Life: A User's Manual (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Bartlebooth, 1

AN ANTECHAMBER, IN Bartlebooth’s flat.

It’s an almost empty room, furnished with but a few straw-seated chairs, a pair of three-legged stools with red, fringed flat cushions, and a long, straight-backed bench-seat in greenish imitation-leather upholstery of the sort you used to see in railway-station waiting rooms.

The walls are painted white, the floor is laid with a thick plastic covering. On a large cork square fixed to the rear wall, several postcards have been pinned: the battlefield of the Pyramids, the fish market at Dumyât, the old whalers’ quay at Nantucket, the
Promenade des Anglais
at Nice, the Hudson’s Bay Company building at Winnipeg, sunset at Cape Cod, the Bronze Pavilion in the Summer Palace in Peking, a reproduction of a drawing showing Pisanello offering four gold medals on a cushioned tray to Lionel d’Este, as well as an announcement edged in black:

Your presence is requested at the burial of

GASPARD WINCKLER

who passed away on 29 October 1973, in Paris in his 63rd year

The funeral will take place on 3 November 1973 and will leave the Bichat Hospital Morgue, 170 Boulevard Ney, Paris 17, at 10 a.m.

NO FLOWERS OR WREATHS

Bartlebooth’s three servants stay in this antechamber, awaiting their master’s problematical summonses on the bell. Smautf is standing near the window with one arm in the air, whilst Hélène, the maid, is restitching the seam that has come undone in the armpit of the right-hand sleeve of his jacket. Kléber, the chauffeur, sits on one of the chairs. He is not wearing his livery, but broad-belted cord trousers and a white woollen polo-neck sweater. He has just laid out on the green leather bench-seat a pack of fifty-two playing cards, face up, in four rows, and he is about to play a game of patience in which you first remove the four aces and then sort the pack into its four colour-suites by using the spaces made by the removal of the aces. Beside the cards lies an open book: it is an American novel by George Bretzlee, entitled
The Wanderers:
its action takes place in New York jazz circles in the early nineteen fifties.

Smautf, as we know, has been Bartlebooth’s servant for fifty years. Kléber was hired as chauffeur in 1955 when Bartlebooth and Smautf returned from their world tour, at the same time as Madame Adèle was engaged as cook, Simone as the kitchen maid, Léonard as the wine steward-cum-butler, Germaine as the laundress, as well as an odd-job man, Louis, and a footman, Thomas. In those days Bartlebooth went out a lot, and also liked to entertain, giving very well-thought-of dinner parties; he would also invite distant relatives to stay, as well as people whose acquaintance he had made in the course of his travels.

From nineteen sixty on, his lavishness began to decline, and staff leaving were not replaced. It is only three years since Smautf engaged Hélène, after Madame Adèle took her retirement. Hélène, who is only just thirty, copes with everything, laundry, meals, cleaning, with Kléber, who hardly has occasion to use the car these days, lending a hand for heavy jobs.

Bartlebooth has not entertained for many years, and these last two years he has scarcely ever left the flat. Most of the time he shuts himself up in his study, having once and for all forbidden anyone to disturb him unless he calls. Sometimes forty-eight hours go by without his giving any sign of life: he sleeps in his clothes in great-uncle Sherwood’s easy chair, and lives on nibbles of crispbread and gingernut biscuits. Only exceptionally does he now take his meals in his large, austere, Empire dining room. When he does consent to do so, Smautf dons his old coat-tails and, trying to keep his hand from shaking, serves him his boiled egg, his small helping of poached haddock, and his cup of verbena tea, which to Hélène’s despair are the only foods he has, these many months, agreed to ingest.

Valène took many years to grasp exactly what Bartlebooth was after. The first time he came to see him, in January nineteen twenty-five, all Bartlebooth said was that he wanted to learn all there was to know about painting watercolours, and he wanted a lesson a day for ten years. The frequency and the duration of these private lessons startled Valène, who was perfectly content if he landed eighteen lessons a quarter. But Bartlebooth seemed determined to devote as much time as was necessary to his apprenticeship, and he seemed to have no money worries. Fifty years later, Valène sometimes reflected that, anyway, those ten years hadn’t been such a waste, seeing how Bartlebooth displayed at the start a complete lack of natural talent.

Not only did Bartlebooth know nothing about the delicate art of watercolours, he’d never even held a paintbrush and scarcely ever tried a crayon. For the first year, therefore, Valène began by teaching him how to draw, and had him do copies in charcoal, in pencil, in red chalk, of models on squared grids, had him do positioning sketches, and exercises in crosshatched sketches highlighted with chalk, and exercises in shading, and exercises in perspective. Next he made him work with Indian ink and sepia wash, forced him to practise complicated calligraphy, and showed him how to make his brush strokes thicker and thinner so as to establish different values and obtain a range of tones.

In two years Bartlebooth learnt to master these initial skills. The rest, Valène assured him, was just a matter of material and experience. They began to do open-air work, at first in the Monceau Gardens, on the banks of the Seine, and in the Bois de Boulogne, then further afield in the Paris region. Every day at two, Bartlebooth’s chauffeur – not yet Kléber, but Fawcett, who had served Priscilla, Bartlebooth’s mother – called for Valène; in the capacious black-and-white Chenard & Walker limousine, the painter would find his pupil dressed sensibly in golfing breeches, spats, check cap, and woollen sweater. They would go to the Forest of Fontainebleau, to Senlis, to Enghien, to Versailles, to Saint-Germain, or to the Chevreuse valley. There they would set up their three-legged camp stools (known as “Pinchart stools”) side by side, and their parasol with its jointed pole and ground spike, and their fragile articulated easel. With manic precision, so obsessively meticulous as to be almost clumsy with it, Bartlebooth would first hold his sheet of Whatman paper (already damped on the reverse side) up to the light, so he could check by the watermark that he had got it the right way round, then he would take drawing pins and fix it onto his board of cross-grained ash, and then he would open his zinc palette with its enamelled inside surfaces spotlessly cleaned after the previous day’s session, and would arrange on it, in ritual sequence, thirteen little cups of paint – ivory black, coloured sepia, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, Indian yellow, chrome yellow, vermilion, madder gloss, Veronese green, olive green, ultramarine, cobalt, Prussian blue, as well as a few drops of Madame Maubois’s zinc white – then he would set out his water, his sponges, and his crayons, check that his brushes were properly mounted in their handles, perfectly tipped, not too thick in the middle, had no stray, loose hairs, and then he would get down to it, first sketching in softly in crayon the volumes, the horizon, the foreground, the vanishing lines, before trying to fix in all their unforeseeable, split-second splendour the ephemeral metamorphoses of a cloud, or a breeze rippling the surface of a pond, or a sunset over the Ile-de-France, a flock of starlings ascending, a shepherd bringing in his sheep, moonrise over a dormant village, a road lined with poplars, a dog halting at a thicket, and so on.

Most of the time Valène would shake his head and with a few curt phrases – your sky’s too heavy, that’s out of balance, you’ve missed the effect, not enough contrast, you haven’t got the atmosphere, there’s no gradation, the layout is banal – alternating with ringings and crossings-out nonchalantly scrawled over the watercolour, he would mercilessly destroy the work of Bartlebooth, who, without a word, would tear the sheet from his ashwood board, affix a fresh piece, and start all over again.

Outside this laconic tuition, Bartlebooth and Valène hardly spoke to each other. Although they were exactly the same age, Bartlebooth seemed entirely uninterested in Valène, and Valène, though intrigued by his employer’s eccentricity, usually didn’t dare question him straight out. Nonetheless, several times, during the return journeys to Paris, he did ask him why he was so obstinately determined to learn to paint watercolours. Bartlebooth’s usual reply was:

“Why not?”

“Because,” Valène retorted one day, “most of my pupils, in your shoes, would have given up long ago.”

“Am I that bad?” Bartlebooth asked.

“In ten years you can get anywhere, and you will get there; but why do you want to master an art for which you have absolutely no spontaneous inclination?”

“It’s not watercolours I’m interested in, but what I plan to do with them.”

“And what is that?”

“Why, to make puzzles, of course,” was Bartlebooth’s unhesitating reply. That day Valène began to grasp more precisely what was in Bartlebooth’s mind. But only after getting to know Smautf and then Gaspard Winckler could he gauge the full extent of the Englishman’s ambition.

Let us imagine a man whose wealth is equalled only by his indifference to what wealth generally brings, a man of exceptional arrogance who wishes to fix, to describe, and to exhaust not the whole world – merely to state such an ambition is enough to invalidate it – but a constituted fragment of the world: in the face of the inextricable incoherence of things, he will set out to execute a (necessarily limited) programme right the way through, in all its irreducible, intact entirety.

In other words, Bartlebooth resolved one day that his whole life would be organised around a single project, an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion.

The idea occurred to him when he was twenty. At first it was only a vague idea, a question looming –
what should I do?
– with an answer taking shape:
nothing
. Money, power, art, women did not interest Bartlebooth. Nor did science, nor even gambling. There were only neckties and horses that just about did, or, to put it another way, beneath these futile illustrations (but thousands of people do order their lives effectively around their ties, and far greater numbers do so around their weekend horse-riding) there stirred, dimly, a certain idea of perfection.

It grew over the following months and came to rest on three guiding principles.

The first was moral: the plan should not have to do with an exploit or record, it would be neither a peak to scale nor an ocean floor to reach. What Bartlebooth would do would not be heroic, or spectacular; it would be something simple and discreet, difficult of course but not impossibly so, controlled from start to finish and conversely controlling every detail of the life of the man engaged upon it.

The second was logical: all recourse to chance would be ruled out, and the project would make time and space serve as the abstract coordinates plotting the ineluctable recursion of identical events occurring inexorably in their allotted places, on their allotted dates.

The third was aesthetic: the plan would be useless, since gratuitousness was the sole guarantor of its rigour, and would destroy itself as it proceeded; its perfection would be circular: a series of events which when concatenated nullify each other: starting from nothing, passing through precise operations on finished objects, Bartlebooth would end up with nothing.

Thus a concrete programme was designed, which can be stated succinctly as follows.

For ten years, from 1925 to 1935, Bartlebooth would acquire the art of painting watercolours.

For twenty years, from 1935 to 1955, he would travel the world, painting, at a rate of one watercolour each fortnight, five hundred seascapes of identical format (royal, 65cm × 50cm) depicting seaports. When each view was done, he would dispatch it to a specialist craftsman (Gaspard Winckler), who would glue it to a thin wooden backing board and cut it into a jigsaw puzzle of seven hundred and fifty pieces.

For twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, Bartlebooth, on his return to France, would reassemble the jigsaw puzzles in order, at a rate, once again, of one puzzle a fortnight. As each puzzle was finished, the seascape would be “retexturised” so that it could be removed from its backing, returned to the place where it had been painted – twenty years before – and dipped in a detergent solution whence would emerge a clean and unmarked sheet of Whatman paper.

Thus no trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period of fifty years, the sole motivation and unique activity of its author.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Rorschach, 3

IT SUGGESTS SOME kind of petrified memory, like a Magritte painting in which stone may have come to life or life been turned to stone, some kind of image indelibly fixed for all time. The man is sitting down; his moustache droops, his arms are crossed on the table top, his thick neck emerges from a collarless shirt. The woman stands behind him, with her left arm on his shoulder, her hair pulled back, in a black skirt and flowered blouse. Hand in hand, the twins stand in front of the table, in sailor suits with short trousers, with the armbands worn for confirmation on their sleeves and their socks falling down around their ankles. On the oilcloth table-covering stands a blue-enamel coffee pot and a photograph of grandfather in an oval frame. On the mantelpiece, bluish clumps of rosemary sprout from two flowerpots that have conical bases and are decorated with black-and-white chevrons. Between them, under an oblong glass bell, appears a bridal wreath with artificial orange blossoms (pellets of cotton dipped in wax), a beaded armature, and ornamental garlands, birds, and bits of mirror.