Free Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec Page B

something in between Great Works at Risk and Great Battles of the Past .
    Rorschach was too influential in television for his proposal to be turned down. He wasn’t quite influential enough for it to be acted on speedily. Three years later, when Rorschach became so ill as to be forced, in the space of a few weeks, to terminate virtually all professional activity, none of the networks had yet given final approval and the scenario was still incomplete.
    Without wishing to anticipate events, it might be useful to point out that Rorschach’s initiative had serious consequences for Bartlebooth. It was by hearing of these televisual misadventures that Beyssandre got wind, last year, of Bartlebooth’s story. And, oddly enough, it was to Rorschach that Bartlebooth came for the name of a director to film the final stage of his enterprise. However, that got him nowhere, except a step deeper into the web of contradictions which he’d known for many years would tie him inexorably tighter.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
     

Altamont, 1
     
    ON THE SECOND floor, at the Altamonts’, preparations are underway for the traditional annual reception. There will be a buffet in each of the five rooms of the flat facing the street. In this room, normally the small drawing room – the room nearest the main entrance hall, and leading onto a smoking-room-cum-library, a large drawing room, a boudoir, and a dining room – the carpets have been rolled up, revealing a valuable cloisonné floor. Almost all the furniture has been removed; they have left only eight chairs, made of lacquered wood with scenes from the Boxer Uprising painted on the backs.
    There are no paintings on the walls, because the walls and doors are themselves the decor: they have been hung with painted wallpaper, providing a lavish panorama (a number of trompe-l’oeil effects suggest that we are dealing with a copy specially made for this room, probably based on older drawings) showing life in India as it was popularly imagined in the second half of the nineteenth century: first, a luxuriant jungle peopled with wide-eyed monkeys, then a clearing beside a marigot in which three elephants disport themselves at spraying each other; further on, in front of straw huts on stilts, women in yellow, sky-blue, and sea-green saris and men in loincloths dry tea leaves and ginger roots, whilst others, at wooden stalls, decorate large squares of silk with blocks which they dip in pots of vegetable dyes; and finally, on the right-hand edge, a classic tiger-hunting scene: between two rows of sepoys, two deep, shaking rattles and banging cymbals, strides a richly bedecked elephant, with a fringed and tasselled rectangular banner embossed with a red winged horse on his forehead; a howdah rises up behind the mahout squatting between the pachyderm’s ears, bearing a red-haired European with sideburns and a pith helmet, and a maharajah wearing a jewel-studded costume and an immaculate turban decorated with a long plume held in place by an enormous diamond; in front of them, at the jungle’s edge, half-emerging from the undergrowth, with its stomach to the ground, the big cat prepares to pounce.
    In the centre of the left-hand wall, there’s a huge pink marble fireplace surmounted by a large mirror; on the mantel, a tall crystal vase, of rectangular cross-section, filled with everlasting flowers, and a turn-of-the-century savings box: it has the form of a full-length, grinning, somehow twisted Negro, dressed in a flowing tartan oilskin cape, mostly red, with white gloves, steel-rimmed spectacles, and a top hat decorated with the stars and stripes and emblazoned with the number “75” in blue and red figures. His left hand is outstretched, his right hand grips the knob of a walking stick. When you put a coin into the outstretched palm, the arm rises and the coin is inexorably swallowed: by way of thanks, the clockwork man shakes his legs half a dozen times, in a fairly good imitation of the jitterbug.
    A