La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

by Georges Perec

  Most of the terms in this dream are like crossword clues.

  No. 23

  September 1970

  To the South

  When I wake up, only one word remains:

  Marseilles

  We were heading South.

  We had already been there, but we were coming from another town.

  No. 24

  September 1970

  Cats

  After various perambulations, I am back in the building on rue de Quatrefages (or is it rue des Boulangers? or rue de Seine?).

  I’m going from the back room to the front. Denis B. is there (or is it Michaud?).

  On the ground, cats. At least three. Tiny little balls of fur. I shout: I said loud and clear that I won’t have that a cat here! I take one of the cats, walk to the door, and toss it out. Then I notice that between the floor and the door there’s a space large enough for a small cat to enter.

  Anyway, the whole house is an utter mess.

  The downstairs neighbor has a gigantic chimney in his house. He makes a fire and my room burns. Beneath the ashes of the floorboards you can see pieces of masonry and bits of iron from the frame. My friend asks with dismay what we’re going to do. But I’m not in the least bit disturbed and I calmly go down the list of things that need to be done.

  No. 25

  September 1970

  Two plays

  I am to be in two plays.

  A recent walk-on part revealed my acting talent and I was cast on the spot.

  At the moment I’m supposed to enter, I realize that I haven’t rehearsed, nor even read my part once.

  The scene takes place in a large hall-cafeteria-dormitory-canteen. The actors are seated at a table. I take the remaining empty seat, right at the front of the stage.

  I’m playing a tramp. On the table is a piece of paper with some lines on it, but an actor next to me (who is also the director) leans over and whispers that it’s not my part.

  I am stricken with unease. A bit later, though, someone manages to pass me a sheet (of something like butcher paper) with a few notes from the script. I have to make do with winks from my partners to know when it’s my turn to speak.

  The play begins.

  I am lost. I’m sure I’m saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment. Happily, the author has written a very disjointed play, a hullabaloo.

  After quite a while of considerable discomfort (I’m ruining everyone else’s work), riot police arrive in the back of the auditorium.

  It’s part of the play.

  Great confusion.

  On to the second play.

  It’s an act with three characters. I am playing the bear (or maybe the devil?) and across from me are either Faust and Marguerite or Don Juan and Faustine. Someone brings me fur for my costume. I’m not worrying much about my lines; my part consists chiefly of grunts.

  I learn that the role was in fact written for Roger Blin, who’s supposed to take over for me after this performance, and I find it hilarious to “create a role for Blin to reprise.”

  The first play, was it actually a rehearsal? In any case, the second is not performed.

  No. 26

  October 1970

  The S-shaped bar

  I am with Pierre G. in my room. My bed is covered in plastic foam cubes wrapped in transparent plastic casings. Good thing, because water is dripping from the walls and ceiling. For that matter, it’s as though the walls and ceiling are just a single network of multicolored tubes. Everything is soaked. Pierre explains that the people upstairs are having their bathtub redone (refitted).

  There is a table next to the bed and on the table a telephone off its hook. I sense that if I hang it up, it will begin to ring (actually, maybe it’s even ringing now, even though it’s off the hook). I hang up; nothing happens.

  Later, Pierre and I are in a large drugstore. At one point I find myself alone in the book aisle. All the books are shelved flat and covered in pale-colored jackets (mauve, blue, light grey, rose, lavender, etc.). I realize that they’re all erotic books. The titles are mostly quite short, usually just a female first name (Fabienne, Irene). I don’t recognize the authors’ names (pseudonyms, no doubt).

  Pierre and I come to a huge room where we think we can get something to eat or drink. But the maitre d’ directs us to a bar farther down, on the other side of a large picture window.

  We each take a glass. One is a tapered whiskey tumbler, the other a handsome stemmed glass with an egg-shaped swelling near the base. On the other side of the window, another large room with a staircase leading up to the restaurant. The maître d’ points us to it, but we only want drinks, and he leads us to the bar. The bar is very long. It is shaped like an S. On the other side of the counter, several large young men, athletic types with crew cuts, are playing dice on a round tray that they seem to be supporting on their knees. The bartender hands us drinks. Someone asks if the dice players are from the university, but they respond by shaking their heads no and they seem to find the suggestion very amusing.

  No. 27

  October 1970

  Change

  I’m supposed to fly to Venice, and later go to Toulouse to pay my taxes. Tricky money-changing issues. By going through Italy I save a great deal of money. But obviously I can’t declare it.

  Great confusion.

  I am carrying a check (for 5,000, 30,000, or 50,000 francs) and a single 500-franc bill.

  I’m supposed to pay 6,000 francs, which seems exorbitant to me. Moreover, I realize that, although it’s Thursday, I can only be in Italy on Saturday and all the banks will be closed. I should have left the same night.

  All of this is happening in transit from counter to counter, in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a major airport.

  I realize that this trip is completely useless in any case, since this banking operation could have been done a bit later during my trip to Germany.

  No. 28

  October 1970 (Neuweiler)

  The epidemic

  The dreamer (this whole story is like a novel in the third person) has sat down at a little bistro. He is foreign, but they quickly come to treat him like a regular. The boss and some of the customers are discussing the epidemic. The Chinese cook of the restaurant enters (the dreamer thinks he looks like someone he knows); the Chinese cook says they need to find a replacement for him, because he can no longer continue to man the stoves and cook for the girls. On this note he cites a Shakespearean proverb:

  “They died not all, but all were sick!”

  Stunned, the owner of the café looks at the dreamer: he’s the one who taught him the proverb. At that instant the dreamer understands that he is no longer a stranger at some table and that he is now the “central character”; at the same time, he recognizes the Chinese cook; he knows only him; he’s the one who comes from time to time to volunteer for the girls.

  There has been a great cholera epidemic. Everyone wants to be examined. The symptom is spitting up blood. The dreamer and two of his friends walk around the town. They arrive in front of a stairway blocked by a mass of young girls, surely a boarding school. They pretend to have priority, like one of them has been stricken, so that the doctor has to look after them first. The doctor has to clear a path through the girls.

  A bit later, in a crowd of girls splayed out, sick, the dreamer picks up a piece of earth (and not a piece of trash or of feces) from the ground. And he discovers, behind a door, his friend J., laid flat, dead, turned into earth, turned into a block of earth that is missing the piece the dreamer just picked up.

  No. 29

  November 1970

  London

  I am in a foreign city. It’s London, an outlying neighborhood, far from Waterloo or Victoria.

  I’m in a group of tourists wandering around a large drugstore. We meet another group, whom I’m supposed to know. Indeed, everyone seems familiar, looks like or could look like someone I know. I’m quite embarrassed. I offer a lot of vague smiles.

  In any case
, it’s clear that one of my old friends, Jacques M., is in the second group. He has grown a beard. There are also friends of his, whose last name is Fried. On the other hand, Jacques’s wife, Marianne, is in my group.

  I realize then that Jacques and Marianne are separated.

  The next morning, I run into Marianne and tell her that Jacques is there. She heads toward him, then suddenly veers off. I follow her.

  We pass in front of a group of girls. One of them recoils in horror at my approach.

  No. 30

  November 1970

  GABA

  My boss pays me 82 francs (3 × 16) instead of 45 (3 × 15) for having served for three days as a fake subject in his experiment.

  I propose that he put the money into a slush fund, but he shakes his head no.

  He asks where my file is.

  I think of GABA (gamma hydroxybutyric acid), then of presynaptic excitation, which is—evidently—synaptic excitation, and of presynaptic inhibition.

  (long feeling of strangeness upon waking)

  No. 31

  November 1970

  The group

  of what may have been a large countryside party, an opera full of twists and turns, there remains the image—static, almost petrified, insidiously upsetting—of a group: Four characters à la Watteau, two men, a woman, a man…….…

  No. 32

  November 1970

  An evening at the theater

  I was, with Z., at a public event that Aragon and Elsa Triolet were also attending. Elsa Triolet, a small and gentle woman, waved to me, which surprised me because we don’t know one another.

  Later.

  We are at the theater.

  I am packed in right near the stage, just above the illuminated walkway. At one point one of the actors, who had been sitting with his back to the audience, rises and begins to count off time like a conductor. We hear music from backstage. First it’s just a harpsichord, then a whole orchestra. A character on the right begins to sing. It’s the end of the play. I am overwhelmed, even as I realize there’s nothing to it and wonder vaguely why I appear to be the only one at all moved.

  The exit of the theater is mobbed.

  I am with Z. at the top of the stairs. Elsa Triolet walks by below, toward another exit perpendicular to ours. Once again she tilts her head toward me. I tell Z.: “That’s Elsa Triolet.” Z. asks how small I was when I met her and tells me she’s going to introduce me to someone who knew me even smaller. But all of this is said in such a way that I can’t tell whether we’re talking about a woman or a man, and whether she really means “even smaller than I am.”

  We go home.

  My uncle, a bald man, is following us. I recognize him as Z.’s current lover. Walking in front of my uncle and somehow losing him, Z. brings me into a little dormitory, a dark room I identify as one of the annexes of the house in Dampierre.

  We tumble down onto a bed. Z. presses against me, panting slightly, but I sense that she plans to rejoin my uncle and wants me to stay here. All told, she doesn’t seem entirely sure what she’s going to do. In any case, I tell her, I don’t feel like sleeping anywhere besides my room.

  No. 33

  November 1970

  The esplanade

  A cluster of cops in capes gathers on a large esplanade; not riot police, but rather policemen marking the perimeter for a celebrity to pass through.

  I find myself surrounded by cops. I am naked, or only in my underwear, but the cops seem to find this normal.

  At one point, I run.

  I make it to a car with J. standing nearby. My clothes are on the ground, in the mud, filthy. I find a sock, but I can’t put it on.

  We want to take the car (so I can change inside). In front, in the driver’s seat, there is an enormous turd; we wipe it away with a curtain.

  Later, J. and I are driving. We are circling a movie theater. A huge animated advertisement announces an erotic film: two neon silhouettes, a man and a woman, in all sorts of positions (implying permutation and recurrence): man and woman on their backs, man on woman, woman on man, man and woman face down, etc.

  No. 34

  November 1970

  The double apartment

  There are many double houses and apartments, i.e. where two families live, separated by a common room. The L. family and P. and I share one. Marianne M. comes to see us. We go to meet her downstairs; she comes up in the elevator with a stranger who she tells me is her husband, but it’s no use trying to recognize him: I don’t.

  A small bathroom: the toilet bowl is full of shit. I’m surprised, and a little relieved, that it doesn’t smell bad. While closing the lid, I get a bit of shit on my thumb. J. points me toward the sink. I have to rub for a long time before the stain goes away, then suddenly my hand turns black.

  A small station, maybe in England.

  P. and I have been here several times. There is an open-air newspaper kiosk. P. takes a newspaper and forgets to pay for it.

  No. 35

  December 1970

  At the café

  1

  M.K. is visiting my apartment. She brings a glass of water from the shower to the kitchen and pours it on a black coffee table. The water spreads out without spilling over, making the surface of the table shine like an instant oil slick.

  2

  Dampierre. The guests are gathering in the dining room. Z. comes down, looking stunningly pretty. I lead her into a small room, narrow as a passageway. I tell her I’m going to leave her. She says:

  “I’m still going to give you a”

  (the noun escapes me: tribute, diploma, secret, tablet). She places a necklace around my neck.

  3

  I am in a bed with P. We’re actually in a café, with a fairly large number of people, but nobody is surprised to see us in bed, nor are we bothered by it. Still, I tell myself, it’s curious to make love in a café; even if we furl ourselves in the sheets as much as we can, you can still see the movement of the covers. Anyway, we begin a complicated gymnastics of undressing. It’s simple enough for me, but for P. it’s much trickier.

  At one point she gets up and unhooks her bra. Her breasts are swollen and purple, spangled with stains, or rather with hematomata from exceptionally voracious suction, prolonged and repeated. I am jealous of the man who did this to her.

  She rises, gets out of the bed wearing nothing but a transparent T-shirt, goes to put a record on the player and announces the song to the people in the café, then goes into a slightly more discreet corner, takes off her T-shirt and comes back to bed, hiding most of her breasts and privates with her arms and the bit of fabric.

  Now someone serves us food on a long table alongside our bed, where two diners are already seated. They toss us a menu: appetizers, entrée and dessert. I order only a steak. They put in front of me a very strange dish, telling me it’s an appetizer, then that no, it’s a dessert for the diner at the end of the table. My steak arrives, but it looks terrible.

  No. 36

  December 1970

  At the department store

  I am in New York with P. We want to go to a department store whose roof we saw over the tops of some houses.

  We’re in a car. I don’t know who’s driving. We have trouble orienting ourselves and eventually take one-way streets in the wrong direction.

  We get to the department store and go into the elevator. The floors are indicated by a black needle on a circular dial, like on a pendulum. We arrive on the 10th floor, but the needle says it’s the 2cd.

  We get off the elevator. We’re in the home linens aisle. P. looks at beach and bath towels; she actually wants to buy sheet bleach or bleach sheets.

  Almost everyone is speaking French, but with American phrases mixed in. I exchange some words with two men. Then two other men appear, young and completely naked.

  They go down the stairs. One of their backs is covered in little dry round patches that overlap like roof shingles. I think (or say) “multiple sclerosis,” then I corr
ect myself: “dermosclerosis.”

  I leave P. to go look in another aisle. I take the elevator again. This time, the floor indicator seems to move at random; at first it calls to mind a wet wristwatch, then I realize there’s a double mechanism operating the arrow, the first corresponding to floor and the second connected to a clock. Indeed, there is not one but two sets of numbers on the dial, one set larger and in black, the other tiny and in red.

  Getting off the elevator, I find P. At the foot of the elevator is a packet (a Moses basket) containing a purse that P. lost the previous night in the river, and two packets of sheet bleach, which consists of little white balls, sort of like naphthalene, that whiten sheets in the wash.

  No. 37

  December 1970

  The plasterer