We get off the elevator. We’re in the home linens aisle. P. looks at beach and bath towels; she actually wants to buy sheet bleach or bleach sheets.
Almost everyone is speaking French, but with American phrases mixed in. I exchange some words with two men. Then two other men appear, young and completely naked.
They go down the stairs. One of their backs is covered in little dry round patches that overlap like roof shingles. I think (or say) “multiple sclerosis,” then I correct myself: “dermosclerosis.”
I leave P. to go look in another aisle. I take the elevator again. This time, the floor indicator seems to move at random; at first it calls to mind a wet wristwatch, then I realize there’s a double mechanism operating the arrow, the first corresponding to floor and the second connected to a clock. Indeed, there is not one but two sets of numbers on the dial, one set larger and in black, the other tiny and in red.
Getting off the elevator, I find P. At the foot of the elevator is a packet (a Moses basket) containing a purse that P. lost the previous night in the river, and two packets of sheet bleach, which consists of little white balls, sort of like naphthalene, that whiten sheets in the wash.
No. 37: December 1970
The plasterer
I am back in Dampierre for a big party. I’m confident and optimistic but, in the immense kitchen and the many dining rooms, a crowd of people who are all more or less familiar, but neither Z. nor her children. I look for her in the park.
Shouts are heard: Niki! Niki! Niki arrives with her seventeen dogs, who jump on me and nearly knock me over, but then they prove affectionate and frisky. Though she’s met me only once, Niki shakes my hand enthusiastically and suggests that I call H., one of our mutual friends, to invite him to join us on Wednesday. Alas, I tell her, on Wednesday I won’t be there anymore.
I walk through kitchens and dining rooms again. There are more and more people and there’s not enough food for everyone. The crowd is getting restless. New arrivals are announced (Z.? food?). People watch the road with binoculars; it’s a straight road that goes on forever, but no sign of any arrivals.
Did I see C.? Did I see S.? Did they tell me their mother was waiting for me? Her room is dark, but at one point I saw a hand wiping a window (the glass of a small square window) with a red-checkered handkerchief (Vichy).
A bit later.
Maybe Z. is in the children’s building. It’s a cardboard house. To enter the ground floor, you have to first cross an extremely narrow but apparently extensible hallway. I go in head first, wondering whether — or rather almost not being surprised that — my shoulders will fit. I’ve already made it half of the way, but inside I see a worker appear (without knowing why, I call him a plasterer): he is coming from the staircase to Z.’s quarters and going toward another staircase. He is holding an electric drill with a heavy-duty sander on it.
I pull myself out of the duct, which almost seems to come with me, nearly collapsing the whole structure.
At my feet there is someone whom I take at first for a small child, a thin and puny being with an elongated head and skinny little limbs.
The children’s building is now a two-story caravan with a wood and copper double door (like the door of a sleeper car). I want to go in through this door, and so does the small child, but I take him by the scruff of the neck and throw him back out. I realize then that it’s a small animal, a bit like a cartoon skunk. It scratches and bites me. It looks mean.
I make it into the caravan. It’s my room. Z.’s might be upstairs, but it seems less and less certain that Z. is even there.
The animal has managed to enter partway between the first and second doors. Suddenly I am so frightened that it will make it into my room, then scare me by hiding in the nooks and crannies, that I decide to kill it. I lay it across my lap; I squeeze its neck, it fights back, but weakly. It looks harmless (frightened, resigned, big sad eyes); its slender paws twitch in furtive little jolts. I squeeze harder. I realize I’m killing it, and soon it’s a small, motionless child. The pressure in his neck veins has increased, grown stronger and stronger, and suddenly stopped.
(I wake up, fingers all numb, soaked in sweat)
A bit later (waking dream)
I am in a dark room. In front of me is a door open onto a dimly lit room. A woman with grey hair and wearing a long dress comes and goes.
But what had been innocuous thus far, not even upsetting, is all at once horrifying: it’s the same woman as that character in Psycho (a young madman dressed like his elderly mother), the sight of whom (in Sfax, ten years earlier) had disturbed me so much that the whole of the night after I was kept awake just remembering my panic and hearing, under the bed and other furniture, noises made by an imaginary animal.
THREE DREAMS FROM J. L.
No. 38: 1966
The Palais de la Défense, I
I am in the Palais de la Défense. It is crumbling.
I rush down a staircase with my wife.
No. 39: 1968
The stone bridge
A stone bridge, at the crossing of a road and a river.
A signal sign indicates the name of the place:
(YOU)
In parentheses.
No. 40: 1972
The Palais de la Défense, II
I am in the Palais de la Défense. Its enormous vault seems to be opening, then closing.
Later: I am still in the Palais de la Défense. There is no longer a vault, or, rather, the vault, the palace, are everywhere.
No. 41: January 1971
The chase in Dublin
An action movie in color; the color is very flat, a fawn-toned monochrome, very “Hollywood” (like Douglas Sirk’s Captain Lightfoot or Raoul Walsh’s The World in His Arms).
It takes place in Dublin, in the XIXth century.
The single central character, whom I am shadowing, is a revolutionary chief who has either been handed over to the police or, rather, been sentenced to death by his former comrades.
He knows it.
He is walking with a small dog and he knows that as soon as two dogs come to track him it will be the signal for the assassins to show themselves.
He does not try to escape what is clearly inevitable; on the contrary, he keeps walking, shows his face all over town, goes into pubs, etc. People turn away from him, or look at him with hatred, spite or pity. But no dog will even come close to his dog.
But suddenly, at one point, the dog escapes her master and runs off.
Hasty run to catch her. For he is willing to die, but he does not want to know when and by whose hand.
Crossing courtyards
Scaling walls
Climbing stairs
Very upsetting: everything and everyone become threatening.
There are at least two shots of the same circular path (actually, the scene always goes in a circle and we end up where we began — like in an engraving by that Swiss artist whose name escapes me (Escher) or, rather, like being on a gigantic Mōbius strip.