La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

No. 71: May 1971

The bus

… first there’s the frightfully complicated consultation of a restaurant menu, which ends with going up and down staircases, perhaps in pursuit of indifferent maîtres d’. All we want to know is how long this or that dish will take to prepare.

It seems the waiting times are so long that we have time to go play a game of Go somewhere fairly far out of town.

We get on a bus.

I’m sitting in the middle of the bus, on the left side. Jacques R., his wife and his daughter are in front, on the right, near the door.

At the back of the bus (so I can see only if I turn around) is a sort of display stand, which I find at once elegant, practical, and banal; by banal I mean that someone should have thought of it long ago.

At one point the bus stops and Jacques R. gets off. We seem to be right by Notre-Dame de Lorette, where he lives. His wife is no longer there. But someone makes a comment to the effect of:

“Why is he getting off when his wife is here?” to which someone else replies:

“No, idiot, that’s his daughter.”

Anyway, the bus leaves. It has become a passenger car. At the wheel is Pierre L. or Jean-Pierre P. It quickly becomes clear that they’re driving very badly; for starters, they go the wrong way down a one-way street.

I am in another car next to the (unidentified) driver and we’re increasingly sure that they’re going to get in an accident.

Indeed, a bit later, on a large and busy road, there is a spectacular pileup, though it proves soon enough to have caused more noise than harm.

The two drivers of the crashed vehicles are circling each other in a slow ballet. Pierre L. (or Jean-Pierre P.) has a crank in his hand; the other driver holds a brick. They rush at each other, stop, Pierre L. leaves, then suddenly turns around and mimes hitting the other driver.

Oil flows from the car

A large puddle collects by the side of the road and grows to the size of a river where washerwomen come to beat their clothes.