La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

No. 28: October 1970 (Neuweiler)

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.