blonde sweetheart, the bus timetables, the racing results, the results of the Sunday football matches.

  Flights of birds drift past high overhead. On the Yonne canal, a long barge with a metallic blue hull slips by, pulled by two big greys. You return on foot along the main road, in the darkness, cars roar past you in both directions, you are dazzled by their headlamps which, from the hollows of the hills, seem momentarily to be trying to light up the skies before bearing down on you.

  YOU RETURN TO PARIS and the same room, the same silence. The dripping tap, the crowds, the streets, the bridges; the ceiling, the pink plastic bowl; the narrow bed. The cracked mirror in which the features that make up your face are reflected.

  Your room is the centre of the world. This lair, this cupboard-like garret which never loses your smell, with its bed into which you slip alone, its shelf, its linoleum, its ceiling whose cracks and flakes, stains and contours you have counted a thousand times, the washbasin that is so tiny it resembles a piece of doll's-house furniture, the bowl, the window, the wallpaper of which you know every flower, every stem, every interlacement, details which - as you alone are able to state with absolute certainty - are never quite identical to each other, despite the virtual infallibility of printing methods; these newspapers that you read and re-read, that you will read and re-read again; this cracked mirror that has only ever reflected your face fragmented into three uneven, slightly overlapping, surface portions that habit almost allows you to ignore, forgetting the ghostly image of an eye in the middle of your forehead, or the split nose, or the perpetually twisted mouth, and retaining only a Y-shaped stripe, like the almost forgotten, partially erased mark of some old wound, a slash from a sabre or the lash of a whip; the shelved books, the ribbed radiator, the portable record-player sheathed in dark red pegamoid: thus begins and ends your kingdom, perfectly encircled by the hosts of ever-present noises - some friendly, some hostile - which are now all that keep you attached to the world: the dripping tap on the landing, the noises from your neighbour's room, his throat-clearing, the drawers which he opens and closes, his coughing fits, the whistling of his kettle, the noises of Rue Saint-Honoré, the incessant rumble of the city. From far away, the siren of a fire engine seems to be heading straight for you, then moving away, then drawing closer again. At the junction of Rue Saint-Honoré and Rue des Pyramides the measured succession of car noises, braking, stopping, pulling away, accelerating, imparts a rhythm to time almost as surely as the tirelessly dripping tap or the bells of Saint-Roch.

  Your alarm clock has been showing five-fifteen for a long time now. It stopped, probably when you were out, and you haven't bothered to wind it up again. Time no longer penetrates into the silence of your room, it is all around, a permanent medium, even more present and obsessive than the hands of a clock that you could choose not to look at, and yet slightly warped, out of true, somehow suspect: time passes, but you never know what time it is, the chimes of Saint-Roch do not mark the quarter-hours, or the halves, or the three-quarters, the traffic-lights at the junction of Rue Saint-Honoré and Rue des Pyramides do not change every minute, the tap does not drip every second. It is ten o'clock, or perhaps eleven, for how can you be sure that you heard correctly, it's late, it's early, the sun rises, night falls, the sounds never quite cease altogether, time never stops completely, even if it is now reduced to the merely imperceptible: a hairline crack in the wall of silence, the forgotten murmur of the drip-feed, almost indistinguishable from the beats of your heart.

  Your room is the most beautiful of desert islands, and Paris is a desert that no-one has ever traversed. All you really need is your sleep, silence around you, your own silence, stillness. All you need is for days to begin and end, for time to pass, for your mouth to be shut, for the muscles in your nape, your jaws and your chin to slacken, for the rising and falling of your rib-cage, the b
eating of your heart to be the only evidence of your continuing and patient existence.

  To want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep. To let yourself be carried along by the crowds, and the streets. To follow the gutters, the fences, the water's edge. To walk the length of the embankments, to hug the walls. To waste your time. To have no projects, to feel no impatience. To be without desire, or resentment, or revolt.

  In the course of time your life will be there in front of you: a life without motion, without crisis and without disorder, a life with no rough edges and no imbalance. Minute by minute, hour after hour, day after day, season after season, something is going to start that will be without end: your vegetal existence, your cancelled life.

  NOW YOU LEARN HOW TO LAST. At times, you are the master of time itself, the master of the world, a watchful little spider at the hub of your web, reigning over Paris: you command the North by Avenue de l'Opéra, the South by the Louvre colonnade, the East and West by Rue Saint-Honoré.

  At times, you attempt to solve the puzzle of a face which emerges, perhaps, from the complex play of shadows and blisters in a portion of the ceiling: eyes and nose, nose and mouth, a forehead uninterrupted by any hairline, or else it is the precise outline of the helix of an ear, the beginings of a shoulder and a neck.

  There are a thousand ways to kill time and no two are the same, but each is as good as the next, a thousand ways of waiting for nothing, a thousand games that you can invent and then drop straightaway.