Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  The young woman stands on tiptoe beside a Louis XIII-style dresser, her arms outstretched to reach from the top shelf an earthenware plate decorated with a romantic landscape: wide fields surrounded by wooden fences and broken by dark spinneys of pine and little streams spilling over into lakes, and, in the distance, a tall narrow barnhouse with a balcony and a flattened roof on which a stork has landed.

  The man is wearing a polka-dot pullover. He holds a fob watch in his left hand which he looks at whilst with his right hand he resets the hands of a large Early American carriage clock on which a group of Negro Minstrels is carved: a dozen musicians wearing top hats, cutaway jackets, and big bow ties, playing various wind instruments, banjos, and a shuffleboard.

  The walls are hung with hessian. There aren’t any pictures, or reproductions, not even a standard post-office calendar. The child – now aged eight – is on all fours on a very thin straw mat. He wears a kind of red leather cap. He’s playing with a small whistling top bearing a bird design drawn in such a way that as the top slows down it looks as though the birds are flapping their wings. Beside him, in a strip comic, you can see a tall mop-haired young man with a blue-and-white-striped sweater jumping onto a donkey. In the bubble coming from the donkey’s mouth – for it’s a talking donkey – are the words: “If you want to play donkey you must be an ass”.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rorschach, 1

  THE ENTRANCE HALL of the Rorschachs’ large duplex. The room is empty. The walls are in white gloss, the floor is laid with grey flagstones. One piece of furniture, in the centre: a huge Empire desk, with a set of drawers fitted in the backpiece, separated by wooden pillars making an arch over the middle, in which a clock is set, with a design carved in it representing a naked woman beside a little waterfall. On the desktop two objects are displayed: a bunch of grapes, each fruit being a delicate sphere of blown glass, and a bronze statuette of a painter, standing in front of a full-size easel, leaning back from the waist, tipping back his head; he has a long drooping moustache, and curly hair down to his shoulders. He wears a full doublet and holds a palette in one hand and a long-handled brush in the other.

  On the wall at the end, a large pen-and-ink drawing depicts Rémi Rorschach himself. He’s an old man, tall and wizened, with a birdlike profile.

  Rémi Rorschach’s life, as narrated in a volume of memoirs ghosted for him with indulgence by a writer specialising in that kind of service, is a painful combination of courage and error. He began his career at the end of the 1914–18 war in a Marseilles music hall doing impressions of Max Linder and other American comedians. A tall, thin man with melancholy, heartbroken gestures and expressions which could indeed remind you of Keaton, Lloyd, or Laurel, Rorschach might have made a name for himself if he hadn’t been a few years before his time. The fashion was for soldier comedians and whilst the crowds flocked to Fernandel, Gabin, and Préjean, soon to be made famous by films, “Harry Kobinz” – that was the name he’d taken – mouldered in miserable poverty and found it harder and harder to get his act taken on. What with the war just over, the recent national unity government, and the “sky-blue” conservative victory at the elections, he got the idea of founding a group specialising in rousing brass flourishes, military tunes from Tipperary, square dances, and a kitbag of similar Armentières. A photo from that period shows him with his band – “Albert Greenfield and his Jolly Rogers” – wearing a cocky look, a fake kepi tilted to one side, a broad-frogged combat jacket, and impeccably tight puttees. It was an instant success, but lasted only a few weeks. The invasion of the paso doble, the foxtrot, the beguine, and other exotic dances from North, South, and Central America and elsewhere closed to him the doors of dance halls and nightspots, and his valiant efforts to adapt (“Barry Jefferson and His Hot Pepper Seven”, “Paco Domingo and the Three Caballeros”, “Fedor Kowalski and His Magyar Minstrels”, “Alberto Sforzi and His Gondoliers”) all failed in succession. In fact, he recalls on this point, only names and headgear changed: the act stayed virtually the same, as they were happy enough to make slight changes of tempo, to swap a guitar for a balalaika, a banjo, or a mandolin, and to utter the appropriate “Baby”, “Olé”, “Tovarich”, “mio amore”, or “corazón”, occasionally, with meaning.

  Shortly after this, dejected, his mind made up to abandon the performing arts, but not wishing to leave the world of show business, Rorschach became the manager of an acrobat, a trapeze artist who had rapidly become a celebrity because of two features: the first was that he was very young – Rorschach met him when he was not yet twelve – and the second was his talent for staying on his trapeze for hours at a stretch. Crowds flocked to the music halls and circuses where he was on, not only to see him do his act, but to watch him napping, washing, dressing, or drinking a cup of chocolate on the narrow bar of his trapeze, ninety or a hundred feet from the ground.

  At the start the partnership flourished, and all the major cities of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East applauded the amazing feats of the young man. But as he grew older, the trapeze artist became more and more demanding. At first purely out of a desire to improve but subsequently from the tyranny of habit as well, he so organised his life that, for as long as he was working in one establishment, he spent his whole time, day and night, on his trapeze. His very modest needs were all met by relays of servants who kept watch below and who raised and lowered everything required up above in specially constructed containers. His way of life occasioned no particular difficulties as far as those around him were concerned, except that, during the other acts on the programme, it was slightly disturbing that he stayed aloft – the fact could not be concealed – and that the audience, though it usually remained calm, let its gaze stray in his direction. The management forgave him this, however, because he was an outstanding and irreplaceable artist. Also, of course, they appreciated that he did not live like that out of mischief and that it was in fact the only way he could keep himself in constant form and maintain his act at the level of perfection.

  The problem was harder to manage when his seasons ended and the trapeze artist had to travel to another town. His manager saw to it that he was spared any unnecessary prolongation of his sufferings: for trips in towns they used racing cars, dashing, if possible at night or in the very early morning, through the deserted streets at top speed, though of course still too slowly for the languishing trapeze artist; in trains, they took a whole compartment, where, adopting a pathetic but at least partial substitute for his normal way of life, he spent the journey up in the luggage rack; in the next theatre on their tour the trapeze was in place long before the acrobat’s arrival and all the doors between them and the auditorium were wide open and all the corridors clear, so that he could be back up on high without losing a second. “Seeing him set foot on the rope-ladder,” Rorschach wrote, “and climb back up to his eyrie with the speed of lightning, were the happiest moments of my life.”

  * * *

  The day came, alas, when the artist refused to come down from his trapeze. He had just done his last performance at the Grand Theatre at Leghorn and was due to leave that evening by car for Tarbes. Despite Rorschach’s and the music hall manager’s pleadings, increasingly hysterical appeals from the other members of the troupe, from the musicians, the entire staff, the technicians, and from the crowds who had begun to leave but had stopped and returned on hearing all this noise, the acrobat, in a fit of pride, cut the rope he could have come down by and began to perform, at ever-faster pace, an uninterrupted succession of grand circles. This supreme performance lasted two hours and caused fifty-three spectators to pass out. The police had to be brought in. In spite of Rorschach’s warnings, the policemen brought a long fire-ladder and began to climb up. They didn’t even get halfway: the trapeze artist opened his grip, and, with a long scream, describing a perfect parabola, he crashed to the ground.

  After paying compensation to the theatre owners who had been trying to get the acrobat for months, Rorschach had some capita
l left, and he decided to invest it in an export-import business. He bought a stock of sewing machines and shipped them to Aden in the hope of trading them for perfumes and spices. He was persuaded to adopt a different course by a trader he became acquainted with on the crossing, who was lugging various copper instruments and utensils, from valve rods to spiral condensing tubes, from pearl-sieves to frying pans and fish kettles. The spice market, so this businessman explained, and more generally everything to do with trade between Europe and the Middle East, was tightly controlled by Anglo-Arabian syndicates which, in order to keep their monopolies, did not flinch from even physically eliminating their most minor rivals. On the other hand, business between Arabia and black Africa was much less supervised and offered opportunities for profitable deals. In particular, the trade in cowrie shells: as is well known, these shells are used as currency by many people in Africa and India. But it is not widely known – and that’s where there was money to be made – that there are several different kinds of cowries, with different values for different tribes. Thus Red Sea cowries (Cypraea turdus) are very highly valued in the Comoro Islands, where they can easily be exchanged for Indian cowries (Cypraea caput serpentis) at a very favourable rate of fifteen caput serpentis for one turdus. Now not far away, in Dar-es-Salaam, the rate for caput serpentis is constantly going up, and deals are often struck there at one caput serpentis for three Cypraea moneta. This last kind of cowrie is commonly called the coin-cowrie: as you would expect from its name, it is negotiable almost everywhere, but in West Africa, in Cameroon and especially in Gabon, it is so highly valued that some tribes pay for it with its own weight in gold. With all expenses offset, you could aim to multiply your stake tenfold. The operation was entirely safe but needed time. Rorschach didn’t feel he had the makings of a great traveller and was not too keen, but the trader’s certainty was sufficiently impressive to make him accept unhesitatingly the offer of partnership that was put to him when they landed at Aden.

  The transactions proceeded exactly as the trader had foreseen. In Aden they exchanged their shipments of copper and sewing machines for forty cases of Cypraea turdus without any difficulty. They left the Comoros with eight hundred cases of caput serpentis, the only problem having been to get the wood for the said cases. In Dar-es-Salaam they chartered a caravan of two hundred and fifty camels to cross Tanganyika with their one thousand nine hundred and forty cases of coin-cowries, reached the great Congo river, and made their descent nearly to the estuary in four hundred and seventy-five days, of which two hundred and twenty-one had been spent on water, one hundred and thirty-seven in rail transshipment, twenty-four in portered transshipment, and ninety-three days in waiting, resting, enforced idleness, palavers, administrative hassles, and diverse incidents and nuisances, which nonetheless constituted, all in all, a remarkable achievement.

  It was a little over two and a half years since they had landed at Aden. What they didn’t know – and how in God’s name could they have known! – was that, at the very time they got to Aden, another Frenchman, called Schlendrian, was leaving Cameroon after flooding it with coin-cowries obtained in Zanzibar; he had brought about an irreversible depreciation of the currency throughout Western and Central Africa. Rorschach’s and his partner’s cowries had not just become unnegotiable, they had become a dangerous liability: the French colonial administration reckoned, quite rightly, that putting seven hundred million shells in circulation – more than thirty per cent of the global mass of cowries used for trade in the whole of French West Africa – would provoke an unprecedented economic catastrophe (the mere rumour sent the prices of colonial goods into a seesaw, an upset viewed by some economists as a prime factor in the causes of the Wall Street crash): the cowries were therefore impounded; Rorschach and his companion were courteously, but firmly, requested to catch the first steamer leaving for France.

  Rorschach would have done anything to take his revenge on Schlendrian, but he never managed to track him down. All he managed to learn was that in the war of 1870 there had indeed been a General Schlendrian. But he’d died long before and didn’t seem to have left any descendants.

  Exactly how Rorschach got through the following years remains obscure. In his memoirs he is very discreet on this point. In the early 1930s he wrote a novel largely based on his African adventure. The novel appeared in 1932, under the title African Gold, published by Les Editions du Tonneau. The one critic who reviewed it compared it to Journey to the End of the Night, which had appeared at about the same time.

  The novel was not much read, but it allowed Rorschach to get into literary society. A few months later he founded a review which he entitled, rather bizarrely, Prejudices, thereby wishing no doubt to signify that the review had none. It appeared at a rhythm of four issues a year up until the war. It published several pieces by some authors who subsequently established themselves. Though Rorschach is very close with precise details on this point, it seems probable that it was a vanity-publishing enterprise. In any case, of all his pre-war projects it is the only one he does not describe as a total failure.

  Some say that he spent his war with the Free French Army, and that he was entrusted with several missions of a diplomatic nature. Others assert, to the contrary, that he collaborated with the Axis powers and that after the war he had to flee to Spain. What’s certain is that he returned to France, rich and flourishing, and even married, in the early sixties. It was at a time when, as he recalls jokingly, all you had to do to be a producer was to set up in one of the innumerable empty offices in the Maison de la Radio, and he began to work for television. It was also at this time that he bought from Olivier Gratiolet the last two apartments in the building still owned by him, apart from the little flat he lived in himself. Rorschach had them knocked into a single, prestigious duplex which was photographed many times for La Maison Française, Maison et Jardin, Forum, Art et Architecture Aujourd’hui, and other specialist reviews.

  Valène can still remember the first time he saw him. It was one of those days when (so as not to cause a surprise) the lift was out of order. He had come out of his flat and was on his way downstairs to see Winckler, and passed in front of the newcomer’s door. It was wide open. Workmen were coming and going, and in the lobby Rorschach was scratching his head as he listened to the advice of his interior designer. At that time he’d gone for the American look, with floral shirts, neckerchiefs, and wristbands. Later he went in for the weary lion look, the old loner who’s seen it all, happier with desert Bedouins than in the drawing rooms of Paris: canvas rubbers, leather jerkins, grey linen shirts.

  Today he is an ill old man, forced to spend most of his time in nursing homes or in long-drawn-out convalescence. His misanthropy remains as proverbial as ever, but has a diminishing field for expression.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  RORSCHACH, R. Memories of a Struggler. Paris, Gallimard, 1974.

  RORSCHACH, R. African Gold. Paris, Ed. du Tonneau, 1932.

  Gen. A. COSTELLO “Could the Schlendrian Offensive have saved Sedan?”, Army Hist. Review, 7,1907.

  LANDES, D. “The Cauri System and African Banking”, Harvard J. Econ., 48,1965.

  ZGHAL, A. “Les Systèmes d’échanges interafricains. Mythes et réalités”, Zeitschrift für Ethnol., 194, 1971.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Dinteville, 1

  DR DINTEVILLE’S CONSULTING room: an examining couch, a metal desk, almost bare, with only a telephone, an anglepoise lamp, a prescription pad, a matt-finished steel pen in the groove of a marble inkstand; a small yellow leather divan, above which hangs a large reproduction of a Vasarely, two broad and sprouting succulents rising out of plaited raffia pot-holders, one on each side of the window; a set of freestanding shelves, the top shelf supporting a number of instruments, a stethoscope, a chrome-plated cotton-wool dispenser, a small bottle of medicinal alcohol; and along the whole right-hand wall, shining metal panels concealing various pieces of medical apparatus and the cupboards where the doctor keeps his instruments, his r
ecords, and his pharmaceutical stores.

  Dr Dinteville sits at his table writing a prescription with a look of complete indifference. He is a man of about forty, almost bald, with an egg-shaped head. His patient is an old woman. She is about to get down from the examining couch where she has been lying, and is adjusting the brooch which holds her blouse together: a metal lozenge inscribed with a stylised fish.

  A third person is seated on the divan; he is a man of mature years, wearing a leather jacket and a wide check scarf with fringed edging.

  The Dintevilles are descended from a Post Master knighted by Louis XIII for the help he gave Luynes and Vitry at the time of Concini’s murder. Cadignan has left us this striking portrait of a character who seems to have been an uncommonly rough old trooper:

  D’Inteville was of middling stature, neither too big nor too small, and his nose was somewhat aquiline, the shape of a razor handle. At that time he was thirty-five or thereabouts, and about as fit for gilding as a lead dagger. He was a very proper-looking fellow, but for the fact that he was a bit of a lecher and naturally subject to a malady that was called at that time “the lack of money, pain incomparable!” However he had sixty-three ways of finding it at a pinch, the commonest and most honest of which was by means of cunningly perpetrated larceny. He was a mischievous rogue, a cheat, a boozer, a roysterer, and a vagabond if there ever was one in Paris, but otherwise the best fellow in the world; and he was always preparing some trick against the sergeants and the watch.

  His descendants were generally less wild and gave France a dozen or score of bishops and cardinals, as well as various other remarkable characters, of whom the following are particularly worthy of note: