Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Service Entrance

  A LONG CORRIDOR crisscrossed by pipes, with a tiled floor and walls partly hung with an old plastic-coated wallpaper vaguely representing clumps of palm trees. Milky glass globes, at each end, give it light, harshly.

  Five delivery men are coming in, bringing various victuals for the Altamonts’ party. The shortest leads the way, wilting under the weight of a fowl fatter than he is; the second one is carrying with extreme care a great beaten-brass tray laden with oriental sweetmeats – baklava, gazelles’ horns, honey and date cakes – arranged as a set piece and surrounded with flowers; the third has in each hand three bottles of vintage Wachenheimer Oberstnest; the fourth bears on his head a metal plate covered in small meat pies, hot snacks, and canapés; and, lastly, the fifth man, closing the procession, carries a case of whisky on his right shoulder, a case on which is stencilled

  THOMAS KYD’S

  IMPERIAL MIXTURE

  100: SCOTCH WHISKIES

  blended and bottled in Scotland

  by

  BORRELLY, JOYCE & KAHANE

  91, Montgomery Lane, Dundee, Scot.

  In the foreground, partly occluding the last delivery man, a woman is leaving the building: a woman of about fifty, wearing a macintosh with a Dorothy bag – a green leather purse with a black leather string fastening – hanging on her belt, her head covered with a printed cotton scarf whose pattern is reminiscent of Calder’s mobiles. She is carrying a grey she-cat in her arms and, between the index and middle fingers of her left hand, holds a postcard depicting Loudun, that town in Western France where someone called Marie Besnard was accused of poisoning all her family.

  This lady does not live in this building, but in the one next door. Her cat, answering to the fond name of Lady Piccolo, spends hours on this staircase, dreaming perhaps of meeting a tom. A vain dream, alas, for all the male cats in the building – Madame Moreau’s Pip, the Marquiseaux’ Petit Pouce, and Poker Dice, who belongs to Gilbert Berger – have been doctored.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  In the Boiler Room, 2

  IN A TINY place with walls full of meters, manometers, and pipes of every calibre, adjacent to the room where the boiler itself is installed, a workman squats, poring over a plan on tracing paper placed on the bare concrete floor. He is wearing leather gloves and a jerkin and seems moderately angry, no doubt because he is obliged to carry out the stipulated terms of a maintenance contract, realises that this year cleaning the boiler is going to take longer than he had anticipated, and knows that therefore his profit will decline proportionately.

  This was the hideout where Olivier Gratiolet set up his radio in the war, as well as the alcohol duplicator on which he printed his daily newssheet. It was a cellar in those days and belonged to François. Olivier knew he would have to spend long stretches down here and set it up appropriately, insulating all the exits with old doormats, rags, and bits of cork which Gaspard Winckler gave him. He used candlelight, kept out the cold by wrapping himself in Marthe’s rabbit-fur coat and a bobbled balaclava, and for feeding himself brought down from Hélène Brodin’s flat a little lattice-work larder in which he could keep for a few days a bottle of water, a bit of salami, some goat cheese his grandfather had managed to get to him from Oléron, and a few of those wrinkled acid-tasting cider apples which were just about the only fresh fruit you could get at all easily at the time.

  He would settle into an ancient, oval-backed Louis XV-style armchair which had no armrests and only two and a half legs left, using a whole system of blocks to keep it stable. Its faded violet upholstery depicted a sort of Nativity scene: there was the Holy Virgin holding in her lap a newborn babe with an unnaturally large head, and, standing in for both the bearers of gifts and the Magi – and in the absence of the ass and ox – a bishop flanked by his two acolytes, all set in a surprising craggy landscape leading down to a sheltered harbour with marble palaces and hazy pinkish roofs.

  To pass the long hours spent waiting during radio silence, he would read a bulky novel he had found in a chest. Whole pages were missing, and he had to try to find the links between the episodes he had. They concerned, amongst other things, a wicked Chinaman who snarled, a brave girl with hazel eyes, a big, quiet fellow whose knuckles turned white when someone really annoyed him, and someone called Davis who claimed to come from Natal, in South Africa, but had never set foot in the place.

  Or he would rummage through the heaps of remnants that were piled up in burst wicker trunks. In them he found an old diary dating from 1926, full of obsolete phone numbers, a wasps’ nest, a worn watercolour depicting ice-skaters on the Neva, and little Hachette editions of the French classics, which brought back painful memories of Corneille

  Rome n’est plus dans Rome, elle est toute où je suis

  and Racine

  Oui, c’est Agamemnon, c’est ton roi qui t’éveille

  and the celebrated muddle of

  Prends un siège Cinna et assieds-toi par terre

  Et si tu veux parler commence par te taire

  and other gobbets of Mithridate and Britannicus which he had had to learn by heart and recite straight off without grasping a word. He also found some old toys which were certainly the ones François had played with: a clockwork spinning top and a little Negro of painted tin with a keyhole in his side and no breadth to speak of, just consisting of two more or less fused profiles, and his wheelbarrow now all bent and broken.

  Olivier hid the wireless set in another toy: a chest whose slightly sloped top was pierced with holes that had originally been numbered – 03 was the only number still visible – into which you had to try to throw a metal quoit; the game was called barrel or frog, because the hardest hole to get was made to look like a frog with a huge gaping mouth. As for the duplicator – one of the small models used by restaurateurs to run off menus – it was hidden at the bottom of a trunk. After Paul Hébert’s arrest, the Germans, led by the air-raid warden Berloux, came to search the cellars, but they scarcely glanced at Olivier’s: it was the dustiest and most cluttered of all, the one where it was hardest of all to imagine a “terrorist” hiding.

  During the Liberation of Paris, Olivier would have willingly fought on the barricades, but he wasn’t given the chance to do so. The machine gun he had kept in reserve under his bed was set up, in the first hours of the Capital’s insurrection, on the roof of a block at Place Clichy, and entrusted to a team of experienced marksmen. As for him, he was ordered to stay in his cellar to receive the instructions flooding in from London and all over the place. He stayed there for more than thirty-six hours on the trot, without sleeping or eating, with nothing to drink save some atrocious ersatz apricot juice, filling notepad after notepad with enigmatic messages like: “the presbytery has lost none of its charm nor the garden its splendour”, “the archdeacon is a past master at Japanese billiards”, or “all is well, Marchioness”, which cohorts of helmeted couriers came to fetch at five-minute intervals. When he emerged next day in the evening, it was to hear the thunderous peal of the great tenor of Notre-Dame and of all the other church bells, celebrating the arrival of the armies of Liberation.

  END OF PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  Moreau, 3

  AT THE BEGINNING of the nineteen fifties, in the flat that Madame Moreau was to buy later on, there lived an enigmatic American woman whose beauty and blondeness as well as the mystery surrounding her, earned her the nickname of Lorelei. She claimed to be called Joy Slowburn and lived apparently alone in the vast space of her apartment, under the silent protection of a driver-cum-bodyguard answering to the name of Carlos, a short and swarthy Filipino always spotlessly dressed in white. People sometimes ran into him in luxury stores, purchasing candied fruits, chocolates, or sweets. She, for her part, was never seen in the street. Her shutters were always shut; she received no mail and her door only ever opened to caterers delivering cooked meals or to the florists who each
morning delivered great heaps of lilies, arum, and tuberoses.

  Joy Slowburn only ever went out after night had fallen, to be driven in a long black Pontiac by Carlos. The inhabitants of the building would watch her pass, a dazzling figure in a black, raw-silk ball gown with a long train which left almost all her back bare, with a mink stole on her arm, a large fan made of black feathers, and her hair of an unrivalled blondeness, skilfully plaited and crowned with a diamond-incrusted diadem; and on seeing her long, perfectly oval face, her narrow, almost cruel eyes, her almost bloodless lips (whereas the fashion then was for very red lips), neighbours felt a fascination such that they were unable to say whether it was delightful or frightening.

  The most fantastical stories circulated about her. People said that on some nights she held sumptuous, silent parties, that men came to see her clandestinely, shortly before midnight, clumsily carrying bulky sacks; people said that a third, unseen person also lived in the flat but was not allowed to go out or be seen, and that ghostly and abominable noises sometimes rose through the cavities of the chimneys, making children sit bolt upright in bed out of fright.

  * * *

  One April morning in nineteen fifty-four, it was learnt that Lorelei and the Filipino had been murdered in the night. The murderer had given himself up to the police: he was the young woman’s husband, that third tenant whose existence had been suspected by some, though none had ever seen him. He was called Blunt Stanley, and his revelations cleared up the mystery of the strange doings of Lorelei and her two companions.

  Blunt Stanley was a tall man, as handsome as a Western hero, with dimples like Clark Gable’s. He was an officer in the US Army when, one evening in 1948, he met Lorelei in a music hall in Jefferson, Missouri: born Ingeborg Skrifter, the daughter of a Danish pastor who had emigrated to the United States, she performed a clairvoyant act under the pseudonym of Florence Cook, a famous medium of the last quarter of the nineteenth century whose reincarnation Ingeborg claimed to be.

  It was love at first sight for both of them, but their happiness was short-lived: in July nineteen fifty, Blunt Stanley left for Korea. His passion for Ingeborg was such that scarcely had he landed when, unable to live without her, he deserted so as to try to get back to her. The mistake he made was to desert not by going AWOL – it’s true he wasn’t granted any leave – but whilst leading a patrol not far from the thirty-eighth parallel: together with his Filipino guide – who was none other than Carlos, real name Aurelio Lopez – he abandoned the eleven men in his patrol, condemning them to certain death, and after a frightful peregrination arrived at Port Arthur, whence they managed to reach Formosa.

  The Americans thought the patrol had been ambushed, that the eleven soldiers had died in it, and that Lieutenant Stanley and his Filipino guide had been taken prisoner. Years later, when the whole affair was about to reach its lamentable conclusion, the chancery division of Land Army general staff was still looking for Mrs Stanley, query widow, to give her the possibly posthumous Medal of Honor awarded to her absent husband.

  Blunt Stanley was at the mercy of Aurelio Lopez, and it quickly became apparent that Aurelio Lopez intended to take full advantage of the fact: as soon as they were in safety, the Filipino told the officer that all the details of his desertion had been put in writing and deposited in sealed envelopes with lawyers having instructions to act on their contents if Lopez failed to give them signs of life at regular intervals. Then he asked for ten thousand dollars.

  Blunt managed to get in touch with Ingeborg. On his instructions, she sold all that she could sell – their car, their trailer, her few jewels – and got to Hong Kong, where the two men joined her. When they had paid Lopez, the couple were together again, alone, with a fortune of some sixty dollars, which nonetheless got them to Ceylon, where they managed to land a paltry engagement in a show cinema: between the shorts and the feature film, a spangled curtain would descend over the screen, and a loudspeaker would announce Joy and Hieronymus, the famous seers from the New World.

  Their first act was based on two classical tricks used by village-fair magicians: Blunt, dressed up as a fakir, would guess various things from numbers chosen apparently at random by Ingeborg; as for Ingeborg, dressed as a clairvoyant, she would take a steel nib and scratch the gelatin of a photographic plate representing Blunt, and a bleeding scar would appear on her partner’s body at exactly the same place. The Singhalese public usually loves this sort of show, but it cold-shouldered this one: Ingeborg soon realised that, although her husband undeniably possessed stage presence, it was imperative that he keep his mouth shut, except to utter two or three inarticulate sounds.

  The basic idea for their subsequent offerings grew out of this constraint and was soon perfected: after various divining exercises, Ingeborg would go into a trance and, communicating with the beyond, call forth the Illumined himself, Swedenborg, the “Buddha of the North”, dressed in a long white tunic, his chest spangled with Rosicrucian emblems, a luminous, flickering, smoky, flashing, frightening apparition, accompanied by crackling, lightning, sparks, discharges, exhalations, and emanations of every kind. Swedenborg was content to utter a few indistinct grunts, or incantations such as “Acha Botacha Sab Acha”, which Ingeborg would translate into sibylline sentences said in a screeching, strangulated voice:

  “I have crossed the seas. I am in a central city, beneath a volcano. I see the man in his bedroom; he is writing, he is wearing a loose-fitting shirt, black with white and yellow trim; he puts the letter in a collection of Thomas Dekker’s poetry. He stands; it is one o’clock by the clock on his mantelpiece, etc.”

  Their act, which relied on the usual sensorial and psychological preparations of this kind of attraction – mirror tricks, smoke tricks based on various combinations of carbon, sulphur, and saltpetre, optical illusions, sound effects – was a success from the start, and a few weeks later an impresario offered them a lucrative contract for Bombay, Iraq, and Turkey. It was there, during an evening at an Ankara nightclub called The Gardens of Heian-Kyô, that the meeting took place which would determine their careers: at the end of their show, a man called on Ingeborg in her dressing room and offered five thousand pounds sterling if she would agree to bring him into the presence of the Devil, and more precisely Mephistopheles, with whom he wished to make the usual pact: his eternal salvation against twenty years of omnipotence.

  Ingeborg accepted. Making Mephistopheles appear was not intrinsically more complicated than making Swedenborg appear, even if this apparition had to happen in front of a single spectator rather than several dozen or several hundred indifferent, amused, or bemused onlookers who were all, in any case, seated much too far away from the thing to come and check any details if the whim so took them. For if this privileged spectator had believed in the appearance of the “Buddha of the North” to the extent of risking five thousand pounds to see the Devil, then there was no reason why his request should not be fulfilled.

  Blunt and Ingeborg thus settled into a villa rented for the occasion and modified their act to fit the required apparition. On the appointed day, at the stated hour, the man turned up at the villa door. For three weeks, obeying Ingeborg’s strict orders, he had tried never to go out before nightfall, to eat only boiled green vegetables and fruit peeled with non-metallic instruments, to drink only orange-flower water and fresh mint, basil, and oregano tea.

  A native servant led the applicant into an almost unfurnished room, painted matt black throughout, barely lit by torches set in inverted conical holders giving off greenish-yellow flames. In the centre of the room hung a cut-glass globe, revolving slowly on its axis, whose thousand minute faces projected twinkling flashes in apparently unpredictable directions. Ingeborg sat beneath it, in a high-backed armchair painted dark red. About a yard away from her, a little to her right, a fire burned on flat stones set directly on the floor, giving off copious, acrid smoke.

  According to custom, the man had brought a black hen in a brown canvas bag; he blindfolded it, then cut its t
hroat over the fire whilst looking to the east. The hen’s blood did not put out the fire; on the contrary, it seemed to make it burn more fiercely: tall blue flames shot up, and for a few moments the young woman observed them attentively, taking no notice of her client’s presence. Finally she rose, took some cinders in a shovel, and spread them on the floor just in front of her chair, where, instantaneously, they formed a pentangle. Taking the man by his arm, she made him sit in the armchair, with his back straight, quite still, with his hands flat down on the armrests. For her part, she kneeled in the centre of the pentangle and began to declaim an incantation as long as it was incomprehensible, in an impossibly high-pitched screech:

  Al barildim gotfano dech min brin alabo dordin falbroth ringuam albaras. Nin porth zadikim almucathin milko prin al elmin enthoth dal heben ensouim: kuthim al dum alkatim nim broth dechoth porth min michais im endoth, pruch dal maisoulum hol moth dansrilim lupaldas im voldemoth. Nin hur diavosth mnarbotim dal goush palfrapin duch im scoth pruch galeth dal chinon min foulchrich al conin butathen doth dal prim.

  In the course of this incantation the smoke grew more and more opaque. Soon there were reddish plumes of smoke accompanied by crackling and sparks. Suddenly the bluish flames grew unnaturally tall, then died away almost at once: just behind the fire, baring all his teeth in a broad grin, with his arms folded, stood Mephistopheles.