There could be scenes with a bit of a “Pepe le Moko” feel to them.
At one point, a bit distressed, I try to “make the image go faster” (to watch myself run up the stairs faster) but I can’t.
No. 42: January 1971
Making the meal
Z. is throwing a party for a friend. On the other side of a small partition, we — i.e., me supervising a crowd of kitchen hands — are making dinner. We’re in high spirits, we’re singing. I’m making some kind of cream, mayonnaise or flan, using lots of ingredients out of boxes: how easy this is! How appetizing!
But — maybe later, at the end — a small animal comes and eats from the plate.
I’m very cheerful. I am the fool, the favored entertainer.
No. 43: January 1971
Apartment
Henri G.’s apartment. Interconnected rooms in “quincunx formation.”
In each room, stereo equipment: tape recorders, radios, stereos, and more, and more, ever more perfect.
No. 44: January 1971
High fidelity
I am walking with P. across the “high fidelity” section of a department store. Maybe one of the appliances has a particularly remarkable shape?
No. 45: January 1971
The tank
P. and one of her friends and I have moved into an abandoned house. Though I recall having recently drunk water from the tap, we are told to use only mineral water, even to cook our food. But the bottle of water we find doesn’t even have a cap.
We sit down to eat. Under the table we find (a bit like a chewed and abandoned piece of gum) a bit of pâté. Though it is likely several days old, it doesn’t seem rotten in the slightest, but P. throws it out in disgust.
Out of the high, narrow window, I notice an immense tank. It’s actually a cliff, but it has the unmistakable look of a tank: large metallic plates covered with layers of varnish or paint that are chipping off in patches or coming loose from their base, like huge blisters. The whole thing looks muddy, dirty and slippery.
Soon I make out, moving from left to right, a small boy running on the upper tracks of the tank, which is really the length of a path carved into the face of the cliff. A man is chasing him. Another man pops up and blocks his passage. The child’s only chance of escape is to jump, but it’s truly a jump into the wide open and his life is at stake. It seems clear that he’s hesitant to dive, but at the last minute he loses his balance and jumps, like a child who is pushed into a pool and decides to make a dive of it once he realizes he’s going to fall into the water anyway.
At the very bottom of the cliff-tank is a lake that I can see from the window. P. and her friend are now on the opposite shore.
The child falls into the lake, feet first, but it’s as though he had jumped from only a few centimeters. There is very little water. The child keeps running toward the center of the lake, then, losing his footing, begins to swim. The two men swim after him. They are obviously cops and a police boat sets off from the bank and blocks the child’s path. He dives down and emerges a bit farther off, but this time he’s completely surrounded. Then a new person pops up: a man with a beard and maybe a pistol. He is threatening the police, not to kill them but to kill himself if they don’t let the child go. They do.
I catch up with P. on the bank. We recount indignantly what we have just seen, like a scandalous and revealing news story.
No. 46: January 1971
Concentration camp in the snow
or
Winter sports in the camp
Only a single image remains: that of someone with shoes made of very hard snow, or ice, irresistibly suggesting the idea of a hockey puck.
No. 47: February 1971
The Chinese restaurant
I am with Henri G. at a very expensive Chinese restaurant.
We’ve been discussing something in the news, no doubt a scuffle between some kids.
Now we see them, the kids, on television. They’re up on a pedestal, in military dress and performing various mass gymnastics.
No. 48: February 1971
The battery-operated alarm clock
1
I am at a bar with a fairly famous Italian actress. Though she is over fifty, she is a remarkably pretty woman, still in excellent shape. She is imagining without rejecting — on the contrary, with satisfaction — the notion of becoming my mistress. But the clock strikes six and she abruptly gets up and leaves.
2
P. has given me a battery-operated alarm clock; it is spherical and transparent, and has several little suction pads and two oblong pieces attached laterally on each side whose function is unclear. But Abdelkader Z. is playing with the pieces, losing them. The alarm clock is unusable. I am very angry.
3
Major railway strike. Red flags on the tracks block the trains. I walk along the rails, suitcase in hand. I enter a city, perhaps Grenoble. I cross an intersection where cops (all in plainclothes, looking almost friendly) are gathered. Before, I had pulled out of the ground one of the innumerable red flags that were planted there and covered my hand with it to carry my suitcase (a gesture I felt was in solidarity with the strikers).
I walk along the palisades. I get to a church. Actually, there are no walls, and the floor is made of macadam, like the street, but only a roof held up by pillars.
I look for the priest, who is not there, but I see him suddenly, hiding above his altar. He comes toward me and says:
“I want to be a father”
“But you cannot you are a priest”
He answers that it makes no difference.
Two herring merchants (the fat Marseillais sort) look at us.
4
The same scene but another setting.
I am at a friend’s house (maybe H.’s). I am dismayed because I have to return to the army. I haven’t finished my service yet. I calculate that I should be free again around February 15th. They could let it slide, since it’s not worth making me come back for so little time, especially since I’ll have to jump (with a parachute) the following day and all the requisite medical visits will take a long time.
My companions explain to me that they’re going to leave town and go back to Paris, and I won’t see them again.
Maybe the battery-operated alarm clock makes another appearance here.
No. 49: February 1971
M/W
In a book I’m translating, I find two phrases: the first ends with “wrecking their neck,” the second with “making their naked,” a slang expression that means “to strip naked.”