Yesterday evening a number of other soldiers and I unexpectedly left the Palais de la Mutualité, the depot where our company was more or less camping out. We were being transferred to some unknown destination in the same fashion that, without even leaving one's bed, one can set off at night in the direction of dream (Réve with a capital R, which expresses its royal majesty and its romanticism á la René) or of nightmare (whether it grunts like a pig or snores like someone sleeping).

As we return from our mission (which had taken us into some vague region of the southeastern suburbs, to the storage dump of the chemical weapons that had been evacuated from Laon to keep them from falling into the hands of the advancing German motorized divisions), there is an air-raid alert that holds up the train in the Melun station. We all have to take cover in the cellars of the Brasserie Grüber, whose metallic décor evokes some ancient foundry or gallery of machines rather than a place where hops are fermenting into ale.

Once the alert is over, we make our way back to the station where a number of retreating civilians are waiting with their various suitcases and packages.

Holding a black cat on her knees, an elderly lady exchanges grievances with another woman. As she was about to leave home, there had been a problem involving her pets: there was no difficulty in taking her cat along, but what to do with the goldfish?

Unwilling to encumber herself with the fishbowl, yet unwilling to abandon its occupant, the woman solved the problem by feeding the fish to the cat.

As I look at the cat--nice and plump, with shiny fur--I realize that, in contrast to his owner who had made such a fuss about having to deal with the harsh necessities of war, this cat thinks he has at last accomplished what had long been the dream of his life, the very thing he had been lying in wait for day after day, pretending to be mesmerized.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Leiris was one of the Surrealists, and his dreams show it. Oddly, so does his day life. This isn't the World Waking Bank, but I wanted to include one or two of these. I find this anecdote hard to forget. What short circuit let this woman suddenly redefine a pet under her care as food?

SOURCE: Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris (1961; 1987 translation by Richard Sieburth) p.107-8. I added title, though the subtitle is Leiris's.

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