Free La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams by Georges Perec

it’s a modest (and flirtatious) game rather than a real act of modesty. For my part, amused, I pretend not to look at her while I explain to Michel’s ex-girlfriend that the apartment is large enough to accommodate everyone, provisionally.

6
     
    I try to go back to the other part of the apartment. I wander the halls, and soon wind up in a neighborhood being torn down.
    The sense I get is somewhat like the one you get upon seeing a façade barely transformed (or recognizable though profoundly transformed) after it’s been covered for a long time by a wooden fence (like the “TARIDE” building at Mabillon): here, at last, is the final look that this house, this street, this neighborhood will have! How long we have waited! That’s just what I thought it would look like! (like a statue being unveiled to inaugurate it).

7
     
    There actually is an inauguration ceremony, not to place the first stone but to make the final blow (Tabula rasa). Without wanting to, I wind up alongside the procession, which passes me slowly until I begin walking faster to pass it. First there are a few cops, then a delegation of gentlemen in uniform (who are nonetheless plainclothes men) and finally a group of young men in uniform (some kind of athletic tracksuits), whom I think I recognize as reserve officers but who are in fact “    .” One of them comes up and specifieswho they are: they live in groups of 30 in special houses (their name, followed by the designation “iary,” is what these houses are called) and they take 30-day oaths of chastity. I almost burst out laughing at the sound of this act of faith, but the young man looks at me with an amused smile too. I walk to the opposite sidewalk to rejoin my friends across the street.

8
     
    I’m in a bar. There are two rooms, one large and one small, joined by a thin hallway where the proper bar (the counter) has been set up. I’m at the bar, perched on a stool. My friends are in the large room. Among them is Nour M. and, certainly, one of the girls from Michel’s apartment.
    I drink vodka at first, then whiskey.
    I buy cigarettes. At one point I pay and there is a minor but quickly resolved problem in the accounts, something that’s been paid for twice or something that hasn’t been paid for. The girl leaves. I walk out with her; she gives me her address. I seem to understand that it’s 5 rue Linné, or maybe on the street that runs along la Halle aux vins, where the Lutèce theater is, but it’s another street, a parallel one, not the rue des Boulangers but a street bordering the Arènes de Lutèce.
    I go to find Nour and suggest that we go to dinner. Two of his companions want to go to a “full show” (dinner, drinks, dancing, etc.) but I prefer to go somewhere quiet. We decide to all go to a restaurant I know near Denfert or Glacière.

No. 83
July 1971 (Lans)
     

The bank note
1
Vacation
     
    L. is on vacation. We’re staying at his place, in a dormitory, waiting for his return.
    In the middle of the night I wake up and go into an adjoining room. I flip through the books and magazines on a table. / /. It’s not impossible that that’s when I happen upon the clipping from
L’Express
.
    Someone comes in and asks for L. He’s on vacation, I say. He looks at me carefully, tells me he thinks he believes me and asks if I’m not Z.’s boyfriend. I say (smiling “sadly”) that I was.
    There is light coming from L.’s office.
    I go back to the common room. I sit down on a corner of the table. There are several open bottles, and I pour myself a glass of beer. It’s not tepid; it’s cold. I am totally demoralized. Someone, a young woman (M.F.), sweeps a bit in my corner, wipes the crumb-covered table, which comforts me somewhat.
    / /

2
Oedipus-Express
     
    Home. R. comes in. He takes off his coat—it’s a mariner’s peacoat—and sighs that he’s totally broke and needs me to support him. I tell him to make himself at home. He looks at B. who is walking around