Georges Perec - La Boutique Obscure - 124 Dreams

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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…….…

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.

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.