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
No. 59: March 1971
The avenger
/ /
/ /
After a long absence, the Avenger returns to Mexico. A traitor is about to shoot him in the back when a gloved hand rises up and stops him.
Long horseback rides to protect watering holes and secret sources.
In town, riots break out. The gates of the grand plaza have been torn off, the posters torn down.
The country is dominated by a petty tyrant, a servant of Yankee imperialism.
Many twists and turns, which become gags in the style of Lucky Luke.
/ /
No. 60: March 1971
Bread liberation
A “Brechtian” musical comedy.
1
We are marines. We are shipping off to war. There is great confusion in the passageway. Nobody knows exactly which room to take.
2
We have set sail.
The liner, viewed from above: majestic. It’s understood this war is going to be something terrible; it seems as though a bomb is going to fall right on the liner.
The liner is full of oblong compartments (not unlike coffins) arranged in long parallel rows, some of which have lids that clack shut (when the “coffin” is empty) while others stay stubbornly closed. It’s like a Busby Berkeley ballet, or like the bank of mussels Alphonse Allais taught to play the castanets. Soon it’s clear that these are crew cabins, then that it’s the bread, which is sealed (vacuum-packed under a nylon sheath).
3
GREAT CAMPAIGN FOR THE LIBERATION OF BREAD
With a friend (H.M.) I’m performing a duet dance number, very Astaire-Kelly, while singing:
Don’t shut away the bread
The bread must be free (ad. lib.)
We persuade various trade associations, who are seen for just a moment in intensely colored close-ups in the film. Thus, a “mustachioed General Boulanger.”
4
Large demonstration.
My friend (or is it me?) takes a microphone that has dropped down from the sky and shouts:
“In a few seconds, under the direction of [stumbles through a comically overlong name], the Marine Orchestra will perform the Bread Liberation.”
Music. The musicians are far above us. We’re on the quay and they’re on the liner.
5
I find a friend (or it’s still H.M.). He shows me his new wife (he used to have an enormous wife, like an Italian matriarch): a slender woman in a long coat.
I insist on going to their house, but he begins to embrace and caress his wife and soon I find myself caressing her too and, finally, naked on top of her and, though she crossed her legs at first, planted strong and deep inside of her.
No. 61: March 1971
Rougeot
Moved by a sort of premonition — one entirely vindicated by what would happen — I arranged for C.T. not to stay and made a “backup meeting” with P. at the Rougeot restaurant near Montparnasse.
At Rougeot, I find P. with F. I am furious.
P. says to me only:
“Indeed, Rougeot really is quite good.”
No. 62: March 1971 (Sarrebruck)
Dream B.
One of the singers I am to meet tomorrow is a granddaughter of Miss B.
This surprises me at first — Miss B. is not married and has no children — until I remember having met, long ago, in Switzerland, a young Yugoslavian couple of which the man was also a grandchild in the B. family.
I can’t even believe this memory had never come back to me.
No. 63: March 1971 (Sarrebruck)
Urban Western
(Revenge. Each side counts its dead. Sniper rifle. On the train. Passing through customs. Flowers in their vases. (Pseudo-)leftist pamphlets)
At the end, I’m supposed to go with the customs agent to see his manager. He tells me to wait in the dining car. It seems empty at first, but all of the tables are taken. The bar stools are free, but some children playing in front of the bar have put their lottery cards on them.
I look out the window. A soft hill. This is the exact spot where, last year, the Vigilante launched his attack on us.
The train begins again. I look at a map. We have just left Buda, we are crossing a bridge, a long island, another bridge, before stopping again in Pest where, I hope, I will find the solution.