La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams (2 page)

—the sign / / indicates an intentional omission.

The height gauge (the name escapes me: metronome, perch) where must stay ad. lib. for several hours. Naturally. The armoire (the two hiding places). The rehearsal. Humiliation. ?. Arbitrary power.

A scene with several people. There is a height gauge in the corner. I know I am at risk of having to spend several hours under it; it’s an act of bullying rather than real torture, but extremely uncomfortable, because there is nothing holding the top of the gauge and, after a while under it, one might shrink.

Naturally, I am dreaming and I know that I am dreaming, naturally, that I am in a prison camp. It’s not really a prison camp, of course, but an image of a prison camp, a dream of a prison camp, a prison-camp metaphor, a prison camp I know only as a familiar image, as though I were ceaselessly dreaming the same dream, as though I never dreamed of anything else, as though I never did anything but dream of this prison camp.

It’s clear that the threat of the gauge is enough, at first, to concentrate in itself all the terror of the camp. And then it seems it’s not so bad. In any case, I escape the threat; it doesn’t come to pass. But it is precisely my avoidance of this threat that most clearly proves the essence of the camp: the only thing that saves me is the indifference of the torturer, his liberty to do or not to do; I am entirely at the mercy of his arbitrary power (in exactly the same way as I am at the mercy of this dream: I know it is only a dream, but I cannot escape it).

The second sequence modifies these themes slightly. Two characters (one is without a doubt myself) open an armoire in which two hiding spots have been forged, crammed with deportees’ valuables. By “valuables” I mean any objects that could increase the safety and chances of survival of their owner, be they bare necessities or objects with some exchange value. The first hiding spot contains woolens, countless woolens, old and moth-eaten and drab. The second hole, which contains money, is made of a rocker device: one of the armoire’s shelves is hollow inside and its cover lifts up like that of a school desk. But this little stash seems unsound, and I am just activating the mechanism that opens it to take the money out when someone enters. An officer. In an instant we
understand that all of this is useless anyway. It also becomes clear that dying and leaving this room are one and the same.

The third sequence could surely, had I not forgotten it completely, have supplied a name for the camp: Treblinka, or Terezienbourg, or Katowice. The performance might have been the
Terezienbourg Requiem
(
Les Temps modernes 196
., no., pp.…–…). The moral of this faded episode seems to invoke older dreams: we can save ourselves (sometimes) by playing.…

With a laugh that can be described only as “sardonic,” she began to make passes at a stranger, in my presence. I said nothing. She kept it up, so I eventually left the room.

I am in my room with A. and a casual acquaintance, whom I am teaching to play Go. He seems to understand the game, until I realize he thinks he is learning to play bridge. The game actually consists of distributing
letter tiles
(more like a kind of lotto than a kind of Scrabble).

: known secret maze, doors of chests (round, armored), hallways, very long trek toward the encounter

and then the same path now known to all.

I am dreaming

She is beside me

I tell myself I’m dreaming

But the pressure of her hand against mine feels too strong

I wake up

She really is beside me

Delirious joy

I turn on the lights

Light bursts forth for a hundredth of a second then goes out

(a rattling lamp)

I embrace her

(I wake up: I am alone)

At the end of a maze of covered walkways, a bit like in a souk, I arrive at a dentist’s office.

The dentist is out but her son, a young boy, is there. He asks me to come back later, then changes his mind and tells me his mother will be back any moment.

I leave. I run into a tiny woman, pretty and cheerful. It’s the dentist. She leads me to the waiting room. I tell her I don’t have time. She opens my mouth very wide and bursts into tears as she tells me that all my teeth are rotten
but
that it’s not worth treating them.

My mouth, open wide, is immense. I have an almost palpable sensation of total rot.

My mouth is so large, and the dentist so small, that I suspect she is going to put her whole head in my mouth.

Later, I run through the shopping mall. I buy a three-burner gas stove that costs 26,000 francs and a 103-liter refrigerator.

One day, I will tell her I am leaving her. She will call her daughter nearly immediately to say she is not going to Dampierre.

Over the course of the telephone conversation, her pretty face will fall apart.

Despite your certainty that you are still young, you must not be so young anymore, since two of your dearest friends are already dead and a third is dying …

It was like those Flaubert letters: “We have buried Jules …” (or is it Edmond?).

Who were those two dead friends? Wasn’t one of them Claude? Régis?

After what might have been countless adventures, I manage to board the train just as it’s preparing to leave, as the dull black automatic doors are already closing.

The compartment is long and narrow, almost empty. There is only an immensely tall woman on the other side of the car, lying over several seats—not across a row but down the length of the car, her feet roughly where I am and her head almost at the other end of the compartment.

(Suddenly) I feel something (someone) gently running (a hand) through my hair.

I am frightened.

I shout.

It is certainly not the woman, who seems even more
than I am.

I spoke with a doctor for a long time about my sinus infections.

In a store, or rather at a large carnival, something like the Fête de l’Humanité. There is a large crowd. We arrange to meet in one place and then another.

I step out “to be introduced to some Soviet writers.” They greet me but then, to my great disappointment, nobody pays me any attention; everyone is listening to Armand Lanoux nearly immediately to say she is not going to Dampierre (I have never seen him before; he looks nothing like I imagined he would), who is speaking in Russian (which I understand without the slightest difficulty) about his ten books that have been translated in the USSR. I am shocked by the number ten, and I mentally correct it to something like “ten times the same thing”

I belong to a group of hippies. We stop traffic on a national highway. We have surrounded a luxury car and are closing in on it, threateningly.

I receive a letter from Germany in which I learn that Eugen Helmlé is dead. I had written to him the night before.

Bit by bit, I understand that I am dreaming and that Eugen Helmlé is not dead.

I am playing Go (though it’s more like a puzzle whose pieces finally form a sort of sphere) with a writer named Bourgoin, whom I find fairly unpleasant.

I am on rue de l’Assomption and I decide to go to Dampierre. I head toward a café at the end of the street, then veer off in the direction of la Muette. I am furious.

Maybe it’s in Dampierre, or still on rue de l’Assomption? The place is under repair, even though they’re holding a reception, whence the presence—rather surprising at first—of workers in the middle of the sitting room. A writer enters; I realize I have his book in my hand and am playing (fanning myself?) with it.

J. and M.L. appear to have made up and are playing Go together. A bit later I walk in on them kissing in a dusty room, which looks like my old office on rue du Bac. A workman comes to tear out the doorpost, saying, in a very technical manner:

“It has beveled edges.”

The post carries electrical wires, so there is a brief blackout. I remark to myself that he is an excellent electrician and that it will be easier to remove the furniture this way.

Three workers (one of whom is the gardener from Dampierre) are building an outdoor living room.

I have a scene with

I am looking to rent an apartment for a month. Someone whose job is to sell or rent apartments suggests that I go to a hotel instead, and recommends La Boule Blanche, in the middle of Saint-Germain. As it turns out, I know that hotel by name, but I’ve never been there.

La Boule Blanche is on a very calm square, not unlike the Square Louis-Jouvet, near the Opera (where the Cintra bar is). It reminds me of another hotel, not far off, where one of my friends either went or told P. (or maybe me) to go.

A rather
fin-de-siècle
congress is being held in the hotel. The reading rooms are packed, the tables strewn with outspread newspapers.

I turn around in a circle, looking for the hotel office, and end up asking someone, who tells me:

“But it’s right there.”

It is, in fact, right there. It looks a bit like my writing desk, but curved. Three young women are behind it.

They whisper to me that there have been many departures
and that I will have no trouble getting a room. Just now, three or four gentlemen are returning their keys.

I want to ask for a room, but by mistake I ask for a suite. They ask me why. I explain that I am in the middle of changing apartments and that I wish to move in for a month.

Two of the three employees talk amongst themselves and decide to show me the bridal suite.

It’s at the very top of the hotel. We take the stairs up. In the small entryway there is a carved lamp whose base represents a headless naked woman gripping or strangling a boa constrictor coiled around her. The woman and the snake are made of wood, but the imitation is so perfect that you could believe, for a moment, that they are alive.

I tour the suite, which consists of two rooms connected by a small staircase.

I try to explain that a room, a large room, would be fine for me. Then, changing the subject, I ask what brands of whiskey they have at the bar. They answer with a certain number of words (“long john,” “glen,” “mac,” etc.) and then the word “Chivas,” which they repeat several times until it loses its shape (chavass, chivelle, etc.).

Then I ask what they have in the way of vodka. They answer with a word that ends in “ya”: I hear “Denitskaya” or “Baltiskaya.” I am pleased that it is an authentic vodka …

A film that I am (a) watching as it is being filmed, (b) seeing in the theater, or (c) acting in.

Somewhere in the forest. Hunting scene. We are in the middle of the woods. Maybe there is snow.

The hunters curse the poachers, who are always a few steps ahead, hunting their game and thinning its population.

The shot moves (pan, lateral).
I am very far off-screen
.

Four forms pass, hairy, bearded, covered in furs: the poachers.

Then, on skis, the “Lead Hunter,” then the cameraman, who is carrying a ridiculous contraption on his back, then the sound engineer, also heavily loaded, then, etc., the rest of the crew.