La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

No. 85: August 1971

Balls and masks

Passing by on the street, I stop to watch a tennis match and mix in with the players, who are apparently indistinguishable from the other passersby. At the end of a service, I catch a fairly difficult ball, earning the praise of one of the players (who is none other than Marcel C.). This sets off a chain of events: he thinks I know how to play; I don’t dare disabuse him; he offers me the service.

Though the ball is terribly large and my racket ridiculously small, at first it doesn’t go too badly. There is no net: the point is to send the ball over the fence in the park. I manage to send my first two balls to the other side and much farther than my opponent can reach (he doesn’t even try), which gets us to 30-love. But the ball grows, finally looking like a slightly flat leather punching bag, and I can no longer get it over the fence. I think we’ve lost only one point, but my partner (Bernard L.) tells me sternly that we’re trailing 50–40 and that if I don’t catch up we will lose the service (just the service, which isn’t so terrible: we’d be one game to one). I explain to him that I can’t send such a heavy ball over with such a small racket and he offers to lend me one of his. Sure enough, under his arm he has two rackets that he’s not using, which he has even put back in their presses (high wooden diamonds closed with four butterfly screws). These rackets are strange: they look like “old rackets” (like violas to violins, crumhorns to bassoons); one of them has an extremely large wooden frame and the racket itself (the stringed part) is a tiny round (not oval) hole that is obviously stringless. This is the one Bernard L. hands me; I tell him it has no strings and that I can’t play with it. He begins to unscrew the press of the second racket, then thinks again and, almost angrily, gives me back the first one, insisting that it’s perfectly strung. Sure enough, when I examine it closely I see that the hole is furnished with a fine network of gossamer threads.

First I try to serve by throwing the ball myself. But the ball and racket are much too heavy. My partners throw the ball while I hold the handle of the racket with two hands. I manage to hit the ball, but not hard enough: the ball falls short of the fence and the point is lost …

Another time, I played a game of chance and won an enormous amount of money (several thousands of new francs). The losers don’t seem very happy but don’t put up any particular fight to pay me. Nonetheless, just before I leave the gaming table, we begin to play again and I lose a negligible sum, say 100 francs. This seems to mean: We can make you win but we can also make you lose when we want and don’t you forget it.

I put the roll of bills in the breast pocket of my shirt. It sticks out a bit.

I live in the annex of a hotel. It serves as a prison as well. A group of prisoners (whose arrest, it seems to me now, I also witnessed) arrives. The henchmen are almost entirely shut up in these shiny metal shackles that bind them like clothes or masks. There is also a man whose neck is held in a leather and steel “platen,” which is actually an instrument of torture. Besides this man, the henchmen are a wolfhound (also wrapped in irons) and a woman. The head of the gang is dressed in a habit.

The jailor’s daughter shuts one of the prisoners in a room that’s next to mine but a bit beneath it. I run into her as she’s coming back up after double-locking the door. Our eyes meet and we smile at one another. I invite her to have a drink and she accepts eagerly.

We’re on a fairly huge esplanade. We’re looking for a bar. There is one, a very narrow one, all the way up (the next-to-last house on the plaza), but we find it ugly (or bad).

F. passes by. We shake hands. I tell him I was waiting for him to visit later. He reminds me that we were supposed to have dinner, and leaves.

The jailor’s daughter is surprised by all the money sticking out of my breast pocket. I tell her that I played, that I won several thousand francs and that I am relieved of the financial troubles that had been dogging me for some time.

We wander through various streets. We remember that there is a pub at the end of rue de Boulainvilliers. I think, “in petto,” that there should also be one on rue des Vignes, on the plaza of the “Ranelagh” cinema.

We go down the rue Raynouard. We’re in a car and I’m driving. I’m not really driving: I have stopped the motor and the car is following the slope, which is also getting steeper and steeper. Far in front of us, there’s a bicycle hurtling downhill alone and, farther still, a car that we recognize as belonging to Harry M. (but there’s nobody in it either).

The descent is increasingly dizzying, spectacular and intoxicating. There are huge bends and at some moments we fall nearly vertically. We’re prodigiously excited. We slalom past all the other cars.

Of course, at the bottom, there is an impossible traffic jam — vehicles have fallen into the river by the hundreds and sailors are struggling to fish them out. People are walking on barge trains. We see our car sticking out of the water; it’s a heap of dripping scrap metal (actually, no: it’s not so much a heap; you can easily make out the form of a car, but it’s an empty form, just the skeleton of the chassis).

We look for Harry M.’s car but don’t find it. Decidedly, every time he is with me, Harry has bad luck with his cars — this is the second time this has happened to him.

We ask the sailors for insurance forms. They tell us that won’t be necessary: our car and Harry M.’s will be paid for entirely, without any trouble, even if the remains are not found.

There is a very simple explanation for the easy reimbursement. The sailors don’t give it to us but let us guess, saying: “In Grenoble and in Romans, they’re only too happy to pay X francs for a trout.”

Which means:

a) car accidents happen all the time on this river;

b) they wouldn’t happen if not for the huge rocks in the middle of the river;

c) but they intentionally leave the huge rocks in the middle of the river so that the trout (and the trout fishers) come in droves …