La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

1

The wedding

In Blevy. Bernard comes to pick me up. We’re supposed to film a minute of A Man Asleep. First I have to feed the cat and change its litter (the litter bag is quite full).

Bernard is accompanied by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 children.

We are filming (in Orly).

We come back. I’m not particularly happy; we pass, with difficulty, among second-hand shops: they are on the bare ground, selling heavily ornamented wooden plaques.

2

I meet S.B. For lack of money, she has not gone on vacation; she’s planning to go to Dampierre. I suggest that we go together: I could easily borrow the house in Villard (our old family home), or the one in Druyes, or others still.

We go, surely just for an hour (with the implicit intention of sleeping together), into Henri C.’s apartment on rue L. Henri C., who is not in Paris at the moment, has, in the same building — not at all a modern building, quite the opposite, an old building — two apartments: a flat on the ground floor (where I lived for a while) and a large studio at the top.

The doorman doesn’t recognize me, but proves to be very friendly. The key is in the mailbox and the mailbox is open. The key is thin and twisted; it doesn’t look at all like the key for a lock, but rather like the key for a deadbolt.

In the apartment. Large sheets of paper are spread out on the floor, with chalk marks on them. Then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, many young people: they’re Americans, dancers. I understand immediately that my niece has given them the key, which they confirm. They eat, and hand us plates with compartments for avocados, tomatoes, and?. They’re not the ones who were there (or in Villard) the previous week, but they’re from the same university. We talk about various things, and soon about Dampierre, which they know well.

The ballet begins, a marriage pantomime. Gags. The groom’s costume: yellow socks, white pants that go down to mid-calf, green shirt that hides his arms completely. He looks not so much like a one-armed man as like a bust.

The whole marriage procession passes in front of us, but, from time to time doubles of the wedding characters pop up: it’s very funny; there are more and more of them, and at the end it’s the same procession as it was at the beginning, but there is no longer a single dancer from the original lineup: all of them have changed.

Applause, like for a sports play.

The three main characters (the groom, the bride and the priest) are fake-decapitated, like in the

“Mysteries of the Organism.”

3

Thérèse and Marcel C. arrive; Thérèse is dressed like a lunchlady; she comes in through the door and sings. Marcel is at the end of a hallway. He is holding a guitar and singing too. I remember that they used to live here. But I didn’t know there was a secret passage between Marcel’s and Henri C.’s.

Next to the large room that we’re in, a long windowed hallway leads to a narrow room that’s probably a workshop or a storeroom for house painting equipment.

While wandering in an unknown room in his own apartment one day long ago, Marcel found himself at Henri C.’s.