CHAPTER XVIII — EPILOGUE

The rain had stopped falling violently, but it was still breathing in the gutters, the low leaves of the park and the cracks in the sidewalk. The Street of Glorious Peace, washed down to the bone, no longer looked like a street. It seemed a long black scar, stitched together by the trembling reflections of the streetlamps.

Damien remained seated in the apartment emptied of its spectres. The suitcase open at his feet. The useless revolver, still wrapped in a towel. Everything had been reviewed. Everything had been turned over like sick earth. Nielle, Mylène, Lysianne, Marilyn, Bichoune, the Brouillettes, the steps on the staircase, the voices from the third floor, the lost years: so many faces, so many fevers, so many fragments he believed he had finally laid down before him.

He was breathing badly, but he was breathing.

That was what he now called a victory.

A gust of wind lifted the badly closed window. Papers quivered on the table. The morning newspaper, abandoned there by the occupant of the premises or slipped under the door by the anonymous habit of the neighbourhood, suddenly opened like a mouth too long closed. The front page rose, then fell back, offered to his eyes.

DAMIEN D. IDENTIFIED AS SUSPECTED HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER IN THE DEATH OF A HOMELESS MAN ON THE RAINY EVENING

A man of no fixed address, found dead in a small residential street in the Centre-Sud district, is believed to have been struck by a car during Tuesday evening’s violent downpour. According to the first elements of the investigation, the driver allegedly continued on his way without offering assistance to the victim.

Traces of paint, the statement of a taxi driver, as well as certain testimonies gathered in the neighbourhood, are said to have enabled investigators to trace the incident back to a Ford belonging to Damien D., a former resident of the area. Without filing official charges at the time of going to press, police say they have identified the name of the suspected hit-and-run driver and wish to question this man without delay in order to establish the exact circumstances of the tragedy.

The victim, a man of approximately fifty, had not yet been formally identified at the time of going to press. Authorities nevertheless believe he was a homeless man known to shopkeepers in the neighbourhood, often seen near the park running along the Street of Glorious Peace.

Damien read the headline once. Then twice. By the third time, the words ceased to be words. They became pieces of white-hot metal that someone was slowly driving beneath his skin.

The rainy evening.

The Ford.

The dull impact.

That shadow he had refused to see.

He brought a hand to his mouth. Nothing came out. Neither cry, nor prayer, nor curse. Only a short, almost shameful exhalation, the breath of a man whom truth had just caught up with without running.

— No… he murmured. No. Not that.

But memory, which all night had served him as theatre, tribunal, altar and common grave, this time refused to obey him. It no longer consented to the aesthetics of pain. It imposed upon him the brutal dryness of fact.

He had backed up.

He had struck.

He had continued.

He saw again the rain on the windshield, the overwhelmed wipers, the drowned headlights, the street turned into a tunnel of black water. He saw again his own face in the rear-view mirror he had not checked. He saw the shadow again. Or rather the deliberate absence of the shadow. For he had seen it. Not enough to know. Enough that he could no longer say he had known nothing.

— I mistook a man for an object.

The sentence, so simple, disgusted him more than all his former tirades. All his life, he had transformed women into muses, neighbours into apparitions, silences into messages, refusals into destinies. And now, at the most real moment of his life, he had done the opposite: he had transformed a man into a thing.

He had believed he had come here to tear Nielle out of himself. To uproot her. To expel her from his memory as one drives out a fever, as one renounces an illusion grown too dangerous. But the more he tried to erase her, the more she took shape again with cruel precision.

Nielle was no longer only a woman. She had become the secret chamber of his soul. A voice, a perfume, a silhouette on the staircase, a breathing above him, and his whole being had tipped over. He had loved her with an impossible love, disproportionate, almost monstrous by force of solitude. A love that had not known how to become flesh, that had not found its place in reality, and that, for lack of being lived, had changed into an inner religion.

He had loved her even before truly knowing her. That was what condemned him. He had loved the apparition before the person, the sign before the face, the dream before the woman. He had loved her steps on the ceiling, the silences of her apartment, the music escaping from her windows, the perfumes descending the staircase before her. He had loved what she did not know she was giving. He had loved what she had never promised him.

And yet, even in understanding this, he could not reduce her to an illusion. Nielle had existed. She had breathed above him, walked in the courtyard, spoken, laughed, suffered, lived. She was not responsible for the sick cathedral he had built around her name. But that name, in his mind, had taken the place of everything: beauty, fault, waiting, lack, impossible absolution.

He had loved her as lost men sometimes love: not in order to be happy, but to give a name to their abyss. He had loved her against himself, against Mylène, against Marilyn, against ordinary life, against time. He had loved her until he confused the real woman with the creature of dream he had sculpted in his nights.

He had loved her also against death. Perhaps that was the most terrible thing. Nielle had been, throughout all those years, the imaginary proof that he was not entirely finished. As long as he could suffer from her, as long as he could summon her face, as long as he could reopen that wound with the precision of a priest relighting a candle, he still believed himself alive. His love had not only been a passion. It had been his last survival system.

And now, at the end of this crossing, he understood that he had never truly wanted to forget Nielle. He had wanted to be delivered from the suffering of loving her. A terrible nuance. For the love itself remained intact, buried beneath the rubble, like an ember refusing to die.

The newspaper trembled between his hands. The homeless man, the rain, the car, the impact, the name of the suspected hit-and-run driver: all that belonged to the real world. But Nielle belonged to that vaster and more pitiless territory where Damien had always lived. She was his crime without apparent victim, his miracle without salvation, his private heaven and his particular hell.

He stood up. His legs were trembling. He wanted to go toward the door, toward the street, toward the police, toward any form of consequence. But the apartment began to spin around him. The walls, those mute accomplices of his memories, threw back at him the echo of his own doublings.

Damien remembered that old temptation, older perhaps even than Nielle: the temptation to raise himself above himself, to disguise himself as sign, as chosen one, as sacred victim. In his nights most swollen with pride and smoke, he had dreamed of being more than a man. Not a mere failed artist. Not a fleeing husband. Not an awkward father. Not a wounded little dreamer. No. Something vaster, more dangerous, more absurd.

— Would the charisma of a Christ, even an anonymous one, bewitch you? he had once asked Nielle’s absence.

The sentence came back to him with ignoble precision. He had thought it, written it or painted it, little mattered. It belonged to him. Just as those grotesque names belonged to him too: Petrus Romanus, Kristos Anonymus, sham prophet or bedroom antichrist. In his wanderings, he had wondered whether he should save someone, overthrow God, chastise heaven, fertilise symbols, repaint the world with colours of blasphemy.

He remembered the mural. The red splashes. The bedroom stinking of paint. Marilyn changed into Mary Magdalene, his own profile crowned by dementia. He remembered that sentence, more accurate than he had wished: “I confess a conscious tendency toward schizophrenia.” Not illness as learned diagnosis, but the obscene call of doubling; the unhealthy desire to sink far enough into madness to alter his perception of the world — and, through pride, the world itself.

No one believes madmen. That was what had fascinated him. In that general refusal, he had found a shameful freedom. Since no one took him seriously, he could imagine everything. Since no one followed him, he could believe himself preceded by heaven. Since no one loved him as he demanded, he could consecrate himself as a martyr of love.

But the homeless man did not belong to the realm of symbols.

A man was dead.

No inner trial, no buffoon’s plea, no celestial court could acquit him. Yet, by old reflex, he felt the temptation to summon the imaginary tribunal.

— Your Honour! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! Look carefully at my client. Does he truly look like a guilty man? His hair, his beard, his burned eyes, his skin yellowed by smoke, his air of a demoted prophet… does all that not already plead for irresponsibility?

He interrupted himself with a dry laugh. The laugh did not last. It cut his throat.

— No. Not this time.

There would be no plea. No Kristos Anonymus. No Petrus Romanus. No tired antichrist, no eunuch Christ, no discreet gigolo of the Gospel, no miserable king, no king’s fool saved by the love of the poor. All those characters, those disguises of the ego, those religious armours, collapsed around him with the wet sound of old cardboard.

He was only Damien.

Damien who had wept in the rain.

Damien who had not looked behind him.

Damien who, in going to save his soul, had perhaps taken another’s.

Then the schizophrenia he had once called, provoked, almost courted, no longer appeared to him as a door toward greatness, but as an ordinary crack through which a man escapes his actions. He understood the abject ease of calling oneself double: the one who strikes, the one who does not know; the one who loves, the one who destroys; the one who dreams, the one who kills; the one who believes himself Christ, the one who abandons a body in the street.

He no longer wanted that ease.

The newspaper slipped from his hands. On the open page, the headline remained legible, enormous, almost alive. The rain, returning in gusts against the window, seemed to want to wash away the ink. It did not manage to.

Damien crouched down, picked up the newspaper and placed it on the table with ceremonial slowness. He went toward the suitcase. The revolver was there, a small cold animal, still swaddled in its towel. He looked at it for a long time. The old solution. The portable black hole. The easy exit disguised as tragedy.

— To die now would still be to dream, he said.

He closed the suitcase without touching it further.

An immense lassitude fell upon his shoulders, but this time there was nothing lyrical about it. It was not the fatigue of the wounded poet nor that of the impossible lover. It was the naked fatigue of the man who will have to answer. To the police. To the living. To the dead. To himself, above all, that intractable witness he had always managed to distract with images.

He took his coat. In the inside pocket, his fingers found an old photograph of Nielle. He took it out, looked at it without fever. The face that had obsessed him for years suddenly seemed to belong to another religion, to an intimate sect whose dogmas he had just abjured.

She was not responsible.

She had not saved him.

She had not ruined him.

She had lived.

That was enough.

— What remains of you? he asked the photograph.

Nothing answered. And that silence, for the first time, had nothing cruel about it.

He would have liked to ask her forgiveness. Not because he had loved her — to love, even badly, is not always a crime — but because he had imprisoned her in his delirium. He had made of her a temple, a wound, a proof, a sentence. He had almost never allowed her simply to be a woman, with her ordinary days, her indifferences, her weaknesses, her desires unknown to him.

— I dreamed you too much, he murmured.

That sentence seemed truer to him than all the others. He had not loved Nielle too much. He had dreamed her too much. And in that excess of dream, he had lost the measure of the real. He had confused love with adoration, waiting with fidelity, suffering with depth. He had believed that intensity gave rights. It gave none.

He placed the photograph on the newspaper, beneath the headline. The old love and the new crime touched each other without understanding each other.

Then he walked toward the staircase.

Each step cost him. The corridor stretched before him. The handrail undulated in the half-light. At the top of the stairs, Damien stopped. The worn wood descended before him, dark, narrow, almost liquid.

He placed his hand on the rail.

— I am going to go, he said.

To whom was he speaking? To the homeless man? To Nielle? To the child he had been? To the anonymous Christ he was finally dismissing? He did not know.

A violent nausea rose to his throat. The landing tilted. The walls drew closer. The first step disappeared beneath his eyes.

Damien tried to hold on.

His foot missed its support.

He fell.

His shoulder struck the wall. His hand grasped the void. His skull hit one step, then another, before breaking against the bottom of the staircase with a dull sound.

After that, nothing more.

Outside, the sky began to rain again.

--------------- THE END ---------------