Life: A User's Manual Page 9

  He had lived in the building longer than anyone else. He had been there longer than Gratiolet, whose family had formerly owned the whole house, but who only came to live here during the war, a few years before inheriting what was left, four or five flats which he’d got rid of one by one, keeping in the end only his own little two-roomed dwelling on the seventh floor; longer than Madame Marquiseaux, whose parents had already had the flat and who was practically born there when he had lived there for almost thirty years already; longer than old Mademoiselle Crespi, than old Madame Moreau, than the Beaumonts, the Marcias, and the Altamonts. Longer even than Bartlebooth; he remembered very precisely the day in nineteen twenty-nine when the young man – for he was a young man at the time, he wasn’t yet thirty – told him at the end of his daily watercolour lesson: “I say, it seems that the big flat on the third floor is vacant. I think I’ll buy it. I’ll waste less time coming to see you.”

  And he had bought it, that same day, without arguing over the price, of course.

  At this time Valène had lived there for ten years already. He had rented his room one day in October nineteen nineteen when he came up from his native town of Etampes, which he’d practically never left before, to enrol at the Fine Art School. He was just nineteen. It was supposed to be a temporary lodging provided by a friend of the family, to tide him over. Later he would marry and become famous, or return to Etampes. He didn’t wed or go back to Etampes. Fame didn’t come after fifteen years, he acquired at best a modest reputation: some steady customers, some work as an illustrator of collections of folk tales, some teaching allowed him to live relatively comfortably, to paint without hurrying, to travel a little. Even later, when the opportunity arose of finding a larger flat or even a real studio, he realised he was too attached to his room, to his house, to his street, to leave them.

  There were of course people he knew almost nothing about, whom he wasn’t even sure of having identified properly, people he passed from time to time on the stairs and of whom he wasn’t certain whether they lived in the building or only had friends there; there were people he couldn’t manage to remember anymore, others of whom only a single derisory image remained: Madame Appenzzell’s lorgnette, the cork figurines that Monsieur Troquet used to get into bottles and sell on the Champs-Elysées on Sundays, the blue enamel coffee pot always kept hot on a corner of Madame Fresnel’s cooker.

  He tried to resuscitate those imperceptible details which over the course of fifty-five years had woven the life of this house and which the years had unpicked one by one: the impeccably polished linoleum floors on which you were only allowed to walk in felt undershoes, the oiled canvas tablecloths with red and green stripes on which mother and daughter shelled peas; the dishstands that clipped together, the white porcelain counterpoise light that you could flick back up with one finger at the end of dinner; evenings by the wireless set, with the man in a flannel jacket, the woman in a flowery apron, and the slumbering cat rolled up in a ball by the fireplace; children in clogs going down for the milk with dented cans; the big old wood-stoves of which you would collect up the ashes in spread-out sheets of old newspaper …

  Where were they now, the Van Houten cocoa tins, the Banania cartons with the laughing infantryman, the turned-wood boxes of Madeleine biscuits from Commercy? Where were they gone, the larders you used to have beneath the window-ledge, the packets of Saponite, that good old washing powder with its famous Madame Don’t-Mind-If-I-Do, the boxes of thermogene wool with the fire-spitting devil drawn by Cappiello, and the sachets of good Dr Gustin’s lithium tablets?

  The years had flowed past, the removal men had brought down pianos and trunks, rolled carpets and boxes of crockery, standard lamps and fish tanks, birdcages, hundred-year-old clocks, soot-blackened cookers, tables with their flaps, the six chairs, the icemakers, the large family portraits.

  The stairs, for him, were, on each floor, a memory, an emotion, something ancient and impalpable, something palpitating somewhere in the guttering flame of his memory: a gesture, a noise, a flicker, a young woman singing operatic arias to her own piano accompaniment, the clumsy clickety-clack of a typewriter, the clinging smell of cresyl disinfectant, a noise of people, a shout, a hubbub, a rustling of silks and furs, a plaintive miaow behind a closed door, knocks on partition walls, hackneyed tangos on hissing gramophones, or, on the sixth floor right, the persistent droning hum of Gaspard Winckler’s jigsaw, to which, three floors lower, on the third floor left, there was now by way of response only a continuing, and intolerable, silence.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Rorschach, 2

  RORSCHACH’S DINING ROOM, to the right of the large entrance hall. It’s empty. The room is rectangular, about fifteen feet long by twelve feet wide. On the floor: a thick ash-grey carpet.

  On the left-hand wall, painted matt green, hangs a steel-rimmed glass display case containing 54 antique coins all bearing the image of Sergius Sulpicius Galba, the praetor who had thirty thousand Lusitanians killed in a single day, but saved his own neck by presenting his children with emotion to the tribunal.

  On the back wall, which is done in white gloss paint like the entrance hall, a large watercolour has been put, over a low sideboard; entitled The Rake’s Progress and signed U. N. Owen, it depicts a little railway station in open country. On the left, a railwayman stands leaning against a high desk which serves as a ticket office. He looks about fifty, with his receding hairline, round face, and bushy moustache. He is wearing a waistcoat. He is pretending to look something up in a timetable whilst in fact completing his transcription onto a small rectangular piece of paper of a recipe for mint cake he’s found in an almanac half-hidden by the timetable. In front of him, on the opposite side of the desk, a bespectacled customer whose face expresses a phenomenal degree of exasperation files his fingernails whilst waiting for his ticket: to the right a third character in short sleeves, wearing broad, flower-embroidered braces, is rolling a big drum out of the station. Fields of alfalfa, where cows are grazing, stretch out all around.

  On the right-hand wall, which is painted a slightly darker green than the left-hand wall, hang nine plates decorated with representations of:

  – a priest giving ashes to a believer

  – a man putting a coin into a barrel-shaped savings box

  – a woman sitting in the corner of a railway carriage, with her arm in a sling

  – two men in clogs, in snowy weather, stamping the ground to warm their feet

  – a lawyer pleading a case, looking vehement

  – a man in a smoking jacket about to drink a cup of chocolate

  – a violinist playing, with a mute attached to his instrument

  – a man in a nightgown, holding a candlestick, looking at a spider, symbolising hope, on the wall

  – a man holding out his visiting card to another man. Both look aggressive, suggesting a duel.

  In the middle of the room there is a modern-style round table in citronwood, surrounded by eight chairs upholstered in raised velvet. In the middle of the table there is a silver statuette about ten inches high. It represents a naked, helmeted man on the back of an ox, holding a pyx in his left hand.

  The watercolour, the statuette, the antique coins, and the plates, according to Rémi Rorschach, are evidence of his “untiring efforts as a producer”. The statuette, a classic caricatural representation of the minor arcanum called the Knight of Cups, is supposed to have been unearthed during work on that “drama” entitled The Sixteenth Edge of This Cube which we have already had occasion to mention, and which does indeed deal with a murky tale of seeing into the future; the plates are supposed to have been painted specially as background images for the credits of a serial in which the same actor was to have played in succession the roles of a priest, a banker, a woman, a peasant, a lawyer, a good-food-guide writer, a virtuoso, a gullible ironmonger, and an obdurate archduke; the ancient coins – claimed to be genuine – were said to have been given by a collector and admirer of a series of program
mes on the Twelve Caesars, though this Sergius Sulpicius Galba has no connection whatever with the Servius Sulpicius Galba whose reign, one and a half centuries later, lasted seven months, between Nero and Othon, before he was slaughtered on the Campus Martius by his own troops, having refused them the donativum.

  As for the watercolour, it is, allegedly, simply one of the models for the set of an Anglo-French adaptation in modern dress of Stravinsky’s opera.

  It’s hard to be sure how much truth there is in these explanations. Of the four programmes, two were never made: namely, the nine-part serial, turned down by each of the actors approached – Belmondo, Bouise, Bourvil, Cuvelier, Haller, Hirsch, and Maréchal – after they’d read the script; and the updated Rake’s Progress, considered too expensive by the BBC. The series on the Twelve Caesars was made for the schools’ broadcasting service, with which Rorschach was, apparently, unconnected, and similarly The Sixteenth Edge of This Cube seems to have been produced by one of those service companies to which French television so often has recourse.

  In fact Rorschach’s television career was conducted exclusively in office-work. Under the vague title of “Project Controller to the Managing Director” or “Test and Research Resources Reorganisation Officer”, his sole function consisted of daily attendance at pre-meetings, joint meetings, study workshops, management boards, interdisciplinary discussion meetings, general meetings, plenary meetings, reading-panel meetings, and other working parties which, at this level of the hierarchy, make up the main business of life in the French broadcasting organisation, alongside phone calls, conversations in the corridor, business lunches, rush screenings, and trips abroad. There’s no reason not to think he might have put forth the idea of an Anglo-French opera at one of these sessions, or of a history serial based on Suetonius, but it’s more likely he spent his time drawing up or extrapolating from audience surveys, trimming budgets, drafting reports on the utilisation rates of editing studios, dictating memos, and going from meeting room to conference suite, taking care to be at all times indispensable in at least two places at once so that scarcely had he sat down than he would be called to the phone, and have to leave, unavoidably.

  Such multifarious activities satisfied Rorschach’s vanity, his taste for power, his talent for plotting and haggling, but they gave no nourishment to his nostalgic desire to be “creative”: in fifteen years, he managed nonetheless to put his name to two productions, both educational serials for export: the first, Doudoune et Mambo, was on French-language teaching for black Africa; the second – Anamous et Pamplenas – used exactly the same scenario, but it aimed “to introduce the pupils of overseas colleges run by the Alliance Française to the beauty and harmony of Greek civilisation”.

  In the early seventies, Rorschach got wind of Bartlebooth’s enterprise. At the time, though Bartlebooth had been back for fifteen years, no one really knew the whole story. Those who could have known something about it said little or nothing; others were aware that Madame Hourcade, for instance, had supplied him with boxes, or that he’d had a funny sort of machine set up in Morellet’s room, or, to take another example, that he’d travelled right around the world for twenty years with his servant and that over the twenty years Winckler had received about two parcels a month from all over the world. But no one really knew how these pieces fitted together, and, what’s more, nobody really tried to find out. And Bartlebooth, though he wasn’t unaware that the little secrets which cloaked his existence were the subject of contradictory and often incoherent theories around the building, didn’t ever dream that anyone could come one day and upset his plans.

  But Rorschach got keen, and what he heard in fragments about those twenty years of circumnavigation, about the paintings cut in pieces, reassembled, and reseparated, etc., as well as all Winckler’s and Morellet’s stories, gave him the idea of a huge programme in which nothing less than the whole story would be re-enacted.

  Bartlebooth said no, obviously. He let Rorschach in for a quarter of an hour and had him shown out. Rorschach persisted, interrogating Smautf and the other servants, grilling Morellet who buried him in increasingly incomprehensible heaps of mumbo jumbo, harassing Winckler who stayed obstinately silent, going out as far as Montargis to talk (pointlessly, for him) to Madame Hourcade, and falling back on Madame Nochère, who didn’t know much but didn’t mind elaborating.

  Since there was no law forbidding him to tell a story of a man who did watercolours and jigsaw puzzles, Rorschach decided to go over Bartlebooth’s head, and submitted to Programme Control a proposal for something in between Great Works at Risk and Great Battles of the Past.

  Rorschach was too influential in television for his proposal to be turned down. He wasn’t quite influential enough for it to be acted on speedily. Three years later, when Rorschach became so ill as to be forced, in the space of a few weeks, to terminate virtually all professional activity, none of the networks had yet given final approval and the scenario was still incomplete.

  Without wishing to anticipate events, it might be useful to point out that Rorschach’s initiative had serious consequences for Bartlebooth. It was by hearing of these televisual misadventures that Beyssandre got wind, last year, of Bartlebooth’s story. And, oddly enough, it was to Rorschach that Bartlebooth came for the name of a director to film the final stage of his enterprise. However, that got him nowhere, except a step deeper into the web of contradictions which he’d known for many years would tie him inexorably tighter.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Altamont, 1

  ON THE SECOND floor, at the Altamonts’, preparations are underway for the traditional annual reception. There will be a buffet in each of the five rooms of the flat facing the street. In this room, normally the small drawing room – the room nearest the main entrance hall, and leading onto a smoking-room-cum-library, a large drawing room, a boudoir, and a dining room – the carpets have been rolled up, revealing a valuable cloisonné floor. Almost all the furniture has been removed; they have left only eight chairs, made of lacquered wood with scenes from the Boxer Uprising painted on the backs.

  There are no paintings on the walls, because the walls and doors are themselves the decor: they have been hung with painted wallpaper, providing a lavish panorama (a number of trompe-l’oeil effects suggest that we are dealing with a copy specially made for this room, probably based on older drawings) showing life in India as it was popularly imagined in the second half of the nineteenth century: first, a luxuriant jungle peopled with wide-eyed monkeys, then a clearing beside a marigot in which three elephants disport themselves at spraying each other; further on, in front of straw huts on stilts, women in yellow, sky-blue, and sea-green saris and men in loincloths dry tea leaves and ginger roots, whilst others, at wooden stalls, decorate large squares of silk with blocks which they dip in pots of vegetable dyes; and finally, on the right-hand edge, a classic tiger-hunting scene: between two rows of sepoys, two deep, shaking rattles and banging cymbals, strides a richly bedecked elephant, with a fringed and tasselled rectangular banner embossed with a red winged horse on his forehead; a howdah rises up behind the mahout squatting between the pachyderm’s ears, bearing a red-haired European with sideburns and a pith helmet, and a maharajah wearing a jewel-studded costume and an immaculate turban decorated with a long plume held in place by an enormous diamond; in front of them, at the jungle’s edge, half-emerging from the undergrowth, with its stomach to the ground, the big cat prepares to pounce.

  In the centre of the left-hand wall, there’s a huge pink marble fireplace surmounted by a large mirror; on the mantel, a tall crystal vase, of rectangular cross-section, filled with everlasting flowers, and a turn-of-the-century savings box: it has the form of a full-length, grinning, somehow twisted Negro, dressed in a flowing tartan oilskin cape, mostly red, with white gloves, steel-rimmed spectacles, and a top hat decorated with the stars and stripes and emblazoned with the number “75” in blue and red figures. His left hand is outstretched, his right hand grips the knob o
f a walking stick. When you put a coin into the outstretched palm, the arm rises and the coin is inexorably swallowed: by way of thanks, the clockwork man shakes his legs half a dozen times, in a fairly good imitation of the jitterbug.