La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

by Georges Perec

  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.

  No. 117

  May 1972

  The joint

  1

  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.

  2

  (forgotten)

  3

  (forgotten)

  No. 118

  June 1972

  The double party

  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.

  No. 119

  June 1972

  Rue de l’Assomption

  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

  No. 120

  June 1972

  Hypotheses

  … 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.

  No. 121

  July 1972

  The rent

  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.

  No. 122

  July 1972

  The wedding

  1

  In Blevy. Bernard comes to pick me up. We’re supposed to film a minute of A Man Asleep. First I have to feed the cat and change its litter (the litter bag is quite full).

  Bernard is accompanied by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 children.

  We are filming (in Orly).

  We come back. I’m not particularly happy; we pass, with difficulty, among second-hand shops: they are on the bare ground, selling heavily ornamented wooden plaques.

  2

  I meet S.B. For lack of money, she has not gone on vacation; she’s planning to go to Dampierre. I suggest that we go together: I could easily borrow the house in Villard (our old family home), or the one in Druyes, or others still.

  We go, surely just for an hour (with the implicit intention of sleeping together), into Henri C.’s apartment on rue L. Henri C., who is not in Paris at the moment, has, in the same
building—not at all a modern building, quite the opposite, an old building—two apartments: a flat on the ground floor (where I lived for a while) and a large studio at the top.

  The doorman doesn’t recognize me, but proves to be very friendly. The key is in the mailbox and the mailbox is open. The key is thin and twisted; it doesn’t look at all like the key for a lock, but rather like the key for a deadbolt.

  In the apartment. Large sheets of paper are spread out on the floor, with chalk marks on them. Then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, many young people: they’re Americans, dancers. I understand immediately that my niece has given them the key, which they confirm. They eat, and hand us plates with compartments for avocados, tomatoes, and?. They’re not the ones who were there (or in Villard) the previous week, but they’re from the same university. We talk about various things, and soon about Dampierre, which they know well.

  The ballet begins, a marriage pantomime. Gags. The groom’s costume: yellow socks, white pants that go down to mid-calf, green shirt that hides his arms completely. He looks not so much like a one-armed man as like a bust.

  The whole marriage procession passes in front of us, but, from time to time doubles of the wedding characters pop up: it’s very funny; there are more and more of them, and at the end it’s the same procession as it was at the beginning, but there is no longer a single dancer from the original lineup: all of them have changed.

  Applause, like for a sports play.

  The three main characters (the groom, the bride and the priest) are fake-decapitated, like in the

  “Mysteries of the Organism.”

  3

  Thérèse and Marcel C. arrive; Thérèse is dressed like a lunchlady; she comes in through the door and sings. Marcel is at the end of a hallway. He is holding a guitar and singing too. I remember that they used to live here. But I didn’t know there was a secret passage between Marcel’s and Henri C.’s.

  Next to the large room that we’re in, a long windowed hallway leads to a narrow room that’s probably a workshop or a storeroom for house painting equipment.

  While wandering in an unknown room in his own apartment one day long ago, Marcel found himself at Henri C.’s.

  No. 123

  August 1972

  The workshop

  Major changes are being made in my lab. During a meeting, my boss asks me to devote my time solely to writing manuscripts and to leave the organization of the documentary filing to a young woman he has just hired.

  The young woman is not very pretty, nor particularly pleasant, but she proves to be remarkably efficient; in particular, she uncovers an official document that allows each member of the lab (1) to have regular interviews in room B1 or B2 with a confessor of his or her choice and (2) to visit the painter.

  It turns out that, like all universities (be they of medicine or fine arts), ours has a “functional workshop” and the young woman takes me there. Sure enough, I was wondering where this door led.

  I enter, expecting to find that the painter is nothing but a dirty penpusher.

  “Wait, I recognize this!” I exclaim.

  It is, in fact, none other than the workshop of the painter Bizet, and you can immediately see all his major pieces covered with gridded patterns. The workshop is an immense room with a very high ceiling; the painter is a very tall old man; he shows me around his workshop graciously, but you can tell he’s annoyed about it (but he can work here only on the condition that he gives tours). He makes mostly tapestries, but he also shows me some drawings, many done on graph paper.

  T., one of the researchers from the lab, comes next, running, to visit the workshop. The painter seems more interested in her than he was in me, even though she starts talking about his painting in an especially banal way, saying something like: “Now that’s not very realistic!” which doesn’t seem to offend the painter (whereas I am shocked).

  The painter takes T. by the waist and leans his other arm on my shoulder: I am much smaller than they are.

  Other people come into the workshop. On the ground are two banknotes that turn out to be large amounts.

  No. 124

  August 1972

  The denunciation

  1941.

  The fabric merchant owed my father money and decided to denounce him to the SS and, at the same time as my father, his own son (or just an employee) who was found distributing clandestine newspapers.

  It’s much more complicated than that. But that’s what it is.

  The SS comes to arrest us. They have black uniforms and tight-fitting, spherical helmets, like masks. They’re preparing to arrest the boss too, but he lifts my head by the chin and points to the little scar underneath it.

  We cross the town.

  If only we could go have a cup of coffee. It seems so simple, but it’s impossible. I’ve already given up. The casino is closed too, or closed to Jews. But a light shines from inside.

  We go back the way we came. We pass the fabric merchant’s store again. It’s a boutique on the corner of two streets; neo-Gothic architecture (turrets, machicolations). It looks fancy. We look at it with a well-justified bitterness.

  We arrive at the train station.

  Disorder.

  I know what’s waiting for us. I have no hope. Get it over with. Or maybe a miracle … One day, learn to survive?

  My father dips his left boot in the icy water of a pond. He thinks this will revive an old wound, which will maybe get him declared unfit for service. But everyone watches him do it, indifferent.

  They put us in a cabin reserved for monsters. Two young children, legs cut off at the knees, a boy and a girl, naked, wriggling like worms. Myself, I have become a young snake (or was it a fish?).

  At the end of a long boat trip, we will reach the camp.

  Our wardens, torturers with degenerate faces, pale, ruddy, cruel, dumb, are crowned with ridiculous titles: “(Worm?) Disinfectant Supervisors”; “Adjuncts to the Conversation of (Preserves?).”

  Soon their faces are surrounded with frills, lace, curlicues; this becomes an album I am paging through, a memorial album, pretty like a theatrical program, with advertisements at the end …

  I am back in this town. There is a large memorial ceremony. I attend, sickened, scandalized, and finally moved.

  I arrive in the middle of a crowd. There’s a party. Lots of scattered records, they’re searching for one to put on a little record player. I burst into tears. J.L. scolds me for it.

  I am a little child. On the side of the road, I stop a motorist and ask him to dare, for me, to go see the gardener from the big orchard to get back my ball, which went over the wall (and, in noting this, the return of a real memory: 1947, rue de l’Assomption, I was playing with a ball against the wall of the convent, just across from our building).

  layers and lairs*

  … because a labyrinth leads

  only to the outside of itself.

  Harry Mathews

  * Numbers given are dream numbers.

  afterword

  by Daniel Levin Becker

  Georges Perec’s bibliography is a wonderland of invention and a sterling model of creative discipline. His facility with language and mastery of structure—see, respectively, A Void, a 311-page whodunit written without the letter E, and Life A User’s Manual, a sprawling novel governed by myriad mathematical and procedural rules—were rivaled only by his tireless will to challenge himself, to invent new problems for the solutions he seemed to generate as a byproduct of breathing. Discovering his work was what first led me to the Oulipo, the Parisian lit-nerd collective in whose ranks I have since joined him; before that, it was simply an affirmation of the great things that become possible when you approach even the wispiest of your passions as though it were honest, calculable work.

  But Perec isn’t important just for his repeated demonstrations of technical genius. His value lies also in the complexities behind his writing, the flaws and rifts and stubbornly inscrutable details: his humanity, in a word. Here is a man who di
dn’t just write a novel without the letter E—so fluently, at that, that one professional book critic failed to notice anything amiss—but who made a dumb mechanical exercise into a project with deep personal roots and great emotional stakes. (For proof, look no further than the hit single of the book you’re holding, dream no. 95, which finds him haunted by the post-publication discovery of hundreds of overlooked, unexterminated Es.) In every sentence he writes, no matter how constrained or convoluted, you can find the trace of a person.

  The privilege of La Boutique Obscure, a collection of dreams Perec recorded during one of his most productive periods—he worked on essays, reviews, screen and radio plays, crossword puzzles, and what would be for some years the world’s longest palindrome—is that it offers an uncommonly direct encounter with that person. It’s an invitation to interpret the patterns and echoes and contradictions of his dreams, psychologically and linguistically; it’s an occasion to spend time in the company of a brilliantly idiosyncratic mind with all its tics and perversities fully present and ready to be accounted for. If this “nocturnal autobiography,” as Perec called it, lacks the polish of his more conventional gestures toward memoir, it may be even more illuminating of who he really was.