CHAPTER XVI

This whim of praising an impossible love that haloed him darkly gradually runs out of breath, with each resurgence in undertow. What still holds him there, … too many dramatisations.

Libertarian though he may be, if he could have chosen to be manic and tirelessly pursue his victim…, throughout all those years, the excitement would at least be justifiable. But, Damienic as he is, those aggressions she would suffer, he imagines them as aubades, as prose or alexandrines.

Throughout more than a decade, Nielle had inserted herself into his mind like a malevolent guardian angel. Through lack of foresight, this ghostly presence of his muse had frequently hindered him. Like a reed bending in the wind, like an obelisk defying the centuries, she had slipped in, imperceptible, and vegetated among the tendernesses and words of love granted to other women, to those who succeeded her without replacing her. The most astonishing touches or the most extravagant alcoves only sparingly withered poses in his memory. Memory and its aftermath making themselves wait, their ignorance validates the excuse to continue…

The dreamopath remembers Mylène, his ex-wife, who had summoned him only six weeks after his hasty and inevitable move. During that meeting, she had insisted that he become Lysianne’s legal guardian, as the child at times asked for him. Mylène, claiming that she had to live something else elsewhere, added, as if to solidify her argument, that no agreement in sight between Lysianne and her lover would soften the often tense atmosphere between them.

In reality, out of friendship, she was sacrificing her maternal love with the deliberate intention that Damien fill in that pit he was digging for himself; her infallible instinct showed her that he was not managing to pull himself together. At once unattached and chained, without Nielle.

He ate and slept less than before he had cleared out. Moreover, he hesitated to begin learning his new neighbourhood. Having neither the courage of true immigrants, nor their determination to carve out a place in the sun, he was sinking toward a dangerous point of no return.

Finally, Damien returned to live on that Street of Glorious Peace in the skin of a single-parent head of household, for in their peaceful affinities, Lysianne’s parents judged it better not to uproot the child. The angel… and the lover left.

Without realising it immediately, without establishing links between key events in his life, this second precipitate move, the return to the fold with Lysianne, took place on April fifth. — He had fled far, too far from his muse’s steps, on February fifth. Chance? … — The previous year, that harmonious separation, the end of the Mylène-and-Damien couple… on July fifth. Coincidence? … The physical death of Marilyn Monroe, on August fifth. — Nothing to do with it!

His morale teemed at the idea of starting from zero again in that Molasses Faubourg, which stuck… to his destiny. Doubly happy to live with Lysianne and to grant himself chances of glimpsing Nielle.

His ex-wife had seen rightly: that little three-room flat on the Plateau-Mont-Royal was undermining him by enveloping and suffocating him like a serpent, like a vice. That tiny lodging, that too-dark ground floor had at the front only a medium-sized window with light striped by steps that camouflaged it from passers-by. At the back, also a single window, where shadow and the rusted sheet metal of a shed reigned.

Time stretched, … long, in that badly divided and badly situated cage. Only his cat comforted him. But he kept that impression of Nielle’s movements above him. In his imagination, these impromptu simulacra recovered all the candour and veracity of his Dulcinea’s steps. He pictured this desire with such determination that the audacity of his oneirism made him glimpse the possibility that she had followed him.

On occasion, he glimpsed his true neighbours! From that instant, the voices no longer sang in his ears; they chattered or yelled at each other. They were no longer the same steps conversing with him; no longer the same feet knocking the risers while stupidly clinging to them; no longer the same manner nor the same hours simply to wash dishes. Even the orgasms no longer had the same finesse!

He could no longer distract himself. Drawing or writing no longer told him anything worthwhile. His only application…, teasing a violin his father had made with his strong, rough and skilful hands. The concentration of playing it proved painful in execution, not so much through lack of talent as through the absence of his inspirer. "What would art be worth without the muses? " he repeated to himself.

The dreamer banalised the ingratitude of time only through tears and psychic clichés, mental snapshots of his muse that rebounded as they fled again, each appearance increasing their blur as through wear. He hastened to correct these flights in their settings by imaginary retouching; he patched his memories before they fell to shreds. Overall, bearing the value of months, only one week had passed since the move of February fifth; that unpredictable abandonment, but at the instant necessary.

Damien expected nothing from Nielle, except increasingly vaporous dreams, provoked without her knowledge by those wounds with which she had gratified him in the game. Exonerated from all “repentance”, having rid his muse of his vile person; in what colours would her own memories travel, her impressions, supposing she kept any?

To be able to distinguish himself from the other loves of Nielle’s life, to offset himself from those coddled men, those beings parading between punctual lapses of memory when she would be old, frail and beautiful with an imminent eternity. To be able to lighten his end, before he became old, cantankerous and disfigured by an infernal life of depression; to transform inequality, with regard to Nielle’s loves, into a slightly troubling difference that would inscribe him, even at the bottom of the list, in a tiny golden dance card. And after their tyrannical tango, they would finally embrace for an infinite waltz.

Still with both feet in hardship, his savings scattered to allow the disinfection of Nielle’s soul, stained by his dreamer’s presence. Would his money evaporate in a half-bottle of Scotch or embalm itself in flowers? To be able to risk? Little.

— Idiot! Flowers, nothing more original? A drawing? … No, she would tear it up like the other one. — A poem? A letter? … Will she ever read me??? — What have the others offered her, I do not know, do I? … I do not know… — No doubt much better, that is obvious! — Too bad, the flowers will serve as softened farewells for her, " he had evaluated, without considering the notion of time…

On the morning of February fourteenth, he went himself to deliver them: four superb fujis, and as a signature, a bird of paradise. Roses? … No. She did not know him as orthodox. Marginality was on his heels. Yet it was Valentine’s Day.

During this visit, he wanted to see no one, for this bundle intimidated him, this signified he was carrying with dignified precaution. His heart palpitated with fear. That grey staircase he had amused himself by clearing of snow to ease the muse’s descent or ascent, that bitter blue door at the very top, those plots and those accusations of madness that came back to him, attacking him like two-headed Cerberuses; these things hurt him. His damp palms seemed to hollow themselves to the bone; his legs trembled slightly.

Dominating with pains and miseries those symptoms of vertigo that hindered him even in his acquired habits; without emitting a sound, as best he could, he installed the stems of his bouquet in that unpadlocked mailbox, which took the form of a vase. Then, after ringing, according to another mania, he fled in terror.

Those offered flowers became the spiritual nourishment of his reveries during those interminable and dreary days. They jugulated his suicidal leanings until his return to his former street. Glorious Peace…

***

Astonishingly, after resettling in his former dwelling with his daughter, among the first decisions he accomplished was the idea of committing a visit to Father Brouillette, who was already renovating the premises that had witnessed his crises.

They were chatting quite simply about the improvements made in that place tracking the dreamer with insubordinate shivers.

— A lot of work to do, Monsieur Brouillette?

— No! It’s not too bad! I’ve finished the plaster; the paint will go on quickly. Everything will be white. No colour like you’d put. No, certainly! — And your drawing on the wall, don’t think about it anymore! … It’s gone! … I had a hard time covering it with white with the primer coat. I don’t remember what you’d written, and I don’t know what kind of “push-push” paint you’d used… It always showed through. I had to paint three coats of primer.

And there, I’m forgetting the sanding! To remove the brush marks, I had to sand like a demon! … (Did he know that the mural had been blessed? Was his memory also failing to the point of forgetting a sentence of three short words? "I love you, Nielle! ")

Loquacious, as his character demanded, the owner continued to add detail after detail. As his personality obliged him, Damien simulated attention and interest while he dreamed, elsewhere…, just a little higher…

He was pursuing steps that turned in circles above his head. His muse was bewitching him again; like plaintive steps. He was dying on the spot; that music had been missing from him. Disconcerted, in stupefaction, he guessed he had fallen in love with those enchanting cadences more than with the soul in which they drew their seductive transcendence. But those steps did not cease their comings and goings, those thorns flaying him, as if they expressed the poignant impatience of waiting uselessly.

(— Steps of my life. You, these torturing steps! Paradox of love, I missed you! Your melody has stripped my soul of every fibre other than that of the muse you glorify. But move away before I collapse into a prayer of tears. Flee, before I regurgitate my heart like a testimony of love. ") he exhorted, distraught within himself. Already prisoner of a suction of oneirism.

With adorable obedience, the steps detached themselves, fearful and hesitant, tracing their movements toward the forbidden staircase. — (Uppercut to the mind, straight hook to the heart.) Illuminated by these unveiled beats, not ceasing to cite their stories with aplomb, they were going to denounce their covetousness. Degree by degree, their poetry exhibited its rhymes and innuendoes in delicate pronunciation. — (Stop!) They immobilised the road of their designs, the instant when, in a haughty reverence, they confined to a subsidiary language the pleasure of pursuing the discreet communiqué.

Affected, a new interpreter discoursed in vain. The muse’s afflicted hand rummaged, in irritated curiosity, through the emptiness of the mailbox, hoping there to seek a denial. Disappointed and at bay, fairy fingers feverishly tapped what they called the postal jewel case, transmitting in their language: "What? Nothing! Neither flowers nor messages? The box is full of a sadness I cannot grasp. I am in turn wounded by emptiness. What have I done? … I, who on his return claimed to joy, am accused by the planned indifference I was showing. — That bastard! — He stole our love from me! " Nothing more! Neither steps! Nor word! Like lightning, a deadly silence had just struck Damien in this absence of mind with the appearance of a last journey.

— You are very pale, Damien! Are you all right? " worried the former owner, who, seeing the dreamer answer him in the affirmative, resumed still more vigorously the enumeration of his renovation projects.

Nodding mechanically and from time to time, to let him believe he was attentive, Damien returned to his thoughts. "Nielle, were you mentioning to me by those gestures the pleasure of receiving this bouquet which, by now, is surely faded; or are you seeking to amaze me with pity? …"

Before he fainted and an unforeseen reaction influenced that normal perception he was striving to give to the tireless fellow, Damien took leave of the man. Of that old frustrated clown who, moreover, had only interest in keeping good contact with the artist who still managed to texture the street’s moroseness with his original behaviours.

— I’m glad you got bored of us, " he said.

— Yes, that’s it, Monsieur Brouillette, of you all… Of you all, " concluded the dreamer, closing the door behind him, not without casting a last glance toward the ceiling, leaving Nielle to her own expectations, whatever they might be.

***

The dreamopath evaluates that he has almost come through it. The coffin of the cruelest one forever immobilised in a muddy hole. A soiled earth sanitising the impure. Although a few harassing spectres remain, and out of control, their term slips away, but he must return to his darknesses.

He recalls his frequent outings… to the threshold of the door. Just to glimpse a light there. From one house to another, from his first home toward the studio, he continued to hope for a gleam coming from only one direction. The left! Always looking to the left. There, where the Brouillettes lived, there where he had dreamed most; there, where Nielle still lived, he wished.

He nourished the eventuality of glimpsing his muse through that courtyard entrance, that grey tunnel in the building, through which she necessarily had to circulate in order to return or leave to go about her occupations and personal trials.

Vengeful, destiny intoxicated his thoughts, for never did he see her emerge and come toward him. Never! … Nothing! Even in those walks, where the chimerical fortune of crossing her overflowed into insult. He illuminated these invectives only by rambling in absurd stories he baptised with numbers. "Nielle Utopia 2500! " The strangeness of these dreams resided in the progressive distancing of all normal probabilities of warming his heart.

No, never anything since what could be his second life on Glorious Peace.

Having exhausted his stock of dreams for the day, while circulating in the faubourg and near his home, he hesitated between undertaking "Nielle Utopia 2,501" or taking a nap, to replenish himself with unconscious and unpublished synopses. In the end, considering this walk already infertile, he retraced his steps. — Extraordinary stupefaction. — Exalted, he heard his muse’s voice somewhere other than in the meanders of his imagination. He was passing in front of the Brouillettes’ property.

The opportunity proved ideal to catch the indifferent one in her naïveté. But the scruple of surprising her swung between embarrassment and fear. Destiny, still as cunning, decided for him. Without sensing the dreamer, she slipped away to her home, emitting one last remark, a piece of advice with the resonance of a supplication.

— Above all, say nothing of it to Damien!

— We swear it, Nielle! "

His muse’s voice, that brief imploration, had sold her, and the promise that followed betrayed the scene. To infer the context became a dreamer-child’s game.

(— "Nielle seated on a step of the staircase would have been surrounded by those adolescents becoming men over the traps of existence. It was indeed those same cracked brains, Bruce at their head; that same group that allowed me my consumption of false delights, happily rarer and rarer. That little group of delinquents among whom, unfortunately for me…, loyalty to a promise is the first virtue, and betrayal of a secret, the final reprimand! ")

The infiltration of these waves within each of his chakras, far from embarrassing his subconscious, at once multiplied sevenfold his capacity for oneirism. Useless to sleep in order to resource himself; he had just been fuelled for months. Millions of "Nielle Utopias"?

Expressionless, the muscles of his face seemed cemented by the vocal manifestation and the reach of the muse’s words. He could enter his home only thanks to reflexes engraved by the recovered habit of his initial roots on the street. By another chance, Lysianne was already purifying herself of the city during her summer holidays, denaturing her city airs in the country, which discharged him of his responsibilities. Thus his daughter would not witness his stupefaction.

What Nielle had said ricocheted against his eardrums when he sat at Lysianne’s piano, to unload the emotions imposed by chance. At first amorphous, he finally succumbed to the appeasement of music by tirelessly repeating almost the same notes on the keyboard. — (G, G, G, G-sharp, A, G. Half-rest. And again, and again again…). This musical phrase implacably monopolised the acoustic space. Like two parallels, black notes and stammering onomatopoeias hummed themselves in a style of already-heard things: "Ba, Ba, Bi, Bo, Bi…"

This colourful stammering, originating in the last instant of shared life with Mylène, this Dadaism sometimes used as a postscript on his numerous and useless letters, those diverted messages, brought him back to reality. This thing revived him like a slap recalling the corrections of childhood.

In this continual round of the same keys, with each hammering on the strings, embarrassing questions resonated discordantly.

— What is this secret guaranteed by a word of honour? … What was the offence or the fear that had given birth to it? … Why did I enjoy only the final full stop of the revelation? …" Again and again interrogations that sprang or spurted. Relative to the facts, whether signed from Damien’s past or bleeding into this present of the dreamopath, stretched out on his divan with an unimpeded view of the vestige of unfurled memories, or collapsed at the piano, pearling the ivories with fine tears.

***

Crossing the hours and days, the timbre of his muse’s voice imprinted on his auditory memory bestowed upon him opulent illuminations. Like marbles a child would drag around in a pouch, he amused himself by rolling them over one another, unbeknownst to all, like a diversion from reality.

Reverberating into autumn, those overheard words: "Above all, say nothing of it to Damien! " Through dream and by way of his manoeuvres, they had transformed into: "Above all, say nothing to Damien, that I love him! " Credits of affection he never, moreover, had the happiness of cashing. All he was able to profit from, in that last season, consisted of crushing and distressing information. His muse had in turn cleared out; he held this information from a sure source. — How could he not believe Mia, who, in the admission of her sister’s move, mentioned its recentness and not its anteriority to his psychodramas…? Double disclosures that had the impact of a pass, a green light for unexplored avenues.

The frustrated being Damien was increasingly ill at ease with his voluntary asceticism and his onanism devoted to Nielle’s ghost, which, from perceived ingratitude, consigned retchings. From being male, failing to be a saint, and his dreamer’s libido losing composure, the sordidness of the normal seduced him.

He knew those adulterated loves of too-brief nights, those suave and deferential caresses, those women with perishable words of love. Through repugnance at these infidelities to his muse and through discomfiture, crushed, he ended by trapping himself in a relationship he already anticipated as exasperating. He deepened the said liaison, body and soul lost…

Taller than he, less than Nielle. Studies interrupted in adolescence. Ex-member of a gang of suspect motorcyclists and dancer at five or twenty dollars, depending on the music… A difficult and bitter life, punctuated by disconcerting and cruel trials; indiscernible thanks to her strength of character. But in appearance, in short, "Sex and drugs, and rock’n’roll… and bad money! " That was Bichoune.

Nothing had truly drawn them toward each other; nothing held them. Except that, sexually, both suited each other wonderfully. Fulfilling without contradiction the following prescription: two to three times a day, every day. Renewable, if necessary.

What were Bichoune’s true feelings for Damien? … He did not give a damn. His own for her were situated just below his navel.

She lived nearby, on a street perpendicular to Glorious Peace. And to get to her place, Damien had to bow to passing before that blockhouse of misty pictures where he had wasted away. That house where Mia now symbolised a vanished presence, Nielle’s abbreviated stay. Sadly, ambivalence, that close friend of doubt, biased his emotions when he committed himself in front of the building.

Slowing or accelerating according to the day’s sensitivity, with a smile plastered on from disabused jouissance, he hoped on the one hand to demonstrate indifference to Nielle through her sister, and in a repressed manner, he annoyed himself with an insane wish. An invitation that might be formulated from one of the third-floor windows.

Shameless hypocrisy. He mimed happiness, with the intention of provoking Nielle’s jealousy through gossip. He even feigned loving the buxom woman sincerely. — His moments of frankness were becoming rare, except with Lysianne. — When he did not find the words to explain the overly dynamic relationship with the hyperactive woman. When comparisons came alive with ease; he never avoided closing the exchange by repeating to his daughter that he still and always loved that former neighbour with blue eyes. That Nielle who had rejected him with the back of the soul…!

***

Like the dirty, stripped palette of a painter, of the variegation of autumn’s bright colours there remained only the monotony of boring greys. Resurrecting the vivacity of the first colours in a fairground jolt, Halloween and its little ghosts stood out. Zombies with eyes sparkling with energy, harmless witches with irresistible smiles, pirates with cardboard swords and naïve caricatured replicas of the heroes in vogue; that whole swarm of spectres of every kind presented their already too-full bags with the desire to see them overflow. As if, on each of these occasions, for these young beggars it were a matter of undergoing the exam of a course in juvenile capitalism immersion.

That day, there was friendly competition between Bichoune and the dreamer. Each at home would count the number of euphoric children begging for sweets or coins for UNICEF. The loser, male or female, would sleep at the other’s place. — Alternating with Lysianne, who for her part preferred giving to receiving, Damien exchanged barley-sugar twists for teasing or nursery rhymes; without, however, insisting before children too intimidated by this man of their age…

Of all those occasional beggars, the most astonishing in originality was beyond question destiny disguised as misfortune.

— Boo! Ooh! … It’s Halloween! Do you want to give me candies? " said a young Carabosse fairy of about ten, carrying at the end of her arms a plastic pumpkin.

— I’m sorry! I only have mints left, " Damien answered, confused at being somewhat caught unprepared.

— Mints? Forget it! I only collect real candies. Anyway, this is the third time I’ve gone home to empty my pumpkin… Tell me, do you really like mint, you? " she asked, while continuing on her way to complete her precious mendicity, without being interested in an answer. She had taken only two steps when she turned her head toward the dreamer, who was watching her hop. "Tell me, sir, … are you the one going out with my cousin Bichoune, … are you her boyfriend? "

— Yes, it’s me. — And for your question… Yes, I adore mint! " ("The lover", he amused himself by thinking.)

— Good for you if you love her a lot, bye! " she exclaimed, eager to recover those few fruitless seconds.

He did not return the child’s farewell. He could not. For a true revenant had just crossed the sidewalk opposite his dwelling.

Without mask or make-up, nor fairy costume, his muse. Nielle, walking with head lowered, looking sad like a child searching for a lost sweet. At once confused and concentrated on herself, she seemed to be meditating in turn. Perhaps on a fragment of sentence perceived by simple coincidence. An ordinary but cursed coincidence.

Mute with stupefaction, he stupidly watched her move away, heading toward that grey tunnel of the Brouillettes’ house, like an unlucky little girl muttering against destiny spoiling one of her rare visits.

The dreamopath also rages. "Cursed! Cursed! Cursed! … Three times cursed! " he cries, violently striking his divan with both fists clenched so hard that his nails incarnate themselves in the hollows of his hands. He knows that a memory resembling this one will arise. Marvellous, in the recuperative abundance of his dreams; rarest and prejudicial to the feelings of the two beings in fact, through its inconsistency.