I am amazed by this effect. I turn the pages and I come to another animated photo: a corner of a room in which you see the corner of the bed and the curve of a large bowl decorated with characters, which I recognize as the Cruels’ Roman bath. The child — he is eight — is crossing through the space toward a door on the left side, half open onto darkness, which I know is the bathroom (I’m surprised the Cruels don’t use the Roman bath for the children, which seems perfectly suited to just that use).
Later, another dream.
Upon waking up, I remember the dream with the phone book and realize I do not know who the 3rd person in the first photo is — I don’t think it was the mother.
No. 105: February 1972
The condemnation
At Jean Duvignaud’s request, I set up a mailing list for people he wants to send offprint publications to.
P. and I are going away for the weekend to a fancy hotel, maybe the Ritz. We’ve booked two large apartments (or suites). We’ve brought so many bags (suitcases and hatboxes) that the busboys have to make two trips to bring everything up in the elevator.
In the elevator. It’s a huge elevator, as big as a bedroom. We are preemptively happy, almost smug, about our luxurious weekend.
In P.’s room. A huge room, some of which is taken up by a bar. A reception is going full steam there. A small child is shoveling huge spoonfuls of chili con carne into his mouth.
I go down to the restaurant. P. is sitting at another table, looking very pretty. J.L. is sitting not far from me. At one point, he leads me to a corner of the room and begins talking to me about an imminent landing in Cuba. I interrupt: he’s talking too much. The room is full of spies.
This is when an old woman, a witch, stands up, points at me, and shouts something like:
“We will be saved but he must die!”
At first I’m frightened, as though this threat is going to be realized on the spot, but then I comfort myself, convinced that it’s an abstract threat, a metaphysical certainty not yet defined in time. However, I have been hoisted onto a sort of pedestal and people have begun worshipping me, which is to say licking my feet. I have barely become accustomed to this ritual when I realize they’re actually trying to assassinate me by knocking me from the top of my pedestal. I end up falling, but I manage to hang on to the bumps on the wall (which is still dangerously slick) and I land uninjured on the floor. From way up high, people are bombarding me with enormous boulders, but none hits me.
I have fled into the high grass; I have met up with a horde and we have wandered for several years, several centuries, following animal tracks (maybe I knew how to find the passage about animals in the book?).
After long centuries of wandering, we come back to the regions we fled. On the steppe, a city has been built. It is called Texas. We see firearms for the first time …
Texas is a new city, made of wooden houses. Mostly saloons. The town hall, where a meeting is about to be held, is in a back room between two saloons. This arrangement is rather surprising at first, but you realize quickly that it’s actually quite clever.
No. 106: February 1972
La Bibliothèque nationale
I’m working in the large reading room at the library. Alain G. comes and sits down at a table next to mine.
No. 107: February 1972
At the Kuntz restaurant
I am at the Kuntz restaurant. I call over an old man with white hair (a sort of maître d’) and a young waiter who — blocking the passage of another, older waiter who has to go to miraculous lengths not to spill anything while serving the neighboring table — brings me a text that I finally identify as a pastiche of “la fabrique du pré” (not exactly a pastiche, nor a copy, more of a text for which “la fabrique du pré” is the source text).
Next to us, there is a box of “After Eight” chocolates.
No. 108: February 1972
The play
… and perhaps the play has already begun and, after a little while, I realize (or remember) that I’ve gone to the suburbs to see it, that I know the actors and the director personally and that, to put it on, the producers might have found money to borrow — maybe 20,000 francs — in Dampierre.
The main character is a Byron who wants to be a Malatesta, which is to say a warlord who crushes his vassals under the pretext of bravery.
In one act, I am an actor: I am to shut off all the lights of a large house and I know that at the death of the lights something terrible will happen. This expectation triggers a light panic in me. But nothing happens.
Later, I’m laid out on a bed with a woman whom I eventually (surprised and stunned as though I had long dreamed of this impossible encounter) recognize as C. We are both overcome with an indescribable pleasure (even the word “ecstasy” gives only a distant, impoverished sense of it). I am on my back. C. mounts me, but she makes a quick movement that jolts me out of her. She begins to moan softly, which quickly excites me again. She kneels and, while she props herself up from behind, I enter her again. Coupled this way, we begin to creep on the carpet.
In the next room there are two men (one of them is F.). They see us, but it doesn’t bother us. It’s part of the play.
The next act takes place in the country. The heroine has become an ugly old woman. She is raising a bull, which we see escaping some kind of ditch. It doesn’t seem real. One character remarks that it would take only a slightly wild cat to take it down.
I have a long discussion with the man seated next to me, which ends up irritating me. He thinks the show is good because it demonstrates that the lord is a bastard, and this is what theater must demonstrate until there are no lords left. I don’t know how to respond. I think the show is awful, but that doesn’t mean the man next to me isn’t right, which makes me more and more uncomfortable.
Between each act, the characters come on stage, wearing outlandish hats. I remark to P. that, the larger the hats, the longer the actors strut about in them, a typical example of directorial demagogy.
The last act is a celebration. Everyone in the audience is invited to come on stage and follow a circuit lined with different attractions (including a game of ping pong). At the exit, they pass in front of a buffet where they are served a cup of coffee, black, no sugar.
After the performance, I called on the director and his wife (who was one of the actresses). I tried to make it clear that I didn’t care for the play. The director came back with a sheaf of papers; it was in these texts, he told me, that he found it was permissible to mix Byron and Malatesta.
I flip through the papers. Among them, I find a “Trois Suisses” leaflet advertising three leather telephone cradles. I was looking for exactly such furnishings, and they seem to cost much less than expected; meanwhile, the director, his wife and a third person are indeed seated (having removed their shoes) in such furnishings.