Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec Read Free Book Online

Arabia and black Africa was much less supervised and offered opportunities for profitable deals. In particular, the trade in cowrie shells: as is well known, these shells are used as currency by many people in Africa and India. But it is not widely known – and that’s where there was money to be made – that there are several different kinds of cowries, with different values for different tribes. Thus Red Sea cowries ( Cypraea turdus ) are very highly valued in the Comoro Islands, where they can easily be exchanged for Indian cowries ( Cypraea caput serpentis ) at a very favourable rate of fifteen caput serpentis for one turdus. Now not far away, in Dar-es-Salaam, the rate for caput serpentis is constantly going up, and deals are often struck there at one caput serpentis for three Cypraea moneta . This last kind of cowrie is commonly called the coin-cowrie: as you would expect from its name, it is negotiable almost everywhere, but in West Africa, in Cameroon and especially in Gabon, it is so highly valued that some tribes pay for it with its own weight in gold. With all expenses offset, you could aim to multiply your stake tenfold. The operation was entirely safe but needed time. Rorschach didn’t feel he had the makings of a great traveller and was not too keen, but the trader’s certainty was sufficiently impressive to make him accept unhesitatingly the offer of partnership that was put to him when they landed at Aden.
    The transactions proceeded exactly as the trader had foreseen. In Aden they exchanged their shipments of copper and sewing machines for forty cases of Cypraea turdus without any difficulty. They left the Comoros with eight hundred cases of caput serpentis, the only problem having been to get the wood for the said cases. In Dar-es-Salaam they chartered a caravan of two hundred and fifty camels to cross Tanganyika with their one thousand nine hundred and forty cases of coin-cowries, reached the great Congo river, and made their descent nearly to the estuary in four hundred and seventy-five days, of which two hundred and twenty-one had been spent on water, one hundred and thirty-seven in rail transshipment, twenty-four in portered transshipment, and ninety-three days in waiting, resting, enforced idleness, palavers, administrative hassles, and diverse incidents and nuisances, which nonetheless constituted, all in all, a remarkable achievement.
    It was a little over two and a half years since they had landed at Aden. What they didn’t know – and how in God’s name could they have known! – was that, at the very time they got to Aden, another Frenchman, called Schlendrian, was leaving Cameroon after flooding it with coin-cowries obtained in Zanzibar; he had brought about an irreversible depreciation of the currency throughout Western and Central Africa. Rorschach’s and his partner’s cowries had not just become unnegotiable, they had become a dangerous liability: the French colonial administration reckoned, quite rightly, that putting seven hundred million shells in circulation – more than thirty per cent of the global mass of cowries used for trade in the whole of French West Africa – would provoke an unprecedented economic catastrophe (the mere rumour sent the prices of colonial goods into a seesaw, an upset viewed by some economists as a prime factor in the causes of the Wall Street crash): the cowries were therefore impounded; Rorschach and his companion were courteously, but firmly, requested to catch the first steamer leaving for France.
    Rorschach would have done anything to take his revenge on Schlendrian, but he never managed to track him down. All he managed to learn was that in the war of 1870 there had indeed been a General Schlendrian. But he’d died long before and didn’t seem to have left any descendants.
    Exactly how Rorschach got through the following years remains obscure. In his memoirs he is very discreet on this point. In the early 1930s he wrote a novel largely based on