Slowly, David rose to his feet. A nurse had just drawn back the curtain and signaled that it was time for Soler’s treatment. What kind of treatment did you give a man whose brain was turning to porcelain?
David slipped quietly away without so much as a goodbye from Soler. “And now I can’t go back down there anymore,” the old man had once told him. “When I try to dive, all I can see is a bottomless black hole, which frightens me. Then I get vertigo, and I stay sitting on the edge of my springboard, here in reality.”
David left the marble warehouse, staring at the tips of his shoes so as not to see the bogged-down slabs. Back home, he checked his mailbox automatically, to make sure Nadia hadn’t written him. He shut the mailbox immediately, thinking, That was stupid.
Yes, stupid … but he hadn’t been able to help himself.
[ 5 ]
The … Days? That Follow/The Flour of Dreams
He had to eat. In the kitchen, the big fridge plundered by Marianne’s passing gaped wide like an empty wardrobe. David, who filled it whenever the young woman was to assist him on a dive, remained dumbfounded by the psychologist’s astounding appetite. How did a body that severe, whose veins and tendons traced branchings a blind man could’ve read with his finger like a page from an anatomy text in braille, manage to wolf down so much food without putting on an ounce of fat? For David was sure that naked, Marianne would offer up the spectacle of a nun smugly steeped in her own deprivations. A hard flesh, stripped to the bare minimum, a machine flesh designed to ensure precision work. As for David—stark muscles tautly rolled around rods of bone, all wrapped up in the tightest-fitting skin, a skimpy suit from a close-fisted tailor cutting costs and corners—he distrusted cadaverous foods. Red meat, fish, the sallow flesh of fowl gave him the creeps. Usually, he lived on buttered bread and coffee with milk. He’d stuffed his cupboards to bursting with bags of coffee, a phenomenal array in flavors harsh and delicate. In the fridge, he kept a slab of butter as yellow as ancient gold, from which he detached fine shavings by means of an iron cable strung between two sticks of wood. He sat down to eat as if to a ritual, picking up a great big plate—thick and heavy, its enamel cracked. His greatest delight consisted of slicing the bread with a knife sharper than a razor blade. He liked watching the bread fall, hearing the crust crunch and crackle. First the knife would labor at that browned hide, then the barrier gave way and the blade plunged into the divine marrow of the close, springy crumb. Serious as any specialist, he required bread that was dense as a sponge, able to sop up great quantities of liquid. More than anything, he hated bread that was full of holes, overtormented by yeastly effervescence. At the first hint of moisture such bread fell to shreds, failed to hold together in the mouth. Two quick bites and it came apart, obliterated when the pleasure was just beginning. High priest of breakfast, David conducted a ritual at once epicurean and austere, banishing jam, croissants, and even brioche, which for him represented an extremity of depraved sybaritic decadence. For a while he’d tried making his own bread, obeying some strange inner stubbornness to live off the grid, depending as little as possible on others. Fermenting yeast had given him too much trouble, and he’d been forced to give up. At first it had upset him, since he had a hard time finding a bakery with bread that met his standards. People today were fine with any old subpar product, and the bakehouses of yore had become automated factories where an artisan’s barely flour-dusted hand was reduced to pushing buttons. David had wandered from bakery to bakery, sullen, despairing of ever finding the spongy bread that was his one and only fare, when he’d met Madame Antonine.
Antonine was plump and pink. A butcher, you’d have thought, raised on glazed ham, but her being a baker led you to liken her skin to the marzipan of her cakes. Antonine reigned over a bakery of blue and gold that the hot breath of ovens filled with the aroma of leavener. She was a widow. A little widow with the shoulders of a wrestler who’d left the ring and let her muscles be sweetly sheathed in fat. Right from the start David had pictured her bare-knuckled, battling the raw, rebellious, clingy dough. He knew kneading called for a great deal of physical strength and quickly gave you arms of steel. Antonine was a warrior princess of the ovens who’d let herself get a little chubby, so as not to frighten customers. She wore her potbelly as a polite disguise, but one punch from her could’ve laid out a junkyard mutt. Her apprentices feared her, and it was said she never thought twice about raising a hand to the pastry chef. When her authority was questioned, she drew herself to her full, fearsome height over the mixer tub, her face white with flour, and sent a ball of raw, gummy dough hurtling right between your eyes, knocking you breathless and almost smothering you. Antonine smelled like flour, David had noticed the first time she’d led him into her bed. As if her body were powdered head to toe and slid beneath your fingertips, almost silky, talcumed. She could’ve crushed David in her wrestler’s arms, but she let him do as he wished, going with the flow, let herself be docilely manhandled.
“I want you to knead me,” she said. “Go ahead. Use your fingers.”
David obeyed, seizing her great white breasts, her thick belly, with delectation. He worked her as if she’d change shape when it was all over, be reborn in another form. Antonine had blonde hair and milky skin. Out of some inexplicable vanity, she shaved her pubic hair. She shared her lover’s passion for breakfast. Like him, she hated cakes, creams, icings, candied fruit, preferring instead the austere nobility of peasant bread and butter with sea salt. In the tiny apartment above the bakery she made coffee the old-fashioned way, her mother’s way.
“Filtered through a sock,” she said, astoundingly strong, two cups knocked you flat on your back in bed, heart hammering in your chest.
“You’re my artist,” she cooed at him inanely, slicing thick hunks from the bread she’d made especially for David. He liked making love to her above the sweltering bakery, in the smell of fresh batches, when warmth exalted the fragrance of yeast, blending it with that of the baker’s cunt.
“I’m the only one who knows how to make the bread you love,” she murmured to him. “Without me, you’d starve to death.” She was right, in a way; apart from his unending breakfasts, all David managed to choke down was a few spoonfuls of soup.
“Out in the country, soup is a part of breakfast,” Antonine assured him, trying to prove that accepting this substance was in no way a breach of his strange code. She loved feeding him in bed, patting his cheeks, settling the great tray of unfinished wood over his knees. Then she would sit at the foot of the bed and butter the slices almost devoutly, a pudgy geisha with astonishingly graceful gestures. David stuffed himself, sinking his teeth into the chewy inside, glutted with café au lait. Then they would make love again, among the crumbs, and Antonine climaxed with a graceful little yelp, for this woman, with her lavish body, was discreet indeed in expressing her pleasure. She yipped, nose buried in David’s shoulder, kneading the woolen mattress with her stubby fingers. A castaway washed up on his mistress’s belly, David would fall into a light sleep while heat from the ovens erupting below came up through the floorboards, threatening to bake them both where they lay.
When she wasn’t busy selling bread, Antonine collected dreams. David had come upon this passion the first time she’d had him up to her apartment. On the mantle in the narrow living room he’d suddenly spotted one of his most recent works. A dream of middling size that had met with critical success at auction. Antonine was an avid collector; as soon as an exhibit was announced, she ordered the catalog and spent hours engrossed in the contemplation of the works on offer. This taste for art kept her from saving up any money, but she made no complaint. That first night, taking David by the hand, she’d led him through every room, showing him the dreams heaped on shelves and hutches like tchotchkes. The ectoplasms, each on their numbered pedestal as required by law, looked somewhat sappy amid her furnishings, a flowering of lace, placemats, and pink lampshades with pom-poms.
“This one’s yours too!” Antonine trumpeted, tw
irling around. “And this one!” David was embarrassed. For a moment he felt like a prodigal husband watching his wife parade before him a string of children he was no longer able to recognize as really his own.
“This one’s yours.” Yes—it was like she was picking and choosing from a litter. “This one’s yours, but that one’s from the postman …” She flaunted her infidelities with a tiny apologetic smile.
“See,” she murmured at the end of the tour, “you could almost say I’m a fan.” David stammered something incomprehensible. He could recall with perfect clarity the circumstances surrounding the capture of each and every dream on display. The one over there on the mantle, by the little porcelain shepherdess mollycoddling a sheep in a pink bow—now that had been hard-won. Nadia had been wounded in the thigh by a guard who’d come charging from the back of the shop, and David had had to carry her on his shoulders while Jorgo covered their retreat, showering the front window with buckshot. Yes, the horrific din of explosions still rocked his ears. He saw the great yellow cartridges the breechblock ejected bouncing off the body of the car. And that other one over there, nestled by a seashell-covered box some laborious brush had inscribed with the legend Souvenir de Sainte-Amine … he’d had to extract that one from a booby-trapped safe that spat gouts of acid. The image of Nadia’s jacket sizzling at the bite of the corrosive liquid had stayed with him …
“I don’t keep track of how much I spend,” Antonine explained. “At first, I was scared to raise my hand at the auctions. I felt like everyone was looking at me. Now I don’t think twice. I feel so good now that they’re there on my shelves, like little soldiers watching over me. I can’t tell you, the nightmares I used to have, the insomnia, how often I woke up screaming. And the knot here, between my breasts, like a fist squeezing the breath out of me. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get any sleep, couldn’t have nice dreams anymore, like I had when I was a girl. I was even afraid of going to bed at night. I’d pace around the bed, inventing a thousand excuses to postpone ever having to slip between the sheets.”
She told him about the death of her husband, the baker, which had terrified her so. The victim of a stroke, he’d fallen face first into a tub of dough, and it had suffocated him. They’d never really managed to clean it all off afterwards, and he had to be buried that way, eyebrows and mustache thick with dough. It made him look like a clown who’d done a bad job taking off his makeup. Antonina hadn’t cried too much; he was an old man with bad kidneys who’d asked her to marry him when she was going through a rough patch—in fact, she’d just broken her wrist during a wrestling bout, and … Two weeks after the funeral she began to be plagued by horrible nightmares. She would see a big fat boule on the table. A huge, fat boule of bread making a curious nibbling noise. When, after lengthy hesitation, she’d cut it in two, she found the head of her late husband inside, busily devouring the crumb. Then she’d wake up screaming, and stay sitting upright all night long, unable to sleep.
The situation couldn’t go on without hurting her business. Wary at first, she bought a dream on a neighbor’s advice. It was a handsome object, a trifle of a bauble, on a pretty pedestal … but what was it supposed to mean? The abstract aspect of the work had troubled Antonine, embarrassed her a bit. She only liked things you didn’t have to go to school to appreciate. Real art—not excuses for intellectual jerking off that sent rich people into ecstasies. She’d dithered in the shop, turning the knickknack over and over in her fleshy hands.
“You’re not supposed to touch them too much,” the man in the shop had explained, making a face. “It shortens their lifespan.” So they were expensive, and fragile? That had given her pause.
“Just do it,” her neighbor had whispered, nudging her with an elbow. “It’ll do you a world of good. I used to be just like you. Now I spend my whole pension on this stuff, but no more nightmares, no more sleeping pills, no more sedatives. I sleep like a baby, twelve hours a night! A woman of my age—can you imagine? My aches and pains no longer wake me, I lie down and just melt away, like a sugar cube. And it’s all thanks to dreams. You dissolve, your body disappears, your brain dozes off—it’s bliss. Saints and real nuns—the ones from the old days—must’ve felt something like it.”
Antonine had left herself be swayed. In women’s magazines, dreams were spoken of as wonderful mood stabilizers. “With just a few ectoplasmic curios carefully placed around your bedroom, you’ll enjoy a veritable rejuvenating experience in the comfort of your own home. Your body will flourish, your skin will grow softer, your wrinkles will disappear!” Everyone sang the benefits of dreams, and declared that there was no longer any need to buy costly works of art to see your life transformed. To sleep like a baby … it was all she asked. Being rid of those horrible nightmares, that head she found every night in boules of bread, its mouth stuffed with crumb—aah! If this kept up she’d lose her health. She’d already lost weight, and didn’t feel like doing anything anymore, not even making love, whereas once …
She would’ve liked it better if the knickknack was an actual art object—a little marquise, for instance. She didn’t really like Greek statues, with their weenies and fig leaves. Fig leaves were stupid, and besides, how did they stay up? Was there a string? A spot of glue? Weenies were cute, especially in marble, all pink like a snail without a shell. Dreams were something else altogether. You weren’t sure which angle to look at them from. They had no front or back, and everyone saw whatever they wanted to see: a child’s head, a flower, a smiling cloud. In the end, she bought the object.
“Is Madame thinking of starting a collection?” the man in the shop had inquired. “If so, there are rules.”
She’d had to learn the rules. Above all, never touch or caress the dreams, even if you got a sudden urge to, for human contact shortened their lifespans, and they withered faster. Naïvely, she’d asked how such a phenomenon manifested itself, and the man in the shop had lowered his voice to whisper evasively: “Oh, you know, they’re kind of like flowers. Harmless. Just be sure to read the instructions.” She’d brought the tchotchke home and set it on the mantle in her little bedroom. That night, she decided to leave the light on so she could keep an eye on it. She couldn’t really see anything specific in it. A bird? A fat sleepy pigeon?
For the first time since her husband’s death, she slept like a baby. A slumber like a long downy crossing, without a single image, without any of the absurd adventures that assail you as soon as you close your eyes. When she woke, she felt comfortable in her own skin, felt hungry for a huge breakfast, felt like running down to the bakehouse to knead dough and browbeat the apprentices. She was bubbling over with barely contained energy. From that day on, she began to collect dreams, haunting auction halls when she had enough money, and when she didn’t, making do with little “art boutiques” or even the home décor sections of larger department stores.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to buy a Soler Mahus?” David would ask. “You’ve seen the one at the Museum of Modern Art, right? The big dream in the rotunda?”
“Oh, no,” she would protest. Soler Mahus was too pretentious, too monumental, it was impressive and even a bit intimidating. She only liked little things—fragile, delicate things, like the ones David made. “Nothing in the world could make me want a Soler Mahus,” she decreed, mussing the young man’s hair, “but on the other hand, I sure do love your little gumdrops. They’re real, they’re cute, they don’t take up too much space, and they last long enough. You’re not that sad when they wither away, because you’re already tired of them.”
David forced a smile. Antonine was a good girl. For her, there was no work of art as good as a big warm loaf of bread, and maybe she was right. She was completely unaware of upsetting her lover when she saddled his dreams with the nickname Gumdrops. In David, she saw a kind of homegrown faith healer, “with the gift but not the craft.” She appreciated dreams for their therapeutic qualities, not for their intrinsic beauty. She even grew downright incredulous when told certain connois
seurs kept their collections locked up in rooms wired with alarms. For Antonine, dreams were like flowers: they made life more pleasant, and when they withered, well, you went and bought more.
She slept like a baby, her wrinkles faded away, her knees creaked no more … and best of all, dark thoughts no longer plagued her like before: insidious ailments that took root in the belly unawares, wars, attacks. The fear of being assaulted at night in the bakery. All those shadows had evaporated. Now all she had to do was lie down in bed and dissolve like a sugar cube. Sometimes she even wanted to reach out and stroke one of the tchotchkes.
“It’s like dough,” she would murmur when trying to explain these urges. “But magic dough, unreal. A terribly light, almost glowing dough. For making communion wafers, maybe? You know what I mean?” In such moments of ecstasy she placed her fingers on the object’s surface but drew them back almost immediately, “because it felt alive.” Lukewarm and yielding, too, like skin—not at all like a statuette of marble or ivory. It was an object and almost an animal at the same time.
“It’s the skin of dreams,” David explained. “That’s why no one ever gets tired of looking at them.”
“And that’s what you make, sweetie pie,” she said, imprisoning him in her great arms. “In the end, you’re kind of a magician.”
A magician? No—a medium, maybe even an artist. But David had no desire to go into any long explanations. He ate Antonine’s bread and made love to her. That was how he got by between dives, willing prisoner of an eternal breakfast.
The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome Page 6
