La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams (6 page)

In each room, stereo equipment: tape recorders, radios, stereos, and more, and more, ever more perfect.

I am walking with P. across the “high fidelity” section of a department store. Maybe one of the appliances has a particularly remarkable shape?

P. and one of her friends and I have moved into an abandoned house. Though I recall having recently drunk water from the tap, we are told to use only mineral water, even to cook our food. But the bottle of water we find doesn’t even have a cap.

We sit down to eat. Under the table we find (a bit like a chewed and abandoned piece of gum) a bit of pâté. Though it is likely several days old, it doesn’t seem rotten in the slightest, but P. throws it out in disgust.

Out of the high, narrow window, I notice an immense tank. It’s actually a cliff, but it has the unmistakable look of a tank: large metallic plates covered with layers of varnish or paint that are chipping off in patches or coming loose from their base, like huge blisters. The whole thing looks muddy, dirty and slippery.

Soon I make out, moving from left to right, a small boy running on the upper tracks of the tank, which is really the length of a path carved into the face of the cliff. A man is
chasing him. Another man pops up and blocks his passage. The child’s only chance of escape is to jump, but it’s truly a jump into the wide open and his life is at stake. It seems clear that he’s hesitant to dive, but at the last minute he loses his balance and jumps, like a child who is pushed into a pool and decides to make a dive of it once he realizes he’s going to fall into the water anyway.

At the very bottom of the cliff-tank is a lake that I can see from the window. P. and her friend are now on the opposite shore.

The child falls into the lake, feet first, but it’s as though he had jumped from only a few centimeters. There is very little water. The child keeps running toward the center of the lake, then, losing his footing, begins to swim. The two men swim after him. They are obviously cops and a police boat sets off from the bank and blocks the child’s path. He dives down and emerges a bit farther off, but this time he’s completely surrounded. Then a new person pops up: a man with a beard and maybe a pistol. He is threatening the police, not to kill them but to kill himself if they don’t let the child go. They do.

I catch up with P. on the bank. We recount indignantly what we have just seen, like a scandalous and revealing news story.

Only a single image remains: that of someone with shoes made of very hard snow, or ice, irresistibly suggesting the idea of a hockey puck.

I am with Henri G. at a very expensive Chinese restaurant.

We’ve been discussing something in the news, no doubt a scuffle between some kids.

Now we see them, the kids, on television. They’re up on a pedestal, in military dress and performing various mass gymnastics.

I am at a bar with a fairly famous Italian actress. Though she is over fifty, she is a remarkably pretty woman, still in excellent shape. She is imagining without rejecting—on the contrary, with satisfaction—the notion of becoming my mistress. But the clock strikes six and she abruptly gets up and leaves.

P. has given me a battery-operated alarm clock; it is spherical and transparent, and has several little suction pads and two oblong pieces attached laterally on each side whose function is unclear. But Abdelkader Z. is playing with the pieces, losing them. The alarm clock is unusable. I am very angry.

Major railway strike. Red flags on the tracks block the
trains. I walk along the rails, suitcase in hand. I enter a city, perhaps Grenoble. I cross an intersection where cops (all in plainclothes, looking almost friendly) are gathered. Before, I had pulled out of the ground one of the innumerable red flags that were planted there and covered my hand with it to carry my suitcase (a gesture I felt was in solidarity with the strikers).

I walk along the palisades. I get to a church. Actually, there are no walls, and the floor is made of macadam, like the street, but only a roof held up by pillars.

I look for the priest, who is not there, but I see him suddenly, hiding above his altar. He comes toward me and says:

“I want to be a father”

“But you cannot you are a priest”

He answers that it makes no difference.

Two herring merchants (the fat Marseillais sort) look at us.

The same scene but another setting.

I am at a friend’s house (maybe H.’s). I am dismayed because I have to return to the army. I haven’t finished my service yet. I calculate that I should be free again around February 15th. They could let it slide, since it’s not worth making me come back for so little time, especially since I’ll have to
jump (with a parachute) the following day and all the requisite medical visits will take a long time.

My companions explain to me that they’re going to leave town and go back to Paris, and I won’t see them again.

Maybe the battery-operated alarm clock makes another appearance here.

In a book I’m translating, I find two phrases: the first ends with “wrecking their neck,” the second with “making their naked,” a slang expression that means “to strip naked.”

Someone has managed to enter my home through the thin shower partition. He knocks and calls out to me. There’s nothing hostile in his voice, in any case. It’s a woman, I suppose; I smell her at the foot of my bed, she is whispering something in my ear; I am absolutely convinced I’m not dreaming; I wake with a start, a bit panicked, hearing myself say:

“What is it?”

A courtyard, a huge space surrounded by houses. I run into Henri C., who tells me he’s going down to Grenoble too and can take me.

We all have dinner together. I move from table to table. There is nothing to eat except cheese, and in almost all cases the cheese looks fine but turns out to be crawling with worms. I tell P. about this, and she says she knew about it, having gone back up to her place. But she makes me a tart anyway, checking (by opening it all around) that the piece she’s giving me is wormless.

Several times I get up to leave. I kiss everyone (several girls on the mouth). Z. is there, staying a bit off to the side, but smiling. Except for a girl who is crying and refuses to let me kiss her (though she relents later) everyone is relaxed (even though I’m leaving?). The hugs and kisses goodbye restart several times. Henri C. and his wife are taking the plane from Grenoble to Paris and I the train. He reiterates his offer to drive me. I accept, asking that we leave right away, since I
like to get my seat on the train fifteen minutes before it leaves. Henri C. answers that we still have time for a cup of coffee (it’s foul but it’s hot). Coffee is served in one of the buildings in the courtyard, the only one with lights on. There are three steps leading up to it. Smoke-filled room, poor people eating, a counter in back. They bring us our coffee outside (we’re crouched on the ground) on a large tray. There are only three large mugs—one black, two very white—and a teacup. I take a sip of black coffee, which was not meant for me (but nothing was meant for me).

Henri C. is very elegant, very youthful; he is wearing a soft black hat, which I tell him looks terrific on him.

’Twas a story replete with twists and turns. It took place near Nice, by the sea. Maybe Menton. Alain Delon was involved, or a friend of Alain Delon. I had dinner in a restaurant whose owner knew my uncle. Later, I wanted to go back there; I called, but ultimately I didn’t make a reservation. My uncle, rather dryly as I recall, scolded me; for what I’m not sure, maybe for not telling him about it.

I returned to Paris in a magnificent machine, ultramodern and very sci-fi. I remember panoramic portholes. Dizzying speed.

(I scratched these words out in the night; I find them in the morning; none of them evokes any particular memory)

(recurring Renshaw inhibition is, to put it crudely, a loop system controlling muscular contraction)

It might have been at Jean Duvignaud’s, or maybe at Paul Virilio’s.

I notice a mimeographed work on the table and open it. It’s a masters thesis—devoted to stage design, it seems—written by A. while she was in South America. I hadn’t heard about it, but I am at once surprised and pleased that she did something during her long stay.

There is a particular detail: the title page was composed by (and here some sort of famous name) on an IBM 307 (let’s say).

I remember, on that note, that Pierre G. had once spoken to me of automatic composition.

This might take place at a cocktail party where things like this make for good conversation.

I am on the street with P. and Henri G. There are buses.

We’re talking about the elephant’s support polygon.

Henri G. reminds me that the center of gravity is located slightly toward the front (or slightly toward the back?) of the body; no effort is required to be upright, or only a tiny effort.

This explanation obviously applies to high heels.

Since I left her, Z. has been living with two men whom she does not love but who are incredibly rich; one is an engineer and the other some sort of Maharajah who has engaged him to build a fabulous house.

I watch as the house is built.

I arrive at the bottom of a high white wall; it’s run through, fairly high overhead, with a large opening (future window or bay window) at the edge of which are two tilers, a man and a woman. I think I know them; in any case, they know me, because the woman asks me whether the third printing of
Things
has come out, then thanks me for having written that book, then tells me that, while we’re at it, there ought to be a translation for people who stutter. This idea amuses me greatly.

Meanwhile, with great difficulty, I’ve managed to climb up to the opening with the help of (in the absence of a ladder) a rather thin but extremely sturdy wooden frame, and with a painful maneuver I stand myself up at the edge of the room where the tilers are working. Though it’s forbidden to
walk on freshly laid tiling (you move on little bridges made from planks and bricks), the tilers give me permission to enter the house. The tiling, which at first I think is the same as in the little house in Filagne, which is to say quadrangular, is hex- or octagonal; and the tiles vary in size, from minuscule to enormous, and the tilers’ very art consists in resolving the delicate (and impossible) topological problems created by this disparity.

I move forward—reciting to myself, laughing, the first few sentences of
Things
while stuttering—sinking imperceptibly (but with a very distinct sensation) into the fresh cement. Some tiles are elevated above others; at first I think they’re meant to be walked on, or that they’re accidents; then I understand that they’re decorative elements, like floating islands, like the rocks emerging from the sand of Zen gardens.

Memories of my life with the Maharajah begin to blur: I was the personal valet of the Maharajah, his right-hand man. I carried his briefcase and spent my time organizing it even though it contained nothing of importance. We had to leave for an official trip; the departure was scheduled for a certain time, but the Maharajah kept everyone hopelessly waiting. The Maharajah is a capricious man: he is never ready, he no longer wants to go, etc. I spend my time coming and going
between my room and his apartments, and explaining his whims in nearly Racinian terms to a confidant. Once I went to beg him to go, not for my sake but for that of the soldiers in his escort, knights with chain-mail coats, one of whom stood trembling right before me. Furious, the Maharajah threw his glass of vodka in my face (or, more precisely, over my head, like in a baptismal aspersion), then shattered the glass while cursing at me. This didn’t bother me that much; what frustrated me most was that, all the way down the long hallway leading back to my room, the soldier whom I wanted so badly to help, and his wife (who was none other than P.), wouldn’t stop making fun of me.