CHAPTER XII

Sudden decision. Kitchen-bound! … A green salad, in haste. One mouthful, two, … no more; accompanied by a glass of iced tea. Having swallowed nothing all day, he thus put an end to his brief psychopath’s uproar, to his fast as a rebuffed dreamer.

In the street, an overtired child hurts himself; left knee scraped. No need for prayer; he has got up on his own. It is the apprenticeship of life. He is developing his threshold of tolerance for pain.

Damien, for his part, squints at Nielle’s photo lying flat on the floor. Like the transparency of a fantasy, it bears witness to its survival after the dreamer’s shipwreck. Yet the object wearies him. That gaze forever fixed toward the left, unfathomable and relentless, reminds him that they never travelled in the same direction. Toward the same dreams…

Through continual reflections, he disavowed the voids of those days; those hours stripped of Nielle’s steps and of her failed simulacra that betrayed her.

— These criminal waits torture me! If I had the faculty, I would drive away this sclerotic time that hypnotises me like an hourglass by each of its grains of sand… shifting with nightmares.

Jostled by my shadow, I have dislodged myself, withdrawn, from Nielle’s existence. Now I exhaust my energies holding back my own spectre and its malevolent intentions. Had it been possible for me to apprehend the sly haunting of my solitude and the hatred spreading around me, I would have hindered and swept them away, those fatal reliefs of my personality. — What is the use! — Before this delectable delirium, this unbridled and infantile admiration of Nielle’s beauty, it is narcosis.

Yet she, naively innocent and victim of my patience atrophied in charm and its preambles; yet she, survivor of my destructive perseverance in my attempts at recovery, wanted to help me.

Why did I not recognise her prodigality in those delicacies she offered me as gifts? … That trust in others she wanted to teach me to welcome without grumbling, without frustrations? … Intuitive, because a woman, was she not aiming to uproot that eccentric in me who, sickly and possessed, was rising in love toward her? In sum, a taming against the grain of reality and its expectations, in anticipation of authentic and direct communication.

Today, she rejects me like poisoned honey! A mad, delirious artist! … Yet I am only a little muddled in the head. That is all!

The clock indicates twenty-one hundred hours. Once again, the anguish of staying awake. More than three hours, then forget this day disturbed by ghosts testing his reason, his scant logic. His body is beginning to feel the effects of akinesia. Fatigue? …

Schizophrenic symptoms, which he nevertheless controlled, serve as amplifiers to these musics floating in the ether of his twisted imagination while hypertrophying. Without being clearer, everything is more tangible. His torments, his wounds…, everything is so alive, so real that his skull seems pierced through by sepulchral modulations. These shadows, these steps, these impeccable voices immobilise his insignificant rationality. He remembers having magnified idiocy to its paroxysm…

Ejecting himself from a dream, preparing his coffee, like a postscript to the night, Damien was drawn by a whitish light diffused by morning. It was snowing. Already, the city’s dirty grey armour was beautifying itself into a white desert: "Fifteen centimetres of precipitation…" they were saying on the radio.

Detecting the danger that Nielle might slip, fall, hurt herself or even, sadly curious, that she might have trouble evading him, Damien decided to make her descent, her exit, her daily flight easier.

With an empty stomach but heart in his belly, seizing a heavy shovel whose handle clattered in the mouth of the blade, he rambled while carrying out his good deed. One shovelful, the momentum of a dream… Another shovelful loaded with crystalline fairies inspired by the whole of the displaced flakes, then another and again, again… Finally, at the foot of the cleared staircase, there glittered not the crude result of this service, … a vulgar mound of snow; but the poetic sum of kisses, thoughts and clandestine touches. An incognito desire of dazzling white.

The work finished, catching his breath, he meditated on the idea of informing Nielle that he was the craftsman of the pleasant chore; that through her, he had made a little drifting snow dream.

Seeking to annotate his time, Damien "Quixote" then ballasted his weapon with the magical snow and charged at full speed toward the dragon’s maw. The third-floor door. — Cerberus did not retreat by a claw or a fang; it did not even roar. Temerarius, Don Damien removed a wet glove and, with his index finger stiffened by the cold, wrote in the opaline powder hypnotising the monster that feigned death the following satirical epitaph: "The masked shovel". Hoping that Queen Nielle would grasp the trick of the homonymic signature. "The masked call."

Then, in a gesture of chivalry, he took his bow and invited his shovel, which he of course nicknamed "Sancho", to support him in the next confrontations with winter. — Yet that year, it hardly snowed at all.

***

The further he advances in his "remembrances"…, the more he assimilates with apprehension the flaws of that period by describing them as clownish malignancies, the more he realises that he was cloistering himself in abandonment tendencies. — The pack, to which he longed to belong, to identify with the species, fiercely rejected him. It evicted him for nothing, forced Damien into a kind of interminable quarantine, to the point of making him feel that it desired to see him die like an anaemic and contagious beast. Sordidly, acrimonious but exciting, the female who would have invigorated him and made him gambol manifested herself as the uncontested authority of the herd, she who alienated the dreamer’s pride…

With great strokes of needles, his birthday was approaching. December eighteenth; fateful date recalling the day when the earth did not stop turning at Damien’s first cries. Slicing through age, crossing alone a new sequence, disordered him like the usurpation of a tradition.

— In five days, it will be my birthday! It will be the big bash! "

This assertion uttered by Damien covered neither the amplification of one of those dispatch records and even less the discreet purring of his cat consoling him when she was not sleeping. — Besides, out of humour and gratitude, dominating the list of his guests, underlined and in parentheses, he inscribed her there. In very first place, like a privilege teasing his daughter’s first name in play; teasingly those of Mylène and the lover; like a favour jesting about reciprocal loyalty, the names of their mutual friends; like a concession to the superficial, that of the student of oenological poetry and, finally, out of desperation, that of "Nielle".

In the hours that followed, with the fervour of an adolescent spending his pocket money in an arcade, he laid in provisions. Then, by telephoning his loved ones, he raised the score of his self-esteem to the maximum, enough to make it tilt. But stubbornly, he fought a headless black hero, his shadow, which sought abandonment in the surveillance of the muse’s comings and goings. It was in this state of mind that he prepared to welcome his nineteen guests into his rearranged and decorated little retreat with all the fantasy granted him by the utopia of receiving his neighbour. She who, however, would not attend this celebration, according to the allegations of his informer Carlos.

— If I meet her, I’ll ask her to come to your party! " he said, completing this with stringy explanations: "I’m not sure she’ll go; she’s almost never there. " Implicitly, these words confirmed to Damien the presence, at least occasional, of Nielle in her apartment.

Despite the benevolent assurance he had drawn from the student’s equivocal turn of phrase; the dreamer, a good-natured host, kept alive the hope of seeing Nielle join his circle of friends. He wished to see her sympathise with Lysianne and learn from Mylène, his angel of confidences, with certain astonishment, that he concealed unsuspected qualities. He anticipated these joys, which imploded at the evidence of withdrawal, at the disappointment of the desired one. As best he could, he strove to respond to the smiles addressed to him or to joke with a deadpan formula to the wishes people made for him.

All the human warmth, the cordiality of the group, did not safeguard him from the contempt, from that cold directed from the third floor. The proven joviality of the rejoicing did not attenuate the strange algid reaction. This prolonged yet predictable absenteeism of his muse, this flaw in the harmony of his birthday, this vacancy in his heart; in sum, grace disdainful of him like a Jansenist, drained his exuberance toward duller emotions, causing him to seep into drama from the first goodbyes.

This sadly unpleasant attitude for those around him improved only at the last farewell, in a mixed euphoria. Without alcohol having flowed freely, it had finally sunk Carlos, who all evening had not known the pleasure, even for a brief instant, of seeing his lips weld themselves to each other. He who, from the first mouthfuls, under the governance of wine, as if to sow discord, bored Damien’s best friends, flattering himself before them that he was the closest.

Deceiving solitude, with the help of his feline emerging cautiously from her hiding place once the uproar had vanished, in an austerity softened by the night, he pursued his calvary, which no interruption had subjugated.

***

The dreamopath dares look only at the ascending moon; like a modified clepsydra, functioning by light, imprecise enough to omit precious seconds, yet formal enough to illuminate him in the eclectic viewing of the saga.

Until now, through the means of his self-taught mnemonics, two elements have truly troubled him by their resurgences. The musical confession, Ferré, "…with time…" ; as well as that unavoidable and disarming frustration aroused by Lou and Carlos’s scheme intercepting his love letters. The first aspect underlining a certain allocentrism in his beauty; the second flatly belonging to injustice. This brief clarification in order better to launch himself toward what memories remain for him to decipher…

Refractory to the idea of restoring order to his digs immediately after that reception, successful according to his guests’ comments, Damien settled back into his habits only the next day, late toward evening. Grand cleaning, small sorrow. Just barely, besides, if the dust lying here and there had not resettled in its original corners.

His cat, who had assigned herself to the living-room window, was resting after her watch, vigilant and clearly visible on the frame. Like her master, once her task was carried out, she would go stretch out in her wicker basket, without eating; then she fell asleep on her bedding, where she dreamed with claws closed.

Neglecting his watch, Damien relaxed in the kitchen in the company of his most faithful and most poisonous supports, his coffee and his cigarettes. These made up his return into the bosom of his usual interrogations.

— Why did she not come to my birthday party? … She had only to come down from her mountain. Did she fear becoming accustomed to it? … Did she dread the sarcasm of my friends or the vehemence of sly tendernesses, cornerstone of my fantasies? — Now, in this obscure relationship, she is no more virginal…, no more innocent than I, even if our rare contacts have been infiltrated, struck by oddities…"

He was only just beginning his guilt-making when his attention was drawn, at the zenith of his almicantarat, by a sudden activity, a crooked racket in his muse’s kitchen. Voices chuckled from time to time in this din; Mia’s, Lou’s, Carlos’s and Nielle’s. She had the right to amuse herself, to receive whomever she pleased, to exclude him from her fantasies if she wished, and he accepted it not without difficulty, in an instinctive wisdom.

On the FM band, where tuning remains classical, solitude was being kept at bay by broadcasting a superb interpretation of a Schubert. — His cat sleeping, the return of order, the pleasant music and nostalgia for his muse’s delicate features made him consider that all these components, balancing one another, justified the context of writing, the drafting of a new letter. Despite the stubborn threat of the word thieves, of the motley company in which she was naively taking pleasure at that moment.

Pencil in hand, he pointed at space as if to indicate to inspiration the place from which it should spring. The antics circulating and rebounding in the party wall from the joking subjects above him disturbed him. He then aimed at the ceiling, targeting through it, like an undulatory elixir, Nielle’s voice.

Vocal jolts annoyed the felicity of listening; stinging palavers emerged like yelps cutting short the pleasure; precisely those corrosive remarks capable of ravaging Damien’s carelessness. To gild his coat of arms, Carlos, whose voice was in no way affected by the previous evening’s consumption, was ranting about the dreamer, vociferating scabrous promises against him enough to make him shudder.

— …And I don’t give a damn about him! And! I’ll even help him move his shit! " He then signed this brief with a burst of laughter, provoking general hilarity to the satisfaction of the neighbours’ core.

Welded to his chair, like a fool he looked at this intersecting plane protecting him immediately from Carlos’s frantic threats. He could still see, stinking up his quietude, the alcoholic student, his two open hands on his cheeks, directing this brutal assertion toward the lower floor. Stunned, the dreamer could barely track his own emotions in order to dislodge them from the trauma in which they were taking root.

— Carlos! Carlos! " As if he were addressing him directly. "How can I ignore my wrongs? But you, what have I done to you? Does the unjustifiable hatred you exercise upon me not risk falling back on your nose? … — Perhaps you would defend yourself by displaying my double game, by pointing out that I use you as a messenger boy for feelings? … I would then remind you of your responsibility in this misunderstanding in our dealings, while underlining the enormous loss of those letters stolen by your hands, by your conscience.

Console yourself, Carlos, you are not alone in hating me. Look all around you. But! … What are your words in their malevolent pirouette, or your sardonic "friendship"? … Incomparable, faced with the arid desert in which Nielle dries out my soul! — Seeing her eyes is no longer a desire, an obsession; it is my motivation for living! "

Getting up and walking toward his studio, he wiped away a budding tear in the corner of one eye, trying to avoid the next ones. He would not cry. He offered great resistance and persuaded himself that no wickedness would reach him; telling himself that a courageous attitude constraining the effects of these assaults might perhaps alter Nielle’s opinion of him. At all costs! Play the innocent.

The swelling of tears past, he returned to pencil and papers in his kitchen, for he remembered that he had been about to write to his mocking beauty before the unsuspected harassment.

Up there, they were still laughing, but less and less, moving farther and farther away from the favourite subject, Damien the scapegoat.

He no longer had to point at the spaces around him to conquer inspiration. The potential content of his missive would be humble and Machiavellian confessions, structured so as to catalyse Nielle’s false absences and coordinated silences. In fact, Damien was betting on the muse’s strategy, for he was convinced that by arousing her curiosity he would lead her to reveal herself.

Imitating an eagle on the hunt, the dreamer hovered around words, spotting the most moving; he swooped toward them with open talons. His bloodied prey, these victim words, he then carried with outspread wings toward the nest of whitened pulp, where he arranged them like poaching trophies. From the most touching to the most infallible… From the most endearing to the most critical… From the frankest to the most complex…

(…From sympathy to Nielle’s pride. His height being inferior to hers, which of the two individuals would be made self-conscious? — From the hidden secret to the bold revelation of a ridiculous malformation; one calf atrophied, the other hypertrophied. Who are Laurel and Hardy? — From extreme intolerance to cultivated patience. Revealing that everything is known when one hears everything, or how to blend one’s time with another’s echoes? … — From envy to repentance. Cease pursuing the beautiful one? Definitively? … For lack of being loved, endure pity? Revocable decision? …)

At the end of the morning rites, he inserted into one of the yellowest envelopes his short text, which he had left to macerate under the counsel of night. Love against commiseration, like a currency of exchange.

To divert all suspicions from his muse, he simulated departure for a long walk by means of significant noises; false telephone calls warning the continuous tone of a late return, and, in the event that Nielle should see him, he dressed warmly enough to lose his breath.

Miming that he was clearing out from his home, he stopped at the street corner; then, keeping watch there, he let his face redden with cold, the frost pinch his cheeks. Retracing his steps, he walked along the houses with his back against their walls, like a pursued criminal; until, revisiting the site of his harmless offences, he deposited his confession in the old wooden box that others before him had already forced open and robbed of an inestimable sentimental fortune. Nielle’s smile.

Distracted by these very questions; these reasons that subjected him to these cautious acts, to this conjectural hypocrisy, he made his boots clap on the stairs, thus staining the winter tranquillity. Barely had he hidden under the balcony when the prompt sound of the latch guaranteeing security on the third floor finalised the percussion.

— Have I been spotted? " He had drawn attention. — The door closed again. — He moved forward and from the corner of his eye checked whether the envelope was still nesting in the mailbox… Gone! It had been plucked. But by whom? …

Apprehending unpleasant consequences in the unfolding of the Damienic delivery, he remained under the staircase, sheltered from ferreting glances, as if to authorise himself to believe that these minutes of immobility in the wind, in the cold, would erase his signature. Imbued with the failure of his feint and without caring for his role as walker, which a dry blizzard forced him to assume quickly, in the space of two minutes he retrieved from his home a psychology book borrowed from his ex-wife. A way to maintain their pre-divorce intellectual relations.

Arriving opposite his former cadastre, barely a hundred metres from his tenuous shelter, he mobilised his circumstantial phlegm, in the interest of exchanging with Mylène without too many emotions in his throat, without irritation in his self-esteem; even though he still considered her a sure confidante.

At the very moment when he activated the bell, as if carding his nerves, a shiver ran through his whole body. Without apparent reason, chance directed his gaze toward the studio, first diverting it into the sky, then toward the third-floor windows. Nielle, letter in hand, was spying on Damien.

Like a mole sensitive to daylight, burying itself in its gallery by instinct of self-preservation, she closed her shutters, retreating out of repulsion.

Doubling the surprise, the dreamer’s lucidity galloping out of frame, his muse’s hallucinatory aura clung to the window. In the joy of the moment, in immense euphoria, he would have boldly scaled the palace walls…, but useless, for that warm affect was already fading in favour of happy conclusions. Too curious, she had shaken, even disintegrated, the foundation of the cartel’s lies; endowing Damien with this fortuitous apparition, she ironically contradicted those who denied her presence.

But had she failed her own instruction by wanting to verify one of Damien’s most sensitive secrets, a malformation in his legs? … Or had she fallen into the trap to look at the artist, out of pity, one last time; reassured as she was by the promise not to be importuned again? … Or again, had she simply stared at him, wishing him misfortunes, bad luck and co.; because she was still fuming at being henceforth informed that her neighbour below could perceive as much as she what was being said on the other floor? …

True, tangible and sane, another kind of love whistled him an air of reality…

— Hello Daddy! " Lysianne, pecking him on the threshold of the door, invited him to enter.

— Hello Damien! What a joyful face! You must be carrying good news!? " clearly distinguished the child’s mother, who kissed her ex-husband amicably, interested in his rare moments of cheerfulness.

— There! … Hi! Come in, please! With this cold, the house cools quickly. " added the lover in his bass voice, interrupting the affections, the tendernesses of the former nucleus, with a brisk handshake.

— Forgive me, happiness makes me distracted… It may not be warm outside, but my morale indicates at least thirty degrees Celsius above zero! "

All four gathered around a verbena tisane, Damien then described to them his recent adventures. He recounted to them with details and passions the configuration of the latest deceptions and the lies deriving from them, the contents of the letter and his singular messenger technique; but above all, in a flight, in emotions swarming beneath his words, he informed them of this impromptu, accidental and analgesic manifestation of Nielle.

— …marvellous! There is obvious proof that I am not mad! She has not moved; she still lives there…! Do you realise, I foiled their strategy despite their malice, their cunning meant to confuse me, to make me swallow like an idiot that she was living elsewhere. Even she…

— …she has shaken you enough. " François brandished, who, astonished by his own answer to the dreamer’s emotionality, steered the conversation toward more concrete spheres, subito presto and as if nothing had happened. "Damien, I have a favour to ask you…

— With pleasure, what is it?

— I would like to complete a cassette of Beatles songs that I cannot finish here…

— You want to use my turntable?

— Yes, the needle on my record player is badly set and yours is new. I am looking for the greatest fidelity, the greatest musicality possible.

— Bah! I see no objections… But you will have to control the volume, to avoid Nielle interpreting your selections as a commotion of courtship. That could amplify the confusion and break the effectiveness of my negotiations with her sensitivity. " said Damien, while scratching the back of his neck as if seeking additional recommendations from his subconscious.

— Be reassured, I shall use precautions, even if I keep the opinion that she is nothing but a siren-woman seeking to destroy you.

— Please! …" To forget that this truth hurt him, without letting a second mark time, he addressed Lysianne. "You will prepare your luggage for tomorrow; we are going to the countryside for Christmas, all right, daughter?

— Yes, Daddy! … What time will you come pick me up?

— I do not know precisely. But surely toward the end of the afternoon.

— She is really looking forward to it. She has been talking for at least a week about seeing her cousin Natasha again. " indicated Mylène, who, while at the same time caressing her daughter’s long hair, authenticated the child’s enthusiasm more by that maternal gesture than by speech.

— Tell me, Damien, … if you leave me the keys to your apartment, I could record during your absence! …?

— Good idea! In any case Lysianne has a duplicate. "

Damien felt at ease in this entourage nonconforming to the social norms of the time. Sometimes, even, this amalgam gave him the air of a patriarch; but this dwelling that he had paced for almost ten years bored him. An emptiness weighed upon him. So he left them upon filial kisses and his classic buffoonish bows, in order to recover in the calm of his shelter, misguided waves, those fractions of life that Nielle would spread upon her wings. — There, he would examine his own sky, his personal firmament, nevertheless concealed by a cloud of white woodwork. But his heart’s radar would still capture the brilliance of a star. A single one. Escaped from an obscure nebula… Always there, by the star’s radiance, dreams would agglomerate, weld themselves to one another, forming more than a planet, … a paradise! An unspeakable Eden, so much would it be worlds and wonders. Then, his images from another universe would flutter toward the muse to resource her with energy in the hope of a recommencement, like a perpetual cycle, an infinite nourishment.

However, the dreamer had a voracious, gargantuan appetite; he gorged, he swallowed greedily all noises, all words of Nielle insatiably. But this avidity to listen, this harmless happiness, transited into an unhappy vein that very evening, like the defect of a quality one no longer restrains.

Following the last letter, he saw himself obliged to retreat, to abandon all poetic or musical praise to the muse, the absolute suppression of her informal charms. He could no longer resort to music to tear himself from his reveries or attempt to mute his desires; in this suffering with airs of ecstasy, he must henceforth refrain from communicating. Force himself to remain mute and even more hidden than Nielle.

The beginning of this withdrawal period was characterised by almost total insomnia. He managed to fall asleep only through imagining the suave sound of satin sheets brushing the goddess’s body, sealing his impulses for the night.

***

Noon. — Like an alarm, steps on the staircase. — By reflex, more than by habit, he rushed to the living-room window. Without being intimidated by his nakedness, a dreamer always sleeps naked…, he caught sight across the street of Nielle, Marc and his son preparing to leave for the Nativity holiday.

All three were busy placing Nielle’s luggage properly and in orderly fashion beside theirs in the rear trunk of the car belonging to the most regular lover of the muse. This ravishing occasional mother seemed, by her presence, to revive the growing libido of Marc’s son. Innocent and naïve, with expressions coloured by dreams similar to the dreamer’s, he never stopped smiling when he addressed her. Yet Nielle was clearly preoccupied. Her concentration divided itself between this family atmosphere of happiness and the artist she was eyeing, without malignity, from the corner of her eye.

He, still without embarrassment, as much spectator as spectacle, stood motionless and congratulated himself on his stroke of genius of the previous day. He was assured that his muse was thinking of him not because of his pale skin washed and enhanced by the sun’s rays, nor because of that letter of revelations and abandonment he had written to her. No. He was certain that this state was due only to the simple fact that she must be topsy-turvy, disoriented by no longer having to hide from him, or even more, marked by not knowing how to do so in the presence of these people. These close beings who, quite obviously, could not, on the spot, become new accomplices. Thanks to his imagination, Damien could read Nielle’s embarrassment as she questioned herself about the technique of those magicians’ assistants, the way they fold themselves into those immense suitcases where they are illusorily sawed in two. But her luggage was already packed, already stowed.

When Marc’s old European car disappeared, this departure reminded Damien that he too should think of preparing himself to go celebrate Christmas with Lysianne at his parents’ home.