La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

No. 119: June 1972

Rue de l’Assomption

I have rented an apartment at 10 or 12 rue de l’Assomption, beneath where Jo A. lives on the second floor.

I’m getting ready to repaint it.

I go to buy groceries on rue Fontaine, but I can’t find good cheese. I would have liked to find a very dry goat cheese.

I come back. J. has come to help me paint. But neither she nor P. wants to go back out to look for cheese.

I go down myself, furious, but my anger subsides once I get to the street.

I pass in front of the house where I lived between my tenth and twentieth years, in front of the Lycée Molière.

What a shame, I think, that this isn’t my month to describe this street!

There have been major changes on the street: just after the butcher shop at no. 52, a cinema — no, that one I remember I know, but a second cinema, brand new, and even a third, where they’re playing a movie about auto racing starring Maximilien SHELL (the name in big letters) and Trintignant (but no “Jean-Louis” and the name very small).

I go into a cheese shop on avenue Mozart. The cheeses look like fat slices of brain. Many entanglements. No goat cheese. It takes ages to get served.

I buy a single (fairly small) piece of cheese. It costs 8 francs 70. That’s highway robbery! Moreover, it takes ages to pay too: the merchant makes a long series of little signals to the clerk, who passes them on to the cashier. The cashier asks me for 8 francs 65.

I go back to pick up my parcel. The merchant initially gives me a lovely one, large and beautifully wrapped, then changes his mind, because that one’s not mine; but he can’t find mine. He looks for another bit of cheese to give me, but the only pieces he can find are rotten. Meanwhile, he has begun make — extremely slowly — a Tunisian delicacy: making it the traditional way is an art unto itself; the gherkins are cut lengthwise in extremely fine slices, the different sizes applied just so.

A conversation about Tunisia starts up among the clients. Someone asks me if the climate is good for sinus infections. No, I say, it’s too humid. (but) Marcel C. goes there to take care of his rheumatism. He goes to Djerba. He has friends there, which lets him get away from the tourist frenzy that, as they say, rules the Island.

To get back to rue de l’Assomption, I will take the other half of the rectangular perimeter formed by