CHAPTER NINETY-NINE
Bartlebooth, 5
Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère.
BARTLEBOOTH’S STUDY is a rectangular room whose walls are lined with dark wooden bookshelves; most of them are now empty, but 61 black boxes still remain, all identically tied with grey ribbon sealed with wax, stacked together on the last three shelves on the rear wall, to the right of the padded door giving on to the entrance hall, on whose lintel has hung for many, many years an Indian puppet with a big wooden head which seems to be watching over this austere and neutral space through its big, slit eyes like an enigmatic and almost disturbing guardian.
In the centre of the room, a scialytic lamp, held up by a whole system of cords and pulleys distributing its huge weight over the whole area, illumines with its unfaltering light a large square table draped with a black cloth in the middle of which an almost completed puzzle is laid out. It depicts a little port in the Dardanelles at the mouth of the river which the Ancient Greeks called Maiandros, the Meander.
The shore is a chalky, arid strip of sand, sparsely dotted with gorse and dwarf trees; in the left foreground, the shoreline widens into a creek cluttered with dozens and dozens of black-hulled fishing boats whose flimsy rigging merges into an inextricable tangle of vertical and diagonal lines. In the middle distance, a mass of coloured spots picks out vines, seedbeds, yellow fields of mustard, black gardens of magnolia trees, red stone quarries on the shoulders of gentle slopes. Further behind, over the whole right-hand side of the watercolour, far inland, the ruins of an ancient city loom with surprising sharpness: preserved by a miracle for centuries and centuries beneath layers of silt deposited by the sinuous stream, the marble and ashlar flags of the recently excavated thoroughfares, dwellings, and temples trace out the city’s ground plan quite perfectly: it is a crisscross of extremely narrow streets, a life-size model of an exemplary labyrinth made of blind alleys, backyards, crossroads, side streets, which girdle the remains of a huge and sumptuous acropolis surrounded by the remnants of pillars, crumbling arcades, gaping stairways opening onto collapsed balconies, just as if, in the heart of this now almost fossilised maze, this unforeseeable vista had been purposely concealed, in the manner of those palaces in oriental tales whither mysterious agents convey by night a person who, brought back home before daybreak, can never find his way back to the magic dwelling which he ends up believing he visited only in a dream. A stormy, crepuscular sky, full of dark-red scudding clouds, dominates this immobile and leaden landscape from which all trace of life seems to have been banished.
Bartlebooth is seated at his table, in his great-uncle Sherwood’s armchair, a swivelling and rocking Napoleon III armchair in mahogany and lie-de-vin leather. To his right, on the top of a little drawer-desk, stands a dark-green lacquered tray bearing a crackled porcelain teapot, a cup and a saucer, a jug of milk, a silver egg-cup with its egg untouched, and a white napkin rolled in a whorled napkin ring, said to have been designed by Gaudì for the refectory of the College of Saint Theresa of Jesus; to his left, in the revolving bookcase beside which James Sherwood had his photograph taken long ago, lies an unsorted pile of miscellaneous books and objects: Berghaus’s World Atlas; the Dictionary of Geography by Meissas and Michelot; a photograph portraying Bartlebooth at the age of thirty or so mountaineering in Switzerland, wearing ventilated snow-goggles, with alpenstock, mittens, and a wool cap pulled over his ears; a detective novel called Dog Days; an octagonal mirror with a frame inlaid with mother-of-pearl; a wooden Chinese puzzle in the shape of a star-faced dodecahedron; a French translation of Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg in a two-volume edition bound in fine grey cloth with gold-leaf titles on black labels; a walking stick with a secret compartment in the top concealing a diamond-studded watch; a tiny full-length portrait of a long-faced Renaissance man wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a long fur coat; an ivory billiard ball; an incomplete set of the works of Walter Scott in English, in magnificent bindings embossed with the arms of the Chisholm clan; and two Epinal woodcuts, one of Napoleon I inspecting the Oberkampf manufactory in 1806 and unpinning his own Legion of Honour cross to attach it to the spinner’s lapel, the other a very free version of The Ems Telegram in which the artist, flouting all verisimilitude, has brought together in the same scene all the main actors in the affair, showing Bismarck, with his mastiffs lying at his feet, using a pair of scissors to edit the message which Councillor Abeken has handed him, whilst at the other end of the room Kaiser Wilhelm I indicates with an insolent smile to Ambassador Benedetti, who bows his head at the affront, that the audience granted him is now closed.
Bartlebooth is seated at his puzzle. He is a thin, old man, almost fleshless, with a bald head, a waxy complexion, blank eyes, dressed in a washy blue wool dressing gown tied at the waist with a grey cord. His feet, in goat-kid moccasins, rest on a fringe-edged silk rug; his head is very slightly tipped back, his mouth is half open, and his right hand grips the armrest of his chair whilst his left hand, lying on the table in a not very natural way, in not far short of a contorted position, holds between thumb and index finger the very last piece of the puzzle.
It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it will soon be eight o’clock in the evening. Madame Berger is back from her surgery and is making a meal, and Poker Dice slumbers on a fluffy sky-blue bedspread; Madame Altamont is putting on her make-up in front of her husband, who has just come in from Geneva; the Réols have just finished dinner, and Olivia Norvell is about to leave on her fifty-sixth world tour; Kléber is playing patience, and Hélène is mending the right sleeve of Smautf’s jacket, and Véronique Altamont is looking at an old photograph of her mother, and Madame Trévins is showing Madame Moreau a postcard coming from the village where they were born.
It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it will soon be eight o’clock in the evening. Cinoc, in his kitchen, opens a tin of pilchards in spice whilst looking up an index of obsolete words; Dr Dinteville finishes examining an old woman; on Cyrille Altamont’s deserted desk two butlers spread a white tablecloth; in the service-entrance corridor five delivery men pass a lady who has come to search for her cat; Isabelle Gratiolet builds a precarious house of cards beside her father as he reads a treatise on anatomy.
It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it will soon be eight o’clock in the evening. Mademoiselle Crespi is asleep; two patients are still waiting in Dr Dinteville’s front room; the concierge is in her office replacing one of the fuses that controls the lights in the entrance hall; a gas company inspector and a workman are checking the central heating system; right at the top of the building, Hutting is in his gallery, working on a portrait of a Japanese businessman; an all-white cat with mismatched eyes is asleep in Smautf’s bedroom; Jane Sutton is rereading a letter she had been eagerly awaiting, and Madame Orlowska is polishing the brass chandelier in her tiny room.
It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it will soon be eight o’clock in the evening. Joseph Nieto and Ethel Rogers are about to go down to the Altamonts’; on the stairs, porters have come for Olivia Norvell’s trunks, and a woman from an estate agency is coming to have a late look at the flat Gaspard Winckler used to occupy, and a displeased Hermann Fugger comes back out of the Altamonts’, and two similarly dressed doorstep salesmen pass by on the fourth-floor landing, and the blind tuner’s grandson waits for his grandfather, sitting on the stairs reading of the adventures of Carel van Loorens, and Gilbert Berger takes down the dustbins as he wonders how to solve the complicated puzzle of his serial novel; in the entrance hall Ursula Sobieski looks for Bartlebooth’s name on the list of occupants, and Gertrude, who has returned to drop in on her former mistress, stops for a minute to say good day to Madame Albin and Madame de Beaumont’s home help; right at the top the Plassaerts do their accounts, and their son sorts out once more his collection of illustrated blotters, and Geneviève Foulerot takes a bath before collecting her baby from the concierge, who looks after him, and “Hortense” listens to music on headphones whilst waiting for the Marquiseaux, and Madame Marcia in her bedroom opens a jar of malosol cucumbers, and Béatrice Breidel has her classmates in, and her sister Anne tries out another way of slimming.
It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and in a moment it will be eight o’clock in the evening; the workers converting Morellet’s old room are knocking off; Madame de Beaumont is resting on her bed before dinner; Léon Marcia remembers the lecture Jean Richepin came to give at his sanatorium; in Madame Moreau’s drawing room two sated kittens sleep deeply. It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it is eight o’clock in the evening. Seated at his jigsaw puzzle, Bartlebooth has just died. On the tablecloth, somewhere in the crepuscular sky of the four hundred and thirty-ninth puzzle, the black hole of the sole piece not yet filled in has the almost perfect shape of an X. But the ironical thing, which could have been foreseen long ago, is that the piece the dead man holds between his fingers is shaped like a W.