Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  Today, out of twenty rooms originally set aside for the serving classes on the street side of the building, and initially numbered in green stencil-painted digits from 11 to 30 (the twenty other numbers from 1 to 10 and 31 to 40 belonging to the rooms on the courtyard side, on the other side of the corridor), there are no more than two actually lived in by servants working in the building: room No. 13, which is Smautf’s, and No. 26, where the Paraguayo-Dutch couple who work for Hutting sleep; one could stretch a point and add No. 14, Jane Sutton’s room, since she pays the rent by doing two hours’ daily housework for the Rorschachs (which actually comes out at a rather exorbitant rent for such a small room), and, at the very limit, No. 15, lived in by Madame Orlowska, who sometimes also does some cleaning, but not usually in the building, except, on rare occasions, for the Louvets and the Marquiseaux, when her Polish and Arabic piecework for the Bulletin signalétique du CNRS isn’t enough for her and her little boy to live on. The other maids’ rooms and attics no longer even belong necessarily to the owners of flats in the building: the manager has bought back several of them and rents them out as “flatlets” after putting in plumbing; several people have put two or more of the rooms together, starting with Olivier Gratiolet, the heir of the former owners of the building, and – in contravention of the terms of the co-ownership agreement, through loopholes in the law and by bribery – some have even annexed parts of the “service areas”, like Hutting, who appropriated the old corridor when he converted his big studio.

  The servants’ stairs are now hardly used at all, except by some delivery men and suppliers, and by workmen working on the building. The lift – when it is in order – is freely used by all. But the glazed door remains a subtle and fearfully persistent mark of a difference. Even if there are people upstairs much richer than those downstairs, that does not prevent it being the case that from the point of view of downstairs people those upstairs are somehow inferior: as it happens, if they are not servants, then they are paupers, children (young people), or artists for whom life must necessarily be inscribed within these tiny rooms where there is space only for a bed, a cupboard, and a stack of shelves for jars of jam with which to eke out the days before the next pay cheque. It is of course quite normal that Hutting, a painter with an international reputation, should be much richer than the Altamonts, and it is moreover quite clear that the Altamonts are flattered to be hosts to Hutting or to be his guests at his château in the Dordogne or at his farmhouse at Gattières, but the Altamonts will never miss an opportunity of recalling that in the seventeenth century painters, writers, and musicians were only valets with a specialism, just like perfumers, hairdressers, dressmakers, and restaurateurs still were in the nineteenth century, who today are destined to reach fame as well as fortune; although one can see how dressmakers or restaurateurs could become businessmen, even industrialists, by their own efforts, an artist, on the other hand, could never cease to be dependent on middle-class need.

  This vision of things, magnificently set out in 1879 in Edmond About’s Worker’s ABC, where he calculates without a hint of irony that when Mademoiselle Patti (1843–1919) goes to sing in a financier’s drawing room she produces, on opening her mouth, the equivalent of forty tons of cast iron at fifty francs per thousand kilos, this vision of things is obviously not shared with equal intensity by all the inhabitants of the building. For some it is a pretext for recriminations and enviousness, displays of jealousy and scorn; for others, it belongs to folklore and is of no real consequence. But for both groups of people, and for both the upstairs and the downstairs dwellers, it functions ultimately as a basic fact of life: the Louvets, for instance, say that the Plassaerts have “converted the maids’ rooms, but made their flat quite nice all the same”; the Plassaerts for their part feel obliged to stress that their three little attic rooms are “really cute” and to add that they got them for a song and to insinuate that they don’t lower their backsides onto reproduction Louis XV antiques like that old Moreau woman (which is, as it happens, entirely false). In much the same way Hutting will often say apologetically that he’d grown weary of the great barn of a luxury flat that he had had at the Porte d’Orléans and that he’d been dreaming of a small and peaceful studio in a quiet neighbourhood; on the other hand, the manager refers to Morellet as “Morellet” but to Cinoc and Winckler as “Monsieur Cinoc” and “Monsieur Winckler”, and if it should happen that Madame Marquiseaux gets into the lift at the same time as Madame Orlowska, she will make some tiny and perhaps unconscious gesture signifying that it is her lift, of which she condescends to share the usufruct for a short moment with someone who on arriving on the sixth floor will still have two flights to climb on foot.

  On two occasions the upstairs and the downstairs folk have entered into open conflict: the first time was when Olivier Gratiolet asked the Co-owners’ Association meeting to approve an extension of the stair carpet to the seventh and eighth floors, beyond the glazed door. He had the support of the manager, for whom a carpet on the stairs meant an extra one hundred francs per month per room. But the majority of the co-owners, whilst they deemed the operation permissible, demanded that its costs be borne solely by the owners of the two top floors, not by the whole association of co-owners. That would not have been worth it to the manager, who would have had to pay for the carpet almost on his own, so he took steps to have the idea buried.

  The second time, it was about mail delivery. The present concierge, Madame Nochère, though she may be the salt of the earth, has class prejudices, and the separation marked by the glazed door is no mere fiction for her: she delivers mail to people living below the door, but the others have to collect at her office: those were the instructions given by Juste Gratiolet to Madame Araña, handed on by Madame Araña to Madame Claveau, who passed them down to Madame Nochère. Hutting, and even more virulently the Plassaerts, demanded the repeal of this discriminatory and dishonourable measure, and the Co-owners’ Association was obliged to yield to them so as not to appear to ratify a practice inherited from the nineteenth century. But Madame Nochère refused point blank, and when the manager gave her formal notice to deliver mail to all floors without distinction, she produced a medical certificate, signed by none other than Dr Dinteville, certifying that the condition of her legs did not permit her to climb the stairs on foot. Madame Nochère’s principal motivation in this affair was hatred for the Plassaerts and for Hutting; for she delivers the mail even when there is no lift working (which is fairly often) and few days pass without her visiting Madame Orlowska, Valène, or Mademoiselle Crespi, and she takes advantage of the opportunity to bring them up their mail.

  That obviously has little practical consequence except for the concierge herself, who knows once and for all that she shouldn’t rely on much of a Christmas box from Hutting or the Plassaerts. It is one of those breaches around which the life of a building is structured, a source of tiny tensions, of micro-conflicts, allusions, implications, skirmishes: it is one of the sometimes bitter controversies which rock the Co-owners’ Association meetings, such as the argument over Madame Réol’s flowerpots, over David Marcia’s motorcycle (did he or did he not have the right to park it in the lean-to adjoining the dustbin area? Today the answer is no longer important, but in the attempts to find it, a good half-dozen legal experts were called in, for completely wasted fees), or, again, over the disastrous musical habits of the crackpot who lived on the second floor right to the rear of the courtyard and who felt deprived, at certain unspecifiable periods and for an unforeseeable length of time, unless he listened thirty-seven times in a row, preferably between the hours of midnight and three a.m., to Heili Heilo, Lili Marlene, and other jewels of Hitlerian music.

  There are even subtler, almost unguessable fractures: for instance, the older versus the newer inhabitants, where the rules governing distribution belong to the realm of the imponderable: Rorschach, who bought his flat in 1960, is an “elder”, whereas Berger, who arrived less than a year later, is a “newer”; Berger, mo
reover, moved in straight away, whilst Rorschach spent a year and a half refurbishing his flat; or the Altamont side versus the Beaumont side; or people’s attitudes during the last war: of the four still living in the building today who were then of an age to take part, only one had an active commitment to the Resistance – Olivier Gratiolet, who ran a clandestine printing press in his cellar and for almost a year kept under his bed a dismantled American submachine gun which he’d transported there, in pieces, in a shopping basket. Véra de Beaumont, on the other hand, willingly adopted pro-German attitudes and appeared several times in public with impeccable, high-ranking Prussians; the two others, Valène and Mademoiselle Crespi, seemed not to take sides.

  All that makes a pretty tranquil history, with dramas over dog-dirt and dustbin tragedies, the Bergers’ dawn radio and coffee grinder waking Madame Réol too early, Hutting still complaining about Gratiolet’s doorbell, or Léon Marcia’s sleepless nights which the Louvets find hard to bear: for hours and hours the old man paces up and down in his bedroom, then goes to the kitchen to get a glass of milk from the fridge, or to the bathroom to rinse his face, or switches on the radio, at low volume but still too loud for his neighbours, to listen to crackling broadcasts from the other end of the world.

  In the whole history of the building there have been few serious events, apart from the little accidents consequent upon Morellet’s experiments and, much earlier on, around Christmas 1925, the fire in Madame Danglars’ dressing room, which is today the room where Bartlebooth does his puzzles.

  The Danglars were dining out; there was no one in the room, but a fire, lit by the servants, was burning in the fireplace. The blaze was explained by a spark flying over the rectangular, painted metal fireguard in the front of the fireplace and landing in a vase standing on a low coffee table: unfortunately, the vase held magnificent artificial flowers which caught fire immediately: the flames spread to the fitted carpet and the cretonne with which the walls were papered, and which depicted a classical rustic scene: a gambolling faun, one hand on his hip and the other bent prettily behind his head, sheep grazing with a black ewe in their midst, a mower-girl cutting grass with a sickle.

  Everything went up in flames, and especially Madame Danglars’s most valuable jewel: one of Carl Fabergé’s 49 Easter eggs, an egg of rock crystal containing a bush of roses; when the egg was opened, the roses formed into a circle at the centre of which there appeared a group of songbirds.

  All that was recovered was a pearl bracelet that Monsieur Danglars had given his wife as a birthday present. He had bought it at the sale of a descendant of Madame de La Fayette, to whom it was given by Henrietta of England. The case it was kept in had stood up to the fire without damage, with the pearls completely black inside it.

  Half of the Danglars’ flat was destroyed; the rest of the building did not suffer.

  Sometimes Valène dreamt of cataclysms and tempests, of whirlwinds that would carry the whole house off like a wisp of straw and display the infinite marvels of the solar system to its shipwrecked inhabitants; or that an unseen crack would run through the building from top to bottom, like a shiver, and with a long, deep, snapping sound it would open in two and be slowly swallowed up in an indescribable yawning chasm; then hordes would overrun it, bleary-eyed monsters, giant insects with steel mandibles, blind termites, great white worms with insatiable mouths: the wood would crumble, the stone would turn to sand, the cupboards would collapse under their own weight, all would return to dust.

  But no. Only these shabby squabbles over buckets and tubs, over matches and sinks. And behind that ever-closed door the morbid gloom of that slow revenge, that ponderous business of two senile monomaniacs churning over their feigned histories and their wretched traps and snares.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Foulerot, 3

  GENEVIÈVE FOULEROT’S BEDROOM, or rather her bedroom-to-be.

  The room has just been repainted. The ceiling has been decorated in matt white, the walls in ivory-white gloss, the quartered woodblock floor in black gloss. A bare bulb on a wire has been partly covered by a makeshift shade consisting of a big piece of red blotting paper rolled into a cone.

  The room is entirely devoid of furniture. A picture of large dimensions has not yet been hung up and stands against the right-hand wall, where it is partly reflected in the dark mirror of the floor.

  The picture itself represents a room. On the windowsill there is a bowl of goldfish next to a pot of mignonette. Through the open window a rural landscape can be seen: the soft-blue sky, rounded like a dome, rests along the horizon on the jagged outline of the woods; in the foreground, at the roadside, a little girl, barefoot in the dust, lets a cow graze. Further in the distance, a painter in a blue smock is working at the foot of an oak, with his paintbox on his knee. In the background there shimmers a lake on the shores of which a misty city rises, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water.

  This side of the window, a little to the left, a man in a fancy-dress uniform – white trousers, chintz jacket overloaded with épaulettes, stripes, sabretaches, and frogging, a big black cape, boots with spurs – sits at a rustic writing desk – an old junior school desk with a hole for an inkwell and a slightly raked top – on which stand a jug of water, a stem glass of the sort known as flûtes, and a candlestick whose pedestal is an admirable iron egg set in silver. The man has just received a letter and reads it with an expression of utter dismay on his face.

  Just to the left of the window there is a telephone fixed to the wall and, still further left, a picture: it represents a seashore landscape with, in the foreground, a partridge perched on a branch of a wizened tree whose twisted, knobbly trunk springs out of a pile of boulders which open out onto a foaming inlet. In the far distance, out to sea, a boat with a three-cornered sail.

  To the right of the window there is a large gilt mirror which is supposed to reflect a scene allegedly taking place behind the back of the seated character. Three people, all also in disguise, a woman and two men, are standing. The woman wears an austere long dress in grey wool and a Quaker’s headgear and holds a jar of pickles under her arm; one of the men, an anxious-looking forty-year-old, is dressed in a medieval Fool’s costume with a doublet divided into narrow-pointed triangles of alternating red and yellow, a bauble, and a cap with bells; the other man, an insipid youngster with thinning yellow hair and a baby face, is disguised, precisely, as a fat infant, with rubberised pants bulging over a nappy, short white socks, patent-leather bootees, and a bib; he is sucking a celluloid coral of the kind babies are for ever sticking in their mouths, and in his hand he holds a giant feeding bottle with marked levels alluding in colloquial or vulgar terms to the sexual exploits and fiascos which are supposed to correspond to the amount of alcohol absorbed: C’mon baby, Get right on and you’ll see the sights, The Bridge over the River Kwai, Money back if not satisfied, Come again, Rock-a-bye baby, Lights out, etc.

  The painter of this picture was Geneviève’s agnate grandfather, Louis Foulerot, better known as an interior designer than as an artist. He was the only member of the Foulerot family not to disown the girl when she decided to keep and raise her child and ran away from home. Louis Foulerot agreed to meet the costs of doing up his granddaughter’s flat, and it seems he has done her proud; the structural work is finished, the kitchen and bathroom are ready, painting and finishing are in progress.

  His painting was inspired by a detective story – The Murder of the Goldfish – the reading of which gave him such pleasure as to make him think of using it as the subject of a picture which would bring almost all the elements of the mystery together into a single scene.

  The action is set in an area quite reminiscent of the Italian lakes, not far from an imaginary city which the author named Valdrada. The narrator is a painter. Whilst he is working in the countryside, a young shepherdess comes up to him. She has heard a loud scream coming from the luxurious villa recently rented to a hugely rich
Swiss diamond-trader called Oswald Zeitgeber. In the company of the girl, the painter lets himself into the house and finds the victim: the jeweller, wearing a fancy-dress uniform, lies struck down, blasted to death by an electric shock, next to the telephone. A footstool has been placed in the centre of the room, and a rope tied into a slipknot hangs from the chandelier. The goldfish in the bowl are dead.