Of Cabbages & Cops

THE DREAMS OF REASON by Xavier Domingo. 148 pages. Braziller. $5.

There is a difference between a nightmare and a "nightmare"--the cliche that can be applied to anything from a rescue out of an abandoned mine shaft to unusually bad traffic conditions.

A real nightmare puzzles, enervates or scares the victim, and it is a rash man who tries to tell about it.

Xavier Domingo, a 36-year-old Spaniard who works as a literary journalist in Paris, has chosen to write about a civic "nightmare"--the 1961 police action against the sub-proletariat of Algerians living in the squalid city outskirts--in terms of a real nightmare.

Afro-Islamic Harlems. The Dreams of Reason proceeds like a script for a dream film in 112 numbered but un-spliced sections. The action is arbitrary and apparently motiveless. The identities of the characters and/or freaks are seen for the first time, but they are recognizable as old friends or enemies, and the most bizarre events are totally credible. The question of truth never arises; it is only the interpreter of the dream who is confused. The reader --or dream interpreter --will have to sup ply his own factual journalism.

Domingo assumes that everyone re members that in the fall of 1961, France was suffering one of its periodic nervous breakdowns. The French army had fought seven years to persuade Algerians that they were Frenchmen, while in Paris, 200,000 Algerians living in jerry-built Afro-Islamic Harlems were not allowed to be Parisians. For them the dirty work and a diet of boiled cabbage, of terror and reprisal, of po lice chasing Algerians into the Metro and beating them up underground, and of the noise of distant plastic bombs to make it all exciting.

To the Sports Palace. Domingo takes this lump of reality and lifts it into a world where dream and reason interpenetrate. His narrator--hero is a Spanish immigrant slaughterhouse worker who looks back on "seven years of sleepwalking from urinal to urinal. Seven years of unconsciousness, of being half asleep and idiotic and happy ... in this limbo of progressive idiocy . . . Mary's blue mantle hangs in the window of the antique shop and there is a glass eye that bleeds every Friday when actresses get divorced . . . but the fishermen no longer go to the Seine, because all they find at the end of their lines are sexless human corpses."

The unnamed hero is swept up in a mass arrest of Algerian demonstrators, taken to an overnight concentration camp in the Sports Palace, and released to go back first to his mistress, a free-swinging Galician tart, and then with his hook and mallet to the old job in the slaughterhouse. Through all this there clings to him "the typical boiled cabbage smell of all immigrants." It is his fault. He clings throughout to a cabbage, the "authentic proof of my innocence and my simplicity"--and of his official guilt. To the police, it makes him an Arab. He loses his cabbage and it is mistaken for a bomb: he regains it and it is taken from him by the police and photographed on a pile of confiscated weapons. About the cabbage and its owner swirls a succession of sharp images designed to exalt the brute facts of political life into the vividness of a dream.

A Long Neck. The real criminals are not the "trapezoidal" cops but the indifferent people, personified by a "man with a long neck," a good leftist who "will never commit any error that has been condemned by Marx." He will never "die on the Cross." Meanwhile, he enjoys sex-and-sadism movies while real men are tortured. The hero thinks in tragic-religious images (Domingo is an ex-seminarian) rather than political. He cannot think about Christ. "I haven't got time. I have to attend the crucifixion." He is given the water torture--or is it metaphysical? "Juice of the Beatitudes? Extract of Rousseau? Essence of the United Nations? Socialist sauce? Fascist alchemy? In any case they poured this liquor down my throat through a funnel ... my mouth vomited the chalice of this passion."

Because of its form, this filmic sermon of cabbages and cops may repel as an example of self-indulgent, pumped-up hysteria. But there is nothing spurious about it. It is violent, yet for once there is no suspicion of moral complicity; cruelty is made to seem hateful. Domingo's dream is hard to shake off. Not everyone can say: "I had this dream about a cabbage last night," and hold an audience.

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