Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec, David Bellos Read Free Book Online

trapped. To paint the look in the eyes of a condottiere, he would have had to look in the same direction as he had, if only for an instant. It was so obvious that what had attracted him had been this immediate image of triumph, the complete opposite of what he was himself! Even his most Herculean labours could not prevent what had to be from coming into being: in the shadow of the Condottiere, all he could attain was the image of his own failure.
    What did it matter, anyway? There’s nothing for you to face up to yet. Death, if you will, but death doesn’t mean much in the end. What you have behind you is this muddled story, your own story: the story of an idiot, to put it bluntly, not without a modicum of sensitivity, not devoid of a love of fine things, not entirely lacking in taste – but an idiot nonetheless. Behind you lies Madera’s corpse, an impressive number of more or less serious failures, a kind of disillusionment, and a few hundred successes you can’t claim as your own because you took great pains to ascribe them to other artists. Behind you are masks. In you there is nothing. A desire to carry on living. A wish to die. A feeling of emptiness and an arrant failure to understand. So what?
    Everything you do has a price, you should know that. You should have picked that up, to your own cost. Every word you utter, every thought you turn over in your mind has a necessary consequence. Nothing comes for free. Everything has to be paid for and the cost is often high. Laughter, mockery, messing up won’t get you anywhere. You still have to get up and look around and stop this stupid game. What have you got to lose? What’s at stake? Another hour will go by. Then twelve. The door will be knocked down. That’s what you’re pondering in your little head. The door will be knocked down. They’ll come and get you. They’ll take you to prison. You’re not scared. You can easily envisage a cell not so different from the one you’re in, only maybe a bit smaller. With a harder bed, darker walls. Some graffiti, to while away the time. Dates, or notches, or grids to mark the days? … Robinson Crusoe’s calendar. 34,089 in clink, or something of that kind. And then?
    Would you like to go on living? Say yes. Yes, and yes again. The pleasure of walking in the sun, the pleasure of walking in the rain, the pleasure of travelling, of eating. And swimming. Hearing the sound of a train? All you have to do is dig for a few metres. Earth and sod, brick and stone, cement and plaster. You’ll be able to unlodge a stone. Will you manage to avoid Otto, to slip noiselessly through the lawns in the grounds, to get through the electric fence? Will you manage to get back on the road? You can flee in life, you can flee in death. And then? You’re making a bet …
    He looks at his watch. Murky light seeps through the ivycluttered basement window. Millions and millions of kilometresweaving all around the planet. Heads or tails. He gets up. He strides around the laboratory. Where is the chink, the invisible pivot? Open Sesame? Which stone will swing open? He glances all round the room. There’ll be a narrow passage, dripping corridors, stairs, steel ladders, a whole underground route stretching out for miles, a labyrinth of dark passageways, a knot of abandoned cuttings, a long march strewn with obstacles and countless side-tracks marked by tiny signs, leading, beyond the mines and quarries, to the transfigured reality of a clearing in the woods, to the marvellous presence of a rain-drenched night, to the discovery of an intense and radiant sky.

    Scrap by scrap. His chisel grazes the mortar: a sharp, accurate blow from his hammer and a shard of cement flies off from the dense layer surrounding each block of masonry. At each effort, each blow, the way out begins to open, the route becomes clearer, an exit looms, still far away but nonetheless present …
    With every inch you