CHAPTER XIV

Mechanically, upon waking, Damien aimed through the window. A trace of new snow covered the previous layer, already greyish with those falls of carbon dust, as if winter were bleaching itself.

— It would have been a fine opportunity for the masked shovel to make itself appreciated, if I were not confined by those oppressors from the lower floors…! " Damien roared with the persistent bitterness of the previous day’s spectre. The kleptomaniac scarecrow.

The steps of a man marked the inner staircase! Damien did not concern himself with them; he was buttoning a shirt. The door opened and closed again! Damien slipped into his trousers without worrying. Finally, discreetly, the anonymous man descended the outside staircase. Damien was tying his shoes.

However, voices filtered through those tiny ventilation holes decorating the lower crosspiece of an old double wooden sash. Among these barnyard chatterings…, the dreamer intercepted the first name of the unknown man prowling around his muse. The latter, blocked in his exit by Father Brouillette, out of civility, had to engage in conversation. That name still tore at the dreamer’s irritated eardrum.

Curious and incredulous, he moved cautiously toward the window, just enough to observe without being seen; convincing himself that, in the end, it had to be only an auditory illusion. But with his jaws clenched hard enough to wear away the ivory of his teeth, he confirmed the validity of the name perceived and, once again, the existence of dream premonition.

— Damn it! … Jonathan! The professor! " he raged within himself.

As if by incidence, joining the teacher and Father Brouillette was Bruce, who greeted the prodigal tenant, almost with a kiss on the hand, in shameful grovelling. Completely copying the approach techniques of the author of his days, Bruce blindly approved what the professor, perched on the first step of the staircase, was clucking in order to seduce them both.

Disconcerted, Damien sought to understand, to explain to himself the trendy one’s presence at Nielle’s. — Divorce or affair? — Slowly stepping back, like a sick alley cat choosing retreat to avoid a fight, he returned to lie down and meditate on the attitude to adopt in the face of this new context.

And yet, without valid reason, he resented Nielle for welcoming the erudite man into her nest. Nothing would have prevented him from morbidly envying the couple, but identifying the previous day’s marauder took precedence over the desire to stay, himself too, in the satin sheets.

Finding no answer, losing himself in his sighs, he ran to Mylène and François’s home to take comfort from this new fragility of his soul.

After a few glasses of refreshments, ounces of advice, he returned home with great reinforcements of relaxation methods, calming herbal teas, incense and a panoply of records lent by Mylène’s lover. From Genesis to Reggiani.

It was with his arms loaded with this musical apparatus and gentle medicines, his head stuffed with: "But that girl is not made for you! She is a siren! A vamp! ", that he tried to take the keys from one of the pockets of his winter jacket. Damien twisted himself about to keep the records from slipping. His fingernail was touching the cold metal of the key ring when the Brouillettes’ door opened slightly.

— Well, hello Damien! So? … Are you all right? …" The landlady’s eagerness to enquire about the dreamer’s moral health sounded more like a statement of fact.

Encumbered by his packages, he would have preferred a helping hand rather than a reproach disguised as a question. However, intuitively yielding to the artist’s unspoken need, she temporarily took hold of the load, suggesting a detour to her place while he unlocked his door.

— Go put your things down, then come have a beer with my husband. It’s been a long time since we had a chat with you. "

This courteous imperative proved to be the ideal opportunity for Damien to investigate, quite innocently, the event of the theft. If, in the event he could not reach the truth, an induction might guide him, no doubt, toward one or two probable suspects.

In fact, once inside the owners’ apartment, he recognised that he was no match for the experience of this empress of the balcony, nor able to rival her in tricks and deft interrogations. All the more so because she was not alone, for her dramas and burdens governed her from the wings. Her husband was speaking on the telephone in a weak, gentle, barely perceptible voice; clearly to a recent, young and pretty acquaintance… Their half-blind daughter, Nadine, had her eyes riveted on the television screen. She was trying to decipher the shadows of a B movie she was watching for the third time.

Having forgotten her hop-flavoured offer, Mother Brouillette indifferently placed coffee, milk and sugar before the dreamer. With understandable impoliteness, she went about her routine. Beginning the discussion with varia, she let Damien caress their obese dog between two futile subjects.

— Well, yes! Well, yes! Did you know, Damien, that big Esther…

— Esther?

— Well, yes! The young bulimic next door, the one who works in a factory in the north of the city…

— I know who you mean.

— Well, yes! Just imagine, my boy, she goes every day to spend a few hours at Simone’s, the old lesbian. I wonder what they can possibly say to each other? … Speaking of the old butch! The other day, I saw her bras hanging on her clothesline. It was comical, no kidding! They were all a little yellowed, stiffened by the cold. And they’re not small. They’re big as all holy hell!

Even Bruce’s pals wanted to play a nasty trick on Simone by stealing her brassieres. Those boys, if they aren’t careful with their drugs and their stealing, they’ll end up in prison. "

Having concluded his telephone secrecy with apparent satisfaction, Monsieur Brouillette, the one who wore the trousers at home but took them off elsewhere, came to join Damien with a mocking air.

— Want a little beer?

— Thank you, I already have coffee…"

Without trying to guess the cause, the dreamer finds the man with advanced greying sympathetic. He savours the patriarch’s stories even though, in the past, this man, with his cock-and-bull tales, was the first to awaken his paranoia. Involuntarily, through innocence or perhaps even amusement, those fabulations inherent in the anecdotes of the street had terrified him.

Madame Brouillette, sniffing out that special admiration Damien felt for her husband, therefore judged the dreamer distracted and took advantage of it to pierce the bell, attacking head-on, though not without a certain subtlety.

— So? Damien! … How is it going with your ex-wife? … Little Lysianne, isn’t she beautiful, with her lovely red hair! " As if to approve her own relevant observations, she added out of habit. "Well, yes! … Well, yes! Well, yes! … Good! " Finally, her strategy reached what most itched at her: the well-being of her tenant, which, of course, passed first through her own. "So? … Do you like your little apartment? … It’s quiet. Eh? … I think you’re well off on the second floor. I often hear music, … you like that, don’t you? … Ah! You know, us, it doesn’t bother us at all! … At all! … Well yes! You can put it on as loud as you want, we don’t hear a thing. Right, you others? "

Method of hypnosis by stunning the subject: the skilful and cunning investigator in slippers accelerated the movement of the pendulum.

— Seems to me you don’t look like you sleep much at night…; is something wrong? … You know, you can tell us if you’re not feeling yourself. Eh, Damien? "

Sinking back on the chair to simulate ease, Damien made the last drop of coffee disappear in one draught, down the back of his throat. By this gesture, he made the curious matron languish for a few seconds; she had frozen in the conviction that she would hear the dreamer’s tears and a few confidences to enter in the agenda of her gossip.

— Yes, everything is going well! " he answered simply to the long statement.

Perceiving the inefficiency, the inanity of his wife’s interrogation, the old husband intervened in a more direct, more masculine manner.

— They’re beautiful, the girls on the third floor! … uh! Mia, I mean, … the other one isn’t there anymore! … Anyway, me…, if I were younger…"

This last correction about age was expressly pronounced to reassure his wife about his reputation as a “playboy”; a charmer of women, whose cornerstones he himself took care to lay before the men living on the Street of Glorious Peace.

This clumsy intervention by the head of the family turned clearly to Damien’s advantage, and he verbalised, not without a certain nervousness in the tone of his voice, his disturbing surprise of the morning.

— The professor has come back. I saw him late this morning. I believe he is staying at Nielle’s… And I even think I saw you discussing with him, did I not, Monsieur Brouillette? …

— Not at all! You hallucinated! You must have seen me chatting with Mia’s boyfriend, the Portuguese. They both have moustaches… Him and Jonathan.

— But when he lived here, he did not wear one! " the dreamer rang out.

— I don’t know if you really saw the professor, but not us. " the landlady added, detecting an obvious flaw in her husband’s words. "And Nielle, you say? … Nielle? … — Nielle! — Well, yes! … Mia’s sister. The one who was here before. You must be dreaming, she doesn’t live here anymore. And she was the only one who knew Jonathan. Her, and us. Well, no! … Well no! "

Endowed with a sixth sense compensating for the defects of her half-blindness, Nadine, who until then had neither involved herself nor expressed herself, already perceived in the artist the alienating repercussions of the misunderstanding aroused by her parents’ rounded lies. So she invalidated their words, those offences to the artist’s intelligence.

— The professor! … He said hello to me at noon! He was with…

— Well, yes! My husband, have you forgotten? We have to go to the market for provisions. Ah! My little holy mother Jesus! How time flies! Excuse us, Damien, but we have to go out! " Madame Brouillette thus botched the matter, avoiding bathing in dreadful apologies and a jumble of vague explanations.

Accompanying Japanese-style salutations with a foolish and false smile, the dreamer withdrew; he too fleeing an impasse. Slowly, almost painfully, he climbed back to his place. Each step ascended constituted a reflection on the younger daughter’s pity, on that proof of affection Nadine Brouillette had given him; she who, despite her handicap, saw better than her parents.

Then he rid himself of that winter skin encumbering him and, underlining the physical pleasure of feeling lightened, permitted himself the discreet audition of a very significant record. The habit of chance was settling in. The grooves were gnawed, worn, damaged; and the first frictions reminded him of his thorny friends below. But when the singer’s voice transfigured the short musical introduction, his thoughts resumed an almost normal ascending movement. Toward Nielle.

— Tell me, Nielle! … What is the secret of your charisma? How do you manage to rally all those who plan to smother life in me? You succeed in congesting my synapses, in shoving me into an irreversible psychosis. — Perhaps you wish to grant me pity, when, from madman of the imagination, I eclipse myself toward schizophrenia? "

Thus rocked by the music, the following hour scarred over the elderly couple’s attempted deception. Gently, the dreamer strove to abstract that the feelings he devoted to his muse, she returned a hundredfold to the erudite man. With moderation, he assumed that feeling of rejection lived through the clumsy intervention of the Brouillettes, and that ecstatic vibration of Nielle with Jonathan, the previous night, became madly charged with meanings.

Independently of the zeal he put into relaxing, a disturbing phenomenon never ceased to torment him. The fact of feeling caught in a vice, immobilised as in a mousetrap. He would vomit from it, but that biological reaction of throwing up would change nothing. His soul was raw. Flayed! The screams he would release passed; unfortunately, the sobs and tears brushing the corners of his eyes refused exodus.

***

At last, on all floors, nocturnal recovery and the diaphanous visions of dream anchored themselves for a few hours. Of debatable importance, some signed the symbolics of the ground floor. Others, more magical, translucent and clear, coveted the third and second levels…

Traum! Dream! Dream!

(-"Suspended in a luminous space and stripped of all details, three immaculate record sleeves appear. Three white squares. From these three forms slide three records… The dreamer feels himself penetrating Nielle. Soft and moist. As if real.")

The dreamer slept. — Satan, for his part, watched over the grains of sand… The devil abhorred this divine to-and-fro motion, this grace of the unconscious, and displaced, deported Damien’s consciousness into a state of half-waking. Pointing at the dreamer with his burning trident, he exhorted him to take revenge at once, from subconscious to subconscious. Betting on his cowardice, his assured faint-heartedness, the prince of darkness incited him to believe he had suffered far too much, and made him succumb to the law of retaliation.

From God’s delight to the devil’s animality, projecting into his unhealthy mind the image of a woman other than Nielle, the image of a fallen love; the dreamer ejaculated, emptied, poured out the wave of his prolific mood into a dead end. The never-seen body of a lost dreamer, abandoned far away in his fantasies.

— No! Not true! No! "

That voice was not Damien’s, but, unjustly, Nielle’s. Still striking the silence of the night, this embarrassing alert, this exclamation of pains and troubles appeared at that very instant, in an obscure concomitance with the sordid revenge. — The professor, Mia as much as the other sleepers above, hastened to reassure and calm Nielle after that brutal awakening, in nightmare.

— It will be all right, Nielle, you must have had a bad dream. That is all. — Are you feeling better now? — Do you want to tell us about it? Would you fall asleep again more easily if you described it to us?

— No! … It’s just that… No, I especially do not want to talk about it. — I feel much better. I am sorry I woke you all. Thank you, and go back to bed. "

A few yawns hailed the silence and recovered quiet, summoning sleep and new oneiric works.

The floor below: Damien, muffling his weeping in the pillow, stunned himself in frantic mea culpa.

— God! What an affront! … Love, deign to chastise me, I who am nothing but abjection. Sweet warmth forever lost like an Atlantis of happiness, swallowed by resentment. Love, innocent, wished to fill our souls, our hearts starved for one another, even unbeknownst to us. May this misery that has already reached me gnaw at my entrails! "

Only the memory of the penetration lightened the weight of the lamentations and the dreadful pallor still tinting his face, at his own admission of evil’s triumph. His soul stolen away. The void circled his beaten mind, guilt strangled him, remorse impaled him. With contrition filling his mouth, faced with fear, doubting, equivocating became his only refuge.

— Impossible that it be so! On what proof can I establish a relation between my dream and Nielle’s nightmare? … The unconscious appearance of a subliminal bridge between her and me? "

As a counterweight, he aspired to serenity, implicitly aiming at mastery of his brain waves. He wanted to be mute of all thoughts of every kind directed toward Nielle; he wished no longer to importune her in her sleep, even restraining himself from exhaling from his mind a call for forgiveness. He managed to keep silent only by making himself still more guilty.

— Horror! … Curse! … I no longer dare pronounce her name. — Rot, waste, that is what my being is. I, who had so desired to cross the zone of her sensitivity! All that time buried in rancour; all that perseverance, that stubbornness in order to gain access to her soul, … volatilised in a vengeful jouissance. Shame on me! … How could I mutilate my conscience forever? How can I repent?

The anguish of her absences, those tears shed for her, the perfidy of the parasites who support her, … I had overcome everything. Our subconscious forces were going to crown our hearts enucleated by imbroglios. This interminable road strewn with sarcasms, with bumpy lies, … crossed uselessly. I travelled all that distance for nothing, sticking her with a lesson she did not deserve.

God! Are you not weary of letting live the runt, the unnameable homunculus that I am? The human rag who dreamed of a utopian love. I, this wreck whom you dared to answer in all your magnificence… Oh! For pity’s sake! Strike down the beast I am. For pity’s sake! Execute it! "

Disappointed at having banalised, under the seal of vendetta, so many solicitations to life, she who invited him to apotheosis; he spat on his hand, henceforth emblem of an absolute profanation, … an outrage against Love.

In his bed undone by torment, the dreamer in foetal position finds lodging, comfort, only in the autosuggestion of the blurred memory of his mother’s womb. He could fall asleep only in the early morning, as he relearned how to pronounce the now sacred first name. Nielle.

The following day, he worked on the modelling without adequate concentration. Brief walks and a light snack. No other distraction; neither music, nor beautiful invented stories. He scoured the idea that his soul had moved toward hell to join the ranks of those who were conspiring against him. He no longer even anticipated his reintegration into this body he was chastising.

***

As much in this “déjà-vu” as in the dreamopath’s current reality, a tearing, the collapse of his strength. He persists in struggling in this introspection that never ends. The source is there, purulent; he drinks from the evil he nourished for all those years. Paradoxically, he quenches his thirst with that same venom that dries out his mind. Long-term suicide. Seppuku by the needles of time. — He could not care less! — This dream joining him to Nielle, this suspended oneiric alcove, may be the origin of the torment. The night broods over the reminiscence of that phase marking out his darkness.

On his old divan, he thinks again of that event whose course he changed, that joy felt which had first carried him into the clouds. Nielle had, in a way, finally addressed herself to him. That touch of enchantment, the dreamopath stabilises it. Eyes closed, he imagines Nielle before him.

He projects her there, in his mind, a few steps away, entirely naked. He bathes in this effluence, this ecstatic fragrance, this perfume of June…, harmonising perfectly with the scent of her woman’s body. Then… with simplicity, he drowns in her smile.

Then he approaches her cautiously, caresses her face and notes its softness by barely brushing her make-up with his blind fingers.

Caressing her curly hair, he moves it imperceptibly, so light is the motion. — He comes a little closer. — His hands discover freely, without making a sound. They barely brush that neck whose scent he inhales, that haven where stolen kisses sink, letting his breath flow into the pores of that flesh he covets as an inspired poet.

His lips, which wish to mingle with his hands, immolate themselves where the neck falls asleep, revealing without embarrassment an unbounded greed.

He exults at the touch of those consenting shoulders, which softly marry the dance of his agile fingers. His arms embrace his muse at first weakly, then, little by little, they catch fire. Impulse and experience ally themselves for voluptuous caresses. Their gazes crossing, he notices Nielle’s blue eyes moistening with emotion. The celebration continues. A universe has just been born.

He trembles a little, barely. His mouth, in defiance, flutters in the danger of succumbing to trapezes. He delicately nibbles her nerves, camouflaging a paradise of exaltation. He does not stop there, but the shivers continue, like waves, to inundate the beauty.

Ritual gestures. The idolatrous hands venerate her skin like a consenting sin, calling the lips again to join them, upon that chest with subtle reactions. Impressed, hands and mouth taste the warmth of her breasts, learning, according to Nielle’s eloquent sighs, to orient themselves in the reactions of this muse’s body. He feels, caresses, kisses, coming and going over those round forms crowned with the stiffest nipples and fairy-like areolas. These mounts, letting themselves be taken, provoke, solicit a frank aura and continual tenderness.

The hands then choose the direction of the back, which arches, just a little, letting the heart express itself in accelerated beats. Nielle bends as if her belly conjured the dreamer’s mouth to delay ecstasy, as though wishing to acclaim, through praise, the exhibition of this torrent of soft kisses.

He would like to lose himself upon that soft abdomen which, in the play, tightens; but instinct invites him, calls him lower still. His hands wander according to the requests, the signals the muse’s body announces. At their passage, the buttocks texture themselves with a slight shiver; they stiffen as if surprised to be discovered.

Discreetly, her goddess’s legs tremble, signalling the feverishness of her being. She stretches out, slowly, taking care not to frighten the privileged moment. The dreamer, with a reassuring kiss, transmits to her his understanding of the sober message. — Intuition, sensitivity on both sides. — All the dreamer’s senses never cease sighing toward this body carried away by exaltation.

Nielle’s burning belly and hips underline the nearness of impatience through liftings; her enveloping and complicit thighs gather these effusions of touches and kisses, asking for more, … more…

Like scouts, the artist’s fingers go out in reconnaissance; tracking intentions, they move toward that admirable rising thicket. So desired. Guiding themselves by the warmth deposited as clues by enchanted palms, the dreamer’s lips, barely gliding over the epidermis, in a refined gesture, humbly incline, without losing composure, to free the tongue coming to confess its weakness in resisting the effluvia.

Divine pleasure to the touch. Magical raptures to the sense of smell. The expression of the gaze, … an ovation to nature. Eve’s irresistible perfume pushes excitement to its summit; the silky, brilliant sheaf amplifies the lover’s loyal fervours. The sensuality of the artist’s lips desires to marry the sensitivity of those, already moist, of the muse, resigning them thus to burst into a stronger, greater desire.

He calls, he covets, he excites, tenderly stimulates by brushing without ever rough-handling the sweet sensitive place. This seal of an unconditionally feminine freedom. Without leaving aside this tiny grimoire without pages, the exorcising clitoris, he brings to his mouth in perdition this Holy Grail blessed by all the virgins and non-virgins of the world. Thirsty! With his rejoicing tongue, he licks and flatters the edges and walls of the consecrated chalice, he drinks from it the savoury philtre, that nectar with the taste of immortality, that chrism with the “flavour” of God’s first fantasy.

She appreciates, she loves! She loves, she comes! He is delighted.

He perceives fine alternations in those melodious complaints calling for liberating intoxication. The mouth then moves away from that fountain of youth, authorising both bodies the ambition to melt into one another. As if gathering his tendernesses toward his final impulses, he covers the flesh of his inspirer so as to remember eternally the language she speaks to him.

She loves, so does he!

Simply. With love. He kisses her, sharing with her the ecstasy he had just tasted, that sapid potion on which he still delights with evident joy. In that same surge, both grant themselves… the intimate and supreme secret, … feeling the other near the limits of apotheosis. — The soft language imprints itself through moments… The language plays in movements. The language goes, accelerating. The language knots the lovers. The language grimaces time. The powerful language. The language. The language. The language.

The language dazzles! Sings! Cries out! Affirms the excitement that provoked the orgasm ringing in echoes like an awakening of consciousness to the well-being of the beyond.

There is release. The mirage has dissipated in reaching its paroxysm. The dreamopath, solitary, relaxed on his narrow divan, wipes away the confession of his passion. — Fruitless seed, except to nothingness. — But he bets on the fertility of the dream, on the subconscious forces. For, even if the acknowledgements of receipt are null, he has the firm conviction that, by evocation, love endorsed the flight of this interlude toward a simple thought Nielle might have for him. A simple imprint in his beauty’s daily life, together with a pleasant tickling in the ears, which she would feel with surprise; as well as an unusual effervescence acting like a very faint and very brief spontaneous combustion in her vagina.

Lost in the extrapolation of this lascivious outlet, forgetting his hours of intense research, of recovered memories…; exhausted, he sinks into sleep disturbed by the exorcism he inflicts upon himself. Numb, nervous, he suffocates as if he wanted to forget that he breathes. He moves constantly, moaning with terror in a nightmare that assaults him, like an alienated man in crisis being prepared for lobotomy.

He had spat upon the sacred. His irreverence toward love had strangled him slowly; irreparably, the knot had tightened. He must breathe a little more, there is release…!

His twenty-four hours have elapsed. The deadline is at its end. It is midnight! … The end of his drama still waits in the wings…!