Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  I went into a pub called The Donkey in Trousers. Its sign showed a donkey whose four limbs were bound in a kind of white cloth legging with red polka dots. I thought such things only existed on the Ile de Ré, but there was obviously somewhere in England with the same custom. The donkey’s tail was a plaited string, and the legend explained how this tail could function as a barometer:

  The pub was packed. In the end I found a seat at a table partly occupied by an amazing couple: an enormously corpulent man, getting on in years, with a high forehead and a great mop of white hair hanging like a cloud over his powerful head, and a thirty-year-old woman with a look that was both Slav and Asiatic at the same time – broad cheekbones, narrow eyes, reddish fair hair plaited and wound around her head. She said nothing and frequently placed her hand on her companion’s as if to stop him getting angry. He spoke incessantly with a slight accent I couldn’t place; he didn’t finish his sentences but broke them off all the time with “all in all”, “well”, “fine”, “excellent”, without ceasing for a moment to down huge quantities of food and drink, getting up every five minutes to make his way to the bar to fetch platefuls of sandwiches, packets of crisps, sausages, hot pies, pickles, apple pies, and pints and pints of brown ale which he drank in a single gulp.

  He struck up a conversation with me quickly and we began to drink together, to chat about this and that, about the war, about death, London, Paris, beer, music, night trains, beauty, ballet, fog, and life. I think I also tried to tell him your story. His companion said nothing. From time to time she smiled at him. The rest of the time her eyes wandered around the smoke-filled bar whilst she sipped her pink gin and lit up gilt-tipped cigarettes which she snuffed out almost straight away in an ashtray provided by the makers of The Antiquarian whisky.

  Obviously I soon lost my sense of time and place. Everything turned into a muddled buzzing punctuated by dull thuds, exclamations, laughter, and whispering. Then suddenly, opening my eyes, I saw I had been pulled upright, that my coat was over my shoulders, that my umbrella was in my hand. The pub had emptied almost entirely. The publican was smoking a cigar in his open doorway. A waitress was strewing sawdust on the floor. The woman had put her thick fur coat on again, and the man, helped by a waiter, was easing himself into a broad cloak with an otter-fur collar. And suddenly he swung his body round and turned towards me to proffer in an almost thunderous voice: “Life, young man, is a woman on her back, with swollen, close-set breasts, a smooth, soft, fat belly between protruding hips, with slender arms, plump thighs, and half-closed eyes, who in her grandiose and taunting provocation demands our most ardent fervour”.

  How did I manage to get back to my room, to undress, to get to bed? I can’t remember anything about it. When I woke a few hours later to come to fetch you, I noticed that all the lights were on and that the shower had been running all night. But I remember very clearly that strange couple, and the last words spoken by the man, and in my memory I see the sparkle in his eyes as he spoke, and I think of all that happened a few hours after, and of the nightmare that our two lives turned into.

  Thenceforth you built your whole life on hatred and on the stale illusion of the sacrifice of your happiness. You will punish me till the end of your days for having helped you to do what you wanted to do and what you would have done in any case, even without my help. To the end of your days you will reproach me for the failure of your love, for the failure of the life which your puffed-up ballet dancer would have squandered unpityingly in the sole name of his own despicable little stardom. To the end of your days you will put on for me your act of remorse, of the pure woman racked at night by the ghost of the man she brought to suicide, just as for yourself you will act out the pretty picture-book story of the suffering woman abandoned by a highflying skirt-chaser, of the impeccable mother bringing her daughter up superbly by removing her from the noxious influence of her father. But you only gave me that child so as to be able to reproach me all the more for having assisted in killing the other child, and you brought her up in the hatred of me, forbidding me to see her, to speak to her, to love her.

  I wanted you for my wife, and I wanted your child. I have neither the one nor the other, and that has been going on for so long now that I have stopped wondering whether it is hate or love which gives us the strength to continue this life of lies, which provides the formidable energy that allows us to go on suffering, and hoping.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

  Moreau, 5

  WHEN MADAME MOREAU began to feel her body failing her, she asked Madame Trévins to come to live in with her, and gave her a room which Fleury had decorated as a rococo boudoir with flimsy draperies, violet silks screen-printed with great leaves, lace doilies, whorled candelabras, dwarf orange trees, and an alabaster figurine representing a child in a pastoral shepherd costume, holding a bird in his hands.

  Of all these splendours, there remain: a still life depicting a lute on a table: the lute is placed face upwards, in full light, whilst underneath the table, almost drowned by the shadow, can be seen its black case, face down; a gilded wooden lectern, highly worked, bearing the controversial hallmark of Hugues Sambin, a sixteenth-century architect and woodcarver from Dijon; and three large hand-coloured photographs dating from the Russo-Japanese war: the first shows the battleship Pobieda, the pride of the Russian fleet, put out of action by a Japanese depth charge off Port Arthur on 13 April 1904; insets display four of Russia’s military leaders: Admiral Makharov, commander-in-chief of the Russian fleet in the Far East, General Kuropatkin, generalissimo of the Russian army in the Far East, General Stoessel, military commander of Port Arthur, and General Pflug, chief of staff of the Russian army in the Far East; the second photograph, the other’s twin, shows the Japanese battleship-cruiser Asama, built by Armstrong’s, with insets of Admiral Yamamoto, navy minister, Admiral Togo, the “Japanese Nelson”, commander-in-chief of the Japanese flotilla off Port Arthur, General Kodama, the “Kitchener of Japan”, commander-in-chief of the Japanese army, and General Viscount Tazo-Katzura, prime minister. The third photograph portrays a Russian military encampment near Mukden: it is evening; in front of each tent soldiers sit with their feet in bowls of tepid water; in the centre, in a taller tent with awnings in the form of a kiosk flanked by two Cossack guards, a most certainly high-ranking officer studies the plan of battles to come on charts heavily laden with pins.

  The rest of the room is furnished in modern fashion: the bed is a foam mattress sheathed in black synthetic leather and placed on a podium; a low piece of furniture with drawers, made of dark wood and polished steel, serves as both a dressing table and a bedside table; on it stands a perfectly spherical bedside light, a wristwatch with digital display, a bottle of Vichy water with a special cap to stop it from going flat, a cyclostyled document 21cm × 27cm entitled French National Standards for Watchmakers’ and Jewellers’ Items, a pamphlet in the “Business” series with the title Employers and Workers, The Dialogue is Still Open, and a book of some four hundred pages covered in a flambé dust jacket: The Lives of the Trévins Sisters, by Célestine Durand-Taillefer [available from the author, Rue du Hennin, Liège (Belgium)].

  These Trévins sisters are supposed to be Madame Trévins’s five nieces, the daughters of her brother Daniel. The reader who wonders what in the lives of these five women made them deserve such a lengthy biography has his mind put at rest on page one: the five sisters were in fact quintuplets, all born in the space of eighteen minutes on 14 July 1943, at Abidjan, kept in an incubator for four months, and since then never ill.

  But the fate of these quins goes a mile higher than the mere miracle of their birth: Adelaïde, after beating the French record for the sixty-metre sprint (juniors) at the age of ten, was seized, from the age of twelve, by a passion for the circus, and dragged her sisters into an acrobatic act which was soon famous throughout Europe: The Fire Girls jumped through flaming hoops, switched trapezes in mid-air whilst juggling lighted torches, or did the hula-hoop on a wire twelve feet a
bove ground. The fire at the Hamburg Fairyland ruined these precocious careers: the insurers claimed that The Fire Girls were the cause of the disaster and refused henceforth to give cover to any theatres where they performed, even after the five girls had proved in court that they used perfectly harmless artificial fire sold by Ruggieri’s under the name of “jam” and specifically designed for circus artists and cinema stunt men.

  Marie-Thérèse and Odile then became nightclub dancers; their impeccable shapeliness and their identical appearances ensured almost immediate and stunning success: the Crazy Sisters could be seen at the Paris Lido, at Cavalier’s in Stockholm, at Naughties in Milan, at the Las Vegas B and A, and at Pension Macadam in Tangiers, the Beirut Star, the Ambassadors in London, the Bros d’Or in Acapulco, the Berlin Nirvana, at Monkey Jungle in Miami, at Twelve Tones in Newport and Caribbean’s in Barbados, where they met two men of substance who took sufficient fancy to them to marry them on the spot: Marie-Thérèse wedded the Canadian shipowner Michel Wilker, the great-great-grandson of one of Dumont d’Urville’s unlucky competitors, and Odile married an American industrialist, Faber McCork, the king of the diet delicatessens.

  Both divorced the next year; Marie-Thérèse, who had become Canadian, threw herself into business and politics, founding and running a huge Consumer Defence Movement, of ecological and autarchic tendencies, simultaneously manufacturing and distributing on a massive scale a whole range of products suited to the return to Nature and to the true macrobiotic life style of primitive communities: canvas water bottles, yoghurt-makers, tent canvas, Pan pipes (kit form), bread ovens, etc. Odile, for her part, came back to France; taken on as a typist by the Institute for the History of Texts, she found that, although entirely self-taught, she had a taste for Late Latin, and for the next ten years did four hours’ unpaid overtime every evening at the Institute in order to establish a definitive edition of the Danorum Regum Heroumque Historia by Saxo Grammaticus, which is still considered the authoritative edition; later, she married an English judge and undertook a revision of Jerome Wolf and Portus’s Latin edition of the so-called Lexicon of Suidas, which she was still working on at the time the story of her life was written.

  The three other sisters had destinies no less impressive: Noëlle became the right hand of Werner Angst, the German steel magnate; Roseline was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe solo, on board her thirty-six-foot yacht, the C’est si beau; as for Adelaïde, she became a chemist and discovered a method for splitting enzymes, allowing “delayed” catalyses to be obtained; this discovery led to a whole series of patents, now widely used in industry for making detergents, varnishes, and paints; since then Adelaïde has become an extremely wealthy woman and devotes her time to her two hobbies, the piano and the handicapped.

  The exemplary biographies of the five Trévins sisters, unfortunately, do not stand up to closer scrutiny, and the reader who smells a rat in these quasi-fabulous exploits will soon have his suspicions confirmed. For Madame Trévins (who, unlike Mademoiselle Crespi, is called Madame despite being a spinster) has no brother, and consequently no nieces bearing her surname; and Célestine Durand-Taillefer cannot live in Rue Hennin in Liège because in Liège there is no Rue Hennin; on the other hand, Madame Trévins did have a sister, Arlette, who was married to a Mr Louis Commine and bore him a daughter, Lucette, who married someone called Robert Hennin, who sells postcards (collectors’ items only) in Rue de Liège, in Paris (VIIIth arrondissement).

  A closer reading of these imaginary lives would no doubt lead to discovering the key and seeing how some of the events that have influenced the history of the building, some of the legends and semi-legends that go round about one or another of its inhabitants, some of the threads that connect them to each other, have been buried in the narrative and have given it its skeleton. Thus it is more than probable that Marie-Thérèse, the exceptionally successful businesswoman, represents Madame Moreau, who moreover bears the same forename; that Werner Angst is Hermann Fugger, the German industrialist friend of the Altamonts’, and a client of Hutting’s and a colleague of Madame Moreau; and that Noëlle, Angst’s right hand, as the result of a very significant sideways shift, could be a figure for Madame Trévins herself; and though it is less easy to see what hides behind the other three sisters, it is by no means impossible to surmise that underneath Adelaïde, the chemist well disposed towards the handicapped, lies Morellet, who lost three fingers in an unfortunate experiment; that behind Odile, the autodidact, lies Léon Marcia; and that behind the solitary yachtswoman loom the very different profiles of Bartlebooth and Olivia Norvell.

  Madame Trévins took many years to write this story, in the infrequent moments of respite that Madame Moreau allowed her. She took particular pains over her choice of pseudonym: a first name very faintly suggestive of something cultural, and a double-barrelled surname composed of a first part as banal and ordinary as Jones, and a second part alluding to a famous fictional character. That did not suffice to convince publishers, who didn’t want anything to do with a first novel written by an 85-year-old spinster. In fact Madame Trévins was only eighty-two, but that didn’t cut much ice with the publishers, and in the end Madame Trévins lost heart and had a single copy printed, which she dedicated to herself.

  CHAPTER NINETY

  Entrance Hall, 2

  THE RIGHT-HAND section of the building’s entrance hall. In the background, the first flight of the staircase; in the foreground, to the right, the door to the Marcias’ flat. In the middle distance, below a large mirror in a surround of gilded mouldings which imperfectly reflects the silhouette of Ursula Sobieski’s back as she stands in front of the concierge’s office, is a large wooden chest with a padded lid upholstered in yellow velvet, serving as a bench. Three women are seated on it: Madame Lafuente, Madame Albin, and Gertrude, Madame Moreau’s former cook.

  The first, that is to say the one on the extreme right from our point of view, is Madame Lafuente: though it is nearly eight in the evening, Madame de Beaumont’s domestic help has not yet finished her day’s work. She was about to leave when the piano-tuner turned up: Mademoiselle Anne was at gym, Mademoiselle Béatrice was upstairs, and Madame was having a rest before dinner. So Madame Lafuente had to show the tuner in herself, and also send his grandson out onto the landing with his comic to prevent any repetition of the stupid way he had behaved last time. Then Madame Lafuente had opened the fridge and realised that all that was left for dinner were three Bulgarian-flavour low-calorie yoghurts, since Mademoiselle Anne had raided the fruit and the roast beef and chicken leftovers that were intended to be the main ingredients of the meal; despite the lateness of the hour, and even though most of the local shops were closed on Mondays, in particular all the stores she prefers to give her custom to, she hurried down to get in some eggs, sliced ham, and two pounds of cherries at the Parisienne in Rue de Chazelles. On returning with the shopping in her net, she found Madame Albin, on her way home from her daily visit to her late husband’s grave, deep in conversation with Gertrude in the entrance hall, and since she hadn’t seen Gertrude for several months, she stopped to say hello. For Gertrude, who for ten years was Madame Moreau’s awesome cook, the one who cooked her monochrome meals and whom all Paris envied her, had ended up yielding to the offer she had been made, and Madame Moreau, who had given up her grand dinner parties for good, let her go. Gertrude now has a position in England. Her employer, Lord Ashtray, made his fortune in recycling non-ferrous metal and nowadays spends his great wealth by leading the lavish life of a great lord on his enormous estate, Hammer Hall, near London.

  Gossip writers and visitors gape before his Regency rosewood furniture, his leather settees which shine with a patina made by eight generations of authentically aristocratic backsides, his cloisonné floors, his 97 lackeys in canary-yellow liveries, and his sectioned ceilings repeating in profusion the emblem which he has associated with his activities all his life: a red cordiform apple pierced right through by a long worm, and surrounded by little f
lames.

  The most disturbing statistics are given about this character. People say he has forty-three full-time gardeners, that he has so many windows, glazed doors, and mirrors in his property that he employs four servants solely for their maintenance, and that since he couldn’t get enough replacement glass to keep up with repairs he solved the problem by simply buying the nearest glassworks.

  According to some people he owns eleven thousand ties and eight hundred and thirteen walking sticks, subscribes to every English-language newspaper in the world, not to read them – his eight archivists look after that – but to do the crosswords, a pastime of which he is so inordinately fond that his bedroom is entirely repapered once a week with grids designed especially for him by his favourite cruciverbist, Barton O’Brien, of the Auckland Gazette and Hemisphere. He is also a keen rugby fan and has built up a private team that he has had in training for months in the hope of seeing it successfully challenge the next victor of the Five Nations tournament.

  According to others, the collections and crazes are just camouflage, designed to hide the three true passions of Lord Ashtray: boxing (Melzack Wall, the contender for the world fly-weight title, is supposed to be in training at Hammer Hall); three-dimensional geometry: he is said to have been funding for the last twenty years a professor researching polyhedrons, who still has twenty-five volumes to write; and, especially, Indian horsecloths: he is alleged to have collected two hundred and eighteen of them, all belonging to the best warriors from the best tribes: White-Man-Runs-Him and Rain-in-the-Face, of the Crows; Hooker Jim, of the Mohawks; Looking-Glass, Yason, and Alikut, of the Nez Percé Indians; Chief Winnemucca and Ouray-the-Arrow, of the Payute; Black Beaver and White Horse, of the Kiowas; Cochise, the great Apache chief; Geronimo and Ka-e-ten-a, of the Chiricachuas; Sleeping Rabbit, Left Hand, and Dull Knife, of the Cheyennes; Restroom Bomber, of the Saratogas; Big Mike, of the Kachinas; Crazy Turnpike, of the Fudges; Satch Mouth, of the Grooves; and several dozen Sioux cloths, including ones owned by Sitting Bull and his two wives, Seen-by-Her-Nation and Four Times, and those of Old-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horse, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horse, Crazy Horse, American Horse, Iron Horse, Big Mouth, Long Hair, Roman Nose, Lone Horn, and Packs-His-Drum.