Georges Perec - La Boutique Obscure - 124 Dreams

From the outside, the house looks like a property surrounded by high walls, whose perspectives have been drawn such that no one could imagine an infinite space contained therein .

I move in indefinitely, to this house where many other people also seem to live already.

One day, I meet a girl on the street. She asks if I can put her up for a while. I say yes, without specifying that there’s nowhere for her to stay besides my room (which seems self-evident to me).

The house looks like Dampierre.

Each morning there is an assembly, like for a flag-raising ceremony.

From my window I see S.B. arriving in a car. She raises her eyes to me and smiles (but maybe there’s something dangerous in her smile).

Later: I’m leaving P.’s and going home by way of rue des Écoles. It seems clear to me that I will meet up with a girlfriend who will spend the night.

I do run into many people I know, but they either don’t see me at all, or too late …

The hypothalamus

It starts with a few harmless comments, but soon there’s no denying it: there are several Es in A Void .

First one, then two, then twenty, then thousands!

I can’t believe my eyes.

I discuss it with Claude.

You might think I’m dreaming.

Look again: no more Es.

Still!

But then again, yes, there’s one, another, two more, and again, tons!

How did nobody ever notice?

Looking at neighbors through binoculars? One has the right to do so, so long as one respects special rules and confines one’s observation to spatiotemporal sequences (as when one plays card games of patience).

I decide (still dreaming) to call this dream “the hypothalamus” because “thus is my desire structured.” I should (in that case) have called it “the limbic system,” which is a more pertinent term for all that refers to emotional behaviors.

The window

/ /

The navigators

The stairway

Fantasia

The photos

“You can see me when you want, but know that I don’t need you,” Z. tells me.

There are four of us. We’re coming back in a rowboat on the Seine. Soon it’s just me in the boat.

The river is filled with other navigators.

Rope

It’s the end of an American comedy. Judy Garland is bewitching her seducer. She runs across the promenade that goes past the Gare du Trocadéro (recognizable by its zoo). It’s 1900. The Eiffel Tower stands in the middle of a large meadow. Nonetheless, there’s an elevator. It’s a “shellevator”; its mechanism is slightly off, causing a small repetitive noise. I wouldn’t want to go up in it. Fortunately, there’s another elevator; it’s a cabin, but I missed the first one.

I get on the second. It’s like a funicular. I feel a friendly pressure on my hand.

At the top. There is an energetic old lady controlling the wire rope. Actually, it’s not a rope that secures us but a very long wooden beam.

We run on the glacier.

Soccer players beneath us cheer for us when we pass by (they’re villagers).

A. falls into my arms.

I see J. again. She’s so happy with the English translation she did of her old friend D.’s play that she’s started one in German with the help of a fat Sachs-Villatte dictionary. I’m pleased for her. She’ll make maybe 2000 marks on the radio, I tell her; how much will she give D.? Just 2 or 300 marks, she replies.

Resistance

An apartment I almost lived in looks like an apartment Z. had. It’s made up of one large living room and two duplex rooms.

But my apartment is square. I’m there with C. and Lise, and many others.

We’re walking in the street, in the country, we’re running.

It’s during the Occupation. Germans everywhere. Sleepless night in a farm taken over by the underground. Scenes from the resistance.

Later, nothing but the evocation of these memories. There is an interviewer, like in The Sorrow and the Pity , which someone calls “The Sorrow and the Service,” which, I don’t know why, makes me think of a pun:

“What’s the matter, Victor? You look lost!”

/ /

Finland

I finished my military service in a large citadel in the suburb of Malakoff. It was an immense fortress surrounded by an enormous network of roads.

On the way back from leave, I drive around it in a car. Here and there from the road you can see the huge towers of the fortress pop up, with innumerable concrete stairways leading up to it.

A change of posting brings me across the citadel to look for the health services office. It’s on the twelfth floor of one of those towers. It takes me a long time to find the right one. I get into an elevator: it’s a horizontal platform that slides at high speed along four dangerously slick walls. You have to avoid coming into contact with these walls (a vaguely upsetting feeling).

On the twelfth floor there is no health services office, but an immense drugstore, whose aisles are the size of streets. Thus I arrive at a sort of impasse. At the end is (maybe) health services (it’s a hospital, or an infirmary, or maybe even a bank). On the right there’s a small hotel, the “FINLAND” hotel, according to a neon sign out front.

I go into this “FINLAND” hotel and head for the bar. I notice right away that there is no Christmas tree. Deeply moved, almost in tears, I explain that there will be no Christmas party this year.

/ /

Disorder

All at once I realized there were damp stains on my living room carpet. Maybe it’s the cat.

I pat and sniff: nothing. But there’s a lot of it, everywhere.

I walked into my kitchen: it was an unbelievable mess.

It seems like a large section of the (blue) wall has come off, but it’s only a plastic trash bag in a corner over the sink.

I decided to clean up and, first of all, to change.

I tried, with no luck, to get into a pair of brown corduroy pants that are obviously too small for me: they clearly belong to. and I’m surprised she didn’t take them with her.

Towers

Near La Rochelle, where I’ve just spent a few days with a woman I didn’t know very well. She is driving. She keeps getting lost, trying to get back to the large tower that stands in the center of town.

We can also see the tower on the horizon, straight up ahead. We go in that direction. The road is straight. We pass several statues and monuments: the statue of Liberty, large buildings with apartments like cells in a beehive. At last, I am seeing real examples of the contemporary architecture I’d only encountered in books! These are only housing projects, barely finished and already old …

We get to the station running very late.

We walk past the ticket window without paying. We get onto a train (where are our bags? what did we do with the car?)

There are no seats.

The train is packed.

Our itinerary, it seems, joins up directly with the métro, or with a circle railway. It seems like we’re being negligent, that we should take advantage of such correspondences more often …