CHAPTER X

The centre of the storm is not yet hovering overhead. Its violence grows slyly. The electromagnetic power amplifies the traces, the marks of return backward. Times gone by restrain, daze the present. The beast dreams, twists in pain; from the outside, nothing shows.

Voices collide, acousmias relentlessly strive to destroy him but force him into the fight for survival. Before him, those poisoned visions confront him, provoking him to a duel, but his inventive mind leads him to consider this experience as a sort of psychological homeopathy…

Soon, eighteen hundred hours. The normal hour for televised news; a necessary ordeal badly lived. Too abundant, the afflictions announce themselves in groups. Everywhere in the world, for incalculable centuries, people have been skinning one another alive. (Mores and customs?…)

The dreamopath needs no one’s assistance to do violence to himself. Opening the valves of his memory, which by jostling leads him back to that period gravitating around his muse, is enough for him. Duped in his suffering by his soft divan, he lets himself be rocked through his odyssey by Beethoven.

His right hand comes alive and loosens, the muscles and bones of his fingers moving in a circumductive motion. This instinctive gesture is the unconscious repetition of the act of writing that once managed to slap his difficult hours across the face. Communication engenders understanding…

— Communicate! Communicate! I have no other objective left in mind! " Damien exclaimed, sending a long, strong sigh toward the third floor. — "Write to her? … Again, without answer? … How many letters have I written in the discomfort of words that did not rebound in the warm form of a thank-you or the more official form of an acknowledgement of receipt? … How to make her recognise herself as a woman of character, a "Hard headed woman"; the authentic muse of my creative genius? By what trick could I make her harmoniously hoard my passion and incite her to velvet my messages until she finally identifies her own dwelling with my person? …"

Blocked in his inspiration by his neighbour’s unalterable phlegm, he evaluated, gauged the sensitive points of the scorpion that Nielle was. He aimed for the most appropriate literary workmanship; the one that would unfailingly translate, with grace, his impressions. From the most wishful to the most explicit.

— I have so many things to tell her. So many images to transcribe into words; hidden feelings, down to the depths of my thoughts, to narrate to her. — Pose, without prose. — A poem? … Perhaps? … — I shall not have Carlos’s originality, not possessing his knowledge nor his concise and direct style; but lyricism will be an extension of my soul. "

Never ceasing his usual watch, peering from time to time toward the door, Damien sat down gently and very slowly at his kitchen table. A single sheet of paper and a very ordinary pen before him. He smothered his breathing, extracting from his belly the vital energy from which the creation of a poem worthy of his muse would spring. Then, spontaneously, like an innocent rhymer, he drafted a few discordant stanzas that he later polished…

(The encounter with a fairy…
A dream within reality.
Fascinating beauty!
Lovely enchantment…
or unconscious cruelty?
Quickly, make her forget
That runt who on your landing
Sought, to soothe himself,
A soul that, from one instant…
…had troubled him.
Swiftly! Offer a mad idea!
A wish to help
All the witches burned,
Bitterly,
By foreign laws.
And in a future within reach
Of your sky-blue eyes, detach myself,
To become whole.
Eternally…
…Magician, even sorcerer!
Open your door to me,
By the light of my soul!)

The pen slowed at the signing of his name at the bottom of the jumble of words, for a few lines aroused the apparition of an outrage committed against the fairy, a stupidity he had forgotten. The wonder of the literary fantasy dissipated, and the hesitation of the last gesture of writing brought forth a different and repugnant memory…

— Either you love me! … Or you leave! "

This warning launched from his digs toward Nielle had revealed itself as the pettiness of a proud and frustrated macho. Without having either the reasons, and still less the assets, to adhere to that type of man, this death cry had aimed to draw his neighbour’s attention, but also to impress the gallery. A little group of untested young men, among whom Bruce played the role of spiritual leader.

They had come to fill the recent freedom Damien had obtained after his marital setback; in exchange for which, they let him benefit from their proscribed pharmacies, free of charge. Was it marijuana, that vegetal siren, that had run him aground on the shores of pretension? Or a love he already sensed as impossible?

The dreamopath’s soul undergoes an undeniable confusion that establishes itself in the tangled ramifications of his memories. The cause of this bewilderment derives from that flashback, which had slipped in subjectively during the writing of the poem; more precisely when he initialled it. This dizziness again draws from him the impression that he has become someone else’s memory… Like a resurgence, a reverberation, a flick from his obsession with the number two; the structure of doubt peremptorily implying at least two orientations. Swollen with scepticism, this annoyance that bedecks him restrains his confidence. His determination fades.

To regain control through a naïve solution? … Why not! — Multiply his problem tenfold in order to anaemise it!

Time being counted by his plan for twenty-four hours of deep interiorisation, he chooses to lie to himself by introducing an anachronism into this marked-out unfolding of his past. To dig into his memory, rummage through those alveoli where dubious adventures lived with the group of young rogues lie hidden.

The dreamopath imagines himself, Damien, seated there before those rhymes written on blue paper, mystifying himself. The temporal lie is required, for that year he carried himself farther, backward…

— I remember! … ? … ! About two weeks after that horrible ultimatum addressed to Nielle! … I had had to leave the city for the countryside in order to recover. The very idea of divorce did not affect me, but I missed the softness of Mylène’s skin and her delicate tendernesses.

Before leaving to rest at my parents’ place, so generous, I had handed the keys to my digs to Bruce Brouillette, telling him casually to make the most of them… But one person’s limits are not necessarily another’s. Relativity applies even to the principle of freedom.

Consequently! … On my return, I discovered this… savage abjection of Bruce and his delinquent entourage. — Total dilapidation. — At first glance, only two empty champagne bottles restored a little solemnity to my lodging. The bedroom was upside down; in the kitchen, pizza crusts were drying on plates for the sole pleasure of a few flies; the sparkling wine having been consumed, the shower, meanwhile, was running full blast. Someone interrupted the jet…! — From the tiny room reproduced on the same scale as aircraft toilets, a young woman emerged, naked beneath my robe. Naïve and unsettled by my presence, she seemed to wrap herself in a cloud of steam that escaped with her from that reduced box, a trap for any elevator claustrophobe. — She had just purified herself there.

Superb, about sixteen or seventeen, she had, if I dare say so…, eyes of a “Nielle” blue. This comparison teasing the mechanism of my imagination, my libido was preparing to violate her soul, innocently. Only that.

Right from the start, in no way surprised by my arrival, Mike, the group’s drug dealer, contacted in me that stupefied being, that intemperate dreamer who was already fornicating with the sylph on the steps of a temple consecrated to Aphrodite, somewhere in Greece.

— …she’s beautiful! Eh? … Try her! … She’s hot as hell! The four of us have all been over her! Right, Bruce?!

— Exact, man! … We even measured the depth of her vagina with a screwdriver! Ha! Ha! "

Was Bruce answering without shame or embarrassment out of boasting? … Truth? … Lie? … A joke camouflaging the amusing discovery of one of them’s misshapen sex? — No matter! Distraught, I had become the involuntary accomplice of their orgy.

Clinging to a fixed idea, Mike repeated his indecent proposal…

— … Come on, Damien, mount her! … She won’t say a word! Right, Sophie?

— No! I don’t want any more, I’ve had enough…! "

She was speaking only of leaving, ever since that insistent proposal from the young pervert. Worried, she signalled to me that same look of disgust, that same expression of rejection I endured from Nielle. Destitution and a too-long abstinence showed through my candied expression. No doubt I was repulsive to her too. With the mimicry and intonations of a child, she alleged, as the pretext for refusing to offer herself to pleasure, a state of immaculate freshness.

Like young rockers attending a show that is late in beginning, all four grumbled, protested against my inertia and Sophie’s resistance. They harpooned us with threats and warnings like aspiring mafiosi determined to impose their pseudo-protection. No longer knowing where to turn, I led the young woman with me into the only other room of the lodging that could be closed by a locked door: my studio.

Motionless, I simply examined the colour of her eyes. What else could I do? Having not made love for a long time, all suspicions of those essential sensual preliminaries had fled.

Surprised by my interest in the light blue of her irises, undoubtedly believing I was losing control of my animal instinct, she opened the neckline of the robe, revealing her firm breasts to me. Made aware, she informed me that this was the only alms with which she would grace me. This candour made her still more attractive to me, but…!

But I was thinking of Nielle!

Sophie’s body dissipated in an imaginary transfiguration and appeared to me as my muse’s, letting her chest be uncovered. This visual marvel had the unpredictable effect of making me false even in reacting to the illusion.

Considering the late hour, I persuaded myself that Nielle was stretched out on her bed: perhaps reading in a relaxing position. Estimating the possible reach of my voice in the acoustics of the closed room, I exclaimed with well-measured moderation, making sure that the sleeper, or the reader, would hear me despite the simulation of addressing the astonished adolescent: "I love woman. My mission on earth is to help her. I love Woman, with a capital W!" Without the intention being truly unhealthy or insensitive to the feminist cause, this delirium claimed to guide Nielle toward a more idealistic perception of the creator I was.

Noting the stupefaction produced in Sophie by this excess of condensed madness, I spoke with her more honestly, less freely.

Paternalistic and moralising, I warned her of the danger incurred in this type of more-than-audacious relationship; a single female in a pack of pernicious wolves. Then, on my advice, uttering a few cries and suggestive moans in complicity and constrained humour, we simulated for a few minutes a coitus with the airs of a radio serial. Satisfied with our adroit concomitance, the diapered oppressors let Sophie go. As for them, they left my digs, giving me back key and autonomy.

Relief, there and then…! Yet there persisted this idea of languishing under simple touches, under those happy gestures I was forgetting… Later, lost in the solicitude of my bed and still excited by the nymph’s rosy flesh, I dreamed deeply of Nielle…, deeply the Puritan was turning toward vice.

The next day, wrath and shouting match! Nielle came to my place to burst her vocal cords reproaching me for the uproar of the preceding days. Distressing coincidence. Hospitable, she had lodged two friends from Amsterdam passing through Montréal; benevolent, she had spent the night elsewhere. She had done everything so the Dutchwomen could make the most of her welcome, her refuge, her philanthropy, but above all the quiet and rest they expected to find.

Rightly, they had complained about the din to Nielle; judging the setting dangerous and sordid, they urged her to move for her own safety, then they left, wishing her the best of luck.

— Sorry! I am sorry! … I was absent. I had left my keys with Bruce Brouillette; and please believe me that if I could have foreseen…

— Do not try to convince me of your incredulity, Damien! I am certain all that racket, all your nonsense was premeditated. Through that tribulation you were trying to annoy me! … To poison my existence, as if your presence alone were not enough! "

Hit!

I could justify myself neither by affirmation nor by denial; this diatribe splitting the syllables of the words that came to my mind, only an evasive explanation could still be supplied to her, which vexed her still further. Undue remorse then flared up, supplanting and crushing my harmless desires.

In fact, I had intended to make myself noticed. But only through my absence. (Naïve!) … Overturning fatality. This stratagem of distance as a simulation of absence, it is Nielle who uses it today. This elusive hindrance because she believes she has unveiled me in my true colours. Yet there were moments that did not vanish, without my having desired to expose myself through my darkest sides. Failing her finding me handsome, tall and strong, I cherished the aberration that she might end by succumbing to the discovery of my qualities. — Ridicule does not kill? … False! — In me, my veneration of absurdity has died.

Tale! … Fairy tale! … Märchen! — I believed in the story of the prince transformed into a frog. Alas, while waiting to be kissed, I smoked the devil’s weed. "Smoke! Smoke, Sir Batrachian. Take a full mouthful! You will swell, swell until the fatum of being shredded into a thousand pieces!" _ There! I am fragmented. I am as if empty, and this nothingness that cohabits sadistically with me, I had invited it. Before, the princess spoke to me and looked at me a little. Now, it is nil! Zero! Nothing! — My love suffers from blindness, I no longer see her; neither her, nor that light she hides with the complicity of those close to her. "

After this short reflection following the desynchronised flashback, Damien reread the poem he had just drafted. Torments and guilt hammered him. Taking his pen, without considering the consequences, he crossed out the verb "bathe". The courage of his conscience staggering in flight, he concluded the line thus: "Of your sky-blue eyes, detach myself…"

Sliding into a blue envelope the text he had taken care to transcribe; according to his feigned rituals, he deposited the message tinged with Damienism in the old mailbox of twenty-three sixty-nine. Not without, to guarantee his chances, abandoning a kiss on the heart of the paper…, his beauty’s first name. Just before the postman’s arrival.