CHAPTER SIXTY
Cinoc, 1
A KITCHEN. The floor is covered with a linoleum mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. On the walls, paint that was once gloss. Against the rear wall, beside the sink, above a plastic-coated wire drainer, stuck one behind the other between the pipework and the wall, four post-office annual calendars with four-colour photographs:
1972: Good Chums: a jazz band composed of six-year-old kids playing toy instruments; the pianist, with his spectacles and deeply serious look, is vaguely reminiscent of Schroeder, the Beethovenish child prodigy in Schulz’s Peanuts;
1973: Summer Visions: bees suck asters;
1974: A Night on the Pampas: three gauchos around a campfire strum guitars;
1975: Pompon and Fifi: a pair of monkeys play dominoes. The male wears a bowler hat and an acrobat’s leotard with the number “32” inscribed in silver spangles on the back; the she-monkey smokes a cigar held between the thumb and index toe of her right foot, wears a feathered hat and crocheted gloves, and carries a handbag.
Higher up, on a sheet of almost identical dimensions, can be seen three daisies in a short-necked glass vase with a spherical base, whose caption simply states “PAINTED BY FEET AND MOUTH” and, in brackets, “original watercolour”.
Cinoc is in his kitchen. He is a dry, thin old man dressed in a dingy-green flannel waistcoat. He is sitting on a Formica stool at a table with an oilcloth covering, beneath an adjustable metal ceiling light fixture enamelled white and equipped with a system of pulleys and a pear-shaped counterweight. He is eating pilchards in spice directly out of a badly opened tin. On the table in front of him are three shoe-boxes full of slips of card covered in meticulous handwriting.
Cinoc moved into Rue Simon-Crubellier in 1947, a few months after the death of Hélène Brodin-Gratiolet, whose flat he took over. He provided the inhabitants of the building, and especially Madame Claveau, with an immediate, difficult problem: how was his name to be pronounced? Obviously the concierge didn’t dare address him as “Nutcase” by pronouncing the name “Sinok”. She questioned Valène, who suggested “Cinosh”; Winckler, who was for “Chinoch”; Morellet, who inclined towards “Sinots”; Mademoiselle Crespi, who proposed “Chinoss”; François Gratiolet, who prescribed “Tsinoc”; and finally Monsieur Echard, as a librarian well versed in recondite spellings and the appropriate ways of uttering them, demonstrated that, leaving aside any potential transformation of the intervocalic “n” into a “gn” or “nj” sound, and assuming once and for all, on principle, that the “i” was pronounced “i” and the “o”, “o”, there were then four ways of saying the initial “c”: “s”, “ts”, “sh”, and “ch”, and five ways of pronouncing the final: “s”, “k”, “ch”, “sh”, and “ts”, and that, as a result, depending on the presence or absence of one or another diacritic sign or accent and according to the phonetic particularities of one or another language or dialect, there was a case for choosing from amongst the following twenty pronunciations:
SINOS |
SINOK |
SINOCH |
SINOSH |
SINOTS |
TSINOS |
TSINOK |
TSINOCH |
TSINOSH |
TSINOTS |
SHINOS |
SHINOK |
SHINOCH |
SHINOSH |
SHINOTS |
CHINOS |
CHINOK |
CHINOCH |
CHINOSH |
CHINOTS |
As a result of which, a delegation went to ask the principal person concerned, who replied that he didn’t know himself which was the most proper way of pronouncing his name. His family’s original surname, the one which his great-grandfather, a saddler from Szczyrk, had purchased officially from the registry office of the County of Krakow, was Kleinhof: but from generation to generation, from passport renewal to passport renewal, either because the Austrian or German officials weren’t bribed sufficiently, or because they were dealing with staff of Hungarian or Poldavian or Moravian or Polish origin who read “v” and wrote it as “ff” or who saw “c” and heard it as “tz”, or because they came up against people who never needed to try very hard to become somewhat illiterate and hard of hearing when having to give identity papers to Jews, the name had retained nothing of its original pronunciation and spelling, and Cinoc remembered his father telling him that his father had told him of having cousins called Klajnhoff, Keinhof, Klinov, Szinowcz, Linhaus, etc. How had Kleinhof become Cinoc? Cinoc really did not know; the only sure thing was that the final “f” had been replaced one day by that special letter (ß) with which Germans indicate double “s”; then, no doubt, the “l” had been dropped or had been replaced by an “h”: so it got to Khinoss or Kheinhoss and, maybe, from there to Kinoch, Chinoc, Tsinoc, Cinoc, etc. Anyway it wasn’t at all important whichever way you wanted to pronounce it.
Cinoc, who was then about fifty, pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a “word-killer”: he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.
When he retired in nineteen sixty-five, after fifty-three years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nicknames, weights and measures; he had wiped dozens of islands, hundreds of cities and rivers, and thousands of townships off the map; he had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects, and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity.
Who would know ever again what a vigigraphe was, “a type of telegraph consisting of watchtowers communicating with each other”? And who could henceforth imagine there had existed for perhaps many generations a “block of wood on the end of a stick for flattening watercress in flooded ditches” and that the block had been called a schuèle (shü-ell)? Who would recall the vélocimane?
VÉLOCIMANE: (masc. nn.) (from Lat. velox, -ocis, speedy, and manus, hand) Special locomotive device for children, resembling a horse, mounted on three or four wheels, also called mechanical horse.
Where had all the abunas gone, patriarchs of the Abyssinian Church, and the palatines, fur tippets worn by women in winter, so named after the Princess Palatine who introduced their use into France in the minority of Louis XIV, and the chandernagors, those gold-spangled NCOS who marched at the head of Second Empire processions? What had become of Léopold-Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, whose outstanding courage at Eisenühr allowed Zimmerwald to carry the day at Kisasszony? And Uz (Jean-Pierre), 1720–1796, German poet, author of Lyrical Poems, The Art of Being Ever Joyful (a didactic poem), Odes and Songs, etc.? And Albert de Routisie (Basel, 1834–White Sea, 1867), French poet and novelist. A great admirer of Lomonosov, he undertook a pilgrimage to his place of birth at Arkhangelsk, but the ship sank just before entering harbour. After his death his only daughter, Irena Ragon, published his unfinished novel, Les Cent-Jours, a selection of poetry, Les Yeux de Mélusine, and, under the title of Leçons, an admirable anthology of aphorisms which remains his finest work. Who would now ever know that François Albergati Capacelli was an Italian playwright born at Bologna in 1728, or that the master caster Rondeau (1493–1543) had been responsible for the bronze door of the funeral chapel at Carennac?
Cinoc began to dally on the banks of the Seine, rummaging through the open-air bookstalls, leafing through penny dreadfuls, out-of-date essays, obsolete traveller’s guides, old textbooks on physiology, mechanics, or moral instruction, or superseded maps in which Italy still figured as a multicoloured patchwork of little kingdoms. Later on he went to borrow books from the municipal library of the XVIIth arrondissement, in Rue Jacques-Binjen, having them bring down from the attic dusty old folios, ancient users’ manuals, volumes from the Library of Miracles, and old dictionaries: Lachâtre, Vicarius, Bescherelle aîné, Larrive, Fleury, the Dictionary of Conversation compiled by a Society of Men of Letters, Graves and d’Esbigné, Bouillet, Onions, Dezobry, and Bachelet. Finally, when he had exhausted the resources of his local library, he grew bolder and enrolled at Sainte-Geneviève, where he started to read the authors whose names he saw as he went in, carved on the stone façade.
He read Aristotle, Pliny, Aldrovandi, Sir Thomas Browne, Gesner, Ray, Linnaeus, Brisson, Cuvier, Bonneterre, Owen, Scoresby, Bennett, Aronnax, Olmstead, Pierre-Joseph Macquart, Sterne, Eugénie Guérin, Gastripheres, Phutatorius, Somnolentius, Triptolemy, Argalastes, Kysarchius, Egnatius, Sigonius, Bossius, Ticinenses, Baysius, Budœus, Salmasius, Lipsius, Lazius, Isaac Casaubon, Joseph Scaliger, and even the De re vestiaria veterum by Rubenius (1665, quarto), which gave him a full & satisfactory account of the Toga, or loose gown, the Chlamys, the Ephod, the Tunica or jacket, the Synthesis, the Paenula, the Lacema with its Cucullus, the Paludamentum, the Prætexta, the Sagum or soldier’s jerkin, and the Trabea: of which, according to Suetonius, there were three kinds.
Cinoc read slowly and copied down rare words; gradually his plan began to take shape, and he decided to compile a great dictionary of forgotten words, not in order to perpetuate the memory of the Akka, a black-skinned pygmy people of Central Africa, or of Jean Gigoux, a historical painter, or of Henri Romagnesi, a composer of romances, 1781–1851, nor to prolong the life of the scolecobrot, a tetramerous coleopter of the longicorn family, Cerambycid branch, but so as to rescue simple words which still appealed to him. In ten years he gathered more than eight thousand of them, which contain, obscurely, the trace of a story it has now become almost impossible to hand on:
RIVELETTE (fem. nn.) Another name for myriophyllum, or water milfoil.
ARÉA (fem. nn.) Med: A: Alopecia, fox-mange, a disease causing loss of body and head hair.
LOQUIS (masc. nn.) Type of glass trinket used for trading with Negroes of the African coasts. Small cylinders made of coloured glass.
RONDELIN (masc. nn. from rond) Vulgar word used by Chapelle to refer to a very fat man.
CADETTE (fem. nn.) Ashlar suitable for paving.
LOSSE (fem. nn.) Tchn: Iron hand-tool with a sharpened steel edge, shaped like a vertically sectioned semicone, hollowed out. Fits on a handle like a deck-scrubber’s holy-stone, used for piercing barrel bungs.
BEAUCEANT (masc. nn.) Name of the Knights Templar’s standard.
BEAU-PARTIR (masc. nn.) Show-jumping. Fine departure of horse. Its straight-line speed up to a stopping point.
LOUISETTE (fem. nn.) Name used for a time for the guillotine, whose invention was attributed to Dr Louis. “Louisette was the familiar name Marat gave to the guillotine” (Victor Hugo).
FRANCATU (masc. nn.) Hort: Type of apple that keeps well.
RUISSON (masc. nn.) Trench cut for draining a saltmarsh.
SPADILLE (fem. nn.) (Span. espada, broadsword.) The ace of spades in the game of humber.
URSULINE (fem. nn.) Small ladder leading to a narrow platform onto which fairground gypsies had their trained goats climb.
TIERÇON (masc. nn.) A: Meas: Liquid measure containing a third part of a full measure. The volume of a tierçon was: 89.41 litres in Paris, 150.8 litres at Bordeaux, 53.27 litres in Champagne, 158.08 litres in London, and 151.71 litres at Warsaw.
LOVELY (masc. nn.) (English lovely, pretty.) Indian bird resembling the European finch.
GIBRALTAR (masc. nn.) A kind of cake.
PISTEUR (masc. nn.) Hotel employee with the task of attracting customers.
MITELLE (fem. nn.) (Lat. mitella, dim. of mitra, mitre.) Ant: Rom: Small mitre, type of headdress worn esp. by women, sometimes with lavish decorations. Worn by men in the countryside. Bot: Genus of plant of the saxifrage family, thus called for the shape of its fruit, native of the cold regions of Asia and America. Surg: Sling for supporting the arm. Ent: Synonym of scalpella.
TERGAL, E (adj.) (Lat. tergum, back.) Relating to an insect’s back.
VIRGOULEUSE (fem. nn.) Juicy winter pear.
HACHARD (masc. nn.) Iron shears.
FEURRE (masc. nn.) Straw from any kind of wheat. Long straw for rushing seats.
VEAU-LAQ (masc. nn.) Very soft leather used for handbags, gloves, etc.
EPULIE (fem. nn.) (From Grk. Eπι, on, and συλσν, gum) Surg: Fleshy excrescence on or around the gum.
TASSIOT (masc. nn.) Tchn: Cross made of two laths which basket-makers use to start certain items.
DOUVEBOUILLE (masc. nn.) Mil: V: (deformation of US: doughboy, private, foot soldier) American soldier during First World War (1917–1918).
VIGNON (masc. nn.) Prickly gorse.
ROQUELAURE (fem. nn.) (From the name of its inventor, the Duc de Roquelaure.) Type of coat buttoned at the front from top to bottom.
LOUPIAT (masc. nn.) Fam: Drunk. “She was bloody stuck with her loupiat of a husband” (E. Zola).
DODINAGE (masc. nn.) Tchn: Way of polishing upholsterers’ stud nails by putting them in a fine canvas or hide bag with emery or other abrasive matter.