La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

No. 58: March 1971 (in the morning following the night of dream no. 57)

Snow

(… no doubt I finally called

M. who told me to come get her)

I find her almost in front of her building. She’s smiling. We begin walking arm in arm. She’s wearing a white jacket with four pockets and I only a T-shirt. I realize I have only 20, or 40, or 60 francs in my pocket, though we’re planning to have dinner at Balzar; but I tell myself it’s okay because I can always tell the maître d’ that I’ll come back and pay the next day; a bit later, I realize it’s even easier for us to go to a bar where I settle my tab monthly.

Though I’m not expecting anything in particular from this evening, thinking I’m still indifferent to M., I realize bit by bit that M. loves me. At one point, we kiss. For an instant I am flooded with joy, but soon some concerns surface. First of all, M. seems much taller than usual, almost too tall for me; I have to stand on tiptoe and crane my neck up to see her face! Also, her hair isn’t done as it usually is; half of it is blown up in front with large swooping waves. Her eyes are not exactly her eyes, but they’re still pretty eyes.

We resume walking. She hooks her left arm around my waist and, laughing, caresses my navel and fly with her long fingers. She presses against me. I harden at the contact with her stomach, my hands gliding along her smooth back.

We keep walking. She tells me she sent her children to boarding school; she tried to kill herself but she doesn’t tell me how. Now she lives at Hôtel Degotex.

“If you could see my room!” she tells me, laughing.

I tell her that she will come live with me and that she’ll be perfectly happy there.

A girlfriend of hers joins us. We arrive in the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève neighborhood. We climb up a narrow, sinuous street. Soon the pavement is replaced with thick, close-cropped grass. Two passenger cars pass us. In one there is a mourning woman, in a state of complete prostration.

Soon it becomes a snowy path, less and less passable. Lots of people are getting worn out climbing up the sides. We make painstaking progress. I see that my grey sock has a hole in the toe, then it’s just a bit worn, then it’s covered with its shoe (it’s a Church Bros. shoe). I was also surprised to be wearing only socks.

At the very end, a little ice cliff that’s very difficult to climb. You have to plant an ice axe in the ice, well above your head, balance on it (execute a difficult pull-up), balance on the axe before you can try to touch the top of the cliff with your fingertips and make it up there with another pull-up.

But before even getting that far, you have to climb a rather steep still hill heap. M. goes for it. I want to follow her but I can’t. All of my will (and it’s the only thing I want to do at this moment) is useless; my muscles are like cotton.

M.’s friend signals to us to come down; a bit farther on is a road that goes straight off, with no snow on it.

We are somewhere near Lans.

Did we cross a mountain pass?

It seems to me that this road and the path we’re coming from are part of the same valley.

This vaguely frustrating situation seems to be written on a chalkboard that someone is carrying by and which says something like

There are not two passes

They meet

There is only one pass

There is no pass

There is nothing