La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams (10 page)

“It’s to buy stamps.”

“You don’t have any at home?”

“I do.”

“Go get them.”

He smiles and starts his car again. (I can’t say I’m surprised at him.)

So I go home, or rather to Michel M.’s. I’ve barely made it through the door when a young girl in white, whom I
recognize as Michel’s ex-girlfriend, comes to ask me for an explanation. She has just arrived with her fiancé and found the house full. I reassure her, send her to her room, and go to see the other occupants. I figure we’ll be able to work something out, since the house is huge. The others are going to bed, even though it’s broad daylight. There is in particular one girl who has put on a ridiculous and rather comical lace nightshirt with tiny buttons, which makes her look like a fragile doll or like a portrait of a child.

Everyone agrees to sleep during the day and go out at night. I declare myself satisfied and go to tell the fiancée—no, she is no longer the fiancée, she’s Michel’s ex-girlfriend. I cross several rooms and halls before arriving: indeed, this place is enormous.

I find Michel’s ex-girlfriend, her fiancé, and another girl, fairly pretty and very cheerful, who is undressing; her chest, very pretty, is exposed; she is passing continually between a small paneled room (“dressing room”) and another small room, maybe a bathroom. She tries to avoid my eyes, but it’s a modest (and flirtatious) game rather than a real act of modesty. For my part, amused, I pretend not to look at her while I explain to Michel’s ex-girlfriend that the apartment is large enough to accommodate everyone, provisionally.

I try to go back to the other part of the apartment. I wander the halls, and soon wind up in a neighborhood being torn down.

The sense I get is somewhat like the one you get upon seeing a façade barely transformed (or recognizable though profoundly transformed) after it’s been covered for a long time by a wooden fence (like the “TARIDE” building at Mabillon): here, at last, is the final look that this house, this street, this neighborhood will have! How long we have waited! That’s just what I thought it would look like! (like a statue being unveiled to inaugurate it).

There actually is an inauguration ceremony, not to place the first stone but to make the final blow (Tabula rasa). Without wanting to, I wind up alongside the procession, which passes me slowly until I begin walking faster to pass it. First there are a few cops, then a delegation of gentlemen in uniform (who are nonetheless plainclothes men) and finally a group of young men in uniform (some kind of athletic tracksuits), whom I think I recognize as reserve officers but who are in fact “    .” One of them comes up and specifies
who they are: they live in groups of 30 in special houses (their name, followed by the designation “iary,” is what these houses are called) and they take 30-day oaths of chastity. I almost burst out laughing at the sound of this act of faith, but the young man looks at me with an amused smile too. I walk to the opposite sidewalk to rejoin my friends across the street.

I’m in a bar. There are two rooms, one large and one small, joined by a thin hallway where the proper bar (the counter) has been set up. I’m at the bar, perched on a stool. My friends are in the large room. Among them is Nour M. and, certainly, one of the girls from Michel’s apartment.

I drink vodka at first, then whiskey.

I buy cigarettes. At one point I pay and there is a minor but quickly resolved problem in the accounts, something that’s been paid for twice or something that hasn’t been paid for. The girl leaves. I walk out with her; she gives me her address. I seem to understand that it’s 5 rue Linné, or maybe on the street that runs along la Halle aux vins, where the Lutèce theater is, but it’s another street, a parallel one, not the rue des Boulangers but a street bordering the Arènes de Lutèce.

I go to find Nour and suggest that we go to dinner. Two of his companions want to go to a “full show” (dinner, drinks, dancing, etc.) but I prefer to go somewhere quiet. We decide to all go to a restaurant I know near Denfert or Glacière.

L. is on vacation. We’re staying at his place, in a dormitory, waiting for his return.

In the middle of the night I wake up and go into an adjoining room. I flip through the books and magazines on a table. / /. It’s not impossible that that’s when I happen upon the clipping from
L’Express
.

Someone comes in and asks for L. He’s on vacation, I say. He looks at me carefully, tells me he thinks he believes me and asks if I’m not Z.’s boyfriend. I say (smiling “sadly”) that I was.

There is light coming from L.’s office.

I go back to the common room. I sit down on a corner of the table. There are several open bottles, and I pour myself a glass of beer. It’s not tepid; it’s cold. I am totally demoralized. Someone, a young woman (M.F.), sweeps a bit in my corner, wipes the crumb-covered table, which comforts me somewhat.

/ /

Home. R. comes in. He takes off his coat—it’s a mariner’s peacoat—and sighs that he’s totally broke and needs me to support him. I tell him to make himself at home. He looks at B. who is walking around the apartment totally nude, as though indifferent to his attention. I go to my room, followed by Nourredine M. / / While talking to him I make a stack of wide—exceptionally wide—5-franc coins. I find several dozen of them. I exchange a dozen for a 50-franc bill (a bank note) (from whom? Maybe M.F.?). In the other room, I hear R. on the telephone. He comes in, laughing, to tell me he’s on the line with an airplane in mid-flight. I think at first that it’s D. on the plane and that he wants to speak to her (even though they’ve been separated for several years) but he clarifies that it’s not, that it’s the Express plane.

Several months before, “as a matter of fact,” I found a paragraph in
L’Express
devoted to Oedipus—or, more precisely, to the figure of Oedipus—and decided to write an article using that clipping as a starting point. On one hand I immediately made it clear that it wasn’t a real article about
psychoanalysis, more of an “opinion by a contemporary author” on his own behalf. On the other hand, I found several pleasing titles, mostly puns I found very subtle and surprising that nobody had used before.

It seems it’s quite complicated to have an article published in
L’Express
, or even elsewhere. I speak about this to a friend of François Maspero, who later tells me, or has someone tell me, that François Maspero is interested but that he wants to submit the article to a specialist (which I obviously find hilarious). Also, Marcel B., who seems to have a friend in a very high place (the king of Morocco) promises me his support: he is meeting with him very soon.

A whole “combination of circumstances” ensues around this article. It’s like the old days of “La Ligne générale,” a review I tried to found with a group of friends. This is how, while in line for a movie, I learn, again from Marcel B., that one of the former participants from La Ligne générale has become a critic under an assumed name and that he too can support my efforts. We remark that choosing a pseudonym is a sign of homosexuality and immediately come up with four examples, which form two almost-famous couples from Parisian Arts and Letters.

Inside the theater I noticed L. with a friend. We said
hello discreetly. He seemed to be eating an Eskimo Pie with a small spoon, but I understood right away that he was eating a hashish jam.

Finally, I have been taken on by
L’Express
. The director is none other than Jean Duvignaud and the secretary is Monique A.

Very soon there are the kind of squabbles that always erupt in such places.

From the window of Duvignaud’s office, I notice a group of men on the street; they’re hiding among parked cars. I smell a rat and go down to investigate. Except for one or two individuals, the group is made up of Englishmen who seem very irritated to see me. I ask to see what they’re hiding. Two are hiding photos in their watch casings. But these photos—whose title had something seductive about it—are just thin slices of leather folded in two and show only vague gray stripes. The third is holding something in his hand: a map or a puzzle, but, though I’m very excited by what he shows me, I don’t see anything of interest in it. Nonetheless, I’m sure the presence of these three Englishmen was what set off the whole affair.

I have a date with Monique A. to discuss just that. We’re supposed to meet in a deserted snack bar in a covered passage (surely Passage Choiseul). Next door there is an Algerian café and, in front, three Algerian women holding each other by the waists. Next to them, the boss, their older brother, scolds them for their behavior, invoking the Ancestor. I remember that, in some sort of alternate story, Monique A. was not fired and the whole affair ended in catastrophe. It’s in order to avoid such things happening again that she has quit this time, and we’re meeting to talk about it.

Monique A. arrives. She stands behind the bar, I in front of it. She is genuinely dismayed. Why, we wonder, did she have to leave? She wasn’t fired, but she had to leave. Why does this always happen at that damn company? Always bickering, people leaving, others staying, etc.

This seems related not so much to any particular newspaper stories as to life, in a much more general sense.

A gigantic snake creeps out from behind the counter and begins to swing above my head. First I tell myself I shouldn’t pay it any mind, but it very quickly turns threatening and I am fascinated and frozen in fear. It swings closer and closer,
whistling. I notice that its eyes are like projectors. The moment I feel all is totally lost, a gunshot, fired from somewhere unknown by someone unknown, blasts and wakes me up.

I think I’ve found a large room in my apartment, but it turns out it’s not mine, and, in fact, it’s the street.

Lots of people show up and invade my room. They tell me that F. is in trouble: he shat in front of a public monument; I’m supposed to testify that I witnessed the scene and that I didn’t see him do that, or even more precisely that I saw that he did not do it.

F. arrives, two cops flanking him. I explain or try to explain that I cannot testify to this.

I am in a play, but I’m also supposed to introduce the actor to some VIPs. Now, the mayor is senile. I manage to communicate through gestures that it’s his tablemate who should speak: the real mayor keeps mum while the fake one delivers a very well imitated speech.

Later, I explain to Z. that it’s not really important, that
the fake was actually the former mayor, and, at the same time, the best friend and worst enemy of the real one.

We come to a place we’ve already seen: a high fence?

I make love to Z. Only inside her, all told, do I feel good.

Passing by on the street, I stop to watch a tennis match and mix in with the players, who are apparently indistinguishable from the other passersby. At the end of a service, I catch a fairly difficult ball, earning the praise of one of the players (who is none other than Marcel C.). This sets off a chain of events: he thinks I know how to play; I don’t dare disabuse him; he offers me the service.

Though the ball is terribly large and my racket ridiculously small, at first it doesn’t go too badly. There is no net: the point is to send the ball over the fence in the park. I manage to send my first two balls to the other side and much farther than my opponent can reach (he doesn’t even try), which gets us to 30-love. But the ball grows, finally looking like a slightly flat leather punching bag, and I can no longer get it over the fence. I think we’ve lost only one point, but my partner (Bernard L.) tells me sternly that we’re trailing 50–40 and that if I don’t catch up we will lose the service (just the service, which isn’t so terrible: we’d be one game to one). I explain to him that I can’t send such a heavy ball over with
such a small racket and he offers to lend me one of his. Sure enough, under his arm he has two rackets that he’s not using, which he has even put back in their presses (high wooden diamonds closed with four butterfly screws). These rackets are strange: they look like “old rackets” (like violas to violins, crumhorns to bassoons); one of them has an extremely large wooden frame and the racket itself (the stringed part) is a tiny round (not oval) hole that is obviously stringless. This is the one Bernard L. hands me; I tell him it has no strings and that I can’t play with it. He begins to unscrew the press of the second racket, then thinks again and, almost angrily, gives me back the first one, insisting that it’s perfectly strung. Sure enough, when I examine it closely I see that the hole is furnished with a fine network of gossamer threads.

First I try to serve by throwing the ball myself. But the ball and racket are much too heavy. My partners throw the ball while I hold the handle of the racket with two hands. I manage to hit the ball, but not hard enough: the ball falls short of the fence and the point is lost …

Another time, I played a game of chance and won an enormous amount of money (several thousands of new francs). The losers don’t seem very happy but don’t put up
any particular fight to pay me. Nonetheless, just before I leave the gaming table, we begin to play again and I lose a negligible sum, say 100 francs. This seems to mean:
We can make you win but we can also make you lose when we want and don’t you forget it
.

I put the roll of bills in the breast pocket of my shirt. It sticks out a bit.