Georges Perec - La Boutique Obscure - 124 Dreams

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.

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.

At the café

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.

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.

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.

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 10 thfloor, 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 correct 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.

The plasterer

I am back in Dampierre for a big party. I’m confident and optimistic but, in the immense kitchen and the many dining rooms, a crowd of people who are all more or less familiar, but neither Z. nor her children. I look for her in the park.

Shouts are heard: Niki! Niki! Niki arrives with her seventeen dogs, who jump on me and nearly knock me over, but then they prove affectionate and frisky. Though she’s met me only once, Niki shakes my hand enthusiastically and suggests that I call H., one of our mutual friends, to invite him to join us on Wednesday. Alas, I tell her, on Wednesday I won’t be there anymore.

I walk through kitchens and dining rooms again. There are more and more people and there’s not enough food for everyone. The crowd is getting restless. New arrivals are announced (Z.? food?). People watch the road with binoculars; it’s a straight road that goes on forever, but no sign of any arrivals.

Did I see C.? Did I see S.? Did they tell me their mother was waiting for me? Her room is dark, but at one point I saw a hand wiping a window (the glass of a small square window) with a red-checkered handkerchief (Vichy).

A bit later.

Maybe Z. is in the children’s building. It’s a cardboard house. To enter the ground floor, you have to first cross an extremely narrow but apparently extensible hallway. I go in head first, wondering whether — or rather almost not being surprised that — my shoulders will fit. I’ve already made it half of the way, but inside I see a worker appear (without knowing why, I call him a plasterer): he is coming from the staircase to Z.’s quarters and going toward another staircase. He is holding an electric drill with a heavy-duty sander on it.

I pull myself out of the duct, which almost seems to come with me, nearly collapsing the whole structure.

At my feet there is someone whom I take at first for a small child, a thin and puny being with an elongated head and skinny little limbs.

The children’s building is now a two-story caravan with a wood and copper double door (like the door of a sleeper car). I want to go in through this door, and so does the small child, but I take him by the scruff of the neck and throw him back out. I realize then that it’s a small animal, a bit like a cartoon skunk. It scratches and bites me. It looks mean.