62: A Model Kit

p.34

where people squeezed together sleep in rooms with tired furniture,

with dark curtains and a breathing in of dust and beer, [...]

I will lose you again on the street car or on the train,

I'll run in my shorts
among crowded people sleeping in the compartments
where a violet light
blinds
the dusty cloth, the curtains that hide my city.

p.57 (the silent attention of Madame Germaine with a duster on Wednesdays and Saturdays)

My profession condemned me to hotels, which wasn't too pleasant when I thought about my apartment in Paris, set up over fifteen years of preference, a bachelor's manias, tendencies of the left hand or the five senses, records and bottles in their proper, obedient places, the silent attention of Madame Germaine with a duster on Wednesdays and Saturdays, life without financial problems, the Luxembourg beneath the windows...

p.60 (sad smell of time)

A friend of bars and custom-houses, of refueling stops early in the morning and beds where memories wouldn't be mixed with the sad smell of time

p.114 (tunnel, spoons nail, posters)

There were few people on the Metro platform, people like gray blotches on the benches along the concave wall with tiles and advertising posters. Hélène walked to the end of the platform where the stairway permitted - but it was prohibited - entry into the tunnel; shrugging her shoulders, vaguely passing the back of her hands across her eyes, she went back to the illuminated part of the platform. That's how, almost without seeing them, you start to look at the enormous posters one after the other, the ones that violate distraction and seek their path in your memory - first a soup, then some eyeglasses, then a make of television, gigantic photographs where every tooth of the child who likes Knorr soups has the size of a matchbox and the fingernails on the man watching television like spoons (to drink the soup in the neighbouring poster, for example), but the only thing completely attracts me is the left eye of the girl who loves Babybel cheese, an eye like the entrance to a tunnel, a series of concentric galleries and, in the middle, the cone of the tunnel which disappears into the depth like that other tunnel where I would have to have entered by going down the forbidden stairs, and which starts to vibrate, to moan, to fill with lights and squeals until the doors of the train open and I get in and sit on the bench reserved for invalids or old people or pregnant women, across from the seats where undefinable pygmies with microscopic teeth and imperceptible nails travel along with the fixed and mistrustful expression of Parisians tied to salaries of hunger and bitterness that are mass produced like Knorr soups. For four or five stations there is a kind of absurd desire for madness, for a stubbornness in fixing the illusion, which might have been enough to suggest it, to take a mental step forward, to throw oneself into the tunnel on the poster so that it would become reality, the real stairway of life, and those people in the car reduced to a ridiculous size would become a mere mouthful for the girl who loves Babybel cheese, a slap of the hand for the giant watching television. Now, at the edge of the forbidden tunnel stairs, something like an abominable caress, a demand... Shrugging your shoulders, rejecting temptations one more time; you remain, Hélène, the bitter harvest of that afternoon remains; the day isn't over yet, you'll have to get off at Saint-Michel station, the people get their normal size back, the posters are exaggerated, a naked man is small, fragile, no one has nails like spoons, eyes like tunnels. No game will make you forget: your soul is a cold machine, a lucid register. You'll never forget anything in a whirlwind that sweeps away the large and the small to fling you into another present; even when you walk through the city you're yourself, inevitably. You'll soon methodically forget, with a before and an after; don't be in such a hurry, the day isn't over yet. Come on, here we are.

p.171 -2 (lost dog, streetcar, amusement park)

... in order to get to the Calle Veinticuatro de Noviembre I would have to take one of the countless street cars that paraded by like a ride in an amusement park, passing without stopping, their sides of peeling ocher, their trolleys full of sparks, an intermittent ringing of meaningless bells which could be heard at all moments and as if because of a whim, with people with hollow and tired faces in the windows, all of them looking down, a little as if they were looking for a lost dog among the bricks of the red pavement.