CHAPTER XV

Ambushed in his own deadline! Surprised into choosing between dying or surviving, imploding or growing, he had underestimated the scale of the challenge. — One does not rid oneself of love, even after an unconscious gestation that has gnawed like a cancer for more than a decade. One does not get rid of that seed of God, of its cosmic quintessence; one fertilises it, modifies it for better or for worse, purifies it or debases it.

Eighteen hours! He has slept eighteen hours! … Nothing is finished!

Furious with himself, he quibbles with time, which did not consent to doze off with him. This unjustified manifestation of anger, his unqualifiable ire, kindles in him the profile of failure. A day has fled. More even, if he decides to begin again from zero. Forty-two hours vanished. All that because of that deserved but undesirable sleep.

He pulls himself together. After all, had he not paid in advance for four days’ rental of these premises that poured out, in multitude, Nielle’s image and voice? This time, he grants himself an indefinite delay. The extension of the introspection will take place without the stress of time timing his reconquest of himself.

The dreamopath allows himself, as a second attempt, to tear away this burden that still blocks him. This tumult that prevents him from letting his sentimentality ripen. He concentrates on the completed retrospective, on those memories already excavated the day before, which he begins again from zero. Exhaustively? … No, in summary, in the manner of the themes composing the overture of certain operas.

— … Our shadows greeting one another. Encounter or collision? — That momentary hypnotism during the neighbourhood celebration, that reciprocal lightning strike nevertheless chipping only one heart, mine. Mistaken identity? Was Cupid drunk? — The divorce from Mylène, the first angel of my life… Irreversible movement anticipated by Nielle’s existence? — The disreputable and crude proposal to sleep with my neighbour… Pretension! — The tricks of the interveners Bruce, Lou and Carlos. Cruelly premeditated? … — The instruction to intercept the mail… The worst of subterfuges! The most stinging of strategies! But planned by whom, in reality? — The collaboration on the scenario annihilated by my impatience and that offensive attempt at recovery, on Saint Catherine’s Day, through the insipid liberality of a vulgar black-and-white drawing. Two consecutive insults as a marriage proposal! — Nielle’s game of hide-and-seek to avoid me. A discomfort fleeing pain? — The messages, sent only one way, in stereo. An answer! … Ferré, ("… with time…") — The winter adventures of the humorous masked shovel. A jest! A play on words without resonance? — Jonathan’s return! … A trap? — The erotic dream. A dislocated “wet dream”… Two new lives exterminated! "

Blocked at this last sequence, the sick dreamer estimates that, until now, the probable causes from which his misfortune comes are unapparent, imperceptible or almost so… in his memories. The benevolent attentions, the unconscious or deliberate delicacies of the muse toward him had hooked him. Nielle’s gentlenesses, rare enough to collect, had kidnapped his imaginative heart.

Doors and shutters are closed again. Outside, the sun sets as if for a second time in the same day. The dreamopath opens himself again down to the soul, like the pages of his journal. The worn photograph of Nielle also comes back to life. The two objects fulfil themselves in friendship to support the dreamer as there resurfaces a trauma lived on the last day of January…

— He is mad! … I tell you, he is mad! " This hard accusation crossed every partition, leaving no right of passage, even for the dreamer’s heart.

— I am… what? " Damien swallowed back, while continuing to smooth the face of the bust to force its shine, final touches to his modelling.

— Mad! Mad! " Nielle’s voice became more and more incisive and acid.

That his muse should point at madness did not displease him, … she was interested in him. She was carrying out this grave indictment at the Brouillettes’. There! … He did not appreciate it, and this shrill accusatory flight intrigued him, surprised him and worried him; she was interesting others besides herself in his probable imbalance.

Damien considered that this disturbing finding of Nielle’s was turning into clear proof of collusion between Nielle and the owners. He wondered about the real motivation of his “dolce” in practising calumnies among those twisted people who could turn against her at any moment as they had done against him.

This verbal assault did not die out the instant she left the dwelling of her landlord accomplices; it ended only with the slamming of her door. A noise preceded by an emphatic reiteration of her conviction, which she addressed to the void hidden behind curtains without silhouette… without any denouncing movement.

In his dive, he paced back and forth to relax. He did not dare absent himself from home. Taking the air, either to change his ideas or to cool the fever that had appeared, seemed incongruous and dangerous to him. He feared crossing members of the Brouillette family, or Lou and Carlos, or Mia, or even, … her! For then, what respective reactions would explode in each one’s face? …

He knew himself cowardly, and from there, decided to remain so “Ad vitam aeternam”. Worried to the point of forgetting to feed himself, he settled into his cherished cowardice, not without feeling guilty.

— What I would like to tell them all, even Nielle, my way of thinking. Yes, definitively! — There! … I would arrive before her, shoulders raised and chest swollen, and there, I would tell her that I heard her call me mad more than once! … Then I would tell her… that she is right, because I love her as such. With debility! "

The soliloquy without resonance was abruptly interrupted by a little continuous hammering on the back door. Courtyard-side door, emergency door almost of recourse… The owner persisted in announcing himself. Damien opened to him before he wore out a few knuckles.

— Hi Damien! … I’ve come to see what’s going on. The girl upstairs, (no mention of Nielle, prudence obliging)… just came out of our place, mad as hell! … She said you’re crazy… Is that true? " he said while letting a sly and laconic smile appear on his zygomatics.

First affected by Nielle’s shattering affirmation, then stunned by Father Brouillette’s unwelcome visit, Damien remained speechless. Taciturn toward pious wishes, for he stopped wallowing in his pusillanimity only long enough to renovate his reason.

— I… am not… mad, Monsieur Brouillette! … and I grant you that I could give you that impression. If you were in my place, how would you act if people tried to double-cross you by forcing you to believe lies or worse…? … What would you do, if letters you had written were pinched from you? … If they were stolen from you… under your eyes? … And what if it were she who was mad? … And if it were she, what would you do? …"

Damien hoped to leave the owner dumbfounded. This old man who might himself have committed the larceny. The latter’s cunning, his experience, inverted the artist’s apprehension, the suspicion of which he was the object.

— Exactly! The girl upstairs has plumbing problems. Her sink is leaking, … she told me. I’m going to fix that, and… I’ll see if she’s mad. OK? … Bye! "

Bold enough to continue his investigation despite the disagreeable task… of feasting his eyes on the harmonious contours of the two sisters, the old male, plumber by obligation, chief inspector by defection, hurried to ring on the third floor. If he had been unable to convince himself of his tenant’s madness, he was nevertheless satisfied to have brutalised the dreamer’s already restricted fragility and freedom. Moreover, he had been able to deduce from his interview that an artist is perhaps not a normal being.

The habit of his apartment’s solitude let him down. Nielle had just invaded what remained to him of space and independence. He had hoped for an interested glance from his muse, but the interest he had aroused developed in a texture displaying harshness. Evicted from any delicacy from his muse, he now waited only for other arrows aimed at him to come perforate his pride, split his soul, even while withdrawn in his lodging.

Lonely in his kitchen, he heard Father Brouillette less caulking the pipes than deliriums and bragging. Having already undergone the owners’ investigation technique himself, he now waited only for the plumber on duty to undertake to recover the leaks Nielle might be willing to let flow… Fixed like a pedestal, the dreamer never tired of waiting in order to hear.

— There! … It has been twenty minutes he has been plumbing…! Repairing the leak while talking nonsense. As I know him, normally he should broach the subject. — Unless some particle of wisdom arises, advising him to pass over it. Let the embers whiten rather than throw oil on the fire. — I hear the sound of the tools he is putting back into his metal box. "

Barely perceptible, because half covered by the careless tidying, the old playboy’s words and tone came in fragments to Damien’s ears.

— … says… not mad… You… mad!

— What! … He dares say that I am mad! That good-for-nothing dared…! I hate him! I hate him! But he is mad! He is mad! "

This justified outburst accorded with the rhythm of Nielle’s heels striking the floor. With sustained intensity, this hatred avowed with stamping sank into the dreamer’s consciousness down to the roots of guilt. Damien’s initially voluntary immobility took on the appearance of paralysis. His legs numb to the point of itching, his abdomen tense, his thorax mute of any breath. The only possible movement: pressing his hands hard against his ears to simulate deafness. Sigh upon sigh detonated against this artificial silence. Tears wet their habitual courses like a river carved on his face by the miseries Nielle and her clan had already made him endure.

He had no strength left except to verify whether, up there, normality had returned.

Hidden by the flowered kitchen curtains he had kept closed all day, he undressed. Letting his clothes fall where he had nailed himself; imprisoned during the time it took to be approached by the hatred Nielle bore him.

Naked and uninterested in life, he pivoted on himself and raised his head toward the ceiling, now the only reflection of his muse. Breath short, throat tight, voice stifled by nodules, he strangely interpreted the truth he felt. Authentic, he was at once actor, author and subject.

— Nielle! … Oh Nielle! Lower your eyes toward me, naked as a worm. My body as much as my soul. Look at this empty pupil…, this cornea dried not by tears but by the absence of light. That gleam you stole from me by interlocking me with nothingness; by hiding, by saving yourself so that I could not surprise the beauty, the blue pigment of your eyes. Those eyes that gave me a taste of ink…

Nielle! … Oh Nielle! Do not curse me! Do not wish me to burn in hell. For I shall trouble Satan himself with my tears. My moans, my complaints will denounce the absence of your gaze. My desolation is such that he would regret being master of the reverse side of Eden; my sorrow is so great that he himself would become the damned one, the whipping boy of the worst evil you could wish upon me: the eternal caress of your eyes. "

Sudden weakening. Damien, falling to his knees, did not feel the shock of his kneecaps on the hardwood floor, so occupied were the circuits of his nervous system in goading the acuity of his inner evil toward future dreams.

While, on the third floor, the clique dined while signalling new faults, while tracing malignant volutes upon the madness, the dementia of the dreamer, of the original below; he painfully dragged himself to his bed.

Like the birds in Little Thumb eating the breadcrumbs sown as clues to find his way back to safety, the air gobbled the tears by drying them.

His cat came to rub against him, believing in her innocence that he wished to play. Then, as if worried, from her mouth filtered a slight and gentle meow like a comfort underlining the existence of a great friendship. She followed him until he took refuge on his bed, where he tempered his consternation by pressing with intensity his pillow, which was rapidly dampening beneath the weeping.

Illogical, destiny reminded him that if God is the mechanics of life, he himself was its irreconcilable dynamism. Stretching out upon his remorse, he polished the idea of a final conclusion to his downfall, the flight from failure. Yet, as if he were isolated in a desert, undergoing there the torment of Tantalus, he imagined mirage after mirage, from second to second, a reflection, a dream or an oasis allowing him to quench himself, to nourish his inextinguishable thirst for his muse.

Welded to his bed by exhaustion, he vaguely examined, through the veil of his moist eyes, the details of Marilyn’s bust. He lingered neither on the defects nor on the successes of the modelling; he painted confidences to it, his meditations on the erotic dream, the unexpectedness of its effect and the events of this never-ending day. In the return of normal breath, he confided to it that he wondered whether his soul worked for or against itself, despite the uncertainty of its presence. However, in the room above, people were moving, bustling. They were scheming!

With sufficient lucidity, Damien discerned that despite multiple precautions taken to avoid noise, up there, two heavy objects were being moved. Sagacious, he detected a commotion, a singular staging. In the centre of the room, near the first objects, something soft was set down, like a cushion. All around, taking the form of the points of a pentacle, five articles of a lightness comparable to that of a small candlestick. Then, for a few stunning minutes, silence invested the place of the machination.

Omitting the raising of the curtain, the actors improvised a situation involving a Deus ex machina. Two characters, god or devil and the saint or the bewitched woman. Nielle held this last role. Then, a voice forced into the lower register, amplified by loudspeakers, evidently the heavy objects, affirmed:

— You must promise never to see Damien again! "

— Nielle’s voice: "Yes, but Lord, I love him! "

— The being’s voice: "If you abstain from this promise, you will be condemned! "

— After a brief silence, a submission: "Yes, Lord, I swear it… for life! "

A brief staging for a ceremony of barely three minutes! The group withdrew toward the kitchen, where all burst out laughing at full volume, entertaining no doubt as to the success of their joke and ignoring, in their childishness, that Damien perceived as much their sarcastic laughter as that voice of the pseudo-eternal still resonating… At last, the ham actors moved toward the front, to the living room, passing from hilarity and derision to simple comments.

Damien, mute until then, did not disdain the circumvolution of that hatred, meanness and betrayals whirling around him, for the pity he felt for his torturers warmed him in the reflection of his own esteem. This comedy performed by his upper neighbours… (?), restored just enough energy to minimise a resurgence of his tears.

Without seeking to track down their intentions, he looked down on them with his soul through thought.

— How could they guess that I was in my bedroom? … Chance? — Mia studies cinema and perhaps it was a sequence for one of her assignments… Yes, that must be it, and this room suited her. But how can I explain to myself that immediately afterward, they hurried to run toward the kitchen to split their sides, laughing like madmen… Why the repeated mention of my first name?

Directing his irritated eyes toward the reproduction of the dead confidante…, the one he amused himself by calling the first inspirer; he blessed its false presence. The clayey impression. For it alone knew that his mental equilibrium was temporarily…

— … Out of order! " it seemed to say to him.

— You too, Marilyn, do you believe I am mad?

— That is not what I said! Fool! … You are undergoing an affect. On the one hand, because you are realising that this woman will never love you, and on the other, by attempting to make you pass for mad, she is clearly signifying to you that you are both from different worlds.

— But, … you too, … you are from another universe and yet you love me, " Damien whined.

— No! I do not love you. You know perfectly well that this is impossible for me. I cannot even bring you the tiniest mark of tenderness. There again! You got it wrong, my lad. As usual, you delude yourself! …

You take pleasure in dreaming, in imagining to the point of establishing your reputation as the village idiot. For example, you transform a vulgar fly into a spy or into a divine trial…, depending on your decision to crush it or let it live. From a simple drop of water, you extract an imaginary and fantastic world into which unfortunately no one but you can enter…! "

— No one but me and… Nielle, " he intervened in a tone pronounced like an aside.

— And me, are you already forgetting me? … And me? … And me? " decanted the Marilyn of his Fantasia.

The dreamer was suddenly suspended in this new ether, not because he ignored the substance of the retort, his answer already being born on the tip of his lips, but up there, there was commotion. There, where he had never dined tête-à-tête with Nielle, a lively discussion was turning black, like a storm into a cyclone.

— What a racket they are making! … Nothingness! I must not listen to them, do myself even more harm. The controversy must aim to decipher my level of delirium, " Damien over-pressed his ears with his hands until his palms paled, until his auricles whitened. He heard himself within banalising the altercation in a cavernous voice. "Perhaps they are discussing last night? … The strange dream? … I do not know. And why should I necessarily be at the centre of their present concerns? "

He then gave his sensitive hearing full leisure to spy. On the third floor, the rather stormy skirmish had sharpened into an acute verbal engagement. The professor seemed to fence, with Nielle, to defend an acquired right. The fascination she devoted to him.

— How can you love a pusher? … A small-time drug dealer. But do you not see he has a pig’s face! …"

Silence. Truce? The sudden appeasement automatically extrapolated itself from Jonathan’s last sentence, which, evidently, had just offered the most accurate self-description of himself by accusing someone else of that repulsive appearance.

Precipitation from one staircase to the other. The door had closed violently between them.

His nose rubbing against one panel of curtain, one eye in their parting, Damien sympathised with the erudite man leaving the muse. The pain he had just sought without suspecting it, the evil that would pursue him to the end of his days, the dreamer already lived them.

Placing his feet on the frozen asphalt, the banished man cast a short glance toward the window from which Damien was observing him, as if greeting a brother of a sect into which he had just been initiated. Then he set off again, perhaps to play the scene of the beaten dog at the feet of his young wife, whom he must have left a few days earlier.

Had the erudite man just been rejected? … Or had he voluntarily excluded himself from that crystal castle before cutting himself on the shards of disenchantment? — In the arena he was fleeing, the consternation of some and a certain relief whistled by the muteness of others were confronting one another.

One floor lower, Damien sighed with a different motivation.

— This pusher… was it me the professor was referring to in his outburst, I who was the deliveryman for a single evening? … Or was he calling up the too-frequent drug deliveries from Bruce Brouillette to Nielle’s? — Was Lou Jobim not warning me at the Gula Lupus restaurant that I was exactly where one must not be, … between Nielle and the young delinquent? — Shit! Clear out, professor! … Even your departure is useless to me! Too many rats in the same cage. The beta has moved away; the alphas remain! "

Shaking his head as if to put his ideas back in place, he authorised himself to an inconsequential conclusion. Without being disconcerted, he remained shocked to deduce that Nielle might be interested in Bruce, even in a passing and purely physical love. Damien was all the more offended because the Brouillette family hindered his return to reality by stubbornly denying him Nielle’s presence for months. Even if their denials had had no direct repercussions in the dreamer’s life, they nevertheless increased their son’s power of seduction by making him just as sly in collusion.

Damien set off again toward his imaginary spheres, to find Marilyn there. He wished to confide his impressions on the latest setbacks to her, demanding in exchange advice and reprimands.

— You again! … What do you want from me? … You no longer love Nielle? … Why do you return to me with every disappointment? … I replace your mother, don’t I? …

— No, Marilyn! I still love Nielle but…, but you too… — I no longer know. I no longer know! Is it only in you that I can have confidence? "

Annoyed at having humiliated the actress’s soul even into its rest; to guarantee indulgence, he tenderly caresses one cheek and places a kiss on the cold and oily reproduction’s forehead. Recovery achieved. Then he continues his astral peregrination with the beyond.

— Tell me, Marilyn, … you heard earlier, did you not?

— Yes, a little too much! Unfortunately, another victim of your games leader. The dice are loaded, my friend!

— You must be mistaken, Nielle surely is not at the origin of…, well, not voluntarily. Are you convinced of it? …" he said, while simulating an instant of reflection from his confidante, conferring on the modelling more authority, more realism than he had ever had himself.

— Absolutely certain! She differs from you in every respect, except on one point. She possesses a mind just as dreamy as yours! — Is this a refutable intuition because it proves incongruous? … She fears loving you, considering that her poetic soul frightens her still more than yours!

Perhaps you are even the "Nec plus ultra" of runts, the love of her life. — Rather! You would have been, if you had not, in a vengeful gesture, diverted the projects God presented to you on a silver platter.

— Are you mentioning the erotic dream?

— What else? … Yes, that famous dream of the three records. — Imbecile! — You would have her in your arms, your damned Nielle, if you had not attempted to double-cross reality with a vengeful lie. But no! … Monsieur preferred the game and let himself be pulled by the hand like a child. What is the result? … Your conscience is neutralised by the inevitable venom of that countertruth that had seduced you. — Did you even reflect for a single instant? … Did you dare to assess that in your insistence, in your perseverance in wanting to interest Nielle in your little person, you had perhaps sown trouble in her? … A dose of madness, unalterable? Insurmountable for a being of her fragility?

— No! I did not make her mad! … No! It is I who am mad! … No, not mad! — Marilyn, why be so cruel? … So cutting! — You get on my nerves in the end! "

Sharply, he turned his head away to evade the insensitive and dead gaze of the sculpture; out of repulsion, he sought to avoid the veracity of his own reflection.

The intensity of the events, he measured it in sighs; he gauged the depth of the abyss in tears he shed, slowly, in order to recover their resonances. Concentrated in his chest, his emotions grazed his heart with every beat. He touched, felt, collated his committed errors as if he were playing blind man’s buff with the blindfold of guilt; with each capture, it burst in his hands, juicy as a rotten fruit. His mind was upside down, as much as his sheets, over which he was still turning, naked.

— Everything is my fault! " translated his weak lamentations.

Lost between their silences, other voices let themselves be heard. Madness, tumult and that parasitic solitude had sharpened Damien’s hearing. As if his eardrums had tamed the whole acoustics of the house, from cellar to attic, he had no need to press his ear to the walls or to the wooden floor to hear the defamations aimed at him. — This time, the voices came from below; the Brouillettes were conversing. According to their habits, they spoke loudly…

— He is mad! … I’m telling you! … That guy isn’t normal! " The nesting mother, like a cheerleader, led the enthusiastic slander of her family into her fierce perspective.

— Yes, I agree with you, Mom. Damien is a moron! … He should be locked up! " Nadine astonishingly flaunted, proud of approval but above all satisfied to soften, for once, her resentment toward the dreamer she loved in secret.

No doubt that, even if inapplicable, the proposal of an immediate lynching would have followed, had it not been for the presence of Anne, one of the three Brouillette daughters. She, a psychology student, tempered the overvoltage of the judges and vigilantes in nightgowns, pyjamas and dressing gowns.

— Personally, I do not believe he is mad. I think he is simply a little neurotic.

— Want me to tell you? … Me, I think they’re both mad. Nielle and him! " added Father Brouillette, badly hiding his delight at slandering his tenants to strengthen his status as head of the family.

These denigrations concerning him or aimed at his muse, he could no longer hear them. New tears, appeared, froze at not being able to retort. — Suddenly beatific with self-love? … False! — Infamies upon wounds, offences upon defamations, hatred upon hatred. The hope of survival no longer flowed through his veins. He grabbed oxygen, and the hope of getting through, in small puffs like an asthmatic in crisis. Fear. The mad dread of this house became like direct access to Gehenna. His entrails twisted, writhed like the ouroboros: that serpent devouring itself by the tail. His hara caught fire!

As if his neurons were going to burst, two fingers from exploding into sobs, he rose quickly and hurried toward the shower.

Cold, then icy, the jet of water striking the metal sheet and tumbling over his body covered his resurfaced tears. Like a violent leak, this acid cascade in turn veiled words.

— No more proofs of my passion for Nielle! Finished! F. I. N. I…. elle. Climb back up, come out of the abyss. Survive without wavering… — My chest is on fire, burning with repentance. Risk taking all the blame, innocenting you, Nielle my love… — Do not waver… — Never! … Never will they succeed in burying my love in doubt and by means of it… Never! … Even if I must accept becoming truly mad, to… cope with mental… illness! "

Cleared of the tangle in his mind, the rediscovered purity of love exhorted him to moan too frequently. The anguish of being surprised camouflaging his pain forced him to regain control over himself. With difficulty, he closed the taps and let the pearls of water evaporate on their own from his body. Kneeling in the shower, he clung to images of Nielle that came to him like lifebuoys, and poles to help him rise again, contain himself.

Provoked by the voluntary and arduous suffocation of his ailment, he salivated overabundantly, still struggling to breathe. In this half-breath, he returned to his bedroom to wrap himself in his sheets soiled with sweat and tears, burrowing there like a reclusive animal licking its wounds to cure itself.

Bruised in his lover’s pride by his beloved’s casualness, his neighbours’ spite, the deceptions and betrayals, his head seemed to wither. — Isolation in the pillow…, an asylum!

Curled up on his undone bed, suffering invaded him more and more intensely. Holding back the tears? Close to impossible. He had the sickness of being and the sickness of the sadly accomplished. In muffled moans, he implored heaven that his muse should not hear him suffer.

His determination to moderate the intensity of his complaints, of his moans, intensified the torture. The virulence of the torment became so unbearable that Damien’s resistance evaporated, splashing the dangerous silence he had striven to maintain.

The inevitable was perceived!

His oscillating lamentations had ended by lashing the sleep of a foreign couple visiting Nielle. From that improvised guest room the depressive crescendo reached them… of the dreamer in crisis.

— But what is wrong with him, crying like that?

— I do not know! But he must be in terrible pain!

— What is happening? " Nielle and Mia questioned, awakened by their guests’ troubled voices.

— He is crying! He has not stopped crying! "

The muse now knew that her inspired one was suffering horribly. Without identifying the cause, she could not deny this first contact with the rejected sensitivity of the evicted being who was moaning beneath her steps. Letting none of her worry show, she returned to her bedroom, certain that in any case she would have no hold over the artist’s nightmare. However! … She was unable to close her eyes again. Her heart was moved. Through her soul passed feelings similar to those the dreamer had already lived. That inexplicable sympathy, when she had come home crying one summer evening.

But Damien knew nothing of it. The implied lack of interest confirmed, and the amoral will of his muse to remain taciturn, was to drink the chalice, the cup down to the dregs. The overflow shot out from too much perceived of Nielle. He expelled from his body, with loud cries, a number of those heavy sobs agglutinated in their repressions, pre-existing the intimacy of the friable walls of his dreamer’s heart.

Fleeing himself without strength, moving away from this weakness he reproached himself for, he followed, tracked, the partitions of his apartment. Staggering and anguished, like a wounded animal seeking to escape a hunter nested in its soul. Trusting his conscience, become a panic-stricken compass, he wandered through every room, desperately trying to cling to an object, … to memories more robust than he.

Anxiety, reviving the origins of his desolation, made him despair as he exclaimed, striking down indiscreet ears: "Nielle! … I love you! … Forgive me! … You, the love of my life, you are not a ghost, you truly live up there. Nielle, you are not mad like me; you are imaginative, nothing more. "

No corner of the building was isolated enough to mute these strident complaints, detaching themselves like a tear from Damien’s belly. No partition, floor or ceiling was caulked against that abyssal cold sliding over their consciences like a shiver subjecting them, at that instant, to loathe the trauma they had provoked.

Damien’s eyes, swollen with tears, puffy with irritation and suffering, now emitted only a wan gleam of life, like crumbs of hope. This body weighed down by the cure of his emotions and the collapse of his feelings, he dragged it under constraint, painfully. Moreover, ill at ease at having laid his heart bare before his inclem­ent and rapacious neighbours, he did not forgive himself for having faltered. He did not forgive himself for having confessed to them his exhaustion in trying to embroider indifference. He did not forgive himself for having reached the limits of his endurance, faced with the errors of others and of himself.

Drunk on these outpourings, he had no other recourse than to go seek comfort in winter’s arms. He dressed with the obligatory slowness of the condemned heading for the scaffold; those no one rushes until five minutes to midnight. Pretending that nothing had ever happened, he went out calmly with absolute precaution.

Above him, Nielle, shaken by the dreamer’s trance, formulated worries: "Let us hope he does not go throw himself off the bridge… In the state he is in, poor him. " But the muse’s anguish was quickly dissipated; her worries were banalised by the reassuring words of Lou Jobim, who, just returning from work, even though he had missed the event, was rubbing his hands at the outcome of his designs.

If inside it had rained too much, outside it was snowing enough for the rising north-westerly to form snowbanks. Over the minutes and reflections, the stretched traces of his steps, and their apparent sinuosity, recovered the aspect of an almost normal gait.

The wind pinching Damien’s face imposed its winter reality. But above the crackings of branches from the iced poplars, a few tears and a few cries of rage signalled his own, through grumbling, through revolt.

Stopped at a red light, he discerned the formation of a drift at his feet; out of simple poetry, he compared himself to a snowflake travelling at the whim of the wind.

— We are both small. Very small. You, the wind places you where it wants; I must make wind! … You are going to melt; I have already melted… You, little thing, cannot live love, having no right to it; I, little thing, I…, neither can I. You, so small, can slip in everywhere, even go die warm at my muse’s place; I, so small, who would like to die in her, I, she does not deign to open to me! Then what else can I offer her but a useless proof of love, … such as leaving and moving away from her. Since my non-being pleases her; how could I not opt for moving…? "

No one knew of Damien’s return, he who had recovered a certain vitality thanks to the gusts of powder snow waltzing in the white agora. The night fled again into its same habits. He, victim of rejection, believed it was deserting him, but held nothing against it, for it had put an end to his distress.

***

Noon. The plaintive meowing of his cat invited him to rise to satisfy her hunger. A slight taste of fish was tormenting her. After satisfying his feline, he hurried to buy the newspaper, in order to consult the classified ads there. — Apartments for rent!

That very day, everything was settled. The signing of a lease, the choice of movers, the acquisition of cardboard boxes that he loaded almost immediately, and his notice to the Brouillettes, who did not hesitate a fraction of a second before accepting it. (The next day, he would be gone.)

That very evening, his apartment was unrecognisable. The studio and the kitchen were emptied of their effects; each seemed larger. The living room, however, seemed shrunken, everything there being methodically placed and stacked. In the bedroom, Damien had kept only his bed, to sleep one last time near Nielle, and his Marilyn, of synthetic clay, to exchange impressions on those overwhelming moments of agony. Optional.

Neither music nor noise indicated his final presence to his neighbours. He moved with the slowness of adepts of "tai chi", resolved to acclimatise Nielle to his very near absence. Pushing delicacy to the maximum, he did not bother switching off before going to bed, for fear the click of the switch might spoil his first intentions.

Certain that he would weep there, he patted his pillow as if to soften better than the previous day the expression of his pains. On the pillowcase, like vestiges discovered without excavations, stains of blood amazed him.

— Could I have been in such pain? … Do I love Nielle to the point of stigmatising my sorrow? … Why suffer all the way to sublimation? … Why the existence of the saintly, of the sacred in my life, … if only to bring me closer to the profane in me? Yes, I am only a man whose love refutes requests! Yes, I have a strange name, Damien. Yes, Damien is only a human being! "

Without hurrying, without ceasing to repeat to himself that he was only a man, conscious of the symbolic gestures he was preparing to accomplish, he rose and went to fetch from one of the sealed boxes a canister of red paint. The same aerosol used to write the famous graffiti "Hard headed woman". — Freezing before his mural, that fresco he had had blessed by a priest by duping him with messianic remarks; he made the sign of the cross, then recollected himself, admiring in a last glance the work in which he had represented himself as Kristos Anonymus.

Like the repetition of a sacrilege, he grafted onto that surface thirteen red letters, which would become most visible and most mortifying when, before leaving, he stripped the windows of their curtains, like the unveiling of an epitaph.

— I LOVE YOU NIELLE!

Then, still more drastic, he turned around with a sharp movement toward the plasticine and, in a brutal gesture, with the energy of his practised thumbs, demolished the mute figurine simultaneously with a final statement: "It is her I love, Marilyn! It is Nielle I love! " At last, he fell asleep, rocking himself in gentle thoughts for his neighbour.

The next day, as planned, Damien lived somewhere other than beneath his muse’s steps.

***

Relative deliverance for the dreamopath. Where is the hour? … Where is he? Total ignorance no longer persists… By induction, he understands that this decision to let Nielle live, by eclipsing himself, was beneficial to her. But for him? … The instant worsening of his sly downfall! If he had had the courage to live under the oppression of isolation like a cloistered man, to act as a monk in the contemplation of her steps, his soul would not have remained unsatisfied. It was not so much the direct effects of the move, the flight from that atmosphere in catalepsy, that reached him, as those waves from which he had unchained himself and which he would never recover.

Time, that rev-counter, that tachometer of human destiny, increased his torment rather than absolved him from it. No detoxification possible. "No, Ferré! It is often false to claim that with time… one forgets. " It is erroneous to claim that the music of a muse’s steps, the echoes of the voice of the being one loves and even those shadows seeking to slip away, … cease to interest memory.

But! … God, he is no less guilty than Chronos! Why did He make emerge, like a new continent to covet, that being with the first name Nielle in the seventh-degree life that was Damien’s, called the dreamopath, called the artist alias the dreamer?

To the divine stroke of genius of the Supreme, of striking the artist without embarrassment by the incredible tangibility of a wonder of the living world close to him; truer, farther than the absolute, love instinctively incited him to love through and with his body, however ugly it might be. (Twin reincarnation of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Toulouse-Lautrec?) He, Damien, who until then had enjoyed only the pleasures of the intellect, understood by the grace of this trial that life feeds through the roots, not by self-sufficiency.

The dreamopath lies in his tears, trembling in the anguish of lost time. He accuses himself of his prostrations before that made-up value which consists of raising one’s life through the ungrateful benefit of creation, dream and art. — Misunderstanding or vocation? New religion of modernity? … Artistic heroism!? — From the start, this anaemic morality had made him lose Nielle through its supposed asceticism, which frightened and disgusted her. This pretension of reaching his muse recalls the idea of two magnets with reversed poles repelling one another, and which, placed differently, would marry each other to the point of welding themselves with energy.

Dimmed consciousness, deceitful madness and peremptory memory. Even through her demented absences, Nielle had drawn him away from nothingness. Yet, unconsciously, offering him the right hand to pull him out of one abyss, the left, that of the heart, pushed him into another.

Their conjectural, often inexplicable ways of acting—were they due to a spontaneous contamination caused by the contacts of their two imaginative beings? She who was only harmony before the ill-licked courtship, she who translated the beauty of her soul in the slightest of her movements, she whose natural generosity subtly dispensed itself with each of her breaths, she who reminded him of the fairies of his childhood. — Yes! — Nielle remained sane; Damien had not corrupted her with his fantasies. — Yes! He remained a simple dreamer. After all, madness is not an object one offers; it is a state one lives with or without pain!

The dreamopath feels that the most corrosive, most difficult distance has been crossed.

From his divan, he heads toward a mirror of impeccable clarity that the current tenant of the premises, (who, moreover, had not yet given any news of himself) had by chance fixed to the narrowest wall of the place. Exactly where Damien, in his time, had hung a reduced reproduction of Fragonard’s "The Reader".

For a few seconds, he looks at himself without contemplating himself. He perceives himself as a travelling companion one is about to leave; a friend choosing another direction, an imprecise destination. But it is not yet the moment of farewells; the segregation of the luggage is not finished; besides, he must continue to search, to look for his ticket…