Free Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec

gloss paint like the entrance hall, a large watercolour has been put, over a low sideboard; entitled The Rake’s Progress and signed U. N. Owen, it depicts a little railway station in open country. On the left, a railwayman stands leaning against a high desk which serves as a ticket office. He looks about fifty, with his receding hairline, round face, and bushy moustache. He is wearing a waistcoat. He is pretending to look something up in a timetable whilst in fact completing his transcription onto a small rectangular piece of paper of a recipe for mint cake he’s found in an almanac half-hidden by the timetable. In front of him, on the opposite side of the desk, a bespectacled customer whose face expresses a phenomenal degree of exasperation files his fingernails whilst waiting for his ticket: to the right a third character in short sleeves, wearing broad, flower-embroidered braces, is rolling a big drum out of the station. Fields of alfalfa, where cows are grazing, stretch out all around.
    On the right-hand wall, which is painted a slightly darker green than the left-hand wall, hang nine plates decorated with representations of:
     
– a priest giving ashes to a believer
– a man putting a coin into a barrel-shaped savings box
– a woman sitting in the corner of a railway carriage, with her arm in a sling
– two men in clogs, in snowy weather, stamping the ground to warm their feet
– a lawyer pleading a case, looking vehement
– a man in a smoking jacket about to drink a cup of chocolate
– a violinist playing, with a mute attached to his instrument
– a man in a nightgown, holding a candlestick, looking at a spider, symbolising hope, on the wall
– a man holding out his visiting card to another man. Both look aggressive, suggesting a duel.
    In the middle of the room there is a modern-style round table in citronwood, surrounded by eight chairs upholstered in raised velvet. In the middle of the table there is a silver statuette about ten inches high. It represents a naked, helmeted man on the back of an ox, holding a pyx in his left hand.
    The watercolour, the statuette, the antique coins, and the plates, according to Rémi Rorschach, are evidence of his “untiring efforts as a producer”. The statuette, a classic caricatural representation of the minor arcanum called the Knight of Cups, is supposed to have been unearthed during work on that “drama” entitled The Sixteenth Edge of This Cube which we have already had occasion to mention, and which does indeed deal with a murky tale of seeing into the future; the plates are supposed to have been painted specially as background images for the credits of a serial in which the same actor was to have played in succession the roles of a priest, a banker, a woman, a peasant, a lawyer, a good-food-guide writer, a virtuoso, a gullible ironmonger, and an obdurate archduke; the ancient coins – claimed to be genuine – were said to have been given by a collector and admirer of a series of programmes on the Twelve Caesars, though this Sergius Sulpicius Galba has no connection whatever with the Servius Sulpicius Galba whose reign, one and a half centuries later, lasted seven months, between Nero and Othon, before he was slaughtered on the Campus Martius by his own troops, having refused them the donativum .
    As for the watercolour, it is, allegedly, simply one of the models for the set of an Anglo-French adaptation in modern dress of Stravinsky’s opera.
    It’s hard to be sure how much truth there is in these explanations. Of the four programmes, two were never made: namely, the nine-part serial, turned down by each of the actors approached – Belmondo, Bouise, Bourvil, Cuvelier, Haller, Hirsch, and Maréchal – after they’d read the script; and the updated Rake’s Progress , considered too expensive by the BBC. The series on the Twelve Caesars was made for the schools’ broadcasting service, with which Rorschach was, apparently, unconnected, and similarly The