La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams (15 page)

In Blevy. Bernard comes to pick me up. We’re supposed to film a minute of
A Man Asleep
. First I have to feed the cat and change its litter (the litter bag is quite full).

Bernard is accompanied by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 children.

We are filming (in Orly).

We come back. I’m not particularly happy; we pass, with difficulty, among second-hand shops: they are on the bare ground, selling heavily ornamented wooden plaques.

I meet S.B. For lack of money, she has not gone on vacation; she’s planning to go to Dampierre. I suggest that we go together: I could easily borrow the house in Villard (our old family home), or the one in Druyes, or others still.

We go, surely just for an hour (with the implicit intention of sleeping together), into Henri C.’s apartment on rue L. Henri C., who is not in Paris at the moment, has, in the same building—not at all a modern building, quite the opposite, an old building—two apartments: a flat on the ground floor (where I lived for a while) and a large studio at the top.

The doorman doesn’t recognize me, but proves to be very friendly. The key is in the mailbox and the mailbox is open. The key is thin and twisted; it doesn’t look at all like the key for a lock, but rather like the key for a deadbolt.

In the apartment. Large sheets of paper are spread out on the floor, with chalk marks on them. Then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, many young people: they’re Americans, dancers. I understand immediately that my niece has given them the key, which they confirm. They eat, and hand us plates with compartments for avocados, tomatoes, and?. They’re not the ones who were there (or in Villard) the previous week, but they’re from the same university. We talk about various things, and soon about Dampierre, which they know well.

The ballet begins, a marriage pantomime. Gags. The groom’s costume: yellow socks, white pants that go down to
mid-calf, green shirt that hides his arms completely. He looks not so much like a one-armed man as like a bust.

The whole marriage procession passes in front of us, but, from time to time doubles of the wedding characters pop up: it’s very funny; there are more and more of them, and at the end it’s the same procession as it was at the beginning, but there is no longer a single dancer from the original lineup:
all of them have changed
.

Applause, like for a sports play.

The three main characters (the groom, the bride and the priest) are fake-decapitated, like in the

“Mysteries of the Organism.”

Thérèse and Marcel C. arrive; Thérèse is dressed like a lunchlady; she comes in through the door and sings. Marcel is at the end of a hallway. He is holding a guitar and singing too. I remember that they used to live here. But I didn’t know there was a
secret passage
between Marcel’s and Henri C.’s.

Next to the large room that we’re in, a long windowed hallway leads to a narrow room that’s probably a workshop or a storeroom for house painting equipment.

While wandering in an unknown room in his own
apartment one day long ago, Marcel found himself at Henri C.’s.

Major changes are being made in my lab. During a meeting, my boss asks me to devote my time solely to writing manuscripts and to leave the organization of the documentary filing to a young woman he has just hired.

The young woman is not very pretty, nor particularly pleasant, but she proves to be remarkably efficient; in particular, she uncovers an official document that allows each member of the lab (1) to have regular interviews in room B1 or B2 with a confessor of his or her choice and (2) to visit the painter.

It turns out that, like all universities (be they of medicine or fine arts), ours has a “functional workshop” and the young woman takes me there. Sure enough, I was wondering where this door led.

I enter, expecting to find that the painter is nothing but a dirty penpusher.

“Wait, I recognize this!” I exclaim.

It is, in fact, none other than the workshop of the painter Bizet, and you can immediately see all his major pieces covered with gridded patterns. The workshop is an immense room with a very high ceiling; the painter is a very tall old man; he shows me around his workshop graciously, but you can tell he’s annoyed about it (but he can work here only on the condition that he gives tours). He makes mostly tapestries, but he also shows me some drawings, many done on graph paper.

T., one of the researchers from the lab, comes next, running, to visit the workshop. The painter seems more interested in her than he was in me, even though she starts talking about his painting in an especially banal way, saying something like: “Now that’s not very realistic!” which doesn’t seem to offend the painter (whereas I am shocked).

The painter takes T. by the waist and leans his other arm on my shoulder: I am much smaller than they are.

Other people come into the workshop. On the ground are two banknotes that turn out to be large amounts.

1941.

The fabric merchant owed my father money and decided to denounce him to the SS and, at the same time as my father, his own son (or just an employee) who was found distributing clandestine newspapers.

It’s much more complicated than that. But that’s what it is.

The SS comes to arrest us. They have black uniforms and tight-fitting, spherical helmets, like masks. They’re preparing to arrest the boss too, but he lifts my head by the chin and points to the little scar underneath it.

We cross the town.

If only we could go have a cup of coffee. It seems so simple, but it’s impossible. I’ve already given up. The casino is closed too, or closed to Jews. But a light shines from inside.

We go back the way we came. We pass the fabric
merchant’s store again. It’s a boutique on the corner of two streets; neo-Gothic architecture (turrets, machicolations). It looks fancy. We look at it with a well-justified bitterness.

We arrive at the train station.

Disorder.

I know what’s waiting for us. I have no hope. Get it over with. Or maybe a miracle … One day, learn to survive?

My father dips his left boot in the icy water of a pond. He thinks this will revive an old wound, which will maybe get him declared unfit for service. But everyone watches him do it, indifferent.

They put us in a cabin reserved for monsters. Two young children, legs cut off at the knees, a boy and a girl, naked, wriggling like worms. Myself, I have become a young snake (or was it a fish?).

At the end of a long boat trip, we will reach the camp.

Our wardens, torturers with degenerate faces, pale, ruddy, cruel, dumb, are crowned with ridiculous titles: “(Worm?) Disinfectant Supervisors”; “Adjuncts to the Conversation of (Preserves?).”

Soon their faces are surrounded with frills, lace, curlicues;
this becomes an album I am paging through, a memorial album, pretty like a theatrical program, with advertisements at the end …

I am back in this town. There is a large memorial ceremony. I attend, sickened, scandalized, and finally moved.

I arrive in the middle of a crowd. There’s a party. Lots of scattered records, they’re searching for one to put on a little record player. I burst into tears. J.L. scolds me for it.

I am a little child. On the side of the road, I stop a motorist and ask him to dare, for me, to go see the gardener from the big orchard to get back my ball, which went over the wall (and, in noting this, the return of a real memory: 1947, rue de l’Assomption, I was playing with a ball against the wall of the convent, just across from our building).

Georges Perec’s bibliography is a wonderland of invention and a sterling model of creative discipline. His facility with language and mastery of structure—see, respectively,
A Void
, a 311-page whodunit written without the letter E, and
Life A User’s Manual
, a sprawling novel governed by myriad mathematical and procedural rules—were rivaled only by his tireless will to challenge himself, to invent new problems for the solutions he seemed to generate as a byproduct of breathing. Discovering his work was what first led me to the Oulipo, the Parisian lit-nerd collective in whose ranks I have since joined him; before that, it was simply an affirmation of the great things that become possible when you approach even the wispiest of your passions as though it were honest, calculable work.

But Perec isn’t important just for his repeated demonstrations of technical genius. His value lies also in the complexities behind his writing, the flaws and rifts and stubbornly inscrutable details: his humanity, in a word. Here is a man who didn’t just write a novel without the letter E—so fluently, at that, that one professional book critic failed to notice anything amiss—but who
made a dumb mechanical exercise into a project with deep personal roots and great emotional stakes. (For proof, look no further than the hit single of the book you’re holding, dream no. 95, which finds him haunted by the post-publication discovery of hundreds of overlooked, unexterminated Es.) In every sentence he writes, no matter how constrained or convoluted, you can find the trace of a person.

The privilege of
La Boutique Obscure
, a collection of dreams Perec recorded during one of his most productive periods—he worked on essays, reviews, screen and radio plays, crossword puzzles, and what would be for some years the world’s longest palindrome—is that it offers an uncommonly direct encounter with that person. It’s an invitation to interpret the patterns and echoes and contradictions of his dreams, psychologically and linguistically; it’s an occasion to spend time in the company of a brilliantly idiosyncratic mind with all its tics and perversities fully present and ready to be accounted for. If this “nocturnal autobiography,” as Perec called it, lacks the polish of his more conventional gestures toward memoir, it may be even more illuminating of who he really was.

So why has it never before been translated into English? Perhaps it’s the lack of polish; perhaps it’s the relative lack of artifice, the vertiginous and sometimes unbecoming absence of the armor Perec so plainly sought in literature. (His biographer, David Bellos, tells us as much in citing Perec’s own reservations about publishing the dreams in French.) But perhaps it’s also because
La Boutique Obscure
doesn’t fit with certain ideas we’ve come to have about how to read its author. When we speak of constraint around Perec’s work, that is, we tend to imagine sturdy, tangible
rules applied at the level of the word or sentence or chapter; we imagine the one-sentence directive of
A Void
or the 300-page
cahier des charges
of
Life A User’s Manual
, but we expect something we can verify. Here, the
cahier des charges
is no less than Perec’s life; the constraints, such as they are, are perpetually sublimated, subterranean, sometimes literally subliminal.

Take dream no. 84, in which Perec acts in a play attended by a senile
maire
, a word that translates to “mayor” but sounds like “mother.” This is a pregnant verbal double entendre—as even the crudest biographical sketch will tell you, Perec’s mother disappeared in the early 1940s, most likely at Auschwitz—but is it the product of pure chance, or a canny bit of authorial artifice, or the work of a dreaming brain so attuned to the slippery play of word and sound that it manufactured an entire character out of a homophone? Likewise, in dream no. 28 Perec misattributes a line from La Fontaine, calling it a “Shakespearean proverb.” Human error? Conscious misdirection? Trick of the accomplished trickster’s own mind?

There is no shortage of such puzzles throughout the book, and it seems worth noting here a sampling of the formulations whose cleverness, intentional or otherwise, resisted my attempts to carry the full nuance over into English. There are elegant phraselets such as
M. m’aime
in no. 58, which I have left as the literal “M. loves me” without hoping to maintain the echo of the M. sound; there are double meanings such as that of the word
coupure
in no. 83 (and elsewhere), which can gloss as both “press clipping” and “banknote.” There is the quicksand trap of Perec’s crossword clues, which mercifully manifests only twice, both times in dream no. 89. (A serviceable equivalent of the second
clue might have been “A Gay who isn’t,” for TALESE.) I should also confess that the lexical trespass of “shellevator” for
coquilleobus
is mine and mine alone.

A few more procedural notes. Typographical irregularities—errant periods, open parentheses that never close, other such sources of dull anguish—are present in Perec’s original (and if it seems strange to you that a punctuation mark should have as much emotional weight as the word “mother,” I’m frankly not sure what you’re doing reading Perec.) Titles of Perec’s works are given in their English translations, though this should not be construed as a claim that any Perec text in translation is truly
equivalent
to its original counterpart. For more on those originals, and much more on the circumstances that inspired many of these dreams, I commend to the curious reader Bellos’s
Georges Perec: A Life in Words
. Finally, I would be remiss in not thanking E.R., N.R., I.M., F.F., and R.D. for their various forms of help in making the preceding just slightly less obscure.