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

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    In a cellar in the lower town a treasure hoard was born: earthenware and sandstone pots, vats and amphoras stuffed full of jewels and coins, sesterces, silver denarii, bracelets, pins, cameos, huge silver brooches, all higgledy-piggledy and deeply buried – a disparate, extravagant hoard that matched quite miraculously what might well have been the treasure-chest of a lord of the Late Empire, a high dignitary of the state stuck in this far-away province that was still Roman but already invaded by barbarians, if only in the mixedorigins of the people in his entourage, who one day had been expelled with his followers from the palace by yet another invasion and pursued in an endless retreat towards Styria, or Illyria, or Gallia Cisalpina or else towards the east, up-river, towards Macedonia or the Carpathians, leaving people and goods where they were, and, in a constantly nurtured hope of returning, hiding in a cellar an impressive mound of gold, silver, and precious stones that formed the unambiguous insignia of a thousand years’ domination …
    And then? Had he been aware that what he had been seeking once again was his own image? Had he known that what he had summoned up, what he had snatched out of the past, what he had projected onto the four dripping, damp, dark walls of the cellar in Split was his own face, his own attitude, his own ambiguity? A treasure was hidden inside. A year of painstaking research, months of solitary labour. A few hundred metres from the bluest sea in the world, with his tiny forge, his gold and silver leaf, his unsorted precious stones, his wooden and brass mallets, working in an untanned leather apron just as, long before, a slave-smith had worked, a man who might have been a cowherd from Transylvania or a Greek shepherd, a tiny dot in a mile-long horde, driven by cold or hunger, or by wolves that had been attracted from their lairs in Latvia or Cappadocia by the Empire’s alleged garden of Eden, the great ship of peace reigning over the world and by the unbounded horizon of Mare Nostrum but which nonetheless was ineluctably peeling away and caving in under the sheer weight of its own coherence – this cowherd or shepherd, dragged against his will into a uselessadventure, by sudden turns horseman, foot-soldier, prisoner of war, and slave, extracting from iron, bronze and gold not just the angry pride of freedom lost, but the unspoken longing for the glimpse he had had of peace.
    But what had come of his own effort, of his slow and blinkered striving, his indefatigable energy, the four months he had spent in a cellar working twelve to fifteen hours a day? What reassurance? What certainty? He had worked in torrid heat, almost naked but for his apron, surrounded by a never-ending swarm of flies, leaving his workbench only when darkness fell, not seeing a soul apart from a vague acquaintance of Nicolas who brought him his food twice a day. Why and for whom had he slaved away? Geneviève had asked him not to leave, he had refused; later, she asked him to come back, and he had refused again. Was his love no stronger than that? He had obstinately tried to convince her, claiming in complete bad faith that it was just a question of a week or two, seeing all the work he’d put in, the paperwork that had been assembled, the money that had been put up, the negotiations that Nicolas and Rufus were conducting …
    And now you’re digging crumb by crumb. Unpredictable geometry of the rock being tackled. No order, no logic: just the continuity of the hammering you’re giving it. Your arm hurts. Your head is buzzing. Do you want to go on? Why do you ask? You mustn’t stop. You’ll collapse from fatigue, your chisel will slip from your hand, you won’t hit hard enough. You have to exhaust yourself. Like an animal. You must not pause to recover. Don’t ask any more questions. Or elsedon’t answer them. Why is that suddenly reassuring? The width of the