Life: A User's Manual

  Grifalconi went back to Verona. Once or twice Valène sent him one of the linoleum prints he made for his friends as New Year’s greetings; they went unacknowledged. In 1972 one of the twins, Vittorio, now professor of botanical taxonomy at the University of Padua, informed him that his father had died as a result of an attack of trichinosis. All he said about the other twin was that he was living in South America and was in good health.

  * * *

  Several months after the Grifalconis’ departure, Gratiolet sold the apartment they had occupied to Rémi Rorschach. It is now the lower floor of a duplex. The dining room has become a living room. The mantel on which Emilio Grifalconi placed his wife’s bridal wreath and the two pots of rosemary has been modernised: its surface is now of burnished steel. The floor is covered with a profusion of wool rugs of exotic design heaped on top of one another. The only other furnishings are three so-called director’s chairs in unbleached linen (scarcely more than modified camping chairs). Examples of American gadgetry are strewn around the place, among them an electronic Feedbackgammon, whose players have only to roll their dice and push the numerically corresponding buttons: the counters, circles that light up on the translucent surface, are shifted by microchips built into the board and programmed to follow optimal strategies. (Since each player thus disposes in turn of the best possible offence/defence, the most common outcome of the game is a reciprocal jamming amounting to a draw.)

  After tortuous legal proceedings involving impounding and seizure, Paul Hébert’s apartment was finally reclaimed by the building manager, who has since rented it. It is at present occupied by Geneviève Foulerot and her little boy.

  Laetizia never came back, nor was she heard from again. It was thanks to young Riri, who ran into him by chance in 1970, that something at least was learned about Paul Hébert.

  Young Riri is now almost twenty-five; his real name is Valentin, Valentin Collot. He is the youngest of three children born to Henri Collot, who runs the café-tabac at the corner of Rue Jadin and Rue de Chazelles. Henri has always been called Riri by everyone, and his wife Lucienne has been called Madame Riri, and their two daughters Martine and Isabelle the little Riris, and Valentin Young Riri – except by Monsieur Jérôme, the retired history teacher, who opted for Riri the Younger after first trying to introduce the title Riri II, an undertaking in which no one supported him, not even Morellet, usually so sympathetic to such initiatives.

  Young Riri had for one miserable year been pH’s pupil at Collège Chaptal; he still shuddered at the memory of joules, coulombs, ergs, dynes, ohms, and farads, and of “acid plus base yields salt plus water”. He spent the period of his military service in the town of Bar-le-Duc. One Saturday afternoon, as he was wandering through its streets in the state of intractable boredom known only to conscripts, he spied his former teacher. Behind a stand outside a supermarket, dressed as a Norman peasant (blue smock, red-checked scarf, and cap), Paul Hébert was proposing to passers-by his assortment of country sausages, bottled cider, Breton biscuits, and bread guaranteed to have been baked in wood-fired ovens. Approaching the stand, Young Riri bought a few slices of garlic sausage and wondered if he would work up the courage to accost his old teacher. When Paul Hébert gave him his change, their eyes met for a fraction of a second. Young Riri saw that the other man knew he had been recognised and was imploring him to go away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  On the Stairs, 3

  IT WAS HERE, on the stairs, it must have been a good three years ago, that he met him for the last time; on the stairs, on the fifth-floor landing, opposite the door of the flat where the unfortunate Hébert had lived. The lift was out of order once again and Valène, painfully climbing back up, crossed the path of Bartlebooth, who, perhaps, had been to see Winckler. He was wearing his usual grey worsted trousers, a check jacket, and one of those lisle-thread shirts of which he was so fond. He greeted him in passing with a very brief nod of the head. He hadn’t changed much; his back was bent, but he walked without a stick; his face had got a little thinner, his eyes had gone almost white: that’s what struck Valène the most, his gaze which did not manage to meet his own, as if Bartlebooth had sought to look behind his head, had wanted to pierce his head to reach beyond it the neutral asylum of the stairwell with its trompe-l’oeil decorations mimicking old marbling and its staff skirting board made to resemble wood panelling. There was in that avoiding look something more violent than a void, something that was not merely pride or hatred, but almost panic, something like a mad hope, like an appeal for help, like a signal of distress.

  Bartlebooth had been back for seventeen years, for seventeen years he had been chained to his desk, seventeen years ferociously recomposing one by one the five hundred seascapes which Gaspard Winckler had cut into seven hundred and fifty pieces each. He had already reconstituted more than four hundred of them! At the beginning he went fast, he worked with pleasure, resuscitating with a kind of ardour the scenes he had painted twenty years earlier, watching with childlike glee as Morellet delicately filled in the tiniest gaps left in the completed jigsaw puzzles. Then as the years wore on it seemed as though the puzzles got more and more complicated, more and more difficult to solve. Though his technique, his practice, his intuition, and his methods had become extremely subtle, and though he usually anticipated the traps Winckler had laid, he was no longer always able to find the appropriate answer: in vain would he spend hours on each puzzle, sitting for whole days in this swivelling and rocking chair that had belonged to his Bostonian great-uncle, for he found it harder and harder to finish his puzzles in the time he had laid down for himself.

  For Smautf, who used to see them covered over by a black cloth on the big square table when he brought his master tea (which the latter most often forgot to drink), an apple (which he nibbled a little before letting it brown in the wastepaper basket), or mail which he only opened now as an exception, the puzzles remained attached to wisps of memory – smells of seaweed, the sounds of waves crashing along high embankments, distant names: Majunga, Diégo-Suarez, Comoro, Seychelles, Socotra, Moka, Hodeida … For Bartlebooth, they were now only bizarre playing-pieces in an interminable game, of which he had ended up forgetting the rules, who his opponent was, and what the stake was, and the bet: little wooden bits whose capricious contours fed his nightmares, the sole material substance of a lonely and bloody-minded replay, the inert, inept, and merciless components of an aimless quest. Majunga was neither a town nor a port, it was not a heavy sky, a strip of lagoon, a horizon dog-toothed by warehouses and cement works, it was only seven hundred and fifty variations on grey, incomprehensible splinters of a bottomless enigma, the sole images of a void which no memory, no expectation would ever come to fill, the only props of his self-defeating illusions.

  Gaspard Winckler had died a few weeks after this meeting, and Bartlebooth had virtually stopped going out. From time to time Smautf would give Valène news of the absurd voyage that twenty years on the Englishman was pursuing in the silence of his padded study: “We’ve left Crete” – Smautf identified himself with Bartlebooth quite often, and spoke of him in the first person plural (it is true they had made all these journeys together) – “we’re approaching the Cyclades: Zafora, Anafi, Milo, Paros, Naxos, that won’t be plain sailing!”

  Sometimes Valène had the feeling that time had been stopped, suspended, frozen around he didn’t know what expectation. The very idea of the picture he planned to do and whose laid-out, broken-up images had begun to haunt every second of his life, furnishing his dreams, squeezing his memories, the very idea of this shattered building laying bare the cracks of its past, the crumbling of its present, this unordered amassing of stories grandiose and trivial, frivolous and pathetic, gave him the impression of a grotesque mausoleum raised in the memory of companions petrified in terminal postures as insignificant in their solemnity as they were in their ordinariness, as if he had wanted both to warn of and to delay these slow or quick deaths which seemed to be engulfing the entire bui
lding storey by storey: Monsieur Marcia, Madame Moreau, Madame de Beaumont, Bartlebooth, Rorschach, Mademoiselle Crespi, Madame Albin, Smautf. And himself, of course, Valène himself, the longest inhabitant of the house.

  And sometimes a feeling of unbearable sadness ran through him: he would think of the others, of all those who had already gone, all those whom life or death had swallowed up: Madame Hourcade, in her little house near Montargis, Morellet at Verrières-le-Buisson, Madame Fresnel and her son in New Caledonia, and Winckler, and Marguerite, and the Danglars, and the Claveaus, and Hélène Brodin with her frightened little smile, and Monsieur Jérôme, and the old lady with the little dog whose name he’d forgotten, the old lady’s name, that is, for the little dog (actually it was a bitch) he remembered very well indeed, it was called Dodéca and since it frequently did its business on the landing, the concierge – Madame Claveau – never called it anything but Dodefecate. The old lady lived in the fourth floor left, beside the Grifalconis, and she could often be seen walking up or down the stairs dressed only in her undies. Her son wanted to be a priest. Years later, after the war, Valène met him in Rue des Pyramides trying to sell pornographic novelettes to tourists about to see Paris aboard a double-decker bus, and he told him an endless story about gold-smuggling in the USSR.

  Once again his head began to whirl with the sad round of removers and undertakers, property agents and their customers, plumbers, electricians, painters, decorators, tilers, and carpet-layers: he began to think of the tranquil life of things, of crockery chests full of wood shavings, of cartons of books, of the harsh light of bare bulbs swinging on their wires, of the slow installation of furniture and objects, of the slow adaptation of the body to space, that whole sum of minute, nonexistent, untellable events – choosing a lamp-stand, a reproduction, a knickknack, placing a tall rectangular mirror between two doors, putting a Japanese garden in front of a window, lining cupboard shelves with a flower-printed fabric – all those infinitesimal gestures in which the life of a flat is always most faithfully encapsulated, and which will be upset from time to time by the sudden – unforeseen or ineluctable, tragic or benign, ephemeral or definitive – fractures of an ahistorical daily grind: one day the young Marquiseaux girl will run off with the Réol boy, one day Madame Orlowska will leave again for no apparent reason, for no real reason either; one day Madame Altamont will fire a revolver at Monsieur Altamont and the blood will spurt onto the glazed hexagonal tiles of their octagonal dining room: one day the police will come to arrest Joseph Nieto and will find hidden in one of the brass spheres on his large Empire bedstead in his bedroom the famous diamond stolen long ago from Prince Luigi Voudzoï.

  * * *

  One day, above all, the whole house will disappear, the street and the quartier will die. That will take time to happen. To begin with, it will seem like a legend or a barely plausible rumour: someone will have heard something about a possible extension of the Monceau Gardens, or a plan for a big hotel, or a direct link from the Elysée palace to Roissy airport using the line of Avenue de Courcelles to get to the ring road. Then the rumours will harden; the names of the developers will become known, as will the precise nature of their plans, illustrated in expensive, four-colour-printed fold-outs:

  … As part of the enlargement and modernisation of the accommodation housing the main Post Office of the XVIIth arrondissement included in the Seventh Five-Year Plan and made inevitable by the substantial expansion of this public service in the last two decades, it has now become possible and desirable to implement a total restructuring of the surrounding area …

  and then

  … The result of teamwork between government agencies and private ventures, this vast multipurpose development, sensitive to the ecological balance of its environment, but with designed capacity for the social and cultural facilities which are indispensable humanising factors in contemporary life, will thus come at the right time to replace an urban fabric that reached saturation point several years ago …

  and finally

  … A few minutes from Etoile-Charles-de-Gaulle (Express Metro) and the Saint-Lazare railway station, scarcely a few yards from the bosky groves of the Monceau Gardens, HORIZON 84 offers you on three million square metres’ floorspace the THREE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED finest offices in Paris: triple-thick carpet, thermophonic insulation by floating floortiles, non-skid surfaces, power-controlled partitions, telex, CCTV, computer terminals, conference rooms with simultaneous interpreting facilities, office canteens, snack bars, swimming pool, clubhouse … HORIZON 84 also means SEVEN HUNDRED apartments from bijou miniflats to five-roomed residences, fully serviced – from electronic porterage to pre-programmable cookers, and TWENTY-TWO reception suites – three hundred square metres of drawing rooms and balconies; and there’s also a shopping centre totalling FORTY-SEVEN shops and service outlets, and you’ll have TWELVE THOUSAND underground car parking spaces, ONE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE square metres of landscaped grounds, TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED installed telephone lines, an AM-FM relay station, TWELVE tennis courts, SEVEN cinemas, and the most modern hotel complex in Europe! HORIZON 84, 84 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE SERVING TOMORROW’S REAL ESTATE!

  But before these cubes of glass, steel, and concrete rise up from the ground, there will be the long palaver of sales and takeovers, of compensation, exchanges, rehousing, and evictions. One by one the shops will close and stay empty, one by one the windows of vacated flats will be bricked up and the floors lifted to discourage squatters and tramps. The street will be no more than a string of blank façades – bleak walls, vacant eye-like windows – alternating with poster-patched palisades and nostalgic graffiti.

  Who, on seeing a Parisian apartment house, has never thought of it as indestructible? A bomb, a fire, an earthquake could certainly bring it down, but what else? In the eyes of an individual, of a family, or even a dynasty, a town, street, or house seems unchangeable, untouchable by time, by the ups and downs of human life, to such an extent that we believe we can compare and contrast the fragility of our condition to the invulnerability of stone. But the same fever which around eighteen fifty brought these buildings out of the ground from Batignolles to Clichy, from Ménilmontant to Butte-aux-Cailles, from Balard to Pré Saint-Gervais, will henceforth strive for their destruction.

  The demolition men will come and their heavy hammers will smash the stucco and the tiles, will punch through the partitions, twist the ironwork, displace the beams and rafters, rip out the breeze blocks and the stone: grotesque images of a building torn down, reduced to piles of raw materials which scrapmerchants in thick gloves will come to quarrel over: lead from the plumbing, marble from the mantelpieces, wood from the structure and the floors, the doors and the skirting boards, brass and cast iron from handles and taps, large mirrors and the gilt of their frames, basin stones, bathtubs, the wrought iron of the stair rail …

  The tireless bulldozers of the site-levellers will come to shovel off the rest: tons and tons of scree and dust.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Third Floor Right, 2

  THE MAIN DRAWING room in the flat on the third floor right could well display all the classic signs of the morning after a party.

  It is a huge room with light-coloured woodwork, revealing its finely laid parquet floor as the carpets have been either rolled up or pushed back. The whole rear wall is taken up by a Regency-style bookcase, the middle part of which is in fact a door painted in trompe l’oeil. Through this half-opened door can be seen a long corridor down which a girl of maybe sixteen is walking, holding a glass of milk in her right hand.

  In the drawing room another girl – maybe it’s for her that the restoring glassful is meant – lies asleep on a grey suede sofa: buried beneath the cushions, half covered by a black, flower-and-leaf-embroidered shawl, she seems to be wearing only a nylon jerkin which is clearly several sizes too big for her.

  On the floor, everywhere, the remains of the party: several odd shoes, a long white sock, a pair of tights, a top hat,
a false nose, cardboard plates in piles, or crumpled, or lying singly, laden with left-overs – tops of radishes, heads of sardines, slightly gnawed lumps of bread, chicken bones, cheese rinds, crimped paper boats that have been used for petits fours and chocolates, cigarette butts, paper napkins, cardboard cups; on a low table, various empty bottles and an almost entire pat of butter in which several cigarettes have been neatly crushed; in other places, a whole assortment of small triangular trays with various morsels still in them: green olives, roast nuts, salty biscuits, prawn crackers; further on, where there is just a little more open space, a barrel of Côtes-du-Rhône on its own stand, beneath which floorcloths, a few yards of kitchen towel that has capriciously loosed itself from its dispenser, and a whole collection of glasses and cups, some of them still half-full, are spread; coffee cups lie about, here and there, as do lumps of sugar, liqueur glasses, forks, knives, a cake-slice, coffee spoons, beer cans, Coca-Cola bottles, almost untouched bottles of gin, port, Armagnac, Marie-Brizard, Cointreau, crème de banane, hairpins, innumerable receptacles used as ashtrays and overflowing with carbonised matchsticks, cigarette ash, pipe ash, butts with and without lipstick stain, date stones, walnut, almond, and peanut shells, apple cores, orange and tangerine peel; in various places lie large plates piled with the remains of diverse dishes: rolled ham in now running jelly, slices of roast beef garnished with gherkins, half a cold hake decorated with sprigs of parsley, tomato quarters, whorls of mayonnaise and crinkle-cut slices of lemon; other shapes have found sanctuary in sometimes implausible locations: balancing on a radiator there is a big Japanese lacquered-wood salad bowl with a bit of rice salad left in it (olives, anchovy fillets, hard-boiled eggs, capers, strips of green pepper, shrimps); under the sofa, a silver dish on which untouched drumsticks lie alongside bare and half-bare chicken bones; a bowl of gooey mayonnaise sits in an armchair; under a bronze paperweight depicting Scopas’s Ares Resting, a saucerful of radishes; dried-out cucumbers, aubergines, and mangoes and a remnant of a lettuce gone sour perch near the top of the bookcase, above a six-volume edition of Mirabeau’s salacious stories, and the remains of an elaborate party cake – a huge meringue in the shape of a squirrel – are precariously wedged between two folds in one of the carpets.