La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

by Perec, Georges

  I have a long discussion with the man seated next to me, which ends up irritating me. He thinks the show is good because it demonstrates that the lord is a bastard, and this is what theater must demonstrate until there are no lords left. I don’t know how to respond. I think the show is awful, but that doesn’t mean the man next to me isn’t right, which makes me more and more uncomfortable.

  Between each act, the characters come on stage, wearing outlandish hats. I remark to P. that, the larger the hats, the longer the actors strut about in them, a typical example of directorial demagogy.

  The last act is a celebration. Everyone in the audience is invited to come on stage and follow a circuit lined with different attractions (including a game of ping pong). At the exit, they pass in front of a buffet where they are served a cup of coffee, black, no sugar.

  After the performance, I called on the director and his wife (who was one of the actresses). I tried to make it clear that I didn’t care for the play. The director came back with a sheaf of papers; it was in these texts, he told me, that he found it was permissible to mix Byron and Malatesta.

  I flip through the papers. Among them, I find a “Trois Suisses” leaflet advertising three leather telephone cradles. I was looking for exactly such furnishings, and they seem to cost much less than expected; meanwhile, the director, his wife and a third person are indeed seated (having removed their shoes) in such furnishings.

  I wake up. Or I dream that I wake up.

  Much later, it seems—another day—I am in the suburbs with friends of recent minting, with P. and one of my friends, maybe R.

  I begin to recount my dream to them. Everything is perfectly clear. I write it down, bit by bit, on slips of paper that I take from my pocket.

  I begin the story of my dream backwards, with the part about the telephone cradles.

  We leave.

  Fruitless search for a taxi, somewhere by a port of Paris …

  P., exhausted, has fallen into a sort of landfill filled with yellowish mud, where she stays, facing the ground, motionless.

  Half laughing, half worried, I call to her, shouting her name:

  “Lise! Lise!”

  I realize that I have made a mistake and I call her again, correctly rectifying her name.

  Very angry, P. stands up and says to me:

  “If you want me to feed you, give me the name I gave to my mother because she fed me!”

  I realize that we’re hungry. I search in my pockets and bring out—joy!—thin slices of Chester cheese: the same slices I thought I was writing my dream on.

  No. 109

  March 1972

  Dives

  Two of my plays are being performed “urgently.”

  The older one isn’t going too badly, but the new one! All of my actors forget their lines. We have to stop the run. Irritation.

  Very elderly people pop up like shadows and begin to applaud. Is it because they think it’s over, or because they’ve just arrived?

  We run this new play again, but this time to music. A musician is directing the performance with the help of a “mixer” and is doing an excellent job of it.

  All of this might be happening in Dampierre.

  Conversation on a lawn. One participant is wearing camouflage fatigue pants. We share a common memory (between us and anyone who has jumped in a parachute): the difficulty of jumping with a hatchet at one’s belt. Many accidents.

  The game goes on and on

  Someone I was with leaves

  I no longer know where I am, where I’m going

  Furious, I go to the hotel office and demand—in French—that I be shown my room. The customs officer understands and speaks French: she will show me the way.

  I get lost in a maze of tiny staircases.

  It turns out I’m in a brothel. Three obese, cheerful women attack me in one of the rooms I explore while looking for my own. I run away. Another woman chases me (this isn’t so bad, actually).

  No. 110

  March 1972

  My shoes

  Did I lose my shoes? How did I lose my shoes?

  It was at a large carnival: you could take a spin in the air by mooring to the end of a rope attached to a ball and chain, or to balloons—the classic gag where the balloon salesman is carried away by his balloons.

  The trip ended on a very high platform. To get back to ground level, you could—this was one of the most popular attractions at the carnival—slide through a huge fabric tunnel (like an enormous sleeve filled with folds, like a gigantic spindly intestine): they told me it was very impressive and absolutely safe.

  It was quite agreeable, in fact (freefall, but totally safe) and, indeed, perfectly harmless.

  Leaving this apparatus, very satisfied, I went to sit down on a bench. It was then that I noticed I had lost my shoes.

  I call the employee responsible for the bottom and ask him to go check if my shoes haven’t wound up at the bottom of the apparatus. He tells me this is not possible. I insist, adding that these are lace-up boots, nearly new (someone just gave them to me), easily recognizable. But the employee continues to swear this never happens, could never happen. I have to insist for a long time before he decides to go look.

  Several times he comes back carrying shoes that are obviously not mine. Finally he finds one, then the other.

  A detail I had not yet spotted: at the tips of my soles there are two little metallic pegs that allow the boots to be instantly adapted to ice skates.

  No. 111

  March 1972 (Blevy)

  Reconstruction of a choice

  (whose very title indicates the degree to which everything is erased. It concerned a whole series of selections: which side to sleep on, which ear to choose, which lamp to light?)

  After a confusing interval, this becomes:

  the path of the father or the path of the mother?

  No. 112

  March 1972 (Blevy)

  Books

  In the coatroom of my laboratory there is a small window that looks out onto the back of a used bookstore. Leaning out this window, I see a whole pile of books presented such that they look like a single work encased in cardboard with a large black stain on the spine. The books form a set, which looks homogenous to me. The theme is a contemporary school with a medieval name—the Gay Sçavoir or the Saincte Sapience—which name is written in delicate calligraphy in black pencil. Scattered in this pile are some large Derrida books, an art book (maybe Claude Roy) and some thin pamphlets. I know the whole thing belongs to the collection of a friend of J.P., and it strikes me that these are exactly the books I’ve been searching for for a long time. The bookseller’s price is extremely modest, given the value and rarity of the titles, but I can’t quite make it out (29 francs? 37 francs?). I would obviously go see the bookseller to make a deal, but of course the store is closed.

  The cigarette I was smoking falls into the store and I am quite anxious (not so much out of fear that the butt will set the box of books on fire, more for the disturbing feeling of leaving a sign of my indiscretion) until I realize the butt has fallen onto a marble plaque on the parquet floor, on which there is already one butt, even several butts.

  Later. The morning. I get a phone call from J.P. He asks if I’m interested in a stack of books he doesn’t want, because a large black stain on the case is a blemish in his library. I tell him I saw them and am planning to buy them. Then he retracts his offer and tells me that, despite the stain, he’s keeping them for himself. I am furious. Why would he offer them to me if only to change his mind a moment later?

  No. 113

  April 1972

  The report

  I have an extremely important task to finish, and, to do it, I’ve set up at P.’s. I’ve used the big table to spread out all the papers I need to write a large report I have to hand in the next morning.

  Actually, I’m not working. There are lots of other people at P.’s too and working would be difficult.

  At one point, I take a walk
with C.F., whom I haven’t seen in a long time. I kiss her behind the ear. She asks me whether she should interpret that gesture as meaning that we have “come together.” I deny the thought immediately and explain to her the changes that have taken place in my life.

  We walk into a medieval courtyard. At the foot of a cathedral stands a Gothic construction, recognizable by its flying buttresses and lancet arch windows. I point out a window to her, saying I live there. She answers:

  “But that’s at least the fifth floor!”

  “No,” I say, “it’s the ground floor.” But, even as I say these words, I feel deeply troubled, since, indeed, from the outside, it’s indisputably much higher than the ground floor.

  I have returned to P.’s and gone to sleep, even though lots of people are still coming and going in the apartment. I tell myself I’ll have time, if I get up in the middle of the night, to finish my report for tomorrow. After all, this isn’t the first time I’ve done this; on the contrary, I’m quite used to doing it.

  I take stock of everything I have to write. This report is about a product (something like “Perspirex” or “Respirex,” it seems to me that, give or take a letter, it has the name of a product that actually exists) that has been tested on a cruise. I’ve made a list of everything I need to say. At some moments, it seems like I’m almost done, that nothing will get in my way; at others, I realize with despair that I haven’t even finished with the second point on my list (of more than a hundred).

  It was Patrice who assigned me this task. At some other point, I had gone down to call him and promised him my report the next day at 9 p.m. That’s already much later than the time we had initially agreed on. Patrice accepted (in all projects like this, it’s a given that they’ll be done at the last minute and they’re programmed accordingly), but it’s getting less and less likely that I’ll make it in time …

  No. 114

  April 1972

  The puzzle

  1

  The puzzle

  Along with a poorly identified person (maybe my aunt), I am visiting a sort of colonial trading post. At the very back of one room, we come upon a gigantic puzzle laid on a long, slightly inclined table. From far away, it looks like there is a nearly completed puzzle in the center—it’s of a Renaissance painting, with very bright and glossy colors—with other objects all around it. Close up, though, you realize the whole thing is a puzzle: the puzzle itself (the painting) is but a fragment of a larger puzzle, unfinished because it can’t be finished; the distinguishing feature of the puzzle is that it’s made up of volumes (cubes, roughly, or more precisely irregular polyhedra) whose faces can be combined at will: each face of cube A can be combined with each face of cube B, and not just two by two, as in children’s (cube) games. Thus there are, if not an infinite number, at least an extremely large number of possible combinations. The painting is only one of them; the fragments surrounding the painting are sketches, drafts, outlines of other puzzles.

  As proof, somehow, of this nearly limitless permutation, I take a piece from the side of one of the fragments (which are, I forgot to say, like the puzzle, not square or regular like most puzzles, but somehow “sideless,” without a rectilinear border) and turn it over for a few moments, then replace it at the side of another fragment, where it fits immediately.

  We go into another room, where we run into my niece Sylvia. It seems to me something very violent happens then (perhaps we break something?)

  2

  Felice’s letters

  (it seems that) I have in my possession the catalogue of first editions of Kafka’s letters to Felice. There are several editions, ranging from the most prestigious for 056 francs (the 0 must be a printing error) to the most common, which are numbered all the same, for 12 francs. It’s one of the latter that I plan to order. It seems that’s not so easy to do, but at least, I think, almost happily, when I’ve received the book it will no doubt contain a card that legally entitles me to order all the other original editions: I will be kept up to date on the most recent releases.

  3

  The three cats

  After a long trip, maybe, I return to Blevy (or is it Dampierre?). My whole family is there. My cat is sleeping in a corner of the room. I am quite surprised to see a second cat (much smaller and striped) in another corner of the room. I go to sit and I step on a third cat; this one is much larger. I don’t believe that this third cat really exists—come now, that’s impossible!—but it jumps up and scratches my face.

  No. 115

  April 1972

  A general history of transportation (excerpt)

  1

  It is not difficult to imagine a particularly exhilarating parking system: a giant spiral buried underground, whose slope has been so well calculated that it requires no more effort to go up than it does to go down with, in either case, a uniformly accelerating speed.

  The only condition is that there can never be more than one car at a time on the spiral: when there are two, one going up and the other going down, they are powerless but to run into each other, with disastrous consequences. The employees who operate the tollbooths, one down below and the other up top, the exit and entrance of the vehicles, thus have a grave responsibility, but, since they’re in cahoots, they can cause accidents easily: what better way to combine the perfect crimes?

  The spiral is made not of concrete but of very hard steel; its end is shaped like a screw: the energy generated by the vehicles traveling on it causes it to turn and it buries itself progressively (extremely slowly, but with virtually no cost) in the ground (a particularly hard rock that cannot be otherwise penetrated): this is how the foundations of gigantic buildings are dug out, with the assumption that there are several screws, which is to say several parking lots.

  2

  It’s fairly easy to go from the above to a project for a General History of Transportation, automobiles in particular. The director of the project is Alain Trutat, who was particularly enthusiastic when I suggested that we do a report on one of the least understood points—and yet one of the most important in this story: the hispanification (or more precisely the castillation, or castillification, or castillinization) of the Gascony concurrent to the rise to power of Catherine of Medici: even today, Gascon mentality, morals, and customs are completely incomprehensible if you forget that, for several decades, Gascony was purely and simply a colony, a protectorate, an appendage of Catalonia.

  I begin my report in a relatively banal classroom, before a scattered audience. Quickly I realize I haven’t prepared enough and, worse, I can no longer get my listeners to understand the simple relationship between the history of the automobile and the history of Spain.

  It’s going down the tubes. A total flop. I’m stammering. Alain Trutat leaves the room. To help create a diversion, someone suggests that we make music. A multi-instrument orchestra is established.

  I go out to take a walk. Maybe I want to find Trutat? I walk in a large French-style park covered in snow.

  I return to the room. A second orchestra has been formed under the direction of R.K., who seems to be the only competent musician in the group and who has taken matters in hand with great authority and, for that matter, efficacy. I want to play the flute, but I notice as I’m taking it up that I’ve broken the tip: I was holding the flute in one hand, and in the other a kind of rosary made of three long olive stones, white and maybe wooden, which was supposed to constitute the mouthpiece of the flute.

  A bit later, someone maybe hands me a clarinet.

  3

  / /

  No. 116

  May 1972

  The monkey

  After various twists and turns, I find myself sharing an apartment with a stranger. One of the oddities of this apartment is that it has a huge entrance-hall—much larger, in fact, than the other rooms, including the bedrooms. Maybe the shared entrance causes the first problem.

  In any case, I’ve written a score and this stranger, who says he is a musician, has offered to
play it. But I suspect he actually intends to steal it.

  Perhaps to apologize for this tactlessness, he introduces me to Adolf Hitler.

  Adolf Hitler is a grotesque clown, with pale skin and long hair: he is played emphatically and exaggeratedly, and at first ridicules his aide-de-camp, General Hartmann, a good old fat ruddy-nosed German who is obviously drunk: he can’t find the right key on his keychain, and is trying desperately to put his outfit in order—shirt and suspenders untucked, shako on his ear—to present himself before his Führer.

  Hitler begins by sweetly saying many nice things about Mariani. But bit by bit, as his speech continues, it gets increasingly pernicious and concludes as a torrent of foul curses.

  Adolf Hitler’s eminence grise is a monkey; it has a very long tail that ends in a hand (in a black glove?) and does not stop playing with itself (exactly like Marsupilami from the Spirou cartoons) to accompany and underscore its master’s speech.

  But I think at one point it loses its glove, or its whole hand.