La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

by Georges Perec

  This frightens me at first.

  Mind the fontanels, which might not be fully bound yet even after so long!

  Then I check for myself. Passing my thumbnails along the edge of the bone, I barely need to apply pressure for the bone (like the case of my alarm clock or the battery cover on my radio) to come loose and go rolling around on the floor.

  I can see my cortex.

  I pick up my bone and put it back in place. I begin to worry again, more and more, about the chance of infection.

  Later, I dare to move my head and my bone does not fall, which is reassuring.

  I’m glad to know it’s just a dream.

  / /

  I am in Dampierre, in my old room. There are spider webs everywhere.

  I begin to suit up to leave on motorcycle. I pick up my shoes. They’re full of spider webs and tiny droppings, like little grains of wheat or lentils. On the sole is a large spider, which I eventually crush.

  No. 65

  April 1971

  Planks

  1

  Dampierre. I go into the bathroom on the second floor. It’s a little room where you can see without being seen. I think I see C. but it’s a little girl in a red dress.

  2

  There are three of us. We’re stealing various things, then two planks of wood from an empty storefront next to the department store near Ledru-Rollin.

  Nobody is watching us, but I ask a nearby artisan whether we can. Even though he didn’t want anything from me! Obviously, he answers that it doesn’t matter for one plank, but he’s not allowed to give up the other. We return both to him.

  I am with J.L. in a narrow alley—it looks a bit like the passage Choiseul—near the Bastille.

  There is a “New Order” demonstration, with parachutists.

  At the end of the alley, a small door with a gate. The lock is not in the middle of the gate but at the very top.

  We have to return to this narrow alley to pick up the packets J.L. and I left there.

  I run into my boss; he introduces me to several American friends whose names I already know (they turn up frequently in my file).

  We watch a baseball game.

  We realize that cops are gathering behind the players.

  Back in the alley. Suddenly I’m afraid. No doubt we should run, but there are too many—decidedly too many, far too many bags.

  No. 66

  April 1971

  The triangle

  During a meal, we are exchanging good crossword clues, particularly a film title.

  J.L. takes me aside to give me a word of advice: I should stop working at the laboratory; I should get up at noon, go to the movies each day from 2 to 4, and make my crossword puzzles afterwards.

  “But I can’t make a living off my crossword puzzles,” I tell him.

  Yes I can, he tells me, I’ll be able to place them and everything; I just have to spend two hours, not three days, on each.

  A bit later, J.L. puts a record on the turntable: it’s barely modern music, more like modern music aping its classical influences. Everyone says it’s lovely.

  “These are,” says J.L., “ ‘Musical recommendations to the Radio Luxembourg Orchestra,’ by Lolita von Paraboom.” Someone makes a crack about the fact that it’s a “commissioned work”; someone specifies that it’s from 1968 or 1969.

  There are three of us in the room. J.L. on the stairs in the back, near the record player; me standing near a long wooden table, and a stranger (male or female?) who is equidistant from me and from J.L. We trace between the three of us a right triangle whose long side is J/me, whose short side is J/the stranger (m/f), and the hypotenuse the stranger (m/f) and me …

  No. 67

  May 1971

  The stolen letter

  I think I have woken up. There are lots of maids in my room. But is it really my room?

  I’m by a body of water. To cross it, I take a footbridge that becomes a suspension bridge over the Seine. At the middle I see the date 1953.

  Someone has stolen the letter I had in my pocket.

  I am running a sprint with a black woman.

  No. 68

  May 1971

  I-words

  There seem to be—really?—three words in my file that begin with the letter I:

  Impedance

  Inhibition

  I?

  Wasn’t there something else before? At the theater? Three sketches?

  No. 69

  May 1971

  Othon

  Jean-Marie Straub’s film, Othon, inspired by the Corneille play, has a different name.

  Maybe it’s the Corneille play that has a different name?

  Actually, there’s another text too, hidden beneath the first, which I try in vain to decipher.

  No. 70

  May 1971

  The two-way switch

  I agree to take in a cat.

  Who is this cat? (complicated genealogy…)

  Where will he relieve himself?

  On the street major public works are being done; they’re installing a two-way switch system for cars.

  Actually, it’s only a question of cuts to make to a text (A man asleep?)

  No. 71

  May 1971

  The bus

  … first there’s the frightfully complicated consultation of a restaurant menu, which ends with going up and down staircases, perhaps in pursuit of indifferent maîtres d’. All we want to know is how long this or that dish will take to prepare.

  It seems the waiting times are so long that we have time to go play a game of Go somewhere fairly far out of town.

  We get on a bus.

  I’m sitting in the middle of the bus, on the left side. Jacques R., his wife and his daughter are in front, on the right, near the door.

  At the back of the bus (so I can see only if I turn around) is a sort of display stand, which I find at once elegant, practical, and banal; by banal I mean that someone should have thought of it long ago.

  At one point the bus stops and Jacques R. gets off. We seem to be right by Notre-Dame de Lorette, where he lives. His wife is no longer there. But someone makes a comment to the effect of:

  “Why is he getting off when his wife is here?” to which someone else replies:

  “No, idiot, that’s his daughter.”

  Anyway, the bus leaves. It has become a passenger car. At the wheel is Pierre L. or Jean-Pierre P. It quickly becomes clear that they’re driving very badly; for starters, they go the wrong way down a one-way street.

  I am in another car next to the (unidentified) driver and we’re increasingly sure that they’re going to get in an accident.

  Indeed, a bit later, on a large and busy road, there is a spectacular pileup, though it proves soon enough to have caused more noise than harm.

  The two drivers of the crashed vehicles are circling each other in a slow ballet. Pierre L. (or Jean-Pierre P.) has a crank in his hand; the other driver holds a brick. They rush at each other, stop, Pierre L. leaves, then suddenly turns around and mimes hitting the other driver.

  Oil flows from the car

  A large puddle collects by the side of the road and grows to the size of a river where washerwomen come to beat their clothes.

  No. 72

  May 1971

  The carnival

  With a young woman who works in the same laboratory as me, I’m getting ready to take a bus to go home.

  The bus arrives. It’s empty except for a single person at the back, who is Z. I board and, after thinking for a long time, I ask the conductor to give me a single ticket and I pay with a one-franc coin.

  I sit next to my colleague, facing Z. but fairly far from her. To all indications she hasn’t seen me, but deep down I’m sure she has.

  We are passed by some motorcyclists, then we come to a crazy carnival that seems to have been organized by high school students. There’s a whole series of painted backdrops, trompe-l’œil, makeup, etc., made with a sort of liquid plastic matter; the
colors are very bright: mauve, candy pink, red, etc. It’s sold in pressurized tubes, so quite easy to use.

  Various carnival scenes. Battle reenactment; an enormous shell falls awfully from a howitzer; a whole section of the street is heaved up, as though a gigantic mole were burrowing underneath it.

  This now seems to be happening near rue de l’Assomption.

  A young boy is lying in a pool of (fake) blood with a grimace of feigned agony; I look at him in passing, but without showing any emotion, and he seems disappointed that I didn’t appreciate his performance (or that I didn’t show my appreciation).

  The road back is now the little road in Dampierre. There’s a whole group of us. They’re explaining how the plastic bombs work, insisting on how practical they are.

  At the table in Dampierre. I’m across from Z. There is a ridiculously small cheese-plate. Z. explains how difficult it is to find good cheeses. Someone brings a slice of brie that needs to be cut, or, more precisely, whose rind needs to be removed. I try to do so with a long knife that I find next to me, but someone on my left (maybe S.B.) takes the plate from me and passes it to Z. I groan, saying something like

  “I can’t do anything right here.”

  I notice that I’ve made a tiny cut on my index finger; it seems covered in soot and I have to press down hard to see a drop of blood form.

  No. 73

  May 1971

  P. sings

  P. is singing.

  She’s singing remarkably well. The song is in a realist style, but very moving.

  We walk together down rue des Boulangers. She’s going to work and I want to go see my aunt on rue de l’Assomption. I suggest that we walk some of the way (it’s nice out).

  I ask how she managed to get a chorus to accompany her at the end of the song. She tells me it was done with a recording and tells me the name of the system—something like “video-tape”—she used.

  She was singing on the street, and people were even turning around to listen to her, but she was still accompanied, as though on a record.

  I’m pleased for her that she is singing. We plan her repertoire and her career. She will begin at Galerie 55, then at l’Écluse, etc. I’m certain I can help her, that her talent will win many people over. I dream that she’s already a star.

  We are slightly lost in a remote neighborhood.

  We’re walking down a staircase; I notice she’s not wearing anything under her white cloth jacket and that she has a lovely chest.

  The staircase is carved out of wood, very rococo. I descend it by sliding down the banister, thinking “in petto” that it must be childish to do such things at my age, but I’m also very happy to be doing it.

  I arrive at the bottom; while trying to get off the banister, I notice that my head is stuck between the banister bars and, across from me, through the unpolished window of the lodge, I see the shadow of the security guard getting up.

  I manage to free myself in time. I leave, but I feel the presence of the guard behind me, following me out of the building.

  I turn left. I see P. in the distance. There are two signs in the street; on one, closer and toward the left, is written “Ollé” (or “Olla”); on the other, a bit farther off and to the right, is written “OPERA.” We go that way. P. is waiting for me not far from a little girl sitting on a garden chair with a schoolbag in her hand. I head toward P., first walking, then running faster and faster, remarking to myself, “I’m definitely giving the impression of a uniformly accelerating speed”; still, I feel spikes in my acceleration. When I arrive, I pretend to grab a comic book that P. is holding under her arm. She tells me that people do that often but I have to arrive slower, and suggests that I start again. I walk back to do so and notice then that the little girl sitting beside P. has blood (or strawberry jam) all over her mouth. I approach P. running slowly, but the book I take, which was a hardcover illustrated book (like Asterix or Lucky Luke) has become just a newspaper …

  (interrupted by “FIP 514, it’s 10:30!”)

  No. 74

  June 1971

  The Quest for California

  I am with P. and someone else in California. We search for something—what?—for a long time, in vain.

  Regardless of your mode of transport, you have to pay a tax to get out of a room in San Francisco.

  Will I take an airplane? A train? A car?

  There is a desert surrounding San Francisco. Beware of forest fires. For many years, people came by sea (Chinese).

  At the top of a hill on the outskirts of town, there is a sort of advertising column with a switch and an electrical wire attached by a very crude splice. Anxiety: it would take almost nothing to set the whole brush on fire.

  I take the train. After the long trip across the desert, I am to arrive in Lyons, then somewhere else (Bordeaux? Marseilles? Paris? Not far from Lyons, in any case).

  I am alone in a bunk. It seems like we’ve just departed, but the train arrives in Lyons.

  I call P., who is in the next compartment. She comes to join me, walking on the steps outside the wagon. Now we are 4 in my compartment: P., me, and two of her girlfriends. The three women undress simultaneously, lifting their blouses over their heads, and wind up on the bunk under the same sheet. They all still have their underwear on. For my part, I’m completely naked; I bunch my underwear and socks into a ball and slide it under a fold in the bed.

  I make love to the three women, one after the other.

  I notice then that I’m on some sort of wide pedestal and that everyone in the wagon can see us. Not far from us, four men are sitting around a table; they look a bit like gangsters.

  Slowly, the train crosses the town of Coursons. I’m surprised: if we’ve passed Lyons, this can’t be Coursons, and yet it is Coursons: P. recognizes it well, me less so, having been there only once. Then the light bulb goes off: it’s Coursons in the Nièvre (and I add: “You don’t know …”), not Coursons in the Yonne.

  On a sloping street you can see a sign indicating: Paris (or Marseilles) 4 (a digit in the tens place); a bit later, the confusion (is it 40 … or 49) clears: it’s 41.

  No. 75

  June 1971

  The painters

  In a huge empty apartment, no doubt Denis B.’s. Gisèle lived across from an even bigger apartment (wasn’t it that big, the place on rue de l’Assomption?).

  I’m sleeping on the bare floor, on a mattress with no frame. In the next room J.L., or R.K., is typing on my typewriter.

  Are we mad at each other? I pretend to be asleep. They move about not far from me and eventually leave.

  Maybe S.B. will show up a bit later and slide under the sheets next to me?

  Very quickly, a crowd takes over the apartment.

  Above all, four painters who, though the apartment seems rather clean (shiny lacquered walls), are beginning to repaint it.

  They intend to “make something of it.”

  No. 76

  July 1971

  The renovation

  I enter the courtyard of a building under renovation (just as mine is under renovation).

  Everything is very white and very dusty.

  There was an external elevator, which has been enlarged and moved.

  There was a stone fountain, which has been moved to the other side. The pipes are still there, but the stones of the base and basin have been moved.

  A whole section of the wall has been reduced to rubble: a newly installed metal ceiling beam runs across it (like in the old “Taride” building at Mabillon).

  No. 77

  July 1971

  The vendor

  I have killed my wife and cut her rather crudely into small pieces, which I have wrapped hastily in paper bundles. The whole of her fits in a cardboard box, which is still relatively easy to handle.

  My only hope is for someone to make her into wine or alcohol. I go to the distillery. I walk without knocking into a room where there are three women in overalls. Two are sitting down, the third is standin
g near a waist-high double door (like a saloon door).

  Either I address them with a wink, like we know one another, or I call out, flatly, something like:

  “I have 50 kilos of quality meat!”

  The young woman who was standing brings me into a tiny room, where she begins to examine my merchandise. My package has all the necessary labels, but the young woman claims that the firm I represent is not an approved client of her Company and that I’m going to have a hard time closing the deal.

  As a sample, I take a series of small bottles from the package. This should be no more than a simple formality, but, to my great confusion, there are more and more bottles: red wine, white wine, rosé, all sorts of liquor, even a pitcher of water—tiny, but full and above all uncorked: you could dip a finger in without making it overflow, which strikes me as an indubitable experimental demonstration of osmosis or of capillarity.