The Indexes

An index begins, in this household, the way weather begins: nobody decides on it. Somebody leaves a quantity of similar things in his line of sight, and some weeks later a notebook exists. He does not announce them, does not name them until they are perhaps a hundred entries deep, and numbers them only in retrospect — which is why Index No. 1 was begun in 1952 and Index No. 206 in 1936. The numbering records the order in which he got round to admitting they were indexes.

Nineteen of the three hundred and forty-one are finished. None has ever been abandoned. When an index becomes impossible to continue — the subject dies, the shop is sold, the harbour is dredged — it is marked suspended, pending and returned to the drawer, where it waits, in his view, for conditions to improve. Four have been suspended for over sixty years.

I am told that three of them turned out to be valuable. I would rather not know which, in case I begin to favour them. — To the Keeper of the Archive, 2017

The three

They are, and the Estate states this plainly because the misunderstanding is universal, in no way different from the other three hundred and thirty-eight. Each was begun for the same reason, kept in the same hand, in the same notebooks, with the same indifference to what anyone might do with it. The only distinguishing feature of the three is that a different person read them.

• No. 1 — Buttons, by grade. Begun April 1949, 897 entries, closed March 1950. Borrowed by a workroom manager at Caubère in 1952 to settle an argument and never returned. Thirty-one couture houses were using it within four years. He was not consulted at any stage and did not know the standard bore his name until 1958.
• No. 74 — Lathe patterns, engraved, by rosette geometry. Begun 1963, an estimated 4,000 entries, presently at 3,988. The source material was fourteen hundred kilogrammes of defunct share certificates bought by weight in Antwerp for about ninety dollars. One unexamined bundle, reached by a clerk in 1975 and not by him, was a controlling interest in a mining concession nobody had wound up.
• No. 112 — Laid-up tonnage, Mediterranean anchorages. Begun 1964 from the terrace of a hotel at Elefsina, 2,340 entries: hull, anchorage, rust pattern, months idle. In 1966 a broker named Stavros Lekkas offered to buy it. He declined, because it was his. Lekkas then suggested he buy the ships instead, and he agreed, because declining twice in one conversation would have been rude.

He has read none of the three since. They are finished or they are not finished, he told his sixth wife in 2001. Neither state requires my attention.

A selection from the drawer

The Keeper publishes thirty of the three hundred and forty-one. The criterion for inclusion is her own and she has stated it once: the ones that explain him.

• No. 1 Buttons, by grade 1949–50. The forty-one grades. Closed. 897
• No. 6 Marriages 1957–. Six fields, his button fields. See Plate III. 8
• No. 12 Meals taken 1952–. Date, components, order in which they were grouped on the plate. 26,411
• No. 29 Apologies received 1954–. He keeps them. He has never referred back to one. 61
• No. 30 Apologies given 1954–. The disparity has been pointed out to him eleven times and is itself Index No. 244. 4
• No. 31 Household 1981–. Children entered by number until 1994, by name thereafter. 4
• No. 74 Lathe patterns, engraved 1963–. Twelve short of complete, which the Estate regards as deliberate. 3,988
• No. 88 Letters from Birgitta Lunde-Saar 1962–2011. Suspended, pending. Will not be closed. 412
• No. 112 Laid-up tonnage, Mediterranean 1964–. Hull, anchorage, rust pattern, months idle. 2,340
• No. 118 The fleet, by grade name Sixty-one hulls named for buttons. He has never been aboard one. 61
• No. 140 Staircases, by number of steps 1958–. Every staircase he has climbed, with a note where the count differs going down. 1,906
• No. 161 Things he has dropped 1961–. Object, surface, whether recovered. Begun after dropping a button he never found. 2,114
• No. 177 Knots, by spill behaviour when wet From the Piraeus riggers, who later named one after him out of what they insist was affection. 88
• No. 198 Birds at Río Pico 1971–. The only index with a co-author. She kept the odd years, he kept the even. 61 species
• No. 206 Barometers, 14 Rue du Simplon, against actual weather 1936–1947, aged five to sixteen. Proved thirty-one of his father's forty barometers wrong. He never showed it to him. 40
• No. 219 Queue lengths, Vevey post office 1953–61. Suspended by him on discovering he was using it to choose when to go, which he considered a corruption of the index. 1,488
• No. 244 Occasions on which the disparity between No. 29 and No. 30 has been raised 1967–. Includes who raised it and how long afterwards they married him. 11
• No. 266 The sea at Cap Ferrat, by shade 1994–. Month, hour, and a swatch cut from whatever paper was nearest. 3,702
• No. 288 Sounds made by the villa after midnight, by room 1996–. Begun during a period of poor sleep and continued after the sleep improved. 214
• No. 301 Symptoms, 14 March 2003, 04:10–04:51 Forty-one entries in forty-one minutes. Closed. See below. 41
• No. 317 Cheeses, washed rind, by weeks of affinage 2002–. Begun the week one was named after him, which he had requested in writing twice. 340
• No. 341 The indexes Begun 2019, aged eighty-eight. An index of the indexes. Necessarily incomplete, as he has pointed out with some satisfaction. 341

Index No. 301

At ten minutes past four on the morning of 14 March 2003 he woke with a pain in his left arm, got out of bed without waking his wife, went to the desk, and opened a new notebook. He recorded forty-one entries over the following forty-one minutes: time, location, character, intensity on a scale he devised in the first three minutes and then applied consistently. At 04:51 he wrote the forty-second line, which reads SUSPECT THIS IS A MATTER FOR SOMEONE ELSE, and woke Solveig Aminoff-Reyes, who called an ambulance.

He survived. The notebook is the only one in the Archive in which the hand visibly deteriorates — legible at 04:10, difficult by 04:30, and at 04:51 reduced to capitals. The scale he invented at four in the morning while having a heart attack has been described by two cardiologists as crude but internally consistent, and by his sixth wife, who has never softened on the subject, as the single most infuriating object in that house.

Why nineteen and not three hundred and forty-one

Only nineteen indexes are finished, and the pattern of which nineteen is the most revealing thing in this plate. He finishes an index when the subject is closed by something outside himself: the buttons ran out, the shop was sold, the heart attack ended. He has never in ninety-five years finished one that he could have gone on adding to.

No. 74 has stood twelve entries from completion since 2019. The twelve certificates are in the drawer. He has handled them. The Keeper, who has watched this for seven years, declines to call it anything but what it is: a man rationing the last of something, exactly as he rations the second tin on the shelf above the desk, which he bought in 1954 and has never opened. Plate V takes up the tin.