CHAPTER XIII

His forehead wrinkles under questioning. Thoughts sharpened like razor blades lacerate his reason. Like thistles of negative energy intertwining and piling up in his brain into a true magma. Exhaustion, underlining like a warning the two meagre hours of psychic labour still left to him in order to disentangle himself, compresses his initial momentum. Final effort, faint recovery.

With a blind gesture, he authorises fate to break the nocturnal quiet by taking a record at random. His only care consists in placing the stylus on side A. The first notes…, uninteresting! Only after striking his chest with a sharp blow to convince himself to finish with it does he recognise the ugly airs of the old banal jazz from the beginning of this savage cure. Out of weakness, he lies down again on his vehicle of travel, the old divan, the family memory more than a century old. Under these auspices, he tries to raise the value of his mnemonic shares.

Of those few days in the countryside, he takes into account only a single flashback; he extracts from it only the clarification that period had granted him.

Even if his blood remained soiled with drugs despite the brief withdrawal, the untainted air and the return to the environment of his childhood had revived him. This impression, of a new health, he hoped Nielle might notice even from a distance.

More than his form, his intentions presented themselves as new. Already, setting foot at home, he murmured softly, lifting his head with pride, a greeting to his solitude with airs of defiance.

— Good morning, solitude, so we are practising mimicry? … Hiding in silence? Well then! You will have to slip discreetly into the eighth notes or sixty-fourth notes, into the treble clefs at reduced volume, for I shall audition my records at the intensity of supermarket “musak”. There is no longer any question of polluting Nielle’s soul with my frustrations. Music will wear the garments of litany, and my urban hermitage will accommodate itself to it.

And I swear to my beloved imagination, intensive window-watching is over! "

Sudden perplexity; he put a brake on his promises, which nevertheless he did not want to direct into the air…

— But what the hell am I going to do with all my time! I suddenly feel disoriented! Continuing my confidences to my journal would implacably lead me to speak to it of my neighbour. — Finish my comic strip? … I would remember too many of my clumsinesses and my impatience. — Clear the snowed-in entrances and double myself as a Don Quixote, as a masked call? … Even if it were only to loosen myself up, I would risk falling back into the storm.

All these too-vivid occupations, these distractions, would tirelessly remind me of my muse with every word, every line or every shovelful! "

Slowly, he turned the palms of his hands upward as if asking heaven to search the future there in the lines. Subtle perception: he sees in them only the symbol of his manual skill. Renewing the appeal, he imagined the supreme being making that same gesture before his genesis. Extrapolating upon this phenomenal fantasy of his imagination, it appeared to him that the creative limit of divine power resided in its apotheosis. Eve, the first woman.

Exhuming from this archaic vision the pleasurable thrill that, perhaps, made God shudder at the accomplishment of his work, and the happiness that he, Damien, had to rediscover; he drew from it an inspiring symbiosis. The creation of a second Lilith. A temptation to which he would consciously succumb. Another woman to distract him from his torment, his love for Nielle. By incidence, all his covetousness led only to a single other lyricism…, already seen…, Marilyn.

Yet reproducing in three dimensions the harmonious face of the Gemini actress would be only a repetition. — In the past, another attempt had failed. The many efforts he had then employed to succeed in modelling it had proved fruitless. As through a concurrence of circumstances, their first volumes protruded from the material at the time of Nielle’s arrival on the street. Their respective beauties, confronting each other with apathy in the artist’s soul, weakened his concentration and diverted him from his technical knowledge of sculpture.

Damien therefore assigned to this pleasant labour he imposed upon himself the task of subjugating his aesthetic fascination with Nielle.

In the minutes that followed, he brought out from the old shed adjoining the house, his arms loaded with a heavy packet of cold plasticine, at a temperature close to freezing.

Stepping onto the walkway that linked, at second-floor level, this decrepit storage place to the gallery, he was stared at by three strangers taking the staircase that led them to the third floor. One of them, a rather tall man, was speaking to the others in English, poorly concealing a strong Portuguese accent. He opened the door for the couple accompanying him. — Damien did not dare question himself for fear of concluding that Nielle had moved away.

The material became malleable only after several hours. But while that waiting mass recovered the ideal temperature for handling, the dreamer consulted the biographies of the star he owned. From his many iconographic sources, he exhumed the image of a Marilyn troubled more than matured by her romantic disappointments. The photo of a woman crushed by the impossibility of a frank, normal liaison visible to all…

In the days that followed, Damien had to redouble his efforts, for he could barely forget the many movements up above. Betting all the same on the work, he was forced to note that distractions were raining down in his beauty’s domain. Besides, Carlos and Lou, who were still on good terms, regularly joined the renewed group.

He recognised Mia’s steps with ease, but sought in vain to abstract himself from Nielle’s. Even in the concentration of work, he was able to codify all the characters, old and new alike. Except one who had inserted himself into that unorthodox percussion. — During his absence. — With the impression that, previously, he had perceived those heel strikes without seeking to connect their sounds to anyone, he named the image lodged beneath those steps “Abstention”.

Each time he heard them, in order to avoid brooding over questions, he repeated to himself for encouragement that the bust had begun well, always with the same intonation, as if recorded.

***

Remembering that painful month of January; the arrival of the mercenaries’ reinforcements, that new asset of players, the dreamopath starts. He is not unaware of his then irreversible sinking into that putrid abyss of his feelings, thrown off balance by unfamiliar foreign reactions. Fear of the unknown. Evil had grazed him; it would wound him. Total humiliation waited in the wings. The banality in the music seems to him still more mawkish. Habit? … Routine? … Already!?

His hands were kneading the material vigorously, modelling better and better. He perceived a clear improvement in his judgment in the game of transposing lines, from the photographic model to the modelling. Developing a taste for this form of expression, he even submitted to the ambition of producing, from memory, a bas-relief of Nielle’s profile.

He was still spilling into the delirium of this lucubration when a surprising telephone call pulled him out of it.

— Damien! This is Lou Jobim. If you are available now… I would have a small favour to ask you.

— Go ahead! What is it? " he answered, intrigued and attentive, even as he wiped the oily traces of plasticine from his fingers onto the receiver.

— Here it is…, I bought a gram of hashish from Bruce, but he does not have time to deliver it here, to the Gula Lupus. You would only have to stop by his place, pick up the stuff and bring it here!

— Fine! All right! I’ll go! … See you soon! "

Seeing in it only the possibility of meeting Nielle by chance, Damien did not meditate, even silently, on the request and set aside his pretentious outlet.

At once nonchalant and suspicious, a certain anger animated him. However, the only favour asked of him in several months involved risks. Barely had he time to learn from Bruce that there was urgency in placing the placebo in Lou’s hands when Damien was already heading toward the restaurant. The route was on foot. Barely two kilometres. A thousand sufferings to traverse in the dreamer’s mind.

— I am willing to grant you peace, but do not abuse your unhealthy projects; otherwise, I do not know from what depths my reactions might surge. — Damned! … — This unforeseen event must not nail me into the taint of bitterness, and still less outbid, multiply the disorder, the morass in my head. — But! … Perhaps they want to set a trap for me? Have me arrested, locked up? — No, Damien! Stop these inner slanders, these subsidiary thoughts. Lou would never risk involving Bruce Brouillette, the landlord’s son, in so Machiavellian a plan. "

Already half the distance covered through the labyrinths of the city and its nervous system… taut. His walk progresses and his imagination derails. Stimulated by a cold light; that of the streetlamps and their shadows, like a cemetery of white-stone monuments.

— If Lou provokes me, since I will be on his ground, I shall exit stage left. I have neither the courage nor the determination of a William the Conqueror. No, thank you, no Battle of Hastings for me! — If Nielle were endowed with telepathic powers, she would feel the sincerity of my love and understand that it is logical for me to fear her, she and her regiment. And then damn it! Her gallant knights, to hell with them all! "

Lifting his right arm, he presented his middle finger to the Most High to beg Him to transmit his message to whom it might concern. He, deflated, did not have the nerve.

— Good, here is the restaurant! … Just enough time to search my pockets and discover there, I hope, the remains of a wry smile. "

His acute poverty forbidding him to frequent restaurants, pleasant and proper manners were somewhat foreign to him. His shyness compensating for his ignorance of proper usage, he waited meekly at the entrance to be shown a seat.

While imposing his culinary recommendations on an assistant, Lou, with a significant gesture, demanded a few minutes’ patience from the cube-dream deliveryman.

Not having the money to pay for even a coffee, Damien occupied his lost time by irritating his taste buds with envy while reading the menu; able to use only the balm of the prices at the end of the line to treat himself for the lingual itch.

— Hi Damien! And… Did you see Bruce? …

— Yes! " Simple assent, underlined by an unnoticed act of subtraction.

Lou, now possessor of the magic square, contented himself with a bachelor’s smile receiving a prize of excellence in order to thank Damien. He was immediately preparing to show the dreamer out.

— Hello, my former neighbour! How is life? … What’s new? " Thus inserted herself Rachelle, former tenant of the Brouillettes, friend of cats and co-owner of the restaurant.

Out of pride or mania? Lou, who had never depreciated the pleasure of being the centre of attention, contrived to silence the artist by chattering first.

— Oh, he still lives on the second floor… Still between Nielle and Bruce…" The cook judiciously interrupted himself for a few seconds, just long enough to let the hypotheses macerate in a brief pause, before Damien had the opportunity to speak. "Now I think of it, artist! I haven’t told you the latest… Just imagine, Mia, Nielle’s sister, is soon going to marry a foreigner. Imagine that he has been living in Canada for barely six weeks.

— What is his country of origin? " Rachelle advanced, seduced by the exoticism of the union.

— He is Portuguese. It seems his parents are well-off people. In any case, my opinion is already made up. It is all the same! … Many immigrants use this legal means to obtain citizenship.

You’ll see if Mia doesn’t undergo a divorce as soon as the ring is on her finger. I am not against immigration, but one must be wary! "

While Rachelle tried to harmonise Lou’s socio-political position on immigration, the dreamer, for his part, pinched his lips to keep himself from shouting at the top of his lungs the word "xenophobe!"

Grasping that his jabbering might have diminished the esteem his boss had for him, Lou slipped away by mentioning that he had recently leafed through a luxury magazine. He added, insisting, that in it he had noticed superb photos of the natives of Papua in war paint. Then he asked Damien to go thank Bruce, escorting his courier while hurrying him along.

No richer for the return trip, for he had demanded no percentage for transporting the precious useless thing, the dreamer set off again toward his routine destitution. Neither the red lights nor those controlled taxi cars (?) driven by Formula One driver personalities distracted him from the gossip narrated by the Gula Lupus kitchen columnist.

— Cursed be this Lou… garou! With him, I am permanently under the impression that he expresses himself on a second level; using words, as a cook, … over a covered fire.

For what malicious reason was he implying that I am still between Nielle and Bruce Brouillette? Why that… still? … Have I become the obstacle to a voluptuous relationship, close to seduction, between Nielle and this adolescent who nourishes his charm on the mimicry of rock singers?

Nielle, you obsess me! … Yet I had sworn to abstract myself from you, delicious neighbour. Where has my New Year’s Day promise gone? "

Without stopping walking, Damien lights a cigarette. In a solemn attitude, he takes a first puff as if it were a peace pipe, for he refuted the idea of a resumption of war against others or against himself. Yet he must extract the splinters of that gossip Lou had revealed to him in Rachelle’s presence.

— This coming marriage of Mia with the Portuguese man…, what interest drove him to inform me of it? None! — But if I let my thoughts decline, I would perfidiously land in the moors of burlesque Damienism; and I would script a long procession of mourners hiding beneath the young bride Mia’s long train. Thus confining the aspect of spectres symbolising impossible hopes flying away with the wedding ceremony.

In the distance, coming from high mountains, a Wagnerian chorus would proclaim that in wanting to conquer one, I had seduced the other. "

Skilfully, Damien flicked his cigarette butt into a ventilation slit of a sewer opening, tossing there at the same time the traces of this succinct delirium.

— This ease I have in daydreaming about love never ceases to surprise me. At the time of my conception, my parents must have been under Morpheus’s control! … Ah! — How ridiculous I feel! Night, it seems, brings counsel! Would it not rather be sleep? " Thus he considered going to bed early after a light snack.

On his sheets, he was not alone. Stretched out beside him, looking at him fixedly without blinking, insomnia dragged him into multiple epics.

***

The dreamopath does not know whether he will reach the borders of his liberation. Those of the deadline now point in terms of minutes. — Neurons white-hot, masochism made indispensable by its contribution of adrenaline, he turns over on his divan soaked with tainted sweat toward his final memories. — End of side A of the jazz record. There will be no side B. Like the hidden side of the moon, he will fill its darkness with buried images that quiver with the joy of committing suicide by resurfacing.

— Damn! Impossible to fall asleep. The stupidest thing is, I know the cause. I am itching to renew contact with Nielle! "

Angry with himself, the insomniac got up and slowly swallowed a glass of cool water to calm himself. Then he moved toward his sculpture to work on it, in order to distract himself from the dizziness that monopolised him.

The more he caressed the form that was approaching Marilyn’s physiognomy, the more he disloyally wished that the volumes he touched, retouched, polished with his hands were those of his jailer. She who had imprisoned him in time, in a single feeling. Of the most serious and the most disordered! Love!

Late, toward the end of the afternoon, he awoke numb from the uncomfortable narrowness of his divan; desiring only a pause from his night work, he had fallen asleep there in the first position. Disoriented by the hour, he remained lying there a few minutes in order to lazily plan the rest of his day. Then he remembered a dream.

(Nielle had become the new heroine of his comic strip. He, an old sage. "We spoke to each other in enigmatic language. She delighted me enough to make wings grow on me.")

Astonished by this poetic remake granted by his subconscious, without subtracting himself from a symbolic analysis, he prepared himself one of his horrible instant coffees, which he consumed in one draught. Those coffee residues having on him the effect of a clandestine psychotropic, he sipped a second cup of that dreadful poison. This surprising toxicity made arise in him the idea of interesting Nielle by the intrigue of a hermetic message.

— Tonight, my beauty, I shall slip a mad confession into that wooden box fixed to your door by a few rusty screws. — I do not care whether Carlos tries to intercept the note, for the apprentice sorcerer concealed in me delights in mystifying him. Especially if the thief, which I know he is, comes home drunk. "

While looking at the last drop cooling at the bottom of his cup, wondering whether he should swallow it, he cogitates on the structure of the words for a just oneiric breakthrough into the enemy bastion.

— First, be brief! Secondly, associate Nielle directly with the character. With that fairy in my dream, with that heroic woman of my comic strip. Finally, sign in such a way that she alone will be able to establish a connection between the esoteric code of the pen name and myself. "

In order to bury the sound of his pen marking the paper and that of the engraved reproaches of his conscience, signalling to him that he was about to falter, to overstep his promise. Like an idle king murmuring the drafting of an official missive to his slightly deaf scribe, he dictated to himself these words…

(-"Fairy N. lies low. Must I keep quiet?

I love you. Sphinx! ")

For several minutes, his eyes did not leave the enigmatic declaration. He read it, reread it a hundred times. Damien even wished for the sublimation of the blue ink into alchemical gold or the metamorphosis of those words into an aphrodisiac philtre. This unusual veneration of his creativity prolonged itself late; until that moment when people choose between the late-evening news bulletin or old-fashioned sex to conclude their day.

Without taking care to be silent, he went to deposit the sibylline statement in that Pandora’s box where only hope already remained, that mailbox worn down by his waiting. He was no more careful in closing the door to return to his reveries; they, overflowing from his digs, prevented him from being discreet. — He was dreaming aloud. — These sweetnesses of the mind, clear but alive like the echo of mountains, ended with the sound of the latch.

At once, it resumed in the following of quick and cadenced steps on the outside staircase. Damien, panting and heart beating with desire, reconnected with his innocuous yet motivated voyeurism. He hurried to conceal himself so he could freely admire Nielle, who would return. — Joy full of bile. — A strange silhouette cut off his breath by seizing his letter, then abruptly rushed down the steps and disappeared from the courtyard outright. Just as promptly, the Brouillettes’ front door opened, closing again at once in that same cadence accompanying the strange moment with corroborating logic.

— Damn you! Whoever you are! " he vociferated toward the plunderer who had just stolen before his eyes the mysterious note intended for his muse.

He no longer moved, even gripping, as if he wanted to tear them, the curtains protecting him from all gazes. He loosened his hands only each time he described to himself the appearance of the individual hostile to his desires.

— Like an androgyne dressed from head to foot and wearing a mask, it is impossible for me to distinguish the sex. A woollen cap pulled down to the ears, a scarf hiding the rest of the face. The bastard, male or female, was wrapped in a thick dark coat and wore heavy winter boots. Someone else’s. Father Brouillette’s. The ones he wears when he de-ices the balconies, the galleries, the sidewalks; the ones he puts on to work.

But why, my God? … Who among the Brouillettes is inhuman enough to hate me to the point of interfering in my trouble and muddling me further? "

Welded to his stupefaction, and to the ire of not being able to place a name on the scarecrow in winter paraphernalia, he closed in on himself, despising the lack of consideration of his neighbours below.

— Does this satanic house lodge only hypocrites of the worst kind? You, from the hell below, you who hear my messages sublimated by music and which I launched toward my paradise. Have I insulted you through my intriguing madness until you judged it useful to restrain my freedom? … May the virus of wickedness contaminating you all fuck you! "

While making many efforts to relax, he looked at the floor as if to inundate the lower floor with his waves.

— Fear not, I am sane of mind. I am in love, that is all! But you must tame my anxiety at fighting the injustices with which I am covered as if I were dung! "

Turning his eyes in the opposite direction, this new interception of one of his messages leads him to reconsider his yet ineffective telepathy as the only conceivable path to dissipate the emotional mist that makes him whimper.

— Nielle, I love you. Simply, I love you! "

Like those unbearable pains that must be externalised from the guts, this frustration he had just endured seized him by the throat, and it was with a voice that made his cat shudder and the walls tremble that he cried out with all his strength.

— Ungerechtigkeit! "

Shouted like a blasphemy, this German word meaning "injustice" had reverberated through the twisted slanders of the neighbourhood. His tears soon signalled their presence to the silence, which sobbed in its own way, as if to console a friend.

Damien, crushed upon his legs, envied the comfort of his bed, aspiring to soften there the harshness of this sudden persecution.

Toward the middle of the night, he emerged from an agitated sleep, brief and barely restorative. Passing over his dose of caffeine, he approached his modelling in progress. He felt more than isolated in that house resembling an asylum for the alienated; caught in a sandwich between the mouldy bread the Brouillettes had become and the consecrated host his beauty had always been. Thus, then, he resorted to the unfinished reproduction of the one who no longer existed, his service muse, Marilyn, to confide in her.

— You are indeed the only one who understands me, Miss Monroe. Your love life was broken by tumult too. Although, … I believe mine will probably never be born. Do you know what I had to endure yesterday…!? Tell me, why do they use the forceps of ignominy to abort the slightest parcel of aspiration to join your rival?

What is the use! Just like God, you do not answer me. I fear Lucifer may finally be the strongest! All these problems in the world, … all this evil in mine. "

Grumbling about the previous day’s event, the artist traced, with the aid of a modelling tool, the movement in the hair of the American Aphrodite. He would have allowed himself the audition of a soft jazz, if the night had not been so close to morning. Damien therefore forced himself to measure the space-times between the obscene quiet of the house and its creakings. Into these latter, undergoing the fluctuations of the wind, others more regular inserted themselves. Despite increasingly difficult efforts of concentration, he continued chiselling the hair in the plasticine.

These distinctive sounds transcribed an exciting feverishness. First light and subtle, and in long cadence, the rhythm increased, thus granting him the ease of identifying its origin. The discreet unveiling of Nielle’s lovemaking with a partner whose sought identification would accentuate the trouble.

Distracted further by the desire to find himself, he, in the humid warmth, in the incomparable smoothness of that divine vessel, in that nocturnal alcove, Damien decided to move his sculpture into his solitary bedroom. Sleep, for its part, came to join him while he tried vainly to analyse the creative errors provoked by that erotic vocal crescendo of Nielle’s.

Träumen! … Dreaming! … Dream! …

(-"I am a languishing animal exhausting myself in enduring these sweet complaints. This "Hymn to Joy" that is Nielle in orgasm. — With ardour, I try to erase, to scratch out dryly those minutes of pleasant debauchery. Then Nielle, gliding on her legs with their troubling curves of black nylon stockings, learns from an academician who ingeniously constructs the interest she feels for him, glorious person that he is, by polishing the pedestal of my memorable blunders with effective satires.")