CHAPTER XVII

After other mortifying seasons without his muse, during which he deceived Bichoune even in his jouissances, which spiritually he granted only to Nielle. After months of those feigned coituses à la Gainsbourg, those false fervours sprinkled with real “… I love you. Me neither,” where the body he embraced did not reproach itself for frequently cuckolding him. Another summer came. — A sunny and pleasantly warm day came. — The beginning of an ordinary afternoon came when, dreamily, he kept looking outside, ceaselessly, toward the left…

Like those fanciful barometers in which a miniature man comes out of a little house at the approach of rain and freezes in place during a storm, Damien hoped that from the opposite exit would appear a good-natured woman announcing fine weather to him. The mechanism was out of order. The muse was not there. Yet the sun was magnificent.

A car parked there, opposite that courtyard entrance which had not yet lost its sense of mystery. The model: a station wagon. Colour and make of the car… to be forgotten, deserving mention in this context less than the occupants who got out of it.

Nielle? …! No, she was not part of the group. Nor were Mia, Carlos, Bruce or the others. Strangers, unknown faces.

New faces, whose similarity of features to Nielle suggested a blood tie. Family resemblances that confirmed it undeniably. Greetings from the third floor, toward these people returning them with smiles so similar and evocative that they reiterated their obvious belonging.

A sparkling joy set them all in their haste to join the loved one up there. For Damien, just as happy about the event, there was no image more voluble to describe their reactions than that of silent films, where actors transposed small happinesses through nervous blinks of their eyes darkened by lashes too long. Like those sequences from long ago, he could no longer converse except with their projections, the actors having already vanished from the stage.

Who were they? … The driver with the august physiognomy, the gentle gaze tinted with prodigality; clearly his muse’s father. There appeared in him that same charisma swarming with little acquired wisdoms as in that old lady with long white hair mounted like a toque, Nielle’s grandmother. The dreamer granted “his granny”, as he liked to call her, the same intelligence and a pragmatism close to her granddaughter’s personality. More anxious and disposed to stretch their legs, the offspring accompanying them reached the rear courtyard of the Brouillettes’ house too quickly for Damien to memorise their number and appearance. Except for the enthusiasm.

The dreamer did not wait to be pointed out by the person they had joined, whether she was Mia or Nielle. He fled the threat that one of them might present him as a troublemaker. Being identified as a spoilsport horrified him. Facing that eventuality made him uneasy, all the more because he knew himself forbidden to love those people, whom he never saw again.

Increasingly abhorring his releases through marijuana, he fed his right of recourse on sharp emotions and on his new outlet. Legal, more discreet and more effective than drugs, that object, an immense box of deliriums and delights… the piano. As in his previous periods of gloom, he played it for hours, without knowing how to play. He tapped on the ivories, integrating his repressions and troubles into the false notes, sometimes intentional, to unfasten himself from his spleens.

Somewhat calmed by his expedient in dissonant sixty-fourth notes, he was about to polish the benefits of this corrective performance with a sigh of relief when, in counterpoint, the telephone rang.

— Hello!

— Damien! It’s Bichoune. I won’t talk long, it’s just… uh! Just to tell you, tonight I’m going out with a… my girlfriend. So we won’t be able to see each other. You don’t mind? …

— On the contr… Hum! No, have a good time. Bye!

Slowly setting down the receiver, he bit out an offbeat comment: “That’s even better!” Revived by his musical release, rubbing the sides of his neck and the nape of his neck, then spinning his head like a warm-up exercise, he prepared himself for a long sinister watch… free from the hold of his decorative sexuality.

Sitting on the threshold of the door in the comfort of an old cushion. His elbows resting on his raised knees, his arms supported his head as if to force himself to acclimatise to a single position, to the only admissible tangent.

First remark: the car had left. That disappointment would have haunted him longer had he not consoled himself with the pretext of a certain apathy toward jousting in pride with his muse’s progenitor or shaking granny’s experience with the seduction of a neurasthenic temporarily awake. He would have liked to be Samson or Goliath, even Louis Cyr or Hulk Hogan, to carry his piano alone onto the sidewalk… and play it between each word to resource himself, but reality forced him to bend.

The street seemed more deserted to him than usual. The daylight, imperceptibly pushed back by the shadow of the row houses, was rapidly decreasing.

Already, toward eight-thirty, Damien estimated that this normal quiet had been disturbed by traffic only seven cars per hour. As well as an average of four strangers walking quickly, in fear of being attacked; three respectable neighbours and two or three gossips; these latter, always the same, punching their rounds with the same barely refashioned slanders.

All these agitating elements…, Damien had counted them in the manner of a survey; just as he was still counting the cigarette butts he had flicked away. Always in the same direction, very attentive. In the same vein, he calculated and evaluated the various possibilities of a return of the station wagon which, perhaps, would park opposite his home.

By dint of riveting himself to that same point on the horizon, he finally felt slight spasms at the base of his neck, and a faint optical fog, caused by the fatigue of aiming, continually disturbed the focus of his vision.

To readjust his sight, to bring it back into focus, he gently rubbed his eyelids and scrutinised his environment in search of a spot of bright colour. His visual acuity first improved by aiming at his bicycle in fluorescent colours, avant-garde at the time, which he had burdened with the equally remarkable nickname “Rainbow”. Then he lifted his eyes toward a large outdoor mural with intentions of historical fresco. This colossal daubing tickled his pride, since it was the last vestige of his finds as neighbourhood-party organiser.

Finally, seeking the last adjustment of his gaze, he stopped on that radiant hue in his landscape. A pregnant woman, dressed in a red maternity dress, appeared at the end of the street. — Red! The pigment of prohibition, of warning. — Scarlet! The tonality of love.

Dazzling! Like the evident affection of that mother for the child she carried. Yes, scarlet red! The colour of that dress hiding that marvellous large belly which easily betrayed Nielle’s more than enviable fertilisation; she who quickened her pace, still fearing the unpredictable gestures of her former neighbour. She, surprised in an exceptional rebirth…, was also visiting her sister.

A heart and more were fleeing. Another wanted to cry out. But neither mouth nor throat responded to the emotion.

It mattered little to him to which male, now honoured by Nielle’s entrails, that paternity belonged. He, Damien, in his illusions, metamorphosed into an archangel, into a holy spirit…, usurping the pretension of the child’s origin with the connivance of his more-than-beautiful one, imagining that she had desired mystical affinities with him. The dreamer unconsciously plagiarised that tormenting saga from his childhood.

He would have covered Nielle with words of love, he would have lifted her with flatteries while cajoling the majestic beauty of that abdomen full of promises…; but the demonstration of a sign, of a call to life, even imperceptible, would have forever extinguished that appeasement toward that fairy in appearance, that Nielle of his interiority. The one he had crowned in the sacred fables of his dreams, the one he jealously protected within himself like a miserly magician, his alchemical gold.

“Badly made!” he vociferated, seated with arms crossed, frequently rocking in jerks to justify the presence of his body. Comparable to a disordered automaton tying inside itself the soul stolen from a human being; hesitation, the fright of feelings, the fear of truth, the horror of no longer knowing how to choose between love for Nielle and the phantasmagorical security imposed by compensation.

Damien waited for hours, suffering from those bursts of laughter pushed by the wind and those exclamations of joy barely muffled by distance, those small happinesses from which he was excluded and which radiated from the top floor of the Brouillettes’ house. He sequestered tonic waves emitted by that voice which absorbed him, consumed him and froze him. When the trade wind made it mute, he searched within himself, retracing similar vibrations besieging his soul. Then he brought them close to one another until he became dizzy with shivers.

From comparison to confrontation, over the course of his impatiences, the intoxication of that voice with opiate effects spilled into another thirst. — Nielle’s eyes. — This avidity made him waver toward dreams, … as a sleepwalker.

— Hi Damien! You look lost! Bruce fired off with a cynical laugh.

— Mm…? Ah! Hi Bruce, where are you going like that?

— Is your head all right? … What do you mean, where am I going? … Rather, where are you going? … You don’t seem to realise you’re in front of our place? …

— … In front of your place…? The dreamer did not know what to say. The voice had drawn him, deploying and allegorising that fanatical need beneath the third-floor windows. A siren song had attracted him as the moon calls the oceans.

Even baited and cornered by his reverie, he pulled himself together, feigning the normality of a loss of lucidity.

— … and what are you up to, Bruce?

— Not much. I’m watching television… Oh, I’m thinking! … I saw your Nielle go up to Mia’s. Did you know she’s big? … We can say you loved her, that slut!

— Bruce!

— Oh! Excuse me, Monsieur Damien. Maybe you still love her, even with a big belly! the young man rattled off, with the intention of taunting him to pass the time.

He tried to master his anger without showing young Brouillette that he had been struck to the heart. Then he answered him in a weak thread of voice and with a calm that would have disconcerted even himself, had he, by ubiquity, been able to observe himself.

— Come now, do you really think I still love her, after all this time? She who must have found a husband. She, too beautiful to live alone. She is ravishing pregnant, isn’t she?

— Bah! Me, …! — Say! In a little while they’re going to show an old kung-fu film with Bruce Lee, my idol. Feel like watching it?

— No. But go on! Go settle in front of the screen and… if it doesn’t bother you too much, I’m going to take the air here. Is that all right? …

— No problem. The sidewalk belongs to everyone! grumbled Bruce, disappointed at not having recruited a new adept of martial arts.

While “Karate Kid” went into ecstasies over Taiwanese violence and out-of-sync dubbing, Damien rehashed everything and nothing in a monotone, without interruption. Neither the intensity nor the flow distracted the viewer. The motif was not aimed at him. The dreamer, through his monotonous and continuous flow, corresponded by exploiting ethereal sediments of states of soul. In a way, he dared the expectation of feedback in the clemency of his muse’s eyes through his tenacious and dull verbal incontinence.

— I will declaim all night if I must! Even if I have to be knocked out by a flowerpot thrown from the window, he verbalised, without anyone noticing, in the idealisation of his negativism.

Irony of fate, oxygenating himself for a moment, to decant his gibberish one tone higher.

— …….. !

Up above, total and sudden silence. Even though the evening was decaying in favour of night and the moon had not kept the rendezvous, strangely, a sea of tranquillity moored itself to his interrupted recitation.

Nielle then came to subject the light carried beyond an open window to her silhouette of enviable procreator. — She no longer moved there. — Then she emitted that coded call only Damien could translate. That exclamation for which his mind had accumulated patience over imagined millennia.

— Ba. Ba. Bi. Bo. Bi, she sang softly in the key of G, letting her expectations hover in a seductive calm with airs of warning.

Stopped. Silent, flabbergasted, he emitted nothing more, neither what was futile nor, sadly, anything salutary and motivated. Prolixity cut short. Nothing. He truly believed he was dreaming. “Illusions! More illusions!” he told himself, without resuming his verbiage, in the hope that this pleasant and phenomenal acousmia might reproduce itself.

Still suspended from an answer that was slow in coming, frustrated, wounded in her self-esteem before Mia and other guests, Nielle seemed convinced that Damien had left her waiting; simply fooled by his despairing indolence, through stupidity or revenge.

— Get the hell out! … Clear off! Nielle proclaimed, in a monarchic firmness striking with expatriation a subject already banished. — The shutters closed violently upon her explicable and vehement exasperation, difficultly tamed by those close to her. Irritation excusing itself in tears imperceptible from the ground floor.

— What’s gotten into them? … — Damien?! — He’s gone! — Tabarnak, he’s boring since he doesn’t take drugs with us anymore, grumbled Bruce without losing interest in the suspense, and plunged back into the film he was watching.

Damien? … — He was crossing that greyish corridor toward that headstrong woman to ask forgiveness and moan at her feet. Brutal and ironic, his muse’s ire had plugged him into reality.

Malignant shadows, slipping from every side toward him, did not reach him. He advanced implacable, exercising only the pleasure of seeing Nielle again: “Ineffable felicity. Divine pleasure. Exquisite joy. Paradisiacal peace, mine at last!” The courtyard offered itself to him, vast and free: “Here I am, Hard Headed Woman, muse of all my muses, fairy-like inspiration, blessed energy. Tender human.” The outline of his steps caressed that of Nielle’s; that of her returns, that of her flights. Each of his strides underlined the apprehension of an intoxication never lived: “Yes, I shall be a friend. Yes, I shall be a confidant. Yes, if you can and wish it, I shall be a lover, a husband, a father to that child developing in your womb.”

From this poetry, the dreamer absents himself for the space-time needed to verify his advantages and handicaps.

— If I stretched this temporal void, perhaps I could find the strength necessary to heal my wounds; sacrifice this non-being, incarcerated in me, for the benefit of the living one, returned. Intuitive, should I invent or reveal…, I shall know how to determine the rightness of my words, with which I will hypnotise my muse, with the aid of our sensitivities.

Reflux! Blackball! Grip! — “NO! You will not go!” ejected from the darkness his vicious spectres, which had finally caught up with him; those of his sufferings and his crises. The staircase, seeming to distort, refused itself to him. His feet remained fixed as if trapped in quick-setting cement. Impossible to climb the steps. Damien suffocated and suddenly collapsed beneath doubts.

— … and what if she wanted to mock me, to distract herself from her task? What a pigeon I would be! — Retreat before ridicule! — I would be incapable of enduring their cutting laughter again. How would I react to it? … Can I risk a crash, struggle and traumatise Nielle and the innocent life inside her? — If I move away now: “Unshakeable!” … she will say of me and, subsequently, she will confess that quality swallowed up in her hatred!

Without noise, without dreams, he set off again for home to try to break that new chain binding him from within, to let himself loose on his piano, locked keyboard, which he wished mute of additional emotions.

***

The dreamopath approaches his farewells to nothingness. But he will stick out his tongue at it only after these trailing sequences. A wish. To glimpse an imagination free of all shackles. An eternal dreamer will never become an inflexible down-to-earth man. He knows it. Still a few recalls to strip of their possessions, those that will not finish him off. Last turn. A gong announces the final sprint.

Bichoune did not come back to see Damien until two weeks after that impromptu outing with her girlfriend… Each sniffing out their own fault, neither enquired about the other’s distractions in the days and months that followed, uninteresting.

Damien eked out a living and let his reveries cross his desert-like heart, where only an oasis refreshed him. There he drank dream water in the shade of date palms of illusion. An invisible plant grew near a clear spring. Normally harmful to the wheats of light growing at the edge of this haven. In Damien’s imagination, it perceived itself harmless, this “Lychnis githago”, decorated with purple flowers whose seeds were inflamed with their own toxicity and commonly named “nielle”. In his soul without bitterness or noxiousness, or outside it, it gave off a hypnotic fragrance that perfumed his daily life.

Another plant, another desire. Mistletoe leaves in hand, he went to Bichoune’s to lodge there for Christmas night and reposition little ox and big donkey. These fantasies served on straw did not, however, distract him from his thoughts of Lysianne, and he understood too that Mylène, who was receiving her, had the right to her share of happiness.

Blowing with more power and magic into his oneiric trumpet like an angel of the mountains, he hoped his wishes would resound all the way to the hearts of the most unfortunate. Like the poor, the sick, the disinherited, the isolated; like those who could not care less about him, for example: the Brouillettes at a reception, the new tenant of the studio whom, moreover, he did not know; or those who betrayed or hated him, those victors, Lou, Carlos, Jonathan and Mia.

Or again, wishes to all those strangers who had profited from Nielle’s sensual prodigality. Those who, to penetrate her domain…, crossed, intrepid, that tunnel. Like a wide-open door toward singular friendships, that corridor seen from the street resembled a painting always depicting the same dreary landscape. Old grey and patched-up sheds, capped by the tops of young trees growing on neighbouring lots according to the seasons.

In that frame, where the snow unified the canvas, a tall silhouette appeared. Nielle’s, who abruptly stopped, protecting her newborn whom she pressed to her chest, out of fear of the dreamer’s reactions. That animal, bearer of rage.

Continuing on his way, indulgent, avid and tender, he forever memorised the two beings.

— Nielle, I love you! I love this child you forever forbid me to know. — Fear nothing. I shall not attack you or approach you for the rest of my days. — My best wishes! … My respects, my loves, my queen, my muse!

Fresh as dew, the dreamopath commemorates with a tear that distant and final encounter announcing that interminable and still existing hollow period without seeing Nielle. In reality, for him, it is still the most troubled, by the null value of zero. — In recurrence over his fantasies and dreams, he lived on the island of his imagination, magnifying pains and sorrows there. The only antidote which, moreover, ennobled him: making love to his solitude.

***

Damien broke off his relationship with Bichoune the following year. Recalcitrant, she harassed him tirelessly. The reason: being left by an ingenious short man…, a pocket intellectual and artist, made her lose some of her vamp’s lustre and dulled her personal prestige among her androgynous friends.

Had it not been for the intervention of his mother, whom he was lodging. (Hospitalisation of the head of the family for chemotherapy treatments.) Had it not been for a stinging confrontation between the two women. — A battle of rams! — he would still have let himself moulder in cuckoldry. Had it not been for that, the coward would still be wondering whether he possessed courage and would never have noted that his last point of reference to his muse would disappear from the surroundings.

Mia, the only sister of Nielle’s whom he knew, she who, by fantasy, evoked for him a protractor when he profited from her ostentatious attitude, when it was possible for him to delight in her charms, to swoon over them. From her, he appropriated, like a kidnapping of intimacy, her resemblances to his muse until he licked his dreams with them. Even reaching Nirvana by kissing with his condemned eyes the pretty demoness’s arse. She who would soon change hell.

However, Mia did not hold her housewarming without gathering from her mail a last sign of life. A letter from Damien, in which he interpreted the motives arousing those intrigues against him; at once expressing disarray and approval of those rebellious and protective gestures in favour of Nielle. He even accosted her with spirited details about the worst turpitudes, certain of astonishing her. — Finally, he signed the farewell with an almost solemn reiteration, his love for Nielle.

The confession would have been encored had he attached a short-duration cassette to it, magnetising the inspiring listener with an overwhelming: “Ba. Ba. Bi. Bo. Bi.”, voiceless on piano.

***

A sudden gust of wind opens the back door. As if an aeolian judge, unsealing a sealed envelope, were revealing the result of a long deliberation: “… and the winner is…? … The little dreamer! Still too weak to move, Monsieur Damien, ex-dreamopath, will come and collect the trophy in his place.”

The reconquest ended in victory. Everything has been remembered, almost relived, without his blowing out his brains. Without having had recourse to the already loaded revolver swaddled in a towel; hauled in that old suitcase beside journal and photo… in the eventuality of a stinging failure.

Useless! Damien, the little healed dreamer, awakens again to life. His frightened oneirism is already stabilising. A rapid cure? … Definitive? He suspects it. He sniffs out the freedom of his soul, euphoria in the heart. Through his inner search, he has freed himself from the slavery of an imperceptible muse. But better! Never again those suicidal ideas spurting from his summers darkened with fatalism in the commemoration of his first cries. — Finished! Over, those weeks of July and August, those temporal corridors ceilinged with countless swords of Damocles, those periods he called his zones of nostalgia. — Gone! Those moments of insurrection against himself, reproaching himself for having abandoned those places when he was eking out his life beneath Nielle’s steps. After all, was she not closer?

He pitied himself for his lack of Damienism. He grieved over the unaccomplished, those fifty steps never taken. That trial run which would have led him to that third floor protected by thirteen steps trapped with anxieties; that distance of infinite character, which he could have crossed even naked and on his knees, flower in hand.

His conscience rectified, he cooled with a farewell that megalomaniac dreamer and the mad lover in himself, braving with a final irritation the subconscious accustomed to the muse.

— Nielle, wherever you are, hear me! … Oblivion? … I do not know it! But conditioned by the recapitulation of my memories, from now on I shall shed only tears of dust; and the suicide that threatened me has annihilated itself through its own evil like a kamikaze pilot committing hara-kiri in his cockpit.

I had experimented with the usurpation of time by putting it to sleep between two picoseconds in a dream. Horror! It proves more insomniac than I. I explored the space that separated us by trying to alter its elasticity. Too resistant, that distance, instead of breaking, drew us apart forever. My will was so great, my powers so derisory.

I desired you so much, ghost muse, that your ectoplasm suffocated my soul. To sweeten your refusal by clinging, through onanism, to your photo allowed me only to wait. Too long?

To die is often to finish living in the manner in which one fought or defended oneself. Death being the ultimate and most valuable lesson of life one can offer to others, to those who regret us, as to those whom we piss off. And so I shall wait for the night of the tomb in the manner in which I hoped for you: with resignation. I shall submit to its deliverance when it presents itself. It, I know, will come to love me.

Scrawny fledglings chirp with fear in their nightmares. By instinct, they fear, for upon waking they will be pushed out of the nest. — They will fly or die.

Safe and sound from the crossing of his darknesses, Damien can amputate his wings, now superfluous and cumbersome, to discover new horizons. But he is exhausted and pallid after having cleansed himself, purged his mind and purified his memory; he feels numbness and his thorax seems to shrink. Despite everything, he needs fresh air for himself, the new man.