The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (8 page)

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, twirling 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 connoisseurs 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 hardest part of being between dives was the blind, deaf wait that the mutual impermeability of the two worlds imposed. Like any diver, David dreaded these derelict stretches that made him shrivel into the hollow of an armchair, one eye glued to the phone. He couldn’t keep from hoping for a call, a letter. Sometimes, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he’d run down the stairs four at a time to the lobby and check his mailbox. What was he expecting? A damp letter from below? A message from Nadia in a bottle? Every time he opened the little metal locker he expected to smell silt, stick his hand in a tangle of seaweed, but nothing ever happened. How could Nadia have written him? They were divided by fathoms of water, deprived of any and all radio communication. David often saw himself as a rescuer leaning from the prow of a salvage ship, a rescuer trying to make out
the shape of a wrecked submarine on the ocean floor. If he didn’t go back down as soon as possible, the world below was going to run out of oxygen—he was inexplicably sure of it. Nadia and Jorgo would start suffocating, their faces going blue; they’d collapse, clawing at their chests. Tormented by this fear, David kept watch for their SOS, but the mailbox remained empty, the telephone silent. Wasn’t there any way through, a leak, a breach between the worlds? He alone could come and go while they remained prisoners, forever captives of a dimension with no exit. From time to time, when his loneliness reached its height, he’d fill his bathroom sink and stare at the still water with the insane hope of creating a passage, opening a channel. He kept telling himself that by concentrating he might manage to transform the stupid white porcelain scallop shell into a kind of magic mirror. He’d stare at the drain for an hour, expecting to see Nadia’s little face lifted toward him, like a woman watching a plane pass by, high above, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand.

“Need a breath of fresh air?” he’d shout. Could she tell it was him? What would he have looked like from below? Wouldn’t there be something terrifying about a face suddenly bursting through the sky’s blue skin to shout words the wind would warp? But the question of oxygen worried him for real. Soler Mahus had blamed it all on drugs, but David’s suspicions went even further. He was convinced that in the diver’s absence, the world below slowly withered away, went into necrosis like a limb that blood reached poorly, if at all. Every time he went down, he brought a little oxygen with him, and that oxygen revivified the people of the dream, restoring color to their skin. The drowned
submarine was resupplied with air. The trapped crew members stopped gasping at last; Nadia’s lips lost their awful bluish tinge, a beautiful red once more. Oh, if only he could know for sure! Meanwhile he stalked his apartment, hands behind his back, a captain pacing the bridge of a ship anchored at neap tide. There was no movement on the surface, and the pavement was too opaque to make out what was going on below, deep beneath its bituminous crust. Lean out the balcony all you wanted, but you wouldn’t see a thing. His gaze ran smack into the asphalt as if into the water of a filthy pond. Nothing ever came floating up, not the slightest flotsam, the least slick of oil. No buoy. And all this time, the trapped crew of the lost submersible was slowly suffocating. David had a very hard time with these latent periods, but it wasn’t in his power to dictate how often he dove. The phenomenon required a certain energy that built up unconsciously. So long as his tank wasn’t full, there was no point in trying another foray into dream. He’d just be depleting his batteries without really sinking beneath the surface. Penetration could only take place when the nervous system was completely recharged. Only then would the blue depths of dream open, would he feel himself sucked toward the bottom, would he sink like a stone. And David knew the hour had not yet come to step over the ship’s rail. His nerves weren’t crackling, they seemed relaxed, limp, like the strings on an old tennis racket. When he touched things, he didn’t feel that little crackle of static electricity at the ends of his nails that announced his internal battery was ready once more to short-circuit reality itself. He was flaccid, emptied out, condemned to wait, and that drove him crazy. Some divers
resorted to drugs to speed up their process, but David didn’t believe in those techniques, which smacked of charlatanry. Besides, chemical substances filtered directly into the world down below, its rivers and streams. Hadn’t Soler Mahus said so? They ran from its faucets and stagnated at the bottoms of soda bottles, poisoning everything. No, he had to make do with waiting. And it was a long wait. Terribly long.