Revision note

Nielle is an original work by Côme Felx. Artificial intelligence was used as a revision aid: correction, lightening, partial restructuring and proposals for narrative connections. The characters, the universe, the themes, the voice and the imagination of the novel belong to the author.

This intervention aimed to preserve the feverish and introspective style of the text while improving its readability. It did not seek to replace the original writing, but to accompany it.

CHAPTER I

For all his luggage, an old suitcase, barely dusted off. He had to leave quickly. Otherwise, everything would crumble. Life would collapse on him.

Outside, a torrential rain was falling over the city. It fell with an almost personal violence, as if the sky, too, had decided to break apart. The drops hammered the hood of the Ford, streamed down the windows, distorted the façades and swallowed the streetlights.

Damien was crying along with the rain. His tears mingled with the water running down his face, and he no longer knew very well whether he was emptying himself out or the world was overflowing.

With a gesture at once careless and nervous, he threw his briefcase onto the back seat of his car. Door slammed. Seat belt? No. He did not care. Ignition. Distracted, eyes reddened, blurred by water and tears, without even glancing in the rear-view mirror, he backed up abruptly.

A dull impact.

Something struck the back of the car. Or the car struck something. In the roar of the rain, he could barely make anything out: a shadow, a movement, a shape that seemed at once to slip away from the trembling light of the headlights. Damien frowned, for barely a second. His mind, already elsewhere, refused to stop there.

The rain was pounding too hard. His vision was tearing beneath the windshield wipers. The whole world had become nothing but a dirty pane of glass, black water, a labyrinth of reflections. He thought he had caught a bag, a garbage can, some obstacle abandoned in the darkness.

He did not insist.

He shifted into drive and sped into the soaked street. Had he looked more carefully, had he simply taken the time to get out, perhaps he would have seen what the rain was already trying to erase.

He could have taken the metro or the bus. In truth, he would not be going very far. But he did not want to see anyone.

— No one! I said no one!

What he called a journey would not truly begin until he parked his Ford on a certain little street. A street so short that, without the house fronts on one side and the park running along the other, one might have taken it for an alley.

With its many cracks in the pavement, its uneven sidewalks patched with several layers of asphalt; with its electrical cables held up by poles of dirty beige and grey, serving as expressways for the squirrels that ventured along them; with its motley constructions erected before the Second World War; with its single elm, so majestic that it made the neighbouring poplars yellow prematurely. All the elements of this landscape, as he projected them, manhandled him and blurred his concentration. This mental setting made it hard for him to obey the traffic lights that slowed his momentum. A surge beyond his last ten years, flooded with mortifications. There! … He must accelerate and cross that decade, barely faded, by forgetting backwards. There! Toward his lost ages, he must launch himself in order to ripen there. Or so he hoped.

Those elsewhere-yesterdays, those foreground characters, a space-time puzzle he had to recreate. A segment of his story scrolling like the trailers of a feature film to come…

"Coming soon to your screens! …(music)… More than a film! (a life) A drama of errors in full gallop. Soon, see the unworthy love story of Damien and J…" _ Even that name, Juliet, charged with passion, remained stuck in his throat. Yet her name was not Juliet. Nor was he quite Romeo.

— Damned shit! Are these turtles at the wheel? These morons must have all agreed to go out for a Tuesday-evening ramble. Move it, you stupid Sunday drivers sitting in shells for asphalt moors! " he shouted, exasperated by the abnormally dense traffic.

Yet this partial congestion allowed him the prelude. To anticipate the ascent. Intentionally to consider the previous day as a springboard from which to plunge into his past, farther and better. To reduce the danger, to avoid the fatal error of forgetting an important detail.

***

The day before, he had appeared at his bank looking so anxious and so nervous that the teller took him for a thief attempting his first hold-up. It was so plausible that the clerk even allowed himself to joke during the transaction.

— This is for a withdrawal, correct? …

… With or without a signature?

— Pardon? What do you mean?

— Oh! It’s of no importance! … A formality. "

Following the usual procedure, in the fascinating rite of institutional know-how, the teller’s agile hand blurred his unaccustomed gaze, which could not count at the same speed.

— …one thousand one hundred eighty, one thousand two hundred!

… There you are, sir!

— Is that the exact amount?

— Would you like me to count it again?

— No! "

With polite indiscretion, the clerk addressed his customer, who was distributing his savings evenly through his pockets.

— I imagine you’ll be doing some wild spending with that money. A cruise through the canals of Sorel, perhaps?

— Precisely a journey. — Yes! — The rediscovery of the farthest reaches of my world.

— I don’t understand.

— It’s of no importance… A formality! "

Too preoccupied with the unusual way in which he would get rid of his money, he was nearly struck by a truck exceeding the permitted speed limit. Only children playing on the sidewalk had noticed the incident. He saw them preparing themselves for the trials of life. No shock, not the slightest tension, had disengaged him from his concerns.

He mimed wandering through his old neighbourhood. In that grey zone he had once adopted, he adjusted the direction of his walk so as to take maximum advantage of the sun’s leaden rays. In this way he armed himself with a reserve of daylight that would spur him on in a hunt for night. Coinciding with his saturation in the star’s benefits, there came a halt. His immobilisation before a door whose appearance was familiar to him.

His index finger, like an arrow, reached the doorbell he had taken as his target. Insistence! … Perseverance!

— No! Really, you’re exaggerating! What do you want?! " raged a man in his thirties, driven from sleep by the annoying bell and embittered by Damien’s impertinence, visiting his memories.

— I apologise. I believe I woke you… I must speak with you…

— But I recognise you! Aren’t you the former tenant? I remember, you showed me around your place, this apartment. You have a face one remembers. No offence intended. Though I do have a phenomenal memory! ” the man dominating the staircase launched, mocking, with a satirical expression.

— “Amazing!

— Not really, because to tell you the truth, I’ve sometimes glimpsed you prowling around the street. And never mind if you find me a little wild, could you get to the point!

— … I have a request to make of you. Rest assured! I won’t abuse your time, I promise you.

— Well then…, follow me! ” said the man, who was looking for clear explanations to provide about his way of living. “Don’t look at the mess, especially since you know you dragged me out of bed. Nothing has changed here; you’ll see the second floor is still as small as before, and you can still hear the neighbours rinsing their mouths in the morning and making each other come at… tra-la-la. "

While keeping close on the resident’s heels, supported by the handrail to which he clung, Damien counted and baptised the steps with tears. Each of them, crashing and splashing on the old worn wood, became frosted with a nostalgic thought. — The erased reflections of a woman. — In his head, from the apartment emanated distorted images, wild cries, biting rage and tearing voices that attacked him. Metaphorical beasts suffocated him with their old threats. Abyssal dizziness! A moan clung to his exhalations, as if his breath were vomiting misery.

— What’s wrong with you, sir? … Are you all right? … You’re not going to puke, I hope. "

Making many efforts to withdraw from the peril of his spectres, but also to be resolutely convincing, he pulled himself together. His eyes begged the man for pity.

— Help me! I feel lost. Suicide has me by the throat… I feel as if I have mislaid my soul. It has hidden behind dream or love, … I no longer know! … And before me, death is amusing itself by exhausting my desire to live! … I beg you! … Help me!

— But why me? Are you crazy or what! " exclaimed Damien’s opposite number, stunned, as his presence of mind gradually returned.

— I am not coming to you by chance. This apartment you live in, I know it; I once lived here. Besides, you know that…" He stopped for a few seconds, disorienting the doubt taking shape within him. "Well, I mean…, I survived here. These partitions enclose a secret that is my own; like a forgotten password, indispensable to recover by steeping myself once again in these places that were cursed for me. In these very rooms where you live… happiness lost and banished me. I can only just sketch the appearance of the joy of living. A woman sold me to death! … Hold out your hand to me, sir! "

The occupant did not move. Becoming more and more phlegmatic, he tried to isolate this growing commiseration and then annihilate it with coldness.

— Hold out your hand to me! " he repeated indistinctly. Damien was no longer pronouncing; he was weeping the words. Collapsing to his knees, he seized the host’s feet to show that he would be crushed, struck down, if he had to endure a refusal.

— Come now, get up! … Make an effort! Pull yourself together. You’re stronger than that, and less of a child, … come on! " the man kept repeating, finding himself obliged to hold out his hand to this weak and disoriented being sobbing at his feet.

Finding that the demonstrations had lasted long enough, he was about to put an end to them by expelling the intruder, when he felt the visitor place a piece of paper in the hollow of his hand. Mechanically, he glanced at it.

— What is…? A hundred-dollar bill! For what unimaginable reason are you giving me this money, when you look… poor, miserable? "

Damien overcame silence with difficulty. With effort, he explained through gestures, words and tears that he had to relive events. To remember her. A woman, a turning point, a great love. But this reclusion in his past, this return backwards, would have to take place in solitude.

— I am even prepared to sublet the apartment from you for two hundred dollars a day. All of it in cash, right now. " he risked.

— … And… for how many days?

— No more than four, perhaps five. In any case, this attempt that might allow me to find myself again is too vital. What use will my savings be to me six feet underground? — No matter! … Here is a thousand dollars and if three days are enough for me, you keep the change, as they say! " The dreamer played the well-off bourgeois. He feared that by admitting his poverty, he would have made the man opposite him sceptical. Moreover, the sum served only as bait. He anticipated that a period of twenty-four hours would be enough to wash himself clean of his pains.

— Fine! I agree. I’ll sublet my place to you. You’re not going to do anything crazy, I hope? I mean you’re not going to… blow your brains out… But I must admit I committed a lie by omission. You can make all the racket you want; there’s no one in the building at the moment. The other four apartments are empty. Almost everyone has fled the city for the summer holidays. The Brouillettes included. You remember them, … the owners? — I’m the only one who didn’t have enough savings to clear out. One could say heaven sent you! — Oh! Now that I think of it, it’s not that I don’t trust you… But I’d rather take my valuables with me: my colour television, my computer and certain small items that are indispensable to me.

— You may take everything away if that is your pleasure. Besides, …" Thus he explained to his interested Good Samaritan that he himself would bring certain things, certain objects, all with connotations of lost memories, but alas, too alive.

This chance, this unexpected event in the landlord’s life, this great desire in that of the strange subtenant, gave rise to no friendship. The first man was on holiday anyway and the second would have to work on himself. In the hours that followed, both busied themselves recreating a provisional arrangement of the place, moving the belongings of one to the other’s home. Without much exchange…

***

At last, the Ford turns onto the Street of Glorious Peace. A grotesque designation forged in another era by his excessive imagination.

After parking his car, slowly letting himself sink into time, measuring his gestures, he begins to swim upstream toward his dried-up shores. Like prisoners in the sand, like artefacts, the memories of his steps will serve as his guide.

Everything withers and becomes more fragile. His hand tightens around the handle of his suitcase, his only intermediary with reality. The closer he comes to that door which had been opened to him the day before, the more the present fades away, non-existent. — The future? For now, an unknown value. Knowledge being linked to the past.

Without the slightest hesitation, he grips the key, … thrusts it into the rust-stained lock. The same one he had possessed, with no greater wear, this key leading toward hope or its end, would reopen wounds.