CHAPTER II

The darkness is complete; a background music is grafted onto it. Ordinary jazz. The minutes flow by, accompanying the sixty-fourth notes that lose themselves one after another on his overly fragile eardrums.

In the cool evening air, a deep sigh topples over, already ravaging the calm foundations of this atmosphere of introspection. A long-awaited self-analysis, vital and long overdue. But now the jazz “turns bluesy” and neglects to lounge in banality.

— Damned karma! … Destiny, you are choking me! My soul hurts. My heart is a decoy and my tears evaporate in my damned hara. "

His weeping, however, is held back and blocked by his unimaginable naïveté, the seed of a swindled bet. Possible gain: an inaccessible relationship.

— My animal strength fades in the overflowing tides of the mockery of my dried-up dreams. Even wild, my creativity is not a bottomless well. Shit! Why am I incurably mortal? Is that the only apparent justification for my mistakes? … The cowardly recourse to suicide would change absolutely nothing!

All those many years waiting for the miracle of a possible encounter, even a commonplace exchange, those incalculable hours forever melted into that chimerical space-time. — Memory. — Their imperishable regrets, engraved in my wrinkles, neutralise me. I must erase from my memory those red-moon moments of blind and childish passions, once and for all! … Forget you forever, love of my life, so I may finally value mine. For I am sick of “auto-da-féing” time. My time! "

The recording was old. The record had borne the marks of time… The marks of time… The marks… No matter the wear, the rhythm of the melody accelerates. The saxophonist improvises in the lower register. The blackness of memories would be cut through by instinct.

Damien called himself a dreamopath. A word of his own invention. He had created it to describe his sickness of living: an almost pathological inability to receive reality without immediately transforming it into dream. Born into the world dreaming, carried since always by an imagination in hyperinflation, he considered reality a mere pretext for invention.

(Born into the world dreaming; experiencing, in his development, a “hyper-inflation” of his imagination, a priori overflowing; considering reality as a pretext for dreaming; all these elements led him to create this neologism.

What he did not know was that… when love or the desire to fornicate dramatically inflames a madman of dreams, the character symptoms increase tenfold. But everything becomes amphigoric, blurred, if his requests are pushed away. Dreamopathy becomes acute. From then on, a vicious triangle forms in his psyche. A loyalty to absence, an asceticism devoted to it, and the inevitable fall into the obsession with an anachronistic existence.)

— Where do those who suffer from a heartbreak like mine hide? In the dark, like me? Do they drag themselves through mire in order to sink into it as into a marsh? — Does not all society wear masks of laughing Janus? … And when evening comes, huddled in solitude to tend its wounds, sensitised by stress, does it not tremble, moaning: “Ouch! My love, I hurt!”

The improvisation is excessive. At the whim of the jazzman’s notes, the dreamopath fastens words to them off-beat.

"Where are you? What are you doing? … Do you sometimes think of me? … You, the one I love, … you whose absence I obsequiously venerate; solely because it proves to be the effigy of your existence within mine! — Do you not hear me whispering my desires to you in dreams?

("Hello! … This is blue dragon. I am calling my heartbreak… Hello! …

Answer me! … Nothing! … Shit! … The code has changed with these unwelcoming waves.

Hello! … Hello! … This is the sphinx of darkness. I am calling my heartbreak… Hello! …

Say something! … There! … I hear, … yes! I hear, but it is becoming blurred again, almost imperceptible; nil! Inaudible!

Inaudible? You again, cruel silence returning to me like a boomerang. I am weary of listening to you, language of despair. What are you waiting for before you flee?

Hello! … This is a blues in the darkness. A void separates us… your voice, which I miss. Where are you, mad unknown woman? … This is the one who can bear no more! ")

Sign of a sick dreamer’s temerity, he grants himself far too little time to review everything, to chew everything over. A single day! These next twenty-four hours, standing before him like an invisible obstacle, will be the only witness to the excision. Favouring, even in extremis, the success of extracting this singular love, he does not eliminate the doubt of failure. The possibility of a fiasco arising not from introspection, but rather from a providential future.

— I will annihilate our shared memories down to the last molecule. I will murder any love that tries to be reborn in me. I will shred it like an unleashed primitive. Is my life not at stake? … In my sights! — Fire! "

From the old stereo system come the final tremolos. The record no longer turns. — Silence resumes its place while coddling the darkness. Only the breathing of the dreamopath, that Damienic tortured man, tries to wrest from them the privilege of expressing himself.

Tears at the edges of his eyes, ready to burst, announce in exclamation the name of the ordeal.

— Nielle! "

Contact! A lamp is switched on.

His hair tousled by the tips of his nervous fingers, the palms of his hands on his hot forehead, his head between his legs, he is dressed in a blue terry-cloth robe. On the back, his name embroidered in white gives him the look of a defeated boxer. Out of sarcasm, he would have liked to add a terrifying word, but Damien is rather small and, for that reason, avoids fights. And yet he concentrates on a final round.

The arena: an old house with shuttered windows. The light is bluish. The atmosphere is blue. The living room is white. A narrow room with low ceilings, like a cage with curtains. Only a yellowing poster competes with the play of urban lights slipping in through the window: Marilyn Monroe in "Don’t Bother to Knock". An indispensable object for his return backwards.

Damien is stretched out on a divan, similar to those owned by psychiatrists. A family inheritance. Chance! His elders having been people of the land. His father more worker than father; his mother more than housewife. Yet the piece of furniture is covered with a fabric of great quality. — But love does not care! The victim questions himself!

"By what spell did I fall in love, even with your absence? Heaven having granted me the happiness of truly seeing you for one hour at most in my painful existence. Brief moments, sparingly distributed over several months. Would I dare add: interminable? How were you able to steal my soul? … Where? … When? … A trick question. Why? A question whose consequences exceed my capacity to answer it.

Today, … or tomorrow, I will have to choose between persisting and dying in the dream, or being reborn and living. I cannot continue to be at the mercy of this dizzying reality that manages my life. Like a candle burning at both ends while apostrophising two submissive shadows, my life is consuming itself too quickly and without discernment.

I already perceive the bitter disturbance of the difficulty of choosing between the originality of lived experience and the facsimile of a dream. Am I already double…, at the moment of your appearance in my life, Nielle?

I remember that at the time, in my moments of lucidity, I identified with a naked ape, member of a society in decline. Whereas under the influence of drugs, I considered myself a god who had become, by mistake, a member of a society of apes in moult, in that famous global village of McLuhan’s. Little by little, I was uprooting myself from this sphere where the fever of money, armouring ad vitam aeternam a devoted Manichaeism, does not prevent the Third World from starving to death. Forgetting what good is, subtracting themselves from evil, the other parts of the planet, with inflated statistics, strive to compare their blinkers.

However, I considered myself fortunate to be poor, almost penniless. Poor, but not destitute. The chance of providence even allowed me to be the tenant of two apartments. A first one, where I no longer distinguished happiness from sadness; the family nest. There I lived with Mylène, my angel of a wife, who continued tirelessly to tolerate me with a patience whose secret only she knows. I also lived there with Lysianne, our sweet daughter. She whose presence remains the only link still attaching me to truth.

As for the second apartment, it served the three of us as a studio. We were not too unhappy there. Mylène analysed her dreams there and deciphered her automatic writings. Lysianne did whatever pleased her there, without restriction. In that place, I cogitated. "

Damien seems to pose. Motionless, he finds himself light-years away… in the same place. Calm and peace reign as king and queen within the family studio.

Lysianne, a charming little girl with brown eyes and auburn hair, a shade bordering on red, charming as she came up to me, her father, who was meditating in my sacrosanct domain.

— Daddy, can you lend me your felt-tip pens, please? I want to make you a drawing.

— Of course you may use them, but don’t forget to put the caps back on every time you use one… Now that I think of it! What do you want to draw for me?

— Ah! It’s a surprise.

— It will surely be very pretty; I know you have talent. "

Just as happy to be able to use the lovely colours as she was stimulated by my flattery, she hurried to settle herself in the room designated for her to play.

While the angel consulted her two or three books by Carl Jung in order to orient the analysis of her dreams more scientifically, I continued my cogitations.

Drawing inspiration from readings on alchemy, I invented, in the manner of a harmless sorcerer’s apprentice, philosophical maxims. Ambiguous formulas in shaky prose. I even amused myself by using them at dinners with friends. Slipping them so subtly into conversations that my maxims provoked no reaction. Then I would pride myself on reciting my hobbyhorse, "Imagine, in order to predict, so as to realise". Thus indicating to my listeners that fame awaited me. Which, incidentally, elicited no comment. That made no difference to me. The occult functions of my prophetic thoughts having as their first objective to locate the place from which I wrote them: "Cogito ergo sum". Thus sparing me from pinching myself to verify whether I still existed.

Extrapolating from my short phrases, closely watched by the ghost of Hermes Trismegistus, I transformed these potential sayings into comic strips as a mode of explication.

— Look, Daddy, I’ve finished my drawing.

— Where am I…? … Ah! Lysianne, you frightened me… you’re finished? … Oh! How beautiful it is; you chose lovely colours. I love your surprise. Have you shown it to Mommy?

— No, I don’t want to disturb her, she’s busy reading. "

With a complicit smile, I invited Lysianne to follow me in silence, to find Mylène absorbed in her painstaking work. Brushing against me like a cat, over my wife; letting my fingers slide into the reader’s hair; I kissed her, satisfied at having broken her concentration. Without raising her eyes, still fixed on the writings of her master thinker, Carl Jung, she reacted by embracing me tenderly.

— Tell me, my bunny! I want to show you the lovely work Lysianne made for me. "

Directing her gaze toward the multicoloured surprise, she burst into sincere laughter. Then she cuddled our child while commenting.

— A caricature of Daddy’s comic-strip character. Lysianne, you made a beautiful gift, my kitten. — Bravo, my little sweetheart! "

The dreamopath watches this sweet image recede with nostalgia. A happy moment, among so many others, inoculating small joys into a misery only barely relieved by social assistance. But the axis on which he will establish his search is in place. A place. The studio.

— I had a certain predilection for that refuge. Besides, I spent most of my time there developing projects likely to satisfy my creativity. A way of keeping busy, for I had broken with the working world. I had become lazy and unmotivated despite my obvious responsibilities. Had I been disgusted by productivity? … ! — With university friends, I was living an exciting adventure in the world of animated film. Everything had begun well, everything had ended badly, … between the two, I had learned to take drugs. But in this apartment that is no longer mine, in this place that was my studio; what else did I do there? … What, then? …

I sometimes slept there; often, I fled there to adore in secret an imaginary harem more exciting than an encyclopedia without pictures… What else?

It’s surfacing! … yes! Memories are beginning to warm my memory like the underground movements of rising lava.

Nielle! … Nielle, beautiful and interesting, nothing more. She had just moved into the third floor, into an apartment directly above the studio. Between boxes that were not emptying fast enough, she went out to take the air; to spot likely anomalies, to shed light on her new neighbourhood. I, taking advantage of a moment of solitude, let my eyes wander at the whim of their blinking, examining already explored corners of an inner courtyard without secrets. Each of us leaning on the railings of our balconies, we observed everything and nothing at once. She out of curiosity, discovery. I out of habit.

The first communication, the first language held, was that of our overlapping shadows. Just long enough for both to be blessed by the full moon. And her mad, impalpable silhouette, perceiving mine watching it, withdrew, taken aback. Who knows whether, in the silence, our darker sides had not just clandestinely made love? "

A moment of halt. Mineral water transforms into a prism the glass preventing it from fleeing. A thirst-quenching pause. Brief.

"Married and physically faithful, nevertheless sweating out the inconstancy of artificial paradises, her presence made me realise the possibility of giving substance to dust-covered fantasies thanks to my libido, which hastened to restore them cheerfully. However, my seduction amputated by drugs, my imagination at a biorhythmic low, only the slightest pretext authorised me to approach the newcomer. A cultural reference point.

It was still summer. The street was deserted. It was late. Smothered by the noise of cars travelling along the boulevard, amplifying their wing-rustlings, only the cicadas were discussing among themselves their latest ecological contributions. In the distance, walking through the shortcut crossing the park where I was sitting, Nielle was returning from I knew not where. Perhaps from work? From amusement? No matter, I had a discreet chance to introduce myself.

Without her seeming to feel the slightest fear, I made our directions converge. Under the lamppost situated halfway between my home and the studio, I accosted her. A thread of nervousness in my voice, a hint of hesitation in my body language thus obliged me to spill out my remarks at a telegram’s cadence.

— Hi! My name is Damien. I’m a neighbour. I live there, right next door. But I also have a studio. There, where you live. On the second floor, just below your place… What is your name?

— Nielle"

She pronounced it as if she were condensing all the full stops I had omitted from what resembled the reading of a cable. This first face-to-face taking a ridiculous turn, wishing to leave her with a better impression, I cut the conversation short while trying to be more poetic.

— Is it Cat Stevens, that defrocked priest of the Church of Rock, ("… it’s a wild world…"), the music I often hear on those evenings when you are alone? Is it indeed him you listen to through your open windows?

— Indeed! Goodbye. " she threw out as an expeditious yet defiant conclusion, turning her back on me as if she truly believed she were showing me what she had that was least beautiful…

Disconcerted by this snobbish evasion, stoic, my lips sealed by astonishment, I extrapolated on my first questions and her second flight: "My beauty, I perceive the melancholy surrounding you as you listen to those songs. Are painful memories anchored there? … Who has none? … Life is hard and the recourse to fornication would change absolutely nothing. Would it, Spiritus Sancti?" _ Suddenly! I was no longer! I was someone else. — The rebuff had baited an abject being dwelling in me.

Like a second soul under my skin, this double had compromised itself by stealing my emotions; imposing its own on me. Able to emerge at any moment, even at the sign of the slightest happiness, it would relapse, transforming into tortured consciousness everything it stapled. "

Gershwin in the background, "Rhapsody in Blue". Sharper and truer, his memories seem sculpted in time. Stifled laughter and tears; always the same method of cooking feelings. The dreamopath simply sees himself again dreaming of Nielle.

— Through the studio windows, I ogled her, she who wandered with a gait exciting enough to make one whistle in admiration. She hid, camouflaged herself behind oversized glasses with the desperate intention of making herself ugly. Lost cause! Clearly, this awkward coquetry explained her fear of her new neighbourhood. She was not unaware of the impact her outrageous beauty would have on a male population, engendered in aggression or disgrace. Placing all her trust in this stratagem of dubious ingenuity, she let herself be watched despite her fright.

A tall woman with moving proportions. Hair dyed blond, a slight madness in the curl. Make-up light as a lace mask; she harmonised the colours of her clothes with the angelic blue of her lyrical eyes, … always concealed by those dreadful frames.

Her comings and goings disturbed me, since she resembled the fixation that motivated utopian aspirations. Nielle haloed the same charisma as Marilyn Monroe. — A subtle sex appeal. A tantalising naïveté. — Without being unpleasant, these convulsive indiscretions she occasioned in me diluted that Hollywood elixir. A lasting vestige of those voluptuous foretastes born of my pre-adolescence. Marilyn, spiritual progenitor, had procreated in me an inexhaustible pastel fantasy. Drugs transforming mirages into miracles, I scented her resurrection soon. In truth, underlying this sterile hope persisted the intention of preserving life as long as possible.

When I took refuge in work at the studio, I admired my creative impulses. Pretentious, I enjoyed them to the bone. In my right hand, the conquering one, … a brush. In the other, the deserter, … a hashish cigarette. A line of ink followed by a line of resin. From the brilliant instant to the poor performance, each gesture was a hallelujah to illusion, a rite of devotion to the blond actress still sleeping, slumbering in ignorance of the potential rival Nielle had become.

I feared the inevitable collapse of my inner self. The moment when my soul, bound by an imaginary pact, would find death through the definitive rooting of my new neighbour. Since her arrival, in reaction, I repeated to myself this expanding lie: "You will never dislodge Marilyn." Even Mylène, who almost no longer loved me, had failed in her iconoclastic efforts. How could Nielle? The prohibition she personified, becoming from day to day more and more seductive, clothed itself in irreversibility. Had I been caught like a rat, ingeniously clumsy, prisoner of my own trap?

Out of loyalty to Marilyn, to guarantee her throne, I consolidated my failings, I exhibited my worst sides. Noisy and too energetic, careless, marginal and with fleeting conscience. This, not to mention a few paranoid outbursts directed against virtual disciples of Karl Marx. — A funny anecdote about those political types! Against the latter, combining effrontery with malignity, simply because they were demonstrating in the park directly in front of her place, I distributed anarchic leaflets to them. I was costumed in a white lab coat daubed with roughly drawn question marks and topped with a safety construction helmet that I had garnished with plastic flowers. On their own ground, I handed them blank papers denigrating the propaganda of their red cabbage rags.

The most touchy militants, doubting the benefit and interest of my presence, were inclined to impose an indoctrinating interrogation on me.

— What the hell are you doing here, saboteur? What is this, little capitalist bourgeois?

— This? … My political programme for the R.N.A., the party of Rien Neant Absolument — Absolutely Nothing at All! "

Then, on my papers, virginal of ideology, was inscribed the anger of the communist groupuscule. All this manoeuvring to ensure that I would decline in the probable esteem of the one I dared hope, forestalling every eventuality, to have as witness.

I loved! I still love! Alas! The skin of a rabid beast served me as a pass. — Double identity! — Impossible for Nielle to guess my real self. The height of absurdity: I anticipated the accidental and complete revolt of my qualities. The aberrant and unhoped-for transfiguration of some nobody. With this unconscious hope gaining on me, how could I convince myself of the mastery of feelings? Is love controlled by the lever of will? "

Damien the dreamopath twists, struggles on his divan as if to extract a contagion from himself. He exorcises himself! He adjures himself to forget one of the most precious memories once his reminiscence has been completed.

— Socially involved for a second consecutive year, I took advantage of my co-participation in organising the national holiday in our neighbourhood to situate my role there as an artist. But even more, to find myself again as a lost soul.

Concentrated on the development of a mascot I had suggested to the local committee, alone in the middle of the courtyard, my back to the old red-brick house sheltering my studio, I busied myself strengthening the structure of what would become a frog riding a ram.

According to my usual way of working, everything lay scattered around me. Hammer and saw, twisted nails and jars of screws, bits of wood and sawdust. (From chaos is born light.) Inspired by the sun on the first day of summer, these reinforcements were quickly botched. As I then set about defining the shapes with wire, my mucous membranes were suddenly, tenderly caressed by the sly effluvia of a perfume inviting me to turn around.

Dressed in a pretty summer dress with floral patterns, elegantly descending the outside staircase that led directly into the courtyard, Nielle threw out, all smiles, a friendly "Hi!" It was now visible to her, thanks to the jumble in which I was struggling, that she was able to explain my strange attitudes by the simple fact that I was nothing other than an artist. Unmethodical and extravagant.

Dumbfounded by what would become one of the most pleasant embraces of my memory. The essence of that sweet moment, that of a perfume that had disarmed me, imprisoned me for an instant. A few seconds died away before I could return her friendliness.

A hundred! A thousand times, over the course of the day, I replayed the scene as on video. That delicate European fragrance, that cordial voice, that atmosphere similar to that of one of my favourite films starring Marilyn, "The Seven Year Itch". (The story of a faithful husband overwhelmed by his fantasies and dreaming of his neighbour on the floor above.)

At the whim of the scene’s tireless repetitions, I observed my weakness before the irresistible charm wrapped in that perfume. The observation also allowed me to grasp that if Nielle had discovered the artist, I now detected in her a living muse. "

The "Rhapsody in Blue" has found its cruising speed. Memories present themselves to the mind in a classical mode. Their flow has the flavour of jazz. Crescendo, inspiration of the Jewish New York composer.

The bottle of mineral water shows its bottom. A moment of halt, an instant of listening. The living room has no more secrets; its slightest recesses are surprised by the searching gaze of the excluded man in quest of necessary sufferings. Damien comments aloud on his impressions.

— Suffer! Kiss pain! When the evil subsides, I gather old wounds lying here and there. Dreamopath masochist! Must I amputate my heart, if today I sow the precise dreams of tomorrow through reminiscences appearing in staccato?

I have been far from this damned house tormenting myself for so many years, cherishing the images I had left of you, those that still sail beneath my cortex at the whim of my reveries. When I have any! … When you are there! … Or there! …"

Applause! Excellent performance by the pianist and the orchestra. Live recording. End of praise. Sleeping light. Everything is suspended. Everything, even the ghost of the “remembrance” of the preceding instants, supports for new phantasmagorical jolts.