It’s during the Occupation. Germans everywhere. Sleepless night in a farm taken over by the underground. Scenes from the resistance.
Later, nothing but the evocation of these memories. There is an interviewer, like in The Sorrow and the Pity, which someone calls “The Sorrow and the Service,” which, I don’t know why, makes me think of a pun:
“What’s the matter, Victor? You look lost!”
/ /
No. 100: December 1971
Finland
I finished my military service in a large citadel in the suburb of Malakoff. It was an immense fortress surrounded by an enormous network of roads.
On the way back from leave, I drive around it in a car. Here and there from the road you can see the huge towers of the fortress pop up, with innumerable concrete stairways leading up to it.
A change of posting brings me across the citadel to look for the health services office. It’s on the twelfth floor of one of those towers. It takes me a long time to find the right one. I get into an elevator: it’s a horizontal platform that slides at high speed along four dangerously slick walls. You have to avoid coming into contact with these walls (a vaguely upsetting feeling).
On the twelfth floor there is no health services office, but an immense drugstore, whose aisles are the size of streets. Thus I arrive at a sort of impasse. At the end is (maybe) health services (it’s a hospital, or an infirmary, or maybe even a bank). On the right there’s a small hotel, the “FINLAND” hotel, according to a neon sign out front.
I go into this “FINLAND” hotel and head for the bar. I notice right away that there is no Christmas tree. Deeply moved, almost in tears, I explain that there will be no Christmas party this year.
/ /
No. 101: January 1972
Disorder
All at once I realized there were damp stains on my living room carpet. Maybe it’s the cat.
I pat and sniff: nothing. But there’s a lot of it, everywhere.
I walked into my kitchen: it was an unbelievable mess.
It seems like a large section of the (blue) wall has come off, but it’s only a plastic trash bag in a corner over the sink.
I decided to clean up and, first of all, to change.
I tried, with no luck, to get into a pair of brown corduroy pants that are obviously too small for me: they clearly belong to. and I’m surprised she didn’t take them with her.
No. 102: January 1972
1
Towers
Near La Rochelle, where I’ve just spent a few days with a woman I didn’t know very well. She is driving. She keeps getting lost, trying to get back to the large tower that stands in the center of town.
2
We can also see the tower on the horizon, straight up ahead. We go in that direction. The road is straight. We pass several statues and monuments: the statue of Liberty, large buildings with apartments like cells in a beehive. At last, I am seeing real examples of the contemporary architecture I’d only encountered in books! These are only housing projects, barely finished and already old …
3
We get to the station running very late.
We walk past the ticket window without paying. We get onto a train (where are our bags? what did we do with the car?)
There are no seats.
The train is packed.
Our itinerary, it seems, joins up directly with the métro, or with a circle railway. It seems like we’re being negligent, that we should take advantage of such correspondences more often …
4
Crossing? Tunnel?
5
In Paris, we look for a taxi. We have to cross a vast esplanade where the fascist “New Order” movement has organized an automobile gymkhana.
Seems to me we’re not far from the Bois de Vincennes …
No. 103: January 1972
The tomb
Time: around Christmas
Place: around Paris
1
slipping and sliding on kilometers of stonework with big protruding pebbles (puddingstone)
2
the kit (for repairs): it contains a “cutter,” a pastry punch, a hammer, a suitcase handle missing its screws …
3
the pun is a bear to get my bearings: a glass of bear!
4
In the distance, the towers from last night’s dream
5
We come to a town: Versailles.
6
Grotesque, police force, parade.
7
We are caught, in spite of ourselves, in the parade; it’s led by a drum major, an old flabby Belgian clown (Valentin the Boneless).
8
Finally we get to the cemetery. Commotion.
I find myself in front of a tomb where distant relatives of one of us (there are three of us, with shifting identities) are laid.
I bend over the grave.
There are portraits encrusted in the stone; one is of a Eurasian woman whom I recognize as Madame Vidal-Naquet, a famous psychiatrist of her time.
I feel tears rising to my eyes, and soon I am weeping abundantly.
No. 104: February 1972
A dream by P.:
The third person
I am standing on a hotel balcony (overlooking the sea? the Seine? the road?). A couple comes up. The woman asks for the phone book; she specifies that it’s white — maybe it’s the most recent edition — and that, since she knows it, she’ll have an easier time finding what she’s looking for. A woman who was standing next to me (the hotel manager?) gives it to her: it’s actually several unbound volumes that aren’t white.
Later, a whole section of the same balcony is occupied by diners. I am at a table with several people. At the next table is the woman from earlier (it wasn’t the hotel manager, just a guest like the others) with her husband: Mr. and Mrs. Cruel. Mrs. Cruel still has the phone book. I want to check something in it; I ask for the volume corresponding to the letter of the name in question, she seems to refuse; I explain to her what I want, and finally she gives it to me and I take it with a knowing look.
I flip through the “phone book,” which turns out to be a sort of Cruel family album. The frontispiece for a chapter in the middle of the book is a photo of the Cruels’ son. He is in the middle of a group of three: on the left, his father, who looks exactly like him, and who is a sort of cruel-looking Sami Frey, very brown, black eyes, thirty years old. The child must be about twelve; he seems kinder, blonder, his eyes are bluer. Suddenly I realize the photo is animated: the eyes are moving, the father’s look is extremely mean and filled with rage, and the son’s eyes are moving as well.