Read Online Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Georges Perec
Tags: Fiction
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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
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
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