Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep

by Georges Perec

  You may well listen, prick up your ears, press them against the wall, but when all is said and done you know next to nothing. It seems that your confidence in your interpretations diminishes in inverse proportion to the precision of your perceptions. Certainly, he opens and closes drawers all the time, but even that isn't proven, it is not entirely out of the question, for example, that for some reason best known to him, he is rubbing together two pieces of wood, or that he is indeed opening and closing one or several drawers, but for no particular reason, that is to say, without putting anything in or taking anything out, simply for the sake of making some noise, or because he likes the sound of opening and closing drawers. Certainly, he goes out every day shortly before lunchtime, but you are not always there to verify this, and, by the same token, you sometimes go out when it gets dark, and before he returns home; perhaps he even knows how to fake a departure: going down a few steps then creeping back up so softly that, despite all your efforts, you are no longer able to detect his presence. Certainly, he draws water from the tap on the landing, certainly his kettle whistles when the water reaches boiling point, but perhaps it is he who is whistling - there is no way of knowing.

  And yet, occasionally, his life belongs to you, his noises are yours, since you are listening, waiting for them, since they keep you alive, like the dripping tap, like the bells of Saint-Roch, or the noises of the street, the sounds of the city. It doesn't really matter if you are wrong, if you are interpreting, inventing. It is sufficient that you have made him into a haberdasher for him to be one, with his folding suitcase, his combs, his lighters, his sunglasses. He leads the slender existence that you allow him to lead, fading away the moment he leaves the range of your perception, dead as soon as you drop off to sleep, condemned the rest of the time to fill his kettle, cough, drag his feet, open and close his drawers.

  But perhaps unwittingly, by some silent symbiosis,. you also belong to him? Perhaps he is like you - as you listen out for his cough, the whistling, the noises of his drawers — perhaps the noise of your cup as you replace it on the shelf, the rustling of the newspapers that you pick up and put down, the slithering of the cards that you deal out onto your narrow bed, the noise of running water, your breathing, perhaps all of this, along with the dripping tap, the belltower, the noises of the streets, the sounds of the city, constitutes for him the tightly-woven fabric of passing time, of the life that remains. Perhaps he is trying desperately to know you, perhaps he endlessly interprets every sign he perceives: who are you, what do you do, you who rustle newspapers, you who stay in for several days at a time, or stay out for several days without coming home?

  But you make so little noise! He can at most detect your presence, and, if he pays so much attention to it, it must be because he is afraid, because you worry him: he is like that old badger in his burrow that can never be too well protected, who can hear somewhere close-by a noise that he never succeeds in pinning down, a noise which never grows any louder, never grows any softer, never ceases. He tries to protect himself, he makes clumsy attempts to set snares for you, to make you believe that he is strong, that he is not afraid of you, that he is not quaking: but he is so old! What little strength he has left is employed in endlessly counting his fortune, in continually changing its hiding place.

  Sometimes, you quite like to believe, you fool, that you fascinate him, that he really is afraid: you try to remain silent for as long as possible; or you take a piece of wood, or a nailfile, or a pencil, and scratch the top of the partition that separates your two rooms, producing a tiny, irritating noise.

  Or else, in a sudden rush of sympathy, you almost feel like sending him salutary messages, tapping with your fist against the partition, one knock for A, two knocks for B . . .

  NOW YOU HAVE RUN OUT of hiding places. You are afraid and you are waiting for everything to stop, the rain, the hours, the stream of traffic, life, people, the world; waiting for everything to collapse, walls, towers, floors and ceilings; waiting for men and women, old people and children, dogs, horses, birds, to fall, one by one, to the ground, paralysed, plague-ridden, epileptic; waiting for the marble to crumble away, for the wood to turn to pulp, for the houses to collapse noiselessly, for diluvian rains to dissolve the paintwork, pull apart the dowel-joints in hundred-year-old wardrobes, tear fabrics to shreds, wash away the newspaper ink; waiting for a fire without flames to consume the stairs; waiting for the streets to subside and split down the middle to reveal the gaping labyrinth of the sewers; waiting for rust and mist to invade the city.

  Sometimes, you dream that sleep is a slow death creeping up on you, an anaesthesia at once sweet and fearful, a blissful necrosis: the chill climbs gradually up your legs, up your arms, numbing you slowly, slowly wiping you out. Your toe is a distant peak, your leg is a river, your cheek is your pillow, you are residing wholly in your thumb, you melt, you flow like sand, like mercury. You are nothing more than a grain of sand, a curled-up homunculus, a tiny blob, without muscles, without bones, without legs, without arms, without a neck, feet and hands merged into one, enormous lips swallowing you up.

  You grow enormously, you explode, you die, you are crazed, petrified: your knees are hard stones, your tibias are steel bars, your stomach is an ice-floe, your penis is an oven, your heart a cauldron. Your head is a mist-shrouded moor, thin veils, thick blankets, heavy cloaks . . .

  YOUR EYEBROWS LIFT AND NARROW, your brow is able to furrow, your eyes stare back at you. Your mouth opens and closes.

  You study yourself carefully in the mirror and, even when you look closely, you look much more fair of face than you thought you were (although, in all truth, it is the light of evening and the source of light is behind you, so that only the fine fluff which covers the rim of your ears is properly lit). It is a pure, harmoniously proportioned face, almost handsome in its outlines. The black of the hair, the eyebrows and the eye sockets leaps out at you like a living creature against the mass of the face which is as yet undecided. The expression of the eyes is in no way ravaged by time, which has left no trace there, but it is not childlike either: it is, if anything, unbelievably energetic, unless, of course, it is merely observant, since you are, precisely, in the act of observing yourself, and trying to frighten yourself.

  What secrets do you expect to find in your cracked mirror? And what truth in your face? This slightly swollen moon-shaped face, already somewhat puffy, these eyebrows which meet in the middle, that tiny scar over your lip, those somewhat protuberant eyes, those uneven teeth, covered in yellowish tartar, that mass of excrescences, spots, naevi, blackheads, warts, comedos, blackish or brownish moles with a few hairs growing out of them, under the eyes, on the nose, below the temples. By moving up very close you are able to discover that your skin is astonishingly furrowed, lined, scoured. You can see every pore, every swelling. You look, you scrutinise the wings of your nose, the cracks in your lips, the roots of your hair, the burst blood vessels which streak the whites of your eyes with red.

  Sometimes, you look like a cow. Your protuberant eyes register no interest in what they see. You see yourself in the mirror and what you see arouses no feelings in you, not even such as might arise from simple familiarity. This somewhat bovine reflection, which you have learnt from experience to identify as the surest image of your face, appears to bear no trace of sympathy for you, of recognition, as if, indeed, it didn't recognise you, or rather that it recognised you, but was careful not to express any surprise. You cannot seriously believe that it is harbouring a grudge against you, or even that it is thinking of something else. It is simply that, like a cow, like a stone or water, it doesn't have anything in particular to say to you. It is looking at you out of courtesy, because you are looking at it.

  You pull up the corners of your eyes, to make yourself look Chinese, you try pulling a few faces, eyes bulging: the one-eyed man with the twisted mouth, the monkey with the tongue pushing out the upper or the lower lip, cheeks sucked in, cheeks puffed out. But, Chinese or grimacing, the cow in the c
racked mirror just lets you get on with it and does not react. Its docility is so blatant that it reassures you at first, before starting to bother you, for, at length, it does indeed become almost embarrassing. You can lower your eyes before a man or before a cat, because men and cats look at you, and their look is a weapon (and a benevolent look is perhaps the most dangerous of weapons, for it can succeed in disarming you where hatred would fail), but nothing is more discourteous than to lower your eyes before a tree, or before a cow, or before your reflection in the mirror.

  Long ago, in New York, a few hundred yards from the groynes where the last Atlantic breakers wash ashore, a man let himself die. He was a penpusher with a law firm. Hidden behind a screen, he remained seated at his desk and never moved. He fed himself on ginger biscuits. He stared out of the window at a wall of blackened brick, which he could almost reach out and touch. It was useless to ask him to do anything, to check a text or go to the post office. Neither threats nor entreaties had any effect on him. Eventually he became almost blind. They had to sack him. He set up home on the stairs of the office block. They had him locked away, but he sat down in the prison courtyard and refused to eat.

  YOU ARE NOT DEAD and you are no wiser.

  You have not exposed your eyes to the sun's burning rays.

  The two tenth-rate old actors have not come to fetch you, hugging you so tightly that you formed a unity which would have brought all three of you down together had one of you been knocked out.

  The merciful volcanoes have paid you no heed.

  What a marvellous invention man is! He can blow on his hands to warm them up, and blow on his soup to cool it down. He can, if he is not too disgusted, take delicately between his thumb and forefinger any butterfly he chooses. He can cultivate plants and extract from them his food, his clothing, a few drugs, and even perfumes to mask his unpleasant smell. He can beat metals and make saucepans out of them (something a monkey could never do).

  So many exemplary stories glorify your greatness and your suffering! So many Robinsons, Roquentins, Meursaults, Leverkühns! The exemplary illustrations, the fine images, the lies: it is not true. You have learnt nothing, you could never bear witness. It isn't true, don't believe them, don't believe the martyrs, the heroes, the adventurers!

  Only idiots can talk of Man, Beast, Chaos, and keep a straight face. In order to survive, the most ludicrously tiny insect invests as much, if not more energy than that expended by goodness knows which aviator - a victim of the crazy schedules imposed by the Company to which, moreover, he felt proud to belong - in flying over some mountain which was far from being the highest on the planet.

  The rat, in his maze, is capable of truly heroic feats: by judiciously connecting the pedals he has to press in order to obtain his food to the keyboard of a piano or the console of an organ, the animal can be persuaded to give a passable rendition of "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring", and there is no reason to doubt that he takes great pleasure in doing so.

  But, poor Daedalus, there never was a maze. You bogus prisoner! your door was open all the time. There was no warder posted outside, no head-warden stationed at the end of the corridor, no Grand Inquisitor waiting at the garden gate.

  It means nothing to talk of hitting rock bottom. Or to plumb the depths of despair or of hatred, or of alcoholic decline or of haughty solitude. The all too perfect image of the diver who resurfaces by pushing off vigorously from the sea bed is there to remind you, if you needed reminding, that the man who has fallen is entitled to all the honours: God's mercy extends no less to him than to those who have never strayed from His flock. Sinners, like divers, are made to be absolved.

  But there was no devious-cruising Rachel to rescue you from the miraculously preserved wreckage of the Pequod, in order that you, another orphan, might bear witness in your turn.

  Your mother has not put your new second-hand clothes in order. You are not going to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscience of your race.

  No old father, no old artificer will stand you now and ever in good stead.

  You have learnt nothing, except that solitude teaches you nothing, except that indifference teaches you nothing: it was a lure, it was a mesmerising illusion which concealed a pitfall. You were alone and that is all there is to it and you wanted to protect yourself; you wanted to burn the bridges between you and the world once and for all. But you are such a neglible speck, and the world is such a big word: all you ever did was to drift around a city, to walk a few kilometres past façades, shopfronts, parks and embankments.

  Indifference is futile. It really does not matter whether you wish or you do not wish. You can play pinball or not play pinball, someone, in any case, will come along and slip a twenty centime coin into the slot. You can believe, if you want, that by eating the same meal every day you are making a decisive gesture. But your refusal is futile. Your neutrality is meaningless. Your inertia is just as vain as your anger.

  You fondly believe that you are just passing by, indifferent, that you are walking down the avenues, drifting through the city, dogging the footsteps of the crowd, penetrating the play of shadows and cracks.

  But nothing has happened: no miracle, no explosion.

  With each passing day your patience has worn thinner, the hypocrisy of your pitiful efforts has been laid bare. Time would have had to stand still, but no-one has the strength to fight against time. You may have cheated, snitching a few crumbs, a few seconds: but the bells of Saint-Roch, the changing traffic lights at the intersection between Rue des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Honoré, the predictable drip from the tap on the landing, never ceased to signal the hours, the minutes, the days and the seasons. You may have pretended to forget time, you may have spent nights walking and days sleeping. But you couldn't ever quite get away with it.

  For a long time you constructed sanctuaries, and destroyed them: order or inaction, drifting or sleep, the night patrols, the neutral moments, the flight of shadows and light. Perhaps for a long time yet you could continue to lie to yourself, deadening your senses, sinking deeper and deeper into the mire. But the game is over, the great orgy, the spurious exaltation of a life in limbo. The world has not stirred and you have not changed. Indifference has not made you any different.

  You are not dead. You have not gone mad.

  Disasters do not exist, they are elsewhere. The tiniest catastrophe might have been enough to save you: then you would have lost everything, you would have had something to defend, words of justification to find, words to soften the hearts of your judges. But you are not ill. Your days are not numbered, neither are your nights for that matter. Your eyes can see, your hand does not shake, your pulse is regular, your heart beats. If you were ugly your ugliness might perhaps be fascinating, but you are not even ugly, neither are you a hunchback, a stammerer, an amputee, a legless cripple, you don't even limp.

  There is no curse hanging over you. You may be a monster, but not a monster of the lower world. You do not need to writhe in agony, cry out in pain. There is no tribulation in store for you, no rock of Sisyphus, no-one is going to offer you a chalice only to snatch it from your lips at the last moment, there is no crow with sinister designs on your eyeballs, no vulture has been assigned the indigestible chore of tucking into your liver morning, noon, and night. You do not have to grovel before your judges, begging for mercy, imploring their pity. No-one is condemning you, and you have committed no offence. No-one looks at you and then averts their gaze in horror.

  Time, which sees to everything, has provided the solution, despite yourself.

  Time, that knows the answer, has continued to flow.

  It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that everything starts again, that everything starts, that everything continues.

  Stop talking like a man in a dream.

  Look! Look at them. Posted like silent sentinels by the river, along the embankments, all over the rain-washed pavements of Pla
ce Clichy, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries, waiting for the sea-spray, for the breaking waves, for the raucous cries of the sea-birds.

  No, you are not the nameless master of the world, the one on whom history had lost its hold, the one who no longer felt the rain falling, who did not see the approach of night. You are no longer the inaccessible, the limpid, the transparent one. You are afraid, you are waiting. You are waiting, on Place Clichy, for the rain to stop falling.