CHAPTER XI

The dreamopath interrupts himself in his episode. The dark veil of the storm and the aggressiveness of the wind simulate the setting of an eschatological day. After closing the shutters, if he has omitted certain details, Beethoven, for his part, does not forget himself. Simultaneously with a flash of lightning striking a poplar very nearby, … between an allegro and an andante…, the disenchanted dreamer reclassifies his errors and his strokes of brilliance. Happy coincidences and the most unpredictable annoyances…

Voluntarily cloistered in his lodging for two days, Damien, prisoner of Nielle’s absences and furtive existences, was pacing back and forth when Carlos’s shadow filtered the brightness of the glazed panes of the door. Without leaving him time to knock, he invited in the student, enamelled with idiotic little smiles, as if during a drinking contest he had managed to dethrone the holder of a Guinness record.

— Hi Damien! I’ve got half a bottle of red. Well, …uh! Let’s rather say I’ve got half of a bottle. I felt like finishing the wine with you. A story of plonk in front of a good chat. No, I mean to pinch a good chat in front of… To talk between pals, that’s it! "

Saying not a word, listening distractedly to Carlos’s redundant palaver about the pedagogical quality "…of shit! …" of the professional body "…shitty! …" of his university "…shithole! ", Damien took two mismatched glasses out of the cupboard. While taking detective-like care to check their cleanliness, he wondered whether the drunkard was in need of consolation or whether he had come, with slyness, to verify his moral balance and feel out his troubles.

Carlos gulped down the wine. Damien drank it only with the tips of his lips. In this attitude, they discussed the effect of absinthe in former times…, of Scotch or whisky at mid-century…, and of current drugs on great artists. Swallowing his last mouthful and straying, thanks to the heady wine, from his pretentious remarks about one day appearing as the nec plus ultra of comic-strip creators, even anticipating receiving the "Yellow Kid" prize; the dreamer could not help questioning Carlos. Asking him about the follow-up that had not come from his poem. However, he kept silent about the form of the writing in order to avoid any suspicion of plagiarism.

— Do you know whether Nielle received my last letter? … I am tormented, I never get an answer!

— Not aware of it! … Nielle, I never see her! I mostly see her sister. She’s the one who lives there now, well, I think…"

Carlos had blushed, and that hue which gave his face the same tint as his brandy nose faded only at the end of his reply.

This manifest hypocrisy seemed to redden Damien’s astonished face. His blood too was rushing to his head. At first glance, this lure seemed to have been dictated under the influence of alcohol, but it was ostensibly meant to sow doubt.

— Do you really believe she no longer lives up there? … But her steps and her voice that I hear, …? Tell me, Carlos, am I going mad? …

— Don’t worry, even Methuselah knew everybody was crazy as shit. _ Well, … I’ve got to go…! Thanks for the red, the next round’s on me. "

Somewhat incoherent, the student, ravaged by the filth of his lie, withdrew sheepishly in a slight drunkenness… (?)

Raging and soured by the uncertainty raised, Damien pursued and hunted Carlos in thought along the staircase; even wishing to hear him tumble down, then relieve himself from his fall with blasphemies at the end of each ascent.

— There, only four steps before he falls. Three, two, and only one left…! — I am vexed, he is not stumbling. He is motionless on the landing. Poor Carlos, he must be trying to pull himself together to avoid losing his balance. No! He turns right to go home. But right! That is the direction… of Nielle’s apartment! "

Clearly, two voices above resounded like two fencing thrusts that would slaughter the skin of a drum, each arrogating one of his eardrums to itself. His muse’s voice struck the first blow.

— Damien wrote to me? … I heard!

— Yes, he says he sent you a poem.

— But he never pronounced that word! He was speaking of letters, only. How do you know it was a poem? …

— I… I was just saying that…! How, you can hear downstairs? …

— Yes, and so what…?! … Who are you to allow yourself to intercept my mail? " Nielle was furious. So exasperated that her words, seeming to grip Carlos by the throat, could loosen only at the moment when he confessed his villainy.

Discovered and powerless, he proclaimed his innocence while revealing, indifferently, a scheme of which he was not the instigator. He was informing.

— …It’s Lou! … He’s the one who forced me. He made me act that way. I swear!

— I do not want this to happen again. Is that clear? … Whether they are letters from Damien or from anyone else! … Do you understand? … As for Lou, he will get what is coming to him. When the time comes, I shall question him to find out whether you are telling the truth! "

If the knowledge of this fact had blurred Damien’s hearing with stupefaction, this underlying revelation that Nielle also gleaned from his intimacy had frozen his eyes. Even enriched by his indiscretion, he did not try to grasp the tenor of the rest of the troubling and confounding exchange between the student and his muse. He was striving to rid himself of the bitterness invading him. Anger and the desire for revenge stepped over one another, jostled each other.

— I hurt! " he uttered, choking in silence.

To avoid crying, for fear she might hear him, he comforted himself with this chance that had allowed him to elucidate the mystery of his sweet shipwrecked notes. This discovery of the venomous tactic had prevented him, himself, from foundering toward the renunciation of his muse and of his future elegies.

The amplitude of this happiness of bad artifice faltered, propping itself under the pressure of a mistrust that had recently been tormenting him. The display of auditory hallucinations. Had his desire been so powerful, so violent, that he imagined Nielle walking, whirling, laughing, living in her refuge and even conversing with someone else…, as with Carlos in the preceding moments? Was it already too late? …

Damien’s pain was so great, so astonishingly acrid, that he struggled to restrain his ravings, to keep himself from spitting his spite upon abstract but suggested neighbours.

— Is it to please the devil, to stroke him in the direction of the beast’s fur, that you have agreed upon a collective pact? … An invisible parchment stained and countersigned with your deceptions, proving your unconditional support of evil. The annihilation of your conscience and of my reason. Voluntary murder by slow hellfire!

Fetid beings! … How can I avoid paranoia? I am caught in a mousetrap by you, the tenants above, and you, my neighbours below. All of you show me cruelty.

The Brouillettes, … every time I pronounce "Nielle" before them, enquiring about an encounter with which she might have honoured them; they all answer me without exception, while slipping away: "Nielle? … Nielle who? … Whom are you talking about, Damien? …" Really! — She has been paying them rent regularly for more than two years. Money may have no smell, but it can be felt! — Who do you take me for? … What are your aims? … Granted, a derangement of my personality has twisted my soul, and I do not deny that I took myself for Kristos! … Perhaps you are not aware; I dismissed him…! Excommunicated him from my madness.

So what is the use of making me suffer uselessly? … Psychic crucifixion? … "The what? …" you would say to me! "

Damien, taking refuge in his bed, muffled the echo of his sobs in his pillow and intercut his complaints with analyses that grew ever more torturing. To recover normal breathing? Difficult! Opposing his efforts were those devouring thoughts with illogical sequences.

— Derisory! They slit my throat like a sacrificial lamb by veiling her with a protection they do not deserve to apply. No danger to contain, to prevent, for no firmness, no courage raises me against their antics. Confrontation terrifies me; I am a coward.

How can I reach my love from now on, brush against her mind, subjugate her soul? Write to her? Even an epic poem on my feelings for her would be vain; the work would risk interception despite the warnings. — See her? They hide her, bury her by engulfing themselves in their contemptible cunning.

How to recover those lost and stolen words that safeguarded the hope of rectifying my life; those I considered a red carpet rolling out toward my muse? … Transcend their loss, sublimate their massacre by enriching the spectrum of those fallen verbs with the slightest note, with the most significant vibrations. Not tire of writing to her… through this music I shall impose upon her. Do not blame me, I hurt so much. "Hard headed woman. "

***

The solar plexus groans; it has become like an independent identity. The dreamopath curls up on his inseparable divan. In execution on his synapses: his memory, the prompter in the theatre of his life.

The storm is intense. The rain twins itself as it splashes on the ground, like tiny and countless fountains of tears swallowing themselves back. Inner volubility settles in again in anticipation of a joy that will excite his already overworked neurons. On his horizon there takes shape the silhouette of unhoped-for messengers come from elsewhere, as if from another planet. The Hertzian world.

Damien had enriched his record collection with new acquisitions; thus broadening his modes of delivery, in the form of decibels, among records borrowed from friends. Already selective, Damien would become eclectic. Measuring the repercussions of every song on his muse’s feelings, he gauged the emotions transmitted by their music. He planned to paint the picture of his dreams exhaustively. He calculated like an actuary; extrapolated like a futurologist, convinced that from those long hours of listening at least one wave would cross Nielle’s heart. The record lover rejoiced in his musical evocations. Then, like a disc jockey, he began the eurythmy intended for the graceful one. The reactions? He knew he would neither see them, nor hear them, nor delight in them, but by mania, better still by whim, he imagined them.

His conscience and his integrity were crumbling. He bribed his morality and absolved himself through candid and soothing motives; knowing that by this trick he was compromising himself in a tortuous and disloyal harassment. Sometimes impassive, he struck his chest with three punches; wavering in his ignorance of error, he mocked himself simultaneously: "Do I have a choice? … Do I have a choice? Do I have a very great choice? … So be it! " Acknowledging the repugnance of resorting to this merry-go-round, he judged that it was fundamentally the minimum.

He resorted to all forms, all musical styles. The naïveté of popular music and the dynamism of rock; the vaporous soul of certain jazz and many blues; the notoriety of classics and the truths, sometimes messianic, of great singer-songwriters. In his projections, he hailed the other Muses of the universe so that they might whisper to him those words unknown to his soul, those words giving him the courage to struggle.

— Nielle, my love! Yes, I have the impertinence to continue evoking this feeling whose immediate and definitive abduction you would prefer! I love you, but it is too late, for the opening of this multicultural ode is your electric troubadour, Cat Stevens, his lyrics and his voice that you savour and that will unseat you. He begins it. Hear "Hard headed woman…!"

That day, before the final note appeared in the atmosphere, Damien allowed himself a pause in order to support, underline, justify through silence the impact and veracity of the song. A late morning was ageing, for a few seconds had just grimaced the eleventh hour. Meanwhile, nothing to ease this wound caused by his exclusion but Nielle’s steps. Yet the possibility of a ruse would revoke certainty.

— …And what if these steps were, in a way, only an imitation parade? The league of the sowers of the great cultivated doubt, demonstrating and labouring to dupe me? No! … Impossible!

Those steps resemble her too much… My heart can only agree to her presence; harmonising, beating at the speed of her movements. A rhythmic code.

There, … she is having breakfast and my pulse feeds upon her awakening_ She has finished; she heads toward her bedroom to dress, make herself up, perfume herself, … it palpitates! — Now she comes out, passes into the living room, stops very near her stereo system… my heart no longer transmits…! Never before has she auditioned music in the morning! "

Damien perched himself on his divan, standing with his feet together, almost on tiptoe, to draw nearer to the musicality slightly filtered by the ceiling. This position, on the threshold of imbalance, was uncomfortable. As with the clairvoyance of a diviner warning of an accident, Nielle raised the volume.

Without ceasing to strain his ear, he sat down again, wondering whether that attention, involuntary as it might be, was not signalling directly to him the rage and embarrassment into which he had selfishly catapulted her. Yet he recognised the famous "Let It Be" by the Beatles.

His knowledge of the English language was limited, and even if he hummed out of tune, that did not prevent him from translating by modulation according to his abilities. "That’s how it is! Let it go! It is so…!" This tune reminded him of his adolescence but also of an intrusion that had not taken place and of mad, imaginary dances with Nielle enough to make the stars shiver. He remembered the non-existent.

Not being the disc jockey was pleasant to him. He took advantage of that pleasure by becoming interested in the next piece, "Across the Universe".

Suddenly his ears were irritated by fluctuations in the intensity of the volume. Nielle was amusing herself by fading the verses while placing the accent on the refrain. These punctuated variations irritated him, but he explained them to himself through a singular appreciation by Nielle of this passage: "Nothing’s gonna change my world"_ (Nothing will change my universe!)_ That phrase glittered, discriminated against the others widely. This sound segregation inclined Damien to believe that she was paying him back in kind. End of the stave, end of the measures. Two old hits only. Nielle removed the record and selected another.

Muzzled! Stunned! His beauty’s new choice dazzled him into a true ectoplasm. Yet, unbeknownst to her, she was trying to exorcise him with the assistance of Léo Ferré, the supreme poet denouncer of social injustice and deceitful extravagance: "Avec le temps, tout s’en va… on oublie…"

Someone rang at her place, obliging her to move. Her steps, like a metronome, indicated the cadence of Damien’s heart. She opened to Marc, her friend and adviser…, then went to lower the volume, almost imperceptibly.

— How are you, Marc?

— Very well, and you, Nielle, are you all right? … Are you ready? …

— … I’m coming right now! " she said, moving toward her bedroom to seize her handbag.

— Nielle, there’s a record playing, do you want me to stop the system…?

— No! I’m letting the song finish.

— Why?

— …mmm… because…! " she answered Marc, in a sugary voice. Then she avoided a litany of mockery by adding shrewdly, "…we also risk accumulating lateness… with time, if we do not leave. "

Clear and sharp for the dreamer. This reply gave tangible form to his muse’s game. She had just compromised herself, involuntarily admitting the determined intention to communicate.

Nielle and Marc were leaving. The door closed behind them.

Recorded during a performance in a hall, Ferré’s song, guillotining the nodules of time, padded Damien’s return to solitude all the way to the applause, to the admirers’ encores interrupted by the technique.

Brusquely, as toward the melting of a dream when at its imminent end a subconscious conclusion imposes itself, Damien analysed the facts and extrapolated on his muse’s modus operandi. — Paralysed! — As unusual and fragile as his illicit communications might be, they had borne fruit.

— Bull’s eye! I have hit my ravishing target! My theory of the plastic message carried in the waves spread by the loudspeaker enclosure; as deranged and perfidious as that hypothesis might be, is strewn with effectiveness! I exult! — Even if Nielle has transmitted to me that "Nothing will change; that with time everything fades; and that it is so!" She answered me!

Is this delicate attention, this veiled tenderness, necessarily excluded from pity? Are they irreconcilable? No matter, I who believed she did not love me at all… What a pleasant denial!

But there is a misunderstanding! Tied up, done for like the ace of spades, I am nonetheless the king of hearts; for never will time banish her eyes from my memory. Love is not expelled from an existence, from a being, by debasing as by biopsy this wondrous feeling. No surgery, however precise, no scalpel, however incisive, can prune or excise its scar. The gesture would revive the wound without relieving the patient, reminding him, in pain, that love will lounge concealed in his mind until the death of both.

***

The Fifth furrows the dreamopath’s hearing. The powerful, impassioned basses tickle the membranes of the mediocre loudspeakers. Disturbing vibrations massacre his only accessible delectation.

Despite the sum of agglutinated images, cloistered in his former digs, he has not yet found the error; that defined space-time which might have caught him, impaling his life, suppressing other attachments. He is worried, the end of the reckless deadline is approaching…

His cat was purring in his arms while he kept watch at the windows; mutually, they provided each other with security and affection. The landscapes of the street and the rear courtyard, he could draw them with his eyes closed, so much, to distract himself in his waiting, did he peel them apart and collate their details.

— Since that Beatles-Ferré association, you live in me, lascivious, invading me with an exceptional and avidly mysterious joy. I no longer have to lower my eyelids or even blink to imagine you; you are there, persistent both within and outside my breath. You are more present than ever. Paradoxically, however, I let my face create circles of grease and sweat on the glass, hoping for your arrival. "

Anguishing, these chimeras with which he fed his time. Implacably, they emboldened this caustic anxiety that tugged at him. It petrified him when he was confronted with the dizzying manoeuvres of his neighbours. Before them, their lies, their objurgations polished with a condemning morality, he preferred to lie by omission, dupe them through silence and through his reactions, which he compressed, reclusive in his shelter.

— What a delight it would be to catch Nielle in the act and foil Lou, who camouflages her. Him, I would slit his pride, I don’t care! But her, intimidate her, never! Yet both of them take malicious pleasure in deceiving my vigilance…

…Almost every morning, he carries with his arm stretched upward a suit supported by a metal hanger and covered in cellophane. As if he were leaving the cleaner’s. While descending the staircase, he gradually shifts his burden backward, thus changing the angle as the steps go by. All this discipline to hide Nielle’s movements as she conceals herself behind the same suit, always well pressed. In the evening on returning, … identical stratagem.

Stupidity! Since the first snows, the subterfuge is non-viable. Needless to say, leaving four footprints when one is human, therefore bipedal, creates a tremendous effect.

What to think of the “egg” effect? … Who, then, engendered the other? … The hen? … Is this question an empty shell? — Mia keeps repeating the same refrain, without changing it by one iota, to incite me to believe that her sister has: "…perhaps…", indeed left the premises. Under this condition, what motivates the games of hide-and-seek? The stagings and those answers marking out ambivalence and certainty? — Her studied sallies, verging on concertation and stuffed with defiance, incline me to estimate that Nielle lives up there when she is not there and that she is present when in reality she is breathing elsewhere? Is her aim resolutely to increase my disarray, feeding it with ambiguity to prod it toward panic, so as to concentrate it into a dangerous magma? … So that later, there may be an abreaction whose source I could not connote?

Who can with dignity and frankness inform me about Nielle? … Mia? Carlos? Lou? The Brouillettes, neighbours below? … Some of them lie with such disconcerting ease that they transcend lying even in their vicious behaviours.

As if I snapped my fingers…, I need only pronounce "Nielle"; from then on I draw them into their sophisms. At the very instant when my love’s first name vibrates in the air, a very slight distinctive smile lazily sketches itself on their faces, then they evacuate through their sparkling eyes the irony and the bland disgust they have for my person.

After that stage comes my astonishment. Their mouths (… who would have believed that is what they were…), open completely; their lips quiver in a synchronic tic. Finally, through the amplitude of their pestilential orifices one notices their taste buds, which, like carnivorous flowers, gape wider in order to savour better their hatred and their spite. Their hunger for the weaker. "

***

Karajan and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra continue with the andante con moto. Even if the storm winds lose their velocity; in their passions, the musicians are truthful. The symbolism of death remains a constant in the storm, in the music and in the dreamopath’s soul. His wish for a conscious extraction of these tumours of the past gains in will, through distress…

Was he seated in his kitchen? … Stretched out on his divan? … Lying on his bed? … Standing, facing the windows? … Motionless in his studio? … Following his numerous avatars, he no longer worked; his imagination stagnated in solving Nielle’s pastiche withdrawal.

— The independence Nielle demonstrates to me, I can understand it, even share it… a little; but she rides it savagely. She tramples my life with it, holding me for dead, and there lies my agony.

With all my strength, I alienate most of my emotions, in retreat, leaving them to suffocate. As for those that struggle, they end incinerated in the fire of my passion. That bitter intoxication, born of the waste of our encounters and the unfortunate interventions of fatality. "

The dreamopath suffers less than he once did, more than is needed. He purges this severe sentence imposed by destiny, the condemnation to forced memories in that penal colony which is his mind.

The symphony comes to an end…; of the storm, only distant growls can still be heard. Time, according to its tireless habit, continues to flow in different perceptions, according to all human things.

The most arduous, the most painful does not yet appear. The procession of the last “remembrances”. Suspended instants, those images he will bring out again and wish to recycle into ecstasy in his guiding memory.

He opens the window. The polluted air, he forgets it. To dry out his acrimony, he takes in a breath of humidity and tender freshness that the storm has naturally deducted from its cumulonimbus. Then, returning to his divan, he circles it several times. Not to stretch, but to authorise himself to ankylosis by making himself dizzy, stupefying himself, numbing himself still more. Seeking farther than aberration while settling into it.