CHAPTER III

The mnemonic rhapsody and the nervous verbiage of his inner voice have fallen asleep. The night is two hours older. Deep reflections, … blessed muteness, … here comes Morpheus. The sleeper stirs. Even if the flight into the unconscious is just but painful, Damien must wake.

Rising sluggishly, eyes half-closed, he prepares himself a coffee, and half asleep, he looks at his half-closed soul. The silence is total. Thoughts modulate into verbs. They climb and descend into the depths of his subconscious with the definite intention of leaving their trace there. As if the vibration of a word in his vocal cords, against his tightened throat, could reassure him, he pronounces the sacred first name.

— Nielle! "_ "Am I going mad? I can barely distinguish the present from the past.

Already three days since your suave bouquet had placed within my being the interested sweetness of the seed of love; since then I had been losing myself in my silences, waiting for the return of that romantic presence.

The feverishness of the final touch-ups. The last preparations for the celebration were not enough to blur that fairy-like impression left by a brief passing, a simple greeting. Even if the considerable amount of work still left for me to accomplish gave me excellent arguments for staying away from home and prowling around the studio, … around her! I was disadvantaged! For a thousand gestures, numerous instructions, frequent telephone calls to participants or suppliers, I enjoyed only a single glance toward the third floor or toward the staircase. — I had not been able to glimpse her. No chance! — Setting up this kind of event is far from amusement. Planning it, organising it, means stuffing oneself with stress, sweat, endless discussions. One loses energy, money, sometimes friends. The rabble couldn’t care less, provided it can get drunk on the day itself. Too bad! Let the celebration begin!

So far, the celebration was a vivid success. Everything was going wonderfully, without a hitch. Almost all the inhabitants of the street had agreed among themselves to dress up. We were treated to the most heterogeneous mixtures. These ephemeral personalities expressed themselves through improvised burlesque. Like that false cardinal offering beer to a prisoner, only to be rewarded with a solemn kick in the backside; that fairy laughing herself breathless at the flatteries of one of the many cowboys, the latter accompanied by a somewhat jealous Spanish countess, shamelessly uttering blasphemies, Latin to the core. Some shared their already incomplete costumes, others were merely made up, but all participated wholeheartedly, with that generosity typical of those who struggle.

In the middle of the evening, we might even have had an athletic Zorro. But just before leaping from roof to roof to put on a show, seized by panic, he withdrew in favour of a substitute Zorro whose belly was so swollen with beer that his trousers, impossible to fasten, revealed the top of his alcoholic buttocks. Fortunately, his belt did not come undone.

As for me, for once, I found myself natural, even handsome, in my court jester’s costume. My red and blue disguise gave me the impression of belonging to everyone and to no one at the same time. While keeping an eye on the progress of the activities, I amused myself as I wished. For everyone, freedom was mistress, for the celebration had replaced breathless everyday life.

Half cherub, half demon, I slipped through the crowd

half drunk. Euphoric, playful, my iris clouded by cannabis, I joked with the old people enjoying their last minutes before going to bed. I invented buffooneries for the children, who laughed only to make their parents believe they were not falling asleep. I amused and distracted the dancers, the drinkers, the active, the passive. The music was devilish. The momentum was at its peak.

In my pocket, more than tricks; in my head, more than stratagems: the illusion of love in print. Bought at a discount from an old shopkeeper in the neighbourhood, small pre-glued paper hearts, which I distributed with kindness and humour, or which I stuck, according to the whim of my imagination, on anything that moved…

— Check to the fool! "

I froze. Nielle was facing me. I would have liked to be nothing but a breath and mingle with hers. React? Hide? … Useless! She had already chiselled my soul into the shape of self-abnegation. And yet life, real life, hooked us both by the heart and disregarded all logic.

Around us, everything disappeared. The decorations, the banners, the fleur-de-lis flags flew away. The crowd, the laughter and the music blended together while fading. ("Why do you no longer move, Your Highness? Have I vexed you? … Offended you? … Are you astonished by your subject’s exuberance? … Or are you experiencing love at first sight? … Perhaps? … Just like me. No doubt!!!

There! Majesty, from your fool, a heart on each of your royal cheeks so that I may hang myself around your neck. Through you, ravishing queen, I shall reinvent passion. Already, I drink from this emotion freezing you, … I touch it with my fingertips…")

"— Nielle! Are you coming? … We’re going somewhere else. "

Annoyance! Her friends, that procession following her, surrounding and protecting her, did not appreciate the state of hypnosis into which we had plunged. Jealousy? … Their blunders eclipsed that divine light which, for an instant, had welded us to one another.

— Nielle! … Are you on the moon or what? "

The spell was definitively broken. Her entourage carried her off. Then the celebration called out to me through a joint; and our societies acclaimed us farther away, each on our own side, in our distinct kingdoms. The celebration was ending. The next day, the people would have to return to their misery and their forced petty thefts.

"Jeu! … Game! … Spiel! …"

Sudden delirium of the dreamopath in his mother tongue, in that of the cultural invader, and in German, because he imagines distant ancestors of his to have been lords and masters of a sumptuous castle on the banks of the Rhine.

— Tell me, Herr Doctor! What are the symptoms of this incurable illness called love?

— Ich glaube! … Entschuldigen Sie! … Dear Monsieur Damien! … Love? … Well, it is a universal syndrome. First, the afflicted patient becomes paralysed from head to foot, his pulse quickens, reality disappears. But above all, a particular characteristic: time stops at one precise moment!

— Which one?

— When the gaze of one travels voluptuously into the eyes of the other, and vice versa! … Then the subconsciouses of these victims communicate, to the detriment of each one’s consciousness, in the sovereign language of the soul, that mystic force called love. Finally, the fatal and irreversible blow… The appearance of idiocy.

Oh! … Mein Herr Damien, what did your wife think of it?

— Ich weiss nicht! … I don’t know! … I don’t know! "

His universe embraces him without strangling him. For the moment, death watches him from afar. He senses it. The password: "Flee". The music remains, the words pass. Cat Stevens on cassette, for the record is worn out by the same intention. Madness is also played out on a ballad.

— To persist in destroying myself, to kill myself by slow degrees! To maim myself with words! To lie to myself. To play with life out of weariness. I am sick of it! … Sick of it! I wager, against the void of oblivion, every chance I have of getting out of this. A strange torpor endlessly tightens the hearts of isolated beings, the fear of understanding themselves while losing their way in the solicitude of inner silence. "

***

The self-analysis intensifies. The coffee has cooled, nothing is consumed, not even the rain preparing to fall. The wind discreetly tries to make itself noticed. The day has heard the call of a frail fledgling.

— Nielle! The love of my life! Like a pleasant torment, from her third floor, that golden castle, she reigned over my Château d’If. But nothing completely derailed me from my obsession with Marilyn, for I drugged myself to the point of mummifying my life. Obstinate, I chained myself to the hallucinatory toxins. Imperturbable, I pursued my incredible quest for utopia.

However, the magical shock of the celebration and that perfume of embalmed days bothered my thoughts. At the studio, from that room that served me as mystical laboratory and oratory consecrated to the Hollywood star, from summer to autumn, I heard Nielle living delicately. Silence, resting upon its echoes and her too frequent absences, had become the incubator of my solitary reveries.

Each of her steps was inevitably disguised as a word. From her comings and goings, I interpreted sentences, … as a confidence. Each of her movements was a pretext for a pause in my work, a "humoristico-esoteric" comic strip. A noise, and I left the dried ink to damage brushes and pens still further; a voice, and my inspiration shattered into a thousand crumbs, abandoning that major project for hours.

When she was elsewhere…, I struggled against the dreams her presence had sown. Victorious, I fed on their emptiness; defeated, I no longer existed, I wandered like a homeless man of reality. In neutral moments, I smoked, seeking to re-engage the fight, for her image assailed me on all fronts.

— What does that sudden crash on the floor of her bedroom mean? … What is the source of that racket? … I thought she was absent! "

I, the impossible dreamer, was always running overcharged through the meanders of my baroque mind. The slightest sound, and I lost myself in the sighs I chewed over, projecting imagined actions and words to the centre of the universe. In my imagination, nothing is impossible. The farther I move from any tangibility, the more absurdity announces itself and the faster its frequency accelerates, until it smashes my skull against the wall of the absolute. The only importance: a lightning-like plausibility, … that living water called Nielle.

— What is that noise again? … What is she doing at home? … Has a jealous lover struck her? … Did she fall while trying to step over one of my dreams? "

These too ordinary possibilities, I rejected. I scripted, all night long, until plausible hypotheses were exhausted! Without tiring, without exhausting myself, searching my abstract world, excavating stories from the absurd to the dullest, from the most impersonal to the most intimate.

I would give Mylène the usual explanation that I was under the aegis of pure inspiration, unable to draw away, to leave this creative flight. If I had to sleep, I would sleep at the studio.

In the morning, the telephone…

— Hello Damien. This is… Nielle! " Her voice was sad, like my soul questioning itself, worried.

— Thieves broke into my place last night. Did you notice anything abnormal? … Those bastards stole family jewellery from me. A gift from my grandmother. It had great sentimental value for me. I… am… upset. — Did you see anything unusual? "

My hands clenched on the receiver, I reproached myself undeservedly. My sense of guilt overflowed into improbity, pushing me to believe that through ubiquity, I might have committed the crime. Yet I had been dreaming. Should I have confessed to her that I had been luxuriating in her reflection? … But what could I answer her?

— Nielle, that noise…, thieves?

— You heard a noise, … nothing else? … And you did nothing?! "

On both sides, the words detached themselves to avoid adding to the confusion.

— Thank you…, … goodbye…! "

An abbreviated conclusion, refined by a painful click.

No doubt, she directed her suspicions toward me. Innocent! I was afraid of being accused… Alas, my instinct told me the blame would be meant for me. Harsh regrets. Nevertheless, I understand that theft is a violation of freedom. The pain, the revolt of an infraction distorts analysis and mows down innocence. Instant paranoia then spares, in its symptomatic doubts, only oneself! "

The thinker stops; so does the wind. The rain, barely begun, ceases. Only the rising sun hunts down the clouds like a madman.

— The harm of her misadventure was my loss. To exonerate myself by protecting her. To overprotect her in order to recover that trust acquired with such difficulty, even if it had been negligible before the theft… That was the only way to clear myself.

At the slightest sound from her place, I would enquire about her presence. At the least silence, a violent worry assailed me to the point of snapping my nerves. Work disgusted me. I wanted only to listen. The more I strained my ear, the more deeply Nielle rooted herself in what I presumed to be my life. The invisible protector I considered myself to be was motivated only by the restoration of normal communication.

With every call, with every visit, always briefly, confirmation of her presence and the sound of her voice offered me the warrior’s rest, the herald’s nap. The more the contacts accumulated, the more I grew attached to her. Candidly, little by little, I began to betray in libidinous thoughts Mylène, my wife, and my spiritual mistress… Marilyn. "

From that old suitcase the dreamopath has hauled around, he takes out a packet of Camel filters. While lighting a cigarette, he examines the famous ochre and yellow dromedary on the package. Then he thinks of the camels he has crossed paths with until now.

— I perceived, coming from the third floor, highly cultural conversations between Nielle and Jonathan, called the professor, her neighbour on the landing, a tall fool yet handsome. He was the trendy one; she was the sigh of swooning. He entertained her with his knowledge of classical music and sometimes, like a snake charmer, played pretty airs for her on his transverse flute. Unfortunately, he touched it so much and so well that I imagined Nielle entirely naked emerging from a wicker basket and, with lascivious swaying hips, approaching him to embrace him… by enchantment.

Between the hearing of a work by a Romantic composer and one of his performances on his wind instrument…, sarcasms about me would sometimes spurt from his throat. Did he have a presentiment that I would love Nielle, hence the usefulness of ridiculing me?

I saw myself wounded by his jokes and hurt by the horrible implicit pauses…! The laughter, the comedy, her complicity with the professor troubled me, shocked me; but they were not an obstacle to my clandestine and unsuspected relationship of the moment. "

In his view of safeguarding, no current ambient noise distracts him from those bursting out of his past. In this house that is no longer the same, without astonishment, he breathes the same air as in his thirties.

Leaving in the morning, returning only in the evening, then going back toward her wild nights… he had seen her live. Even today, he can almost hear her breathe.

— At that time, I applied myself so carefully to listening that the noises of dishes clashing together or a simple background music at Nielle’s had become integral parts of my routine.

Like a dessert, distinctly from the other noises, I stuffed myself with the cracklings of the beauty’s trembling bed, warm witness to those desirable orgasms. Despite the envy that gently disembowelled me, I savoured the listening to those moments of tenderness and sonorous exaltations.

My hearing developed, trained itself to capture everything. From autumn gusts to snow squalls upon her winter, up to the breath of a certain spring which, I hoped, would allow me to reach the beating of Nielle’s heart. Ultimate privilege! "

***

The sun has well and truly won the game. The departed night applauds faintly in the distance this new victory of Helios. Daylight calls for the concretisation of memories. Other revelations of secrets…

— The days having whistled the months that had joined them by; it was summer again. Already one year since Nielle had moved into the third floor and shaken my fragile foundations. I, so little realistic, zigzagged more and more through constant phantasmagoria. That living dream, throbbing above my derisory mirages… What joy!

The first warm evening of the year. The last of May. Settled at my worktable, I was nonchalantly sketching new ideas intended for the next neighbourhood celebration. Distracted by the sweating pores of my hands gripping the paper like suction cups, I was disconcerted by my wish to relive the sentimental events of the previous year.

At that period, with the temperature two steps from the suffocation of a heatwave, I cogitated with shutters open. Thus, to the urban repertoire of summer noises were added the incessant ticklings endured by my concentration. Nothing affected my heart, which closed in upon Nielle’s absences. I caught myself loving her more; and of those distances… I wished each one to be as brief as possible.

— A car has just stopped on the street… Door slamming… The vehicle leaves again… Is it she returning? "

I did not verify whether it was Nielle, preferring to wander through various scenarios to strip bare a palette of different outcomes.

— Steps on the staircase. Yes, hers! … Troubling revelations. Her steps are sad words… There! I do not understand! … Contrary to her habits, rather than heading toward her kitchen, she goes directly from the staircase to her bedroom. Her steps barely murmur, so afflicted does she seem… She throws herself onto her bed, which welcomes her with its open and consoling sheets. "

No! I was not dreaming, Nielle was upset. She was crying. I imagined myself very close to her, trying to comfort her.

— I too feel pain, for I take on your suffering. These pallid minutes torture me and each of your tears becomes a drop of acid on my cheeks, hot with anguish. I am near you…, do not worry. Listen to me suffer inside your soul. "

Silence. — She was no longer crying; the turmoil was finally over, as if my caressing waves had reassured her. So much the better! — She was sleeping. Fortunately! — I love her! Too bad!

Nielle’s tears oxidised with the days that trickled through my reveries. The more time slipped by, the more anxiety gnawed at me. She had not gone out of her home during the week following that evening of long sobs. Emitting only scattered and light sounds, her long silences worried me. I could no longer keep still. For my mental balance, try to verify Nielle’s well-being. "Is she well?" That disappointment having affected her, that sorrow whose cause I still did not know, seemed to have shaken her habits. Without hesitation, I went to ring my beauty’s doorbell and waited…

— May she not be thinking of suicide! I cannot imagine loving two dead women! My madness has limits. How could I devote my art to two vanished women, Marilyn and Nielle! "

At that thought, the door opened to me like an answer. Nielle was at the top of that narrow inner staircase. Like a passage, with the air of trembling houses, the worn steps and the dim light provoking unease and fear.

— Hello Damien!

— Hello Nielle! … May I come up for a little minute…"

The farther I advanced toward her, the more I trembled under my skin. Her long nightgown, with broad horizontal stripes in alternating tones of navy and white, teased my libido. This night garment hugged the body of this woman so well that I could gauge the volume of her breasts, hips, buttocks. While striving to raise my eyes, for fear of alarming the woman facing me, I addressed her…

— I was worried, Nielle. I wasn’t hearing the slightest noise from your place… or almost none… Is everything all right?

— Yes! Don’t worry about me. I simply have the flu and I’m staying in bed.

— Good! … Then, a swift recovery! … If you need a caretaker, give me a sign! …"

Reassured by Nielle’s laughter, which sealed the succinct exchange, I returned home trying to imitate the precious grin with the definite intention of calming my dreams. "

***

From his divan, watchtower of the place of his memory, Damien examines the shelves of the bookcase. In his staging before the beginning of the excavation of his fog, he had placed there two objects inseparable from each other.

Rising as if mechanically, always the same repeated gesture; a ceremonial, a mass, black with memories and sad manias, he first seizes a photo worn by his embittered gaze. Undeniable bewitchment.

Also the journal of his ethereal journeys, with wrinkled pages stained by coffee and tears. Cardboard-bound, black, a few sheets missing and torn, like his soul. Moreover, it is incomplete, for its author had compromised himself in wandering utopias. But he holds it! … The gestures, the movements are tender and restrained. He dreams of her.

— In one-way love…, why? What is the reason for this affliction, this degeneration of my feelings? Will my journal show me even the source of an explanation? … The path of liberation? "

Holding his breath to blankness, he orders his lungs to exhale into nothingness…; then he breathes again. Like an intention to live backwards, the obscure desire to see himself born while dying.

Logically, denigrating chance and its irrationality, he cloisters himself in chronology and opens his journal to the sequence consequential to his memories.

(-"Today, July fifth. Sunday. Day of separation…

Five in the morning. I worked all night. I am barely finishing the renovation of the floors in the family apartment. Taking advantage of Lysianne’s summer holidays, amusing herself in the country, I carried out this major work. In short! … Last stain, last varnish, last breath of nausea.

Exhausted, leaving brushes, rollers and bowls to deteriorate; I left to find Mylène at the studio, where we had temporarily set up our bed. Having frolicked all night with her lover, selected by love from among a couple of friends, the angel is relaxed, but her mind floats elsewhere.

What importance? … None! … I may be inhaling the balm of my wife’s infidelity, but Nielle exhales from my consciousness. — Without knowing it, the fallen couple we had become slept together for a final exchange of dreams. A last awakening that was not unpleasant. Fortunately!

Before her confession, her revelation and my abjuration, a last amusement, a simple distraction as denouement. — A game! — Like the childish song of a child learning its first words. Funny gibberish. — "Ba, ba, bi, bo, bi! Me! Me!"_ Meaning in clear language… "Place a peck on my mouth and prescribe me the same order!"… And return to sender and return to addressee until the sensitive exhaustion of the lips. A magical and unconscious diversion, like the desire to offer oneself to someone other than the person being kissed.

Double state! Hypocritical reality! I am a devil of a man. Faust and Mephistopheles. The victim and the executioner. A hellfire in a corner of paradise. After this day of upheaval, I consider myself cruel, having lacked frankness, loyalty and authenticity.

— You made love with François, didn’t you?

— Yes! And so what…!

— You love each other? …

— Yes! I love him and he loves me too! It may surprise you, Damien…, but it is more than simple physical attraction. We have many things in common. When I talk with him, I feel happy. You don’t communicate, and then… you’re no longer the same.

— What would you say to living with him? … I would take the studio and he would move into our place. "

Is it the fruit of the obligatory mimicry of several years of life together? Astonishment imprinted itself on our faces in the same way, at the same moment. Would I regret this decision? Possible, for already I realise that my sickly impulsiveness has traced a new crossroads. Lives separate; others join. The most incongruous thing is this new path on which I am embarking and the hope that it may unite me with Nielle. ")

Once again, truth shocks, reprimands. It wounds, haunts and advises. For the moment, rereading the journal proves fortuitous. The day, for its part, has not stopped growing, allowing life to reveal from these nocturnal passions certain sometimes murderous truths.

The shower refreshes, the jet at full force. The dreamopath dresses without modifying the order of his tics; despite his journal distracting him, attracting him like a magnet.

— That very same day…! What a perfect blunderer! … And that damned drug, the wrongs it caused me, the torments I made others endure under my influence. Stop thinking about it! … How should I have reacted?

Change attitude!? … And if History underwent rectitude. Napoleon Bonaparte without hidden right hand! … Left? — Van Gogh dead in the arms of a whore, both ears in place, … in his pockets? — Marilyn…, a Eurasian woman? …"

Damien takes up the black cardboard notebook again and blasphemes while trying to reread himself.

— But how badly I wrote! Terribly! … like a fly amputated of its legs and its genes. Courage, and decipher! This is your own shit. "

(-"Sunday, July fifth… Again! …

Middle of the afternoon. The whole neighbourhood is already informed of the separation. The neighbours react worse than we do. No matter! This Lord’s day promised to be too calm for them. Having spent the day before searching for an interesting subject of gossip that had not yet presented itself, the disintegration of our union would satiate them. A superficial trauma that will unquestionably be paraphrased!

But the heart of the drama lies above all in the failure, on Mylène’s part and mine, to predict the consequences of a separation for Lysianne, at this moment happy and carefree. Yet the dice being cast, I shall let myself be led by the sequence of events.

Now here I am, alone in the studio. I have moved everything I could to the studio, even the shredded memories of my defunct marriage. This coming and going, under the circumspect eye and the most insidious questions of one and all. Then, in the middle of the evening, all the upheaval finished, checking whether I was, at the very least, summarily installed, I began to reflect, noting my fatigue and my rather faded appearance. My feet were dirty, my sandals stained by an identifiable urban pollution; my jeans faded, worn to the thread; a vulgar T-shirt, a blue undershirt, its pigmentation nuanced by the sweat of the day’s efforts. I was dilapidated!

Then my reflection took another direction. Examining like a hungry wolf the ceiling separating me from Nielle, I imagined her offering me, out of pity, a night in that bedroom that makes me so envious.

After consuming the illegal, that false courage in capsule form, without, however, taking the trouble to clean myself up, I went to ring her doorbell. She opens. I am completely high, I am dirty and I stink.

— May I come up? "

Her answer has not yet reached me when my gaze is already languishing and my feet welded to the third landing. Without hesitation, I ask her for a coffee. Here I am, already served.

Checking whether the atmosphere remains favourable to the realisation of my perverse aims, I inform her of the unusual, this sudden rupture. Granting myself the easy advantage of this normally distressing situation, I proclaim to her, as a bonus, the beginning of Mylène and her lover François’s Damienic union.

— I give them my blessing; no, it doesn’t affect me…! "

Clearly, my words ring false, but the oily lie seems to suit me. Yet my conscience grants me this much: her beauty is so great that, before her, the capital sins strive to improve themselves. The more I look at her, the more I desire her. This very fresh freedom to venture farther than the mere hearing of her movements incites me to exalt deception and concupiscence.

— Nielle, … I… I don’t know how to ask you…? … Here it is! … The consequence that frightens me most in my wife’s distance…; I…, it is finding myself alone in a bed… uh! … You see, I am afraid of the shock! …

— And so? …"

Perceiving her doubt, I make myself more honeyed and still more fallacious.

— … I would like to sleep with you, just lie down… Don’t be afraid! … I don’t want to make love! (?)… Only, … your body at rest…, like a consolation!

— No! That is out of the question! " This clear answer accompanied the offer of a second cup of coffee. An astonishing kindness, almost out of place.

— No! … uh! … I’m tired, … I must go. Thank you for the coffee, Nielle. "

Ashamed and disarmed, recognising without admitting to her the merit of that lesson, I repeated to myself while descending the staircase, on each step, that the king of imbeciles was setting his foot there! ")

At the memory of that diplomatic correction, despite everything, a sincere laugh. First music of the day. Two-toned trees. Lights and shadows dispute a fictitious territory fluctuating according to the sun’s itinerary. The city is barely waking. It is still early.

Lying down again on the divan, he takes refuge in his madness like a treasure chest overflowing with old images arranged in too orderly a manner.

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