La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 thetrains. 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 tojump (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