Life: A User's Manual (7 page)

The site was identified with great care and entered by Smautf in an
ad hoc
register. The next day Bartlebooth would call on the British Consul if there was one thereabouts, or on some other local notable. The day after, they departed. The length of the leg of voyage sometimes modified this timetable slightly, but in general it was scrupulously adhered to.

They didn’t proceed necessarily to the nearest port on their itinerary. Depending on the most convenient means of travel, they would perchance come back on their tracks or make fairly large detours. For example, they went by rail from Bombay to Masulipatnam, then crossed the Bay of Bengal to the Andaman Islands, went back to Madras, whence they reached Ceylon, and set off again towards Malacca, Borneo, and the Celebes. Instead of going thence directly to Puerto Princesa on Palawan Island, they went first to Mindanao, then Luzon, and up to Taiwan before coming back down to Palawan.

Nonetheless it is fair to say that in practice they explored the continents one after another. After visiting large parts of Europe from 1935 to 1937, they moved on to Africa and toured it clockwise from 1938 to 1942; from there they reached South America (1943–1944), Central America (1945), North America (1946-1948) and finally Asia (1949-1951). In 1952 they covered Oceania, in 1953 the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. In the last year they crossed Turkey and the Black Sea, crossed into the USSR, and went up as far as Dudinka, beyond the Arctic Circle, at the mouth of the Yenisei, crossed the Kara and the Barents Seas on a whaler and, from North Cape, came down the Scandinavian fjords before ending their long circular tour at Brouwershaven.

Historical and political circumstances – the Second World War and all the regional conflicts before and after 1939 and 1945: Abyssinia, Spain, India, Korea, Palestine, Madagascar, Guatemala, North Africa, Cyprus, Indonesia, Indochina, etc. – had virtually no influence on their travels, except that they had to wait a few days in Hong Kong for a visa for Canton, and a bomb exploded in their hotel when they were at Port Said. It had a small charge and their trunks hardly suffered at all.

Bartlebooth returned from his travels almost empty-handed: he had only gone in order to paint his five hundred watercolours, and had dispatched them to Winckler as each one was done. Smautf, for his part, had built up three collections – of postage stamps, for Madame Claveau’s son, of hotel stickers, for Winckler, and of postcards, for Valène – and brought back three objects which are now in his room.

The first is a magnificent sea chest of soft coral (
gummiferous pterocarpous
, he likes to specify) with brass fittings. He found it at a ship chandler’s at St John’s, Newfoundland, and entrusted it to a trawler which brought it back to France.

The second is a carved curio, a basalt statue of the tricephalous Mother-Goddess, about fifteen inches high. Smautf obtained it in the Seychelles in exchange for another sculpture, similarly tricephalous, but of an entirely different design: it was a crucifix on which three wooden figurines had been fastened by means of a single thick bolt: a black child, a tall old man, and a life-size dove, once white. That object he’d found in the souk at Agadir, and the man who sold it to him explained that they were the movable figures of the Trinity, and that each took yearly turns “on top” of the others. The Son was then foremost, the Holy Ghost (almost out of sight) against the cross. It was a cumbersome object, but apt to fascinate Smautf’s particular cast of mind for a long while. Thus he bought it without haggling and lugged it around with him from 1939 to 1953. The day after he got to the Seychelles, he went into a bar: the first thing he saw was the statue of the Mother-Goddess, standing on the counter between a beat-up cocktail shaker and a glass full of little flags and champagne mixers shaped like miniature shepherds’ staves. His stupefaction was such that he returned forthwith to his hotel, came back with the crucifix, and engaged the Malay barman in a long conversation in pidgin concerning the statistical near-impossibility of coming across two statues with three heads twice in fourteen years, at the end of which conversation the barman and Smautf swore undying friendship cemented by the exchange of their works of art.

The third object is a large engraving, a kind of primitive woodcut. Smautf found it at Bergen in the last year of their peregrinations. It depicts a child receiving a book as a prize from an old dominie. The child is seven or eight years old, wearing a sky-blue jacket, short trousers, and polished slip-on shoes; a laurel wreath crowns his head; he is climbing the three steps of a parquet-floored platform adorned with succulents. The old man wears an academic gown. He has a long grey beard and steel-framed spectacles. In his right hand he holds a ruler of boxwood and in his left a large folio volume in a red binding on which can be read
Erindringer frå en Reise i Skotland
(it was the account, Smautf learnt, of the Danish pastor Plenge’s journey to Scotland in the summer of 1859). Near the schoolmaster there is a table covered in a green cloth with other volumes placed on it, as well as a globe and an open, oblong musical score. A narrow engraved brass plate attached to the print’s wooden frame gives its title, apparently unrelated to the represented scene:
Laborynthus
.

Smautf would like to have been this prize-winning good schoolboy. His regret at having had no schooling has turned over the years into an unhealthy passion for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Right at the start of their travels, he had seen a prodigious mental arithmetician performing at a music hall in London, and over the twenty years of his world tour, by dint of reading and rereading a well-thumbed treatise on mathematical and arithmetical diversions which he’d picked up at a secondhand bookshop at Inverness, he took up arithmetic; on his return he was capable of extracting square and cube roots of nine-digit numbers with relative speed. When that began to get a bit too easy for him, he was seized by a fever for factorials: 1 ! = 1; 2 ! = 2; 3 ! = 6; 4 ! = 24; 5 ! = 120; 6 ! = 720; 7 ! = 5,040; 8 ! = 40,320; 9 ! = 362,880; 10 ! = 3,628,800; 11 ! = 39,916,800; 12 ! = 479,001,600; […]; 22 ! = 1,124,000,727,777,607,680,000, that is to say more than a billion times seven hundred and seventy-seven billions.

So far Smautf has got up to 76! but he can no longer find paper of sufficient width, and even if he could no table would be big enough to lay it out on. He has less and less confidence in himself, which means that he is for ever doing his sums over again. A few years ago Morellet tried to discourage him by telling him that the number written 9(9
⁹
), that is, nine to the power of nine to the ninth, which is the largest number you can write using only three figures, would have, if written out in full, three hundred and sixty-nine million digits, which at the rate of one second per digit would keep you busy for eleven years just in writing it, and at the rate of four digits per inch would be one thousand one hundred and fifty-four and one eighth miles long! But that hasn’t deterred Smautf from filling backs of envelopes, notebook margins, and butcher’s wrappers with columns and columns of numbers.

Smautf is now nearly eighty. Bartlebooth offered him retirement long ago, but Smautf has always refused. To tell the truth, he doesn’t have much to do anymore. In the morning he prepares Bartlebooth’s clothes and helps him dress. Until five years ago, he shaved him – with a cut-throat that had belonged to Bartlebooth’s great-great-grandfather – but his sight has dimmed a lot and his hand shakes a little, so he was replaced by a lad sent up every morning by Monsieur Pois, the hairdresser on Rue de Prony.

Bartlebooth no longer ever goes out, he scarcely leaves his study all day. Smautf stays in the next room with the other servants, who don’t have much more work than he does and spend their time playing cards and talking of times past.

Smautf stays for long periods each day in his bedroom. He tries to make some little progress with his arithmetic; for relaxation he does crosswords, reads detective stories which Madame Orlowska lends him, and spends hours stroking the white cat, which purrs whilst massaging the old man’s knee with its claws.

The white cat doesn’t belong to Smautf but to the whole floor. At times it goes to live in Jane Sutton’s room or at Madame Orlowska’s, or goes down to Isabelle Gratiolet or Mademoiselle Crespi. Three or four years ago it came in from the roof. It had a large wound on its neck. People noticed that its eyes were different colours, one was as blue as Chinese porcelain, the other was gold. A little later, people realised that it was completely deaf.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Servants’ Quarters, 6

Mademoiselle Crespi

OLD MADEMOISELLE CRESPI is in her room on the seventh floor, between Gratiolet’s flat and Hutting’s maid’s room.

She is lying in bed, beneath a grey woollen blanket. She has a dream: an undertaker, eyes gleaming with hatred, stands opposite her in the doorway; in his half-raised right hand he proffers a pointed, black-edged card. His left hand supports a round cushion on which two medals lie, one of which is the Stalingrad Hero’s Cross.

Below him, beyond the doorway, lies an Alpine scene: a lake, a frozen and snow-covered round, bordered with trees; the mountains seem to slope directly down to its further shore, while beyond there again show unfamiliar peaks, all in full snow, overtopping each other against the blue sky. In the foreground, three young people are climbing a path which leads to a cemetery, in the middle of which a column surmounted by an onyx basin rises from a clump of oleander and aucuba trees.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

On the Stairs, 2

ON THE STAIRS the furtive shadows pass of all those who were there one day.

He remembered Marguerite, and Paul Hébert and Laetizia, and Emilio, and the saddler, and Marcel Appenzzell (with two z’s, unlike the canton or the cheese); he remembered Grégoire Simpson, and the mysterious American girl, and the not at all nice Madame Araña; he remembered the man in yellow shoes with a pink in his buttonhole and his malachite-handled stick who came every day for ten years to see Dr Dinteville; he remembered Monsieur Jérôme, the history teacher whose
Dictionary of the Spanish Church in the Seventeenth Century
had been turned down by 46 publishers; he remembered the young student who lived for a few months in the room now occupied by Jane Sutton and who had been kicked out of a vegetarian restaurant where he worked in the evenings after being caught pouring a big bottle of beef extract into the pot of simmering vegetable soup; he remembered Troyan, the secondhand book dealer whose shop was in Rue Lepic and who found one day in a pile of detective novels three letters from Victor Hugo to Henri Samuel, his Belgian publisher, about the publication of
Les Châtiments
; he remembered Berloux, the air-raid warden, a fumbling cretin in a grey smock and a beret, who lived two houses up the road and who, one morning in 1941, in virtue of God knows what ARP regulation, had had put in the hallway and in the back yard, where the rubbish bins were kept, barrels of sand which never had any use at all; he remembered the time when Judge Danglars gave grand receptions for his Appeal Court colleagues: on these occasions, two Republican Guards in full regalia would stand sentry at the door of the building, the porch would be decorated with big pots of aspidistra and philodendron, and a cloakroom was set up to the left of the lift: it was a long tube mounted on casters and fitted with coat hangers which the concierge draped as required with minks, sables, broadtails, astrakhans, and big cloaks with otter-skin collars. On those days Madame Claveau wore her black, lace-collared dress and sat on a Regency chair (hired from the same caterers as the coat hangers and the indoor plants) beside a marble-topped sideboard on which she put her box of tokens, a square metal box decorated with little cupids armed with bows and arrows, a yellow ashtray praising the virtues of Cusenier Bleach (white or green), and a saucer equipped in advance with five-franc coins.

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.”