Life: A User's Manual Read Online Free PDF

and two limes, as is proper, were planted beside the grave.
    * * *
    The only other piece of furniture in the room is a narrow low table filling the available space between the bed and the window, on which stands a gramophone – a tiny model, known as a disc-muncher – plus a quarter-full bottle of Pepsi-Cola, a set of playing cards, a potted cactus complemented by some multicoloured gravel, a little plastic bridge, and a minute parasol.
    There are some records piled up on the low table. One of them, out of its sleeve, stands almost vertical against the edge of the bed: it’s a jazz record – Gerry Mulligan: Far East Tour – and the sleeve depicts the temples of Angkor Wat in morning haze.
    A macintosh and a long cashmere scarf hang on a coathook fixed to the door.
    A fourth photograph, of large square format, is stuck with drawing pins on the right-hand wall, not far from where the girl is standing; it depicts a large drawing room at Versailles with a woodblock floor, without any furniture except a huge, carved armchair in Second Empire style, to the right of which, with one hand on the top of the chair-back and the other on his hip, with his chin jutting forward, there stands a very short man dressed as a musketeer.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     

Hutting’s Studio, 1
     
    IN THE LEFT-hand corner of the two top floors of the building, Hutting the painter has knocked eight maids’ rooms, a stretch of corridor, and the corresponding roof-space into a huge studio, with a raised gallery running round three sides of it giving access to several bedrooms. Around the open spiral stairs leading to the gallery he has made a sort of lounge, where he likes to rest between working sessions, and where during the day he receives friends and clients, separated from the main part of the studio by an L-shaped piece of furniture, a two-sided bookcase, vaguely Chinese in style, that is to say lacquered black with imitation mother-of-pearl and beaten brass inlays; it is tall, broad, and long – more than seven feet along the larger arm, about five feet along the shorter. Lined up on top of this bookcase are various casts, an old Marianne from some town hall, large vases, three fine alabaster pyramids, whilst the five layers of shelving bow under the weight of a heap of knickknacks, curios, and gadgets: kitsch objects from a 1930s Inventors’ Exhibition: a potato-peeler, a device for stirring mayonnaise with a little cylinder that releases the oil drop by drop, a tool for fine-slicing hard-boiled eggs and another for making butter whorls, a terrifyingly complicated monkey wrench no doubt intended to be merely the ultimate in corkscrews; ready-mades of surrealist inspiration – a silver-coated stick loaf – and of the pop-art age: a bottle of 7-Up; dried flowers under glass in little romantic or rococo settings made of painted cardboard and cloth, charming trompe-l’oeil works in which every detail is minutely reproduced, from a lace doily on a table no more than an inch high to a zigzag parquet floor of which each woodblock is no more than one tenth of an inch long; a whole collection of old postcards showing Pompeii at the turn of the century: Der Triumphbogen des Nero (Arco di Nerone, Arc de Néron, Nero’s Arch), la Casa dei Vetti ( “one of the best examples of a noble Roman villa, the fine paintings and marble decorations have been preserved in the peristyle, which was decorated with greenery …” ), Casa di Cavio Rufio, Vico di Lupanare, etc. The finest pieces of the collections are dainty musical boxes; one of them, allegedly antique, is a small church with bells which play the famous Smanie implacabili che m’agitate from Così fan tutte when you gently lift the bell-tower; another is a tiny, valuable pendulum clock whose movement powers a little ballerina in a tutu.
    In the rectangle defined by the L-shaped structure each arm of which ends on an opening that can be closed by a leather drape, Hutting has placed a low sofa, a few