La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams (14 page)

After a long trip, maybe, I return to Blevy (or is it Dampierre?). My whole family is there. My cat is sleeping in a corner of the room. I am quite surprised to see a second cat (much smaller and striped) in another corner of the room. I go to sit and I step on a third cat; this one is much larger. I don’t believe that this third cat really exists—come now, that’s impossible!—but it jumps up and scratches my face.

It is not difficult to imagine a particularly exhilarating parking system: a giant spiral buried underground, whose slope has been so well calculated that it requires no more effort to go up than it does to go down with, in either case, a uniformly accelerating speed.

The only condition is that there can never be more than one car at a time on the spiral: when there are two, one going up and the other going down, they are powerless but to run into each other, with disastrous consequences. The employees who operate the tollbooths, one down below and the other up top, the exit and entrance of the vehicles, thus have a grave responsibility, but, since they’re in cahoots, they can cause accidents easily: what better way to combine the perfect crimes?

The spiral is made not of concrete but of very hard steel; its end is shaped like a screw: the energy generated by the
vehicles traveling on it causes it to turn and it buries itself progressively (extremely slowly, but with virtually no cost) in the ground (a particularly hard rock that cannot be otherwise penetrated): this is how the foundations of gigantic buildings are dug out, with the assumption that there are several screws, which is to say several parking lots.

It’s fairly easy to go from the above to a project for a General History of Transportation, automobiles in particular. The director of the project is Alain Trutat, who was particularly enthusiastic when I suggested that we do a report on one of the least understood points—and yet one of the most important in this story: the hispanification (or more precisely the castillation, or castillification, or castillinization) of the Gascony concurrent to the rise to power of Catherine of Medici: even today, Gascon mentality, morals, and customs are completely incomprehensible if you forget that, for several decades, Gascony was purely and simply a colony, a protectorate, an appendage of Catalonia.

I begin my report in a relatively banal classroom, before a scattered audience. Quickly I realize I haven’t prepared enough and, worse, I can no longer get my listeners
to understand the simple relationship between the history of the automobile and the history of Spain.

It’s going down the tubes. A total flop. I’m stammering. Alain Trutat leaves the room. To help create a diversion, someone suggests that we make music. A multi-instrument orchestra is established.

I go out to take a walk. Maybe I want to find Trutat? I walk in a large French-style park covered in snow.

I return to the room. A second orchestra has been formed under the direction of R.K., who seems to be the only competent musician in the group and who has taken matters in hand with great authority and, for that matter, efficacy. I want to play the flute, but I notice as I’m taking it up that I’ve broken the tip: I was holding the flute in one hand, and in the other a kind of rosary made of three long olive stones, white and maybe wooden, which was supposed to constitute the mouthpiece of the flute.

A bit later, someone maybe hands me a clarinet.

/ /

After various twists and turns, I find myself sharing an apartment with a stranger. One of the oddities of this apartment is that it has a huge entrance-hall—much larger, in fact, than the other rooms, including the bedrooms. Maybe the shared entrance causes the first problem.

In any case, I’ve written a score and this stranger, who says he is a musician, has offered to play it. But I suspect he actually intends to steal it.

Perhaps to apologize for this tactlessness, he introduces me to Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler is a grotesque clown, with pale skin and long hair: he is played emphatically and exaggeratedly, and at first ridicules his aide-de-camp, General Hartmann, a good old fat ruddy-nosed German who is obviously drunk: he can’t find the right key on his keychain, and is trying desperately to
put his outfit in order—shirt and suspenders untucked, shako on his ear—to present himself before his Führer.

Hitler begins by sweetly saying many nice things about Mariani. But bit by bit, as his speech continues, it gets increasingly pernicious and concludes as a torrent of foul curses.

Adolf Hitler’s eminence grise is a monkey; it has a very long tail that ends in a hand (in a black glove?) and does not stop playing with itself (exactly like Marsupilami from the Spirou cartoons) to accompany and underscore its master’s speech.

But I think at one point it loses its glove, or its whole hand.

Sudden change of scenery. Deathly silence. On a vast esplanade, a crowd of soldiers dressed in black is pushing everyone back while the monkey, at once terrible and grotesque, advances through the middle of the grand plaza. He is sitting on a little chariot (the carriage of a cannon), tail pointing in front of him like a tank cannon.

A child is running. One of the soldiers turns around quickly as the child passes and knocks him down with his rifle butt.

I am at a demonstration. We are singing “La Jeune Garde.” The song fades out slowly. The silence is oppressive. I sense the police just in front of us and know they are going to charge.

I know this is only a scene from
Duck, You Sucker!
, but still, why on earth do I always get myself into these situations?

I managed to take refuge in a building under construction. I’m hidden in a little square room without a door (I had to enter through the ceiling). This is where the toilets will be; the plumbing is not yet installed, but there are already footprints in the cement.

Large demonstration for le Joint Français. Threat of clashes between the demonstrators and the police. I almost panic at the idea of being arrested, brought to a police station and beaten.

These things do not happen.

(forgotten)

(forgotten)

I’m visiting a house with the bartender from a bar I go to often. There is a glass wall, which is trembling. The bartender explains: it’s because it’s in contact with the metallic posts of the awning. There is a clogged sink. To unclog it, you first have to fill another: thanks to some sort of system of communicating vases, the flow of the normal sink will enable the flow of the clogged sink.

There is a large party at my parents’ house. I’m sitting on a couch between P. and a young woman with whom I am flirting. P. gets up angrily; I don’t understand why. I make a date with the young woman for 11:30 p.m.

I take a train. I cross a city. Somewhere, an incline in the sidewalk is replaced by a moving walkway.

I get to Dampierre, where there is a big party. Almost everyone who was at the party at my parents’ house has come.

I meet my aunt, who is with Z.; Z. looks like another one of my aunts and has the same voice as her (a disagreeable voice); she says to me:

“There’s a concert in the garden.”

At the dinner table. P. is across from me; she’s been drinking heavily.

I didn’t tell the young lady where we would meet.

I cross the property. Many things have changed. I have a hard time recognizing the old basements, which have become large vaulted rooms; I meet people whom I have seen before in the same place, a woman, in particular, who may have been my mistress; she gives me an enigmatic smile that seems to signify that our relationship is quite finished.

I can’t get over how unpleasant Z.’s voice has become to me.

A large lunch is served on a huge esplanade looking down on the entrance to the property. The people arriving down below look like ants; sometimes they actually are ants: someone sweeps the path to keep them from entering.

The young woman comes to meet me; she’s wearing a hat that is a sort of turban topped with a tiny umbrella; I am pleased that she knew she was supposed to meet me here.

I have rented an apartment at 10 or 12 rue de l’Assomption, beneath where Jo A. lives on the second floor.

I’m getting ready to repaint it.

I go to buy groceries on rue Fontaine, but I can’t find good cheese. I would have liked to find a very dry goat cheese.

I come back. J. has come to help me paint. But neither she nor P. wants to go back out to look for cheese.

I go down myself, furious, but my anger subsides once I get to the street.

I pass in front of the house where I lived between my tenth and twentieth years, in front of the Lycée Molière.

What a shame, I think, that this isn’t my month to describe this street!

There have been major changes on the street: just after
the butcher shop at no. 52, a cinema—no, that one I remember I know, but a second cinema, brand new, and even a third, where they’re playing a movie about auto racing starring Maximilien SHELL (the name in big letters) and Trintignant (but no “Jean-Louis” and the name very small).

I go into a cheese shop on avenue Mozart. The cheeses look like fat slices of brain. Many entanglements. No goat cheese. It takes ages to get served.

I buy a single (fairly small) piece of cheese. It costs 8 francs 70. That’s highway robbery! Moreover, it takes ages to pay too: the merchant makes a long series of little signals to the clerk, who passes them on to the cashier. The cashier asks me for 8 francs 65.

I go back to pick up my parcel. The merchant initially gives me a lovely one, large and beautifully wrapped, then changes his mind, because that one’s not mine; but he can’t find mine. He looks for another bit of cheese to give me, but the only pieces he can find are rotten. Meanwhile, he has begun make—extremely slowly—a Tunisian delicacy: making it the traditional way is an art unto itself; the gherkins are cut lengthwise in extremely fine slices, the different sizes applied just so.

A conversation about Tunisia starts up among the clients. Someone asks me if the climate is good for sinus infections. No, I say, it’s too humid. (but) Marcel C. goes there to take care of his rheumatism. He goes to Djerba. He has friends there, which lets him get away from the tourist frenzy that, as they say, rules the Island.

To get back to rue de l’Assomption, I will take the other half of the rectangular perimeter formed by

 … was I rolling along at a good clip, backward, on the road that was supposed to lead us to the highway? It was a large road, more reminiscent of an esplanade, and crisscrossed in all directions by vehicles bearing down at full speed …

There were four of us in a rented car, P., J., a strong tall Englishman we didn’t know, and me. The Englishman was driving. We were going to join the front, to go fight …

“No, that was in a Truffaut film …”

Near Auxerre, we reach the highway. We can see it in front of us, beyond a wide gate: it’s a wide, straight road that an uninterrupted tide of whirring cars is crossing from right to left.

For the moment, we’re in some sort of drugstore; we don’t have time to stop to eat. At most, I manage to steal a few bits of sugar.

Just as I’m paying my rent, I realize that the last three bills in a 1000-franc roll (ten 100-franc bills) have been replaced with pieces of paper from restaurant tablecloths I once wrote on.

I find myself in an immense restaurant, so big they’ve put a sauna in the bathroom.