Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep

by Georges Perec

Indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs. You are patient and you are not waiting, you are free and you do not choose, you are available and nothing arouses your enthusiasm. You ask for nothing. You demand nothing, you make no impositions. You hear without ever listening, you see without ever looking: the cracks in the ceilings, in the floorboards, the patterns in the tiling, the lines around your eyes, the trees, the water, the stones, the cars passing in the street, the clouds that form . . . cloud shapes in the sky.

  Now, your existence is boundless. Each day is made up of silence and noise, of light and blackness, layers, expectations, shivers. It is just a question of getting lost once again, for ever, more each time, of ceaseless wandering, of finding sleep, a certain physical calm: abandon, lassitude, drowsiness, drifting-off. You slide, you let yourself slip and go under: searching for emptiness, running from it. Walk, stop, sit down, take a table, lean on it, stretch out on your bed.

  Robotic actions: get up, wash, shave, dress. A cork on the water: drift with the current, follow the crowd, trail about: in the heavy silence of summer, closed shutters, deserted streets, sticky asphalt, deathly-still leaves of a green that verges on black; in the cold light of the shop-fronts, the streetlights, the little clouds of condensing breath at café doors, the black stumps of the dead winter trees.

  You frequent scruffy down-at-heel cafés, bistrots, back-street bars selling only wine by the glass, gloomy Vins et Charbons stinking of vinegar and accumulated filth. Out towards Charles Michels square or Château-Landon you walk down slimy alleyways, past hoardings disfigured by tattered posters. You sit on the benches in public gardens and parks, like a pensioner, an old man, but you are only twenty-five. You go and loiter in hotel lobbies, sitting on an imitation leather settee, you watch the people come and go, you read the brochures, catalogues, notices, you read the tourist leaflets. Paris by night, Cruise to the Indies, the glossy magazines that are lying around, the Echo de l'Hôtellerie française, the Revue du Touring-Club de France; you go and read the newspapers displayed on boards outside printing works or editorial offices: Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Capital, La Vie française. You while away your time in public libraries, you fill out a form, you read history books, scholarly works, memoirs of statesmen, or mountaineers, or parish priests.

  You walk the streets, looking in the gutters or in the space of variable width which separates the parked cars from the kerbside. You discover marbles, little springs, rings, coins, gloves, and on one occasion a wallet which contained a little money, identity papers, letters, and some photographs which almost made you cry.

  You watch the card-players in the Luxembourg Gardens, the great ornamental lakes of the Palais de Chaillot, on Sundays you go to the Louvre, walking straight through all the rooms and finally stationing yourself in front of a single painting or a single object: the unbelievably energetic portrait of a Renaissance man with a tiny scar above his upper lip, on the left, that is to say to his left, your right, or perhaps a stone engraving, or else a small Egyptian spoon in front of which you stand for an hour, or two hours, before leaving without looking back.

  It is one ceaseless and untiring circumambulation. You walk like someone carrying invisible suitcases, like someone following his own shadow. A blind man, a sleepwalker. You proceed with a mechanical tread, never-endingly, to the point where you even forget that you are walking.

  You are a meticulous stroller, an accomplished nightowl, a blob of ectoplasm, which, with the addition of a billowing sheet, could be mistaken for a ghost incapable of scaring even tiny children.

  You are a tireless walker: every evening you emerge from the black hole of your room, from your rotting staircase, your silent courtyard, to criss-cross Paris; beyond the great pools of noise and light: Opéra, the Boulevards, the Champs Elysées, Saint-Germain, Montparnasse, you head out towards the dead city, towards Péreire or Saint-Antoine, towards Rue de Longchamp, Boulevard de l'Hôpital, Rue Oberkampf, Rue Vercingétorix.

  All-night cafés. You remain standing, almost motionless, with one elbow resting on the glass counter - a thick, translucent sheet with rounded edges, fixed to its concrete base by means of copper bolts - half-turned towards a pinball machine into which three sailors shovel endless coins. You drink red wine or percolated coffee.

  It is a life without surprises. You are safe. You sleep, you walk, you continue to live, like a laboratory rat abandoned in its maze by some absent-minded scientist, and which, morning and night, unerringly, unhesitatingly, follows the path to its food dispenser, turning left, turning right, pressing down twice on a pedal ringed in red in order to receive its portion of homogenised feed.

  There is no hierarchy, no preference. Your indifference is motionless, becalmed: a grey man for whom grey has no connotation of dullness. Not insensitive but neutral. You are attracted by water, but also by stone; by darkness, but also by light; by warmth, but also by cold. All that exists is your walking, and your gaze, which lingers and slides, oblivious to beauty, to ugliness, to the familiar, the surprising, only ever retaining combinations of shapes and lights, which form and dissolve continuously, all around you, in your eyes, on the ceilings, at your feet, in the sky, in your cracked mirror, in the water, in the stone, in the crowds. Squares, avenues, parks and boulevards, trees and railings, men and women, children and dogs, queues, crushes, vehicles and shop windows, buildings, façades, columns and capitals, pavements, gutters, sandstone paving flags glistening grey in the drizzle, or almost red, or almost white, or almost black, or almost blue. Silences, rows, rackets, crowds at the stations, in the shops, on the boulevards, teeming streets, packed platforms, deserted Sunday streets in August, mornings, evenings, nights, dawns and dusks.

  Now you are the nameless master of the world, the one on whom history has lost its hold, the one who no longer feels the rain falling, who does not see the approach of night.

  All you are is all you know: your life that continues, your breathing, your step, your ageing. You see the people coming and going, crowds and objects taking shape and dissolving. Your eye is suddenly caught by a curtain rail in the tiny window of a haberdasher's: you continue on your way: you are inaccessible.

  A MOUNTAIN is ENGENDERED by the meeting of your eye and the pillow, a fairly gentle slope, a segment, or rather the arc of a circle which stands out in the foreground, darker than the rest of the space. This mountain is not worth bothering with; it is quite unexceptional. For the moment, your mind is preoccupied with a task that you somehow feel you should accomplish but which you are unable to define precisely; a task of little importance in itself but which is, perhaps, merely the pretext, the opportunity, to check whether you know the code; you suppose, for example, and this is immediately confirmed, that the task consists in drawing your thumb, or the whole of your hand, up over the pillow: but is it really your job to do this? Should you not be exempted from this tedious chore by virtue of your position in the hierarchy and your years of service? This problem is clearly a lot more important than the task itself, and you have no means of solving it, since you never dreamt that after so long you would still be called to account in this manner. And what is more, when you come to think about it, the problem is even more complicated: it is not a question of knowing whether or not you should move your thumb in accordance with your function, your grade, your seniority, but rather this: you will have to move your thumb sooner or later in any case, but you will lift it over the pillow if you are senior enough, and slide it under the pillow if you are not, and naturally you have no idea as to how many years of service you have, except that you feel you have a considerable number, though perhaps not considerable enough. Perhaps they even chose this moment to pose the question precisely because it is the very moment when nobody, not even the most honest and upstanding judge, would be able to declare with certainty that you are, or are not, sufficiently senior?

  The question could apply equally well to your feet or your thighs. In fact, the question is meaningless: the real problem revolves around contact. In t
heory, there are two kinds of contact: the contact of your body with the sheets, and this applies to your left thigh, your right foot, your right forearm, part of your stomach: this contact is fusion, osmosis, dilution; and the contact of your body with itself, in those places where flesh meets flesh, where your left foot rests on your right foot, where your knees meet, where your elbow comes up against your stomach: these contacts are sharp, hot or cold, or both hot and cold. One could naturally, and almost without risk, invert the whole operation and maintain that it is the other way round, the left foot under the right foot, the right thigh under the left thigh.

  What emerges most clearly from all of this is obviously that you are not lying down on your right or your left side, with your legs slightly bent and your arms wrapped around the pillow, but hanging upside-down, like a hibernating bat, or, rather, an over-ripe pear on a pear-tree: this means you could fall at any moment, although you are not overly alarmed by the prospect since your head is perfectly protected by the pillow, but it is nevertheless your duty to avoid this danger, no matter how slight it may be. But if you run through in your head all the means that you know of, you soon realise that the situation is more serious than you had initially imagined, if only because the loss of horizontally is rarely conducive to sleep. So, you will have to resign yourself to falling, even though you foresee that it will not be particularly pleasant (one never knows when one wall stop falling), but above all, you do not know how to go about letting yourself fall, it's only when you are not thinking about it that you start falling, and how could you not think about it since, precisely, you are thinking about it? That is something that no-one has ever given serious thought to, but which is not without a certain importance: there should be books written about it, reliable books that would enable one to face up to these situations which occur far more often than is generally thought.

  Three-quarters of your body has taken refuge in your head; your heart has taken up residence in your eyebrow where it now feels quite at home, where it is beating like a living creature, albeit, perhaps, at the very most, a little too quickly. You will have to conduct a roll-call of your body, to check that your limbs, your organs, your entrails, your mucous membranes are all intact. You would really like to clear your head of all these pieces that are cluttering it up and weighing it down, but at the same time, you congratulate yourself on having saved as much as you could, for everything else is lost, you no longer have any feet, or hands, your calf-muscle has turned to jelly.

  This is all becoming increasingly complicated: what you should do first is to remove your elbow, and then, in the space that is thus created, you could place at least a portion of your tummy, and so on until you are more or less back together again. But it is terribly difficult: there are bits missing, others are duplicated, others still have grown outrageously large, and yet others are voicing utterly insane territorial claims: your elbow is more an elbow than ever, you had forgotten just how elbow-like an elbow could be, a fingernail has supplanted your whole hand. And this, naturally, is always the moment that the torturers choose to intervene. One of them stuffs a chalk-filled sponge into your mouth, another bungs up your ears with cotton wool; a few pit-sawyers have set to work in your sinus passages, a pyromaniac is on the loose in your stomach, sadistic tailors compress your feet, force your head into a hat which is too small, cram you into an overcoat that is too tight, strangle you with a necktie; a sweep and his sidekick have introduced a knotted rope into your windpipe and, despite their best efforts, are unable to withdraw it.

  They come almost every time. You know them well. It is almost reassuring. If they have arrived, it means that sleep cannot be too far off. They will make you suffer a little, then they'll get bored and leave you alone. They hurt you, that goes without saying, but you have, with regard to pain, as with all the sensations you perceive, all the thoughts that cross your mind, all the impressions you feel, an attitude of complete detachment. You see yourself without astonishment being astonished, without surprise being surprised, without pain being assaulted by the torturers. You wait for them to calm down. You willingly concede to them whatever organs they want. You watch them from afar arguing over your stomach, your nose, your throat, your feet.

  But often, so often, this is just the final snare. Then the worst begins. It wells up slowly, imperceptibly. At first everything is calm, too calm, normal, too normal. Everything looks as if it will never have to move again. But then you know, you begin to know, with ever more implacable certainty, that you have lost your body, or no ... it is rather that you can see it, not far away, but you will never again be able to get back to it.

  You are now nothing more than an eye. A huge staring eye which sees everything, which sees your limp body just as it sees you, looked at and looking, as if it had turned round completely in its socket and was contemplating you in silence, you, the inside of you, the dark, empty, slime-green, frightened, impotent interior of you. It looks at you and it nails you to the spot. You will never stop seeing yourself. You can do nothing, you cannot escape yourself, you cannot escape your own gaze, you never will be able to: even if you were to fall into a sleep so deep that no shock, no shout, no burning pain could rouse you, there would still be this eye, your eye, that will never close, that will never sleep.

  You see yourself, you see yourself seeing yourself, you watch yourself watching yourself. Even if you were to wake up, your vision would remain the same, immutable. Even if you managed to grow thousands, billions of extra eyelids, there would still be this eye, behind, which would see you. You are not asleep but sleep will never come again. You are not awake and you will never wake up. You are not dead and even death could never set you free.

  AS FREE AS A cow, as a mollusc, as a rat!

  But rats don't spend hours trying to get to sleep. But rats don't wake up with a start, gripped by panic, bathed in sweat. But rats don't dream and what can you do to protect yourself against your dreams?

  But rats don't bite their nails, especially not methodically, for hours on end, until the tips of their claws are little more than a large open sore. You tear off half of the nail, bruising the spots where it is attached to the flesh; you tear away the cuticle nearly all the way back to the top joint until beads of blood start to appear, until your fingers are so painful that, for hours, the slightest contact is so unbearable that you can no longer pick things up and you have to go and immerse your hands in scalding hot water.

  But rats, as far as you know, do not play pinball. You hug the machines for hours on end, for nights on end, feverishly, angrily. You cling, grunting, to the machines, accompanying the erratic rebounds of the steel ball with exaggerated thrusts of your hips. You wage relentless warfare on the springs, the lights, the figures, the channels.

  Painted ladies who give an electronic wink, who lower their fans. You can't fight against a tilt. You can play or not play. You can't start up a conversation, you can't make it say what it will never be able to say to you. It is no use snuggling up close to it, panting over it, the tilt remains insensitive to the friendship you feel, to the love which you seek, to the desire which torments you. Six thousand points, when four thousand four hundred are enough for a replay, will only add to your bruises, will only beat you down a little further.

  You drift around the streets, you enter a cinema; you drift around the streets, you enter a bar; you drift around the streets, you look at the Seine, the butchers' shops, the trains, the posters, people. You drift around the streets, you enter a cinema where you see a film which resembles the one you've just seen, the same inane story, full of sweetness and music, told by a gentleman who is too intelligent to be real, then the intermission, commercials that you've seen ten, twenty times, a documentary about sardines, or the sun, about Hawaii or the Bibliothèque Nationale, a trailer for a film you've already seen and will see again, the film that you've just watched starting all over again, with its fragmented title-sequence, the beach at Etretat, sea, sea-gulls, children playing in the sand.

/>   You walk out, you drift around the over-lit streets. You go back to your room, you undress, you slip between the sheets, you turn out the light, you close your eyes. Now is the time when dream-women, too quickly undressed, crowd in around you, the time when you reread ad nauseam books you've read a hundred times before, when you toss and turn for hours without getting to sleep. This is the hour when, your eyes wide open in the darkness, your hand groping towards the foot of the narrow bed in search of an ashtray, matches, a last cigarette, you calmly measure the sticky extent of your unhappiness.

  Now you get up in the night. You wander the streets, you go and perch on bar-stools at the Rosebud, at Harry's Bar, or take a seat at the Franco-Suisse in Rue Saint-Honoré, almost directly across the street from your room, or you install yourself at a café table in Les Halles, and there you stay, for hours, until closing-time, with a beer in front of you or a black coffee or a glass of red wine. You watch the others come and go, the butcher's boys, the florists, the newspaper vendors, the crowds of merry revellers, the lonely boozers, the tarts.

  You are alone and drifting. You walk along the desolate avenues, past the stunted trees, the peeling façades, the dark porches. You penetrate the bottomless ugliness of Les Batignolles, and Pantin. Your only chance encounters are with Wallace fountains which long since ran dry, tacky churches, gutted building sites, pale walls. The parks whose railings imprison you, the festering swamps near the sewer outlets, the monstrous factory gates. Steam locomotives pump out clouds of white smoke under the metallic walkways of the area around Gare Saint-Lazare. On Boulevard Barbès or Place Clichy, impatient crowds raise their eyes to the heavens.

  You will not break the magic circle of solitude. You are alone and you know no-one; you know no-one and you are alone. You see the others bunch together, huddle together, hug and protect one other. But you, lifeless gaze, transparent wraith, leper blending with the walls, you are a silhouette already returned to dust, an occupied space that no-one approaches. You force yourself to hope for unlikely encounters. But it is not for you that leather, brass and wood start suddenly to shine, that lights are lowered and noises gently muffled. You are alone despite the thickening cigarette smoke, despite Lester Young or Coltrane, alone in the snug heat of the bars, in the empty streets which echo to your tread, in the drowsy complicity of the last bars to remain open.