Life: A User's Manual (5 page)

The young woman in the leather dungarees is Hutting’s secretary. The man and woman are Austrian clients. They have come especially from Salzburg to negotiate the purchase of one of Hutting’s most highly rated
hazes
, the one which began as nothing less than
The Turkish Bath
, supplied by the Hutting process with a superabundance of steamy vapour. From afar, the canvas looks curiously like Turner’s watercolour
Harbour near Tintagel
, which, at the time he was giving him lessons, Valène showed to Bartlebooth as the most accomplished example of what can be achieved in water-colours, and which the Englishman went to copy exactly, on site, in Cornwall.

Although he is not often in his Paris flat, dividing his time between his New York “loft”, his château in the Dordogne, and a country
mas
near Nice, Hutting has returned for the Altamonts’ reception. At the moment he is at work in one of the upper rooms, where, of course, it is strictly forbidden to disturb him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Réol, 1

FOR A VERY long time the small two-roomed flat on the fifth floor left was occupied by a single lady, Madame Hourcade. Before the war she worked in a cardboard factory making casings for art books in strong card covered in silk, leather, or suedette and with cold-hammered lettering, storage folders, advertising display folders, office sundries – file boxes in red or Empire-green cloth bindings with thin gold edging – and novelty boxes with stencilled decorations, for gloves, cigarettes, chocolates, and fruit jellies. It was of course from her that Bartlebooth, a few months before his departure in nineteen thirty-four, ordered the boxes in which Winckler would pack his puzzles after he had made each one: five hundred absolutely identical boxes, twenty centimetres long, twelve centimetres wide, and eight deep, in black cardboard, with a black ribbon for tying them closed and which Winckler would seal with wax, and with no labelling other than an oval sticker bearing the initials P.B. followed by a number.

During the war the factory could no longer manage to obtain raw materials of adequate quality and had to close. Madame Hourcade survived with difficulty until she had the luck to find a position in a large hardware store on Avenue des Ternes. It seems she enjoyed the work, for she stayed on after the Liberation, even when the factory reopened and offered to take her back.

She retired in the early seventies and settled in the little house she owned near Montargis. There she leads a quiet and peaceful life and, once a year, returns the good wishes sent her by Mademoiselle Crespi.

The people who have succeeded her in the flat are called Réol. At the time they were a young couple with a little boy of three. A few months after moving they posted on the glass pane of the concierge’s door an announcement of their marriage. Madame Nochère made a collection around the building to buy them a present, but gathered no more than 41 francs!

The Réols will be in the dining room and just finishing dinner. On the table there will be a bottle of pasteurised beer, the remains of a sponge cake with the knife still in it, a cut-glass fruit bowl containing what are called “the four beggarmen”, that is to say an assortment of dried fruits, prunes, almonds, walnuts and hazelnuts, sultanas, raisins, figs, and dates.

The young woman stands on tiptoe beside a Louis XIII-style dresser, her arms outstretched to reach from the top shelf an earthenware plate decorated with a romantic landscape: wide fields surrounded by wooden fences and broken by dark spinneys of pine and little streams spilling over into lakes, and, in the distance, a tall narrow barnhouse with a balcony and a flattened roof on which a stork has landed.

The man is wearing a polka-dot pullover. He holds a fob watch in his left hand which he looks at whilst with his right hand he resets the hands of a large Early American carriage clock on which a group of Negro Minstrels is carved: a dozen musicians wearing top hats, cutaway jackets, and big bow ties, playing various wind instruments, banjos, and a shuffleboard.

The walls are hung with hessian. There aren’t any pictures, or reproductions, not even a standard post-office calendar. The child – now aged eight – is on all fours on a very thin straw mat. He wears a kind of red leather cap. He’s playing with a small whistling top bearing a bird design drawn in such a way that as the top slows down it looks as though the birds are flapping their wings. Beside him, in a strip comic, you can see a tall mop-haired young man with a blue-and-white-striped sweater jumping onto a donkey. In the bubble coming from the donkey’s mouth – for it’s a talking donkey – are the words: “If you want to play donkey you must be an ass”.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Rorschach, 1

THE ENTRANCE HALL of the Rorschachs’ large duplex. The room is empty. The walls are in white gloss, the floor is laid with grey flagstones. One piece of furniture, in the centre: a huge Empire desk, with a set of drawers fitted in the backpiece, separated by wooden pillars making an arch over the middle, in which a clock is set, with a design carved in it representing a naked woman beside a little waterfall. On the desktop two objects are displayed: a bunch of grapes, each fruit being a delicate sphere of blown glass, and a bronze statuette of a painter, standing in front of a full-size easel, leaning back from the waist, tipping back his head; he has a long drooping moustache, and curly hair down to his shoulders. He wears a full doublet and holds a palette in one hand and a long-handled brush in the other.

On the wall at the end, a large pen-and-ink drawing depicts Rémi Rorschach himself. He’s an old man, tall and wizened, with a birdlike profile.

Rémi Rorschach’s life, as narrated in a volume of memoirs ghosted for him with indulgence by a writer specialising in that kind of service, is a painful combination of courage and error. He began his career at the end of the 1914–18 war in a Marseilles music hall doing impressions of Max Linder and other American comedians. A tall, thin man with melancholy, heartbroken gestures and expressions which could indeed remind you of Keaton, Lloyd, or Laurel, Rorschach might have made a name for himself if he hadn’t been a few years before his time. The fashion was for soldier comedians and whilst the crowds flocked to Fernandel, Gabin, and Préjean, soon to be made famous by films, “Harry Kobinz” – that was the name he’d taken – mouldered in miserable poverty and found it harder and harder to get his act taken on. What with the war just over, the recent national unity government, and the “sky-blue” conservative victory at the elections, he got the idea of founding a group specialising in rousing brass flourishes, military tunes from Tipperary, square dances, and a kitbag of similar Armentières. A photo from that period shows him with his band – “Albert Greenfield and his Jolly Rogers” – wearing a cocky look, a fake kepi tilted to one side, a broad-frogged combat jacket, and impeccably tight puttees. It was an instant success, but lasted only a few weeks. The invasion of the paso doble, the foxtrot, the beguine, and other exotic dances from North, South, and Central America and elsewhere closed to him the doors of dance halls and nightspots, and his valiant efforts to adapt (“Barry Jefferson and His Hot Pepper Seven”, “Paco Domingo and the Three Caballeros”, “Fedor Kowalski and His Magyar Minstrels”, “Alberto Sforzi and His Gondoliers”) all failed in succession. In fact, he recalls on this point, only names and headgear changed: the act stayed virtually the same, as they were happy enough to make slight changes of tempo, to swap a guitar for a balalaika, a banjo, or a mandolin, and to utter the appropriate “
Baby
”, “
Olé
”, “
Tovarich
”, “
mio amore
”, or “
corazón
”, occasionally, with meaning.

Shortly after this, dejected, his mind made up to abandon the performing arts, but not wishing to leave the world of show business, Rorschach became the manager of an acrobat, a trapeze artist who had rapidly become a celebrity because of two features: the first was that he was very young – Rorschach met him when he was not yet twelve – and the second was his talent for staying on his trapeze for hours at a stretch. Crowds flocked to the music halls and circuses where he was on, not only to see him do his act, but to watch him napping, washing, dressing, or drinking a cup of chocolate on the narrow bar of his trapeze, ninety or a hundred feet from the ground.

At the start the partnership flourished, and all the major cities of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East applauded the amazing feats of the young man. But as he grew older, the trapeze artist became more and more demanding. At first purely out of a desire to improve but subsequently from the tyranny of habit as well, he so organised his life that, for as long as he was working in one establishment, he spent his whole time, day and night, on his trapeze. His very modest needs were all met by relays of servants who kept watch below and who raised and lowered everything required up above in specially constructed containers. His way of life occasioned no particular difficulties as far as those around him were concerned, except that, during the other acts on the programme, it was slightly disturbing that he stayed aloft – the fact could not be concealed – and that the audience, though it usually remained calm, let its gaze stray in his direction. The management forgave him this, however, because he was an outstanding and irreplaceable artist. Also, of course, they appreciated that he did not live like that out of mischief and that it was in fact the only way he could keep himself in constant form and maintain his act at the level of perfection.

The problem was harder to manage when his seasons ended and the trapeze artist had to travel to another town. His manager saw to it that he was spared any unnecessary prolongation of his sufferings: for trips in towns they used racing cars, dashing, if possible at night or in the very early morning, through the deserted streets at top speed, though of course still too slowly for the languishing trapeze artist; in trains, they took a whole compartment, where, adopting a pathetic but at least partial substitute for his normal way of life, he spent the journey up in the luggage rack; in the next theatre on their tour the trapeze was in place long before the acrobat’s arrival and all the doors between them and the auditorium were wide open and all the corridors clear, so that he could be back up on high without losing a second. “Seeing him set foot on the rope-ladder,” Rorschach wrote, “and climb back up to his eyrie with the speed of lightning, were the happiest moments of my life.”

* * *

The day came, alas, when the artist refused to come down from his trapeze. He had just done his last performance at the Grand Theatre at Leghorn and was due to leave that evening by car for Tarbes. Despite Rorschach’s and the music hall manager’s pleadings, increasingly hysterical appeals from the other members of the troupe, from the musicians, the entire staff, the technicians, and from the crowds who had begun to leave but had stopped and returned on hearing all this noise, the acrobat, in a fit of pride, cut the rope he could have come down by and began to perform, at ever-faster pace, an uninterrupted succession of grand circles. This supreme performance lasted two hours and caused fifty-three spectators to pass out. The police had to be brought in. In spite of Rorschach’s warnings, the policemen brought a long fire-ladder and began to climb up. They didn’t even get halfway: the trapeze artist opened his grip, and, with a long scream, describing a perfect parabola, he crashed to the ground.

After paying compensation to the theatre owners who had been trying to get the acrobat for months, Rorschach had some capital left, and he decided to invest it in an export-import business. He bought a stock of sewing machines and shipped them to Aden in the hope of trading them for perfumes and spices. He was persuaded to adopt a different course by a trader he became acquainted with on the crossing, who was lugging various copper instruments and utensils, from valve rods to spiral condensing tubes, from pearl-sieves to frying pans and fish kettles. The spice market, so this businessman explained, and more generally everything to do with trade between Europe and the Middle East, was tightly controlled by Anglo-Arabian syndicates which, in order to keep their monopolies, did not flinch from even physically eliminating their most minor rivals. On the other hand, business between Arabia and black Africa was much less supervised and offered opportunities for profitable deals. In particular, the trade in cowrie shells: as is well known, these shells are used as currency by many people in Africa and India. But it is not widely known – and that’s where there was money to be made – that there are several different kinds of cowries, with different values for different tribes. Thus Red Sea cowries (
Cypraea turdus
) are very highly valued in the Comoro Islands, where they can easily be exchanged for Indian cowries (
Cypraea caput serpentis
) at a very favourable rate of fifteen caput serpentis for one turdus. Now not far away, in Dar-es-Salaam, the rate for caput serpentis is constantly going up, and deals are often struck there at one caput serpentis for three
Cypraea moneta
. This last kind of cowrie is commonly called the coin-cowrie: as you would expect from its name, it is negotiable almost everywhere, but in West Africa, in Cameroon and especially in Gabon, it is so highly valued that some tribes pay for it with its own weight in gold. With all expenses offset, you could aim to multiply your stake tenfold. The operation was entirely safe but needed time. Rorschach didn’t feel he had the makings of a great traveller and was not too keen, but the trader’s certainty was sufficiently impressive to make him accept unhesitatingly the offer of partnership that was put to him when they landed at Aden.

The transactions proceeded exactly as the trader had foreseen. In Aden they exchanged their shipments of copper and sewing machines for forty cases of Cypraea turdus without any difficulty. They left the Comoros with eight hundred cases of caput serpentis, the only problem having been to get the wood for the said cases. In Dar-es-Salaam they chartered a caravan of two hundred and fifty camels to cross Tanganyika with their one thousand nine hundred and forty cases of coin-cowries, reached the great Congo river, and made their descent nearly to the estuary in four hundred and seventy-five days, of which two hundred and twenty-one had been spent on water, one hundred and thirty-seven in rail transshipment, twenty-four in portered transshipment, and ninety-three days in waiting, resting, enforced idleness, palavers, administrative hassles, and diverse incidents and nuisances, which nonetheless constituted, all in all, a remarkable achievement.