CHAPTER XXXV: COLD

   Despair must first put on a coat of impenetrable darkness, where even a last light could be seen but your thought is already clouded and your reason stops to be perceived. Later, when dressing completely, everything becomes blackness, just as clarity has become stained hopes, broken dreams, promises that have been fruitless, uninhabited homes. Your body gets sick, your mind weakens and your heart withers, your soul does not radiate, the last perception is pain. If it is your body that suffers, at times you can even feel heat, but the pain in your soul is cold, icy darkness, infinite emptiness, inability to think. You can only feel a bitter wind that hurts your inner furrows and burns all crops.

  Thus I must have walked that night, my treacherous face betraying my thorns, my infinite bitterness, and my steps of mournful appearance, that languor that was slowly taking over all my being. I was opposite John, his eyes staring at me, with a mirror to reflect everybody’s figures and their gentle movements. My sixth mate maybe did not like what he saw because he started talking to me.

− "Nike −he said to me with a serious face, concerned by what he noticed in me−, come a few minutes into my tent.  I think that we should talk."

  I didn't want to talk. I didn't want to think, although I needed it so much. I wanted to walk so the rhythm of my feet could accompany my mind in darkness. I intuited that if I had talked with some of my mates then, I would have begun to cry, and not because I knew that there are tears that can heal, I should forget that there are also tears that kill. Therefore, I don't remember what I said, but I was elusive. I needed to lose myself, to be away from them all, to be away from me. But his second call was more imperative.

− "Nike, we are friends. We are mates. And for those two reasons I will dare tell you that not I'm asking. I am ordering you. I don't like what I can see on your face. Come in."

 I had no choice but to give in. Whenever I entered his tent, it was a key day in my life: August 6, October 4, and now October 19. The two previous times Miguel was not inside, but now it looked empty and unoccupied, colder now that one of its two usual sources of heat was not in. John began to talk to me right away.

− "Listen to me, my friend. I met Miguel, as you know, almost four years ago, on January 26. But previously that night my black face, having had a mirror, must have reflected what now your eyes are telling me. I know that look, because although I never saw it, I had it on the darkest night of my life. But then came the great light that lit me. Therefore, even if it hurts you, I have to say that your face is betraying fierce ideas of suicide. Talk to me, Nike, what is happening to you? The faces of the others were not quiet either. What the hell has happened at the bonfire?"

− "Paul –I started troubled. I don't know whether my words gave him clarity or darkness, or whether I was being coherent−... called me dad."

− "Paul has called you dad? That's impossible, Nike. He is just two and a half months."

− "But he has, John. And if you don’t believe me, there you have the testimony of those who have also heard him."

− "Nike, forgive me. I don't know what the gravity of that situation is. You are not his father, and if it is that you've always loved him as a son, Luke would rather you give him the love of a father and not the indifference of a simple acquaintance. We all love his little king, and as for you, today, while you were in the streets with Bruce, he referred to his mate, talking to me, describing him as a great man who both cares about his wife and his son. Luke can't blame you for a few words, or babbling, that his little king has said."

− "At the bonfire there has also come a second part, John, but I do not know whether all of them have been aware. Perhaps they have. It is always easy to discover my thoughts. It is not going to be easy for me to make you believe me, but with hand on heart, what I'm going to tell you now is the truth. In August, also here, I confessed to you my love for Luke. And that has not changed or I wish it ever changes. Because falling in love with him, with its beauty and its pain, is the most beautiful thing that has happened to me in life. And if my life ended soon, at least I would know for what reason I have lived: to know him one day and love him. I cannot say that my existence has been in vain. But in October I must confess another equally burning secret. And never will I deny again that I like men. But I made a mistake, John. I still like women. A few words from Lucy in the fire made me discover that –I started to cry then. Each subsequent word took me several seconds−... her too, that I am in love with Lucy."

− "Holy heaven –and he stopped a few minutes to watch me. However, he did not seem to doubt me−. But like I said one day, let me repeat that I believe you. Even so, Nike, it is serious because it will mean more pain for you. There used to be one in your heart, now there are two. But that pain was not stronger than you. You are here, and if you were afraid to stain Luke, I think that those were your words, now he feels clean with you, renewed, reborn. The only thing that has changed is that you have a double agony. I can understand that. But my friend Nike is strong. You can live with both."

− "But John, I am a stain for them. I love the mother, I love the father, and their child confuses paternity. I was in love with you. How long would it take to fall in love with you again, who also have a partner, or in love with Miguel, or Mistress Oakes, Olivia, Bruce...?"

− "That will not happen. But if it happened, for every new love, you will have a new respect. It would only mean giving you back part of what you have already given us. Like the love you've given to Lucy and Luke, who cannot love you more. But the important thing is: would you be able to live with a double pain? Neither Luke nor Lucy will be offended because you love them. Believe me. So you will live with an added suffering, but besides that, I ask again: what is the seriousness of what you feel? In August you said that you could not stay with us because of him. Two months later you live here, enjoying or suffering the same as us, and Luke is not only your friend but also your mate."

   Perhaps he was right and nothing was so serious. Despair makes you feel as if some time after putting out a bonfire you continue perceiving the smoke, and all my pain was burning me. Today I think that perhaps it was not so thorny, but as the winds for Olivia: when the north wind blows you are unable to think of anything else, just to get away from it, away from its breath perhaps sheltered in your tent. But with my winds, where could I get any shelter?

− "Miguel told me that night that a bird is born to fly, and if it can’t fly in freedom, it is necessary to open the door of its cage. I found out what my cage was. Surely someone has to open yours. Maybe it is necessary to speak with Lucy, with Luke, or with both. I think it would be less painful anyway than fleeing forever from your way through the back door."

− "My true path is this, John, and as long as I have been allowed to walk on it, I have been very happy. Nobody is gonna steal me the memory of these days. But I don't know if I have any future. Anyway, my friend, my most sincere thanks to everyone. I've been the eighth. But according to the tale that Mistress Oakes told me, it is not known whether the eighth motif by Verôme would be with you only fifteen days or maybe more."

− "I still see you with gloomy ideas. Nike, where are you going? Do you really think that suicide is the only path that you have?"

− "Maybe you think I'm a coward."

− "I cannot say that suicide is cowardice. I've also gone through that despair. But of every bitter experience you may come out. After that exasperated night of January, I have been allowed to live the happiest years of my life. And that will happen to you, if you are in the hands of two mates as tender as Lucy and Luke. And as for the others... Nike, if for whatever reason you want to live again your previous life, that we could understand. You have the right to choose any path. But if we lose you forever, there are seven people who could not stand it, if we had not tried before to take that terror from you. Now that option has been given to me. And before allowing you to get out of here towards nothingness, I would call Lucy or Luke."

− Do not do that, please, my friend. I just want to go for a walk and try to examine my pros and cons."

− "But what about suicide?"

− "John –and I guess that I got solemn then−, I don't know what happened to my parents. I was told that shortly after I was born both of them died in a traffic accident. But I don't think that it was like that. If I ever happened to ask my grandparents or my servants at Siddeley Priory, they told me the same. In my teens, I got used to hearing stealthily my servants' talks. We had a maid, very short, so short that she looked like a dwarf, although she was not, named Dora. One morning she was talking to someone, I don't know very well to whom, at the door of my room, where someone should be making my bed. She didn’t notice me and suddenly she said these words that I have never forgotten: "what happened to Mr. Siddeley is that he could not stand his wife's death. It took him only nine days to..." But right there she must have noticed me and she stopped. And I know from old documents that my father died on August 9. Alone. My mother had to die before then. As I have guessed it, John, Alma Siddeley died in childbirth. And Martin Washington, my father, could only endure it for nine days, and he probably committed suicide. I also know that the old Siddeley generations used to have some guns, but I have not seen any at Siddeley Priory, because they must have removed them all after my father's death. So as you can see, though I can never be sure, I have always thought that my father killed himself, and that my parents loved each other."

− "Then let me tell you sweetly, Nike, that if it was like that, your father lost the one he loved most. But the two people you love, my friend, are alive, and love you."

− "Thank you, John. I will not deny that everything is as you say. The reconstruction of my parents' death I should have done when I was about 13 or 14 years old. Since then, I have lived wondering what I would do if I had the same circumstances, and telling myself mentally once and again: "you had a life that was cut short, Dad, but if I ever live the same horror, I hope I have learned from my heredity and can get out of this tunnel." I can only say that I now understand my father: a deadly wind, an irretrievable loss, he must have loved her so much that I can put myself in his shoes. I only have to ponder whether I still have any other alternatives. But I can say that I do not wish to do the same thing, my mate."

− "What are you going to do then, Nike?"

− "I don't know, John. I have to walk. And try to think."

− "What I'm going to say, Nike, perhaps is not what can be expected from a friend. But I love you and I cannot allow you to do a crazy thing if I can avoid it. You will not leave my tent if I don't have a promise from you which I can believe that you will not kill yourself."

− "I don't know which promise I could make you that you could believe. Let me think. No! Not for Lucy and Luke. For my seven mates and for the light of the little king. For the brightness of the star Regulus. I hope it shines for me. I won’t choose suicide, John. I do not know yet what decision I will take, but I promise you."

   He looked at me carefully and he must be seeing that life hurt, but I renounced to be followed by death.

− "Nike, please, when you've made a decision, come and look for me, even if it has been that you go away."

− "Maybe there is no reason for me to walk inside this dark tunnel. But if I find the light, I may have got the idea that even despair is beautiful and carries me some teachings. Life is the mother and life is the whore, but in its lap I've been comfortably well, and I want to live."

− "I wonder whether I have been able to give you some warmth, my mate."

− "You have, John. Since I arrived here you have not stopped saving my life and giving me food and warmth. One night I was finally able to bring food for all. The warmth that I would like to give you I don't know if one day I will be able to grant you. Goodbye, my dear John. Wherever I go, this absence should be shorter. I could not withstand another two months without you."

   He finally let me leave, but I first had to repeat my promise that whatever I decided I wasn't going to kill myself. That October night was cold as if it were a night in early winter, willing to settle in the year. I didn't know where to go and I didn’t even remember to go to my tent in search of a jacket. Or maybe I went there, but in the threshold was Bruce, who just told me that he wanted to give me a hug. We did and some warmth I then got under the frozen ash trees. He told me again that in case I needed him, I could look for him. Mistress Oakes, still in the weak fire with Olivia, looked at me with a glance that I then understood as a brief farewell, as if she meant: "in this cold hour you will reach your harbour. We shall be waiting here for you to return. You can’t believe me, but you go in peace, and in its sedative light you will return." Olivia didn't look at me. She must be meditating what the meaning of my words was, of the furrows of my face, of my disoriented steps, my tiny tears already beginning to bathe me. Lucy and Luke I didn't see them. They would still be inside their tent. I do not know very well whither I was going. Perhaps due to having found Bruce next to my house, I started at the middle finger, towards Meander Bridge and the beginning of the alder grove.

   With hardly any moon or no moon, it would have been a magnificent spectacle of stars if it weren't for the weak luminosity of the autumn stars in the early hours of the night. And looking up, I don't even know which path my feet took. My mind must be walking a starry pathway where we all were one constellation surrounding the two moons that night were in the sky, the ones I wanted to imagine. One was Luke, and for a long time it had been full. Beside him another moon was growing, with Lucy’s face, and it was waxing with so much security that I know that I would always love her as much as him. Imagining this nonsense, I imagined myself in the waning phase, shy and dull. But that's the way I should advance so that my painful learning got dressed first of a new moon and so that my soul was created again ex nihilo.

   I don’t even remember, Protch, how long I was wandering. Vague memories of the sound of moving water seem to place me over Meander Bridge perhaps. As I was not able to decide my future or even to put myself mentally in its coldness, the weak lights of my beacons illuminated my recent past with bright pictures of my fifteen days in the street and I was thinking of an inventory of diffuse small things which for some reason had become important: my first mate telling me that one would become five; Through the looking glass and my life as a chess battle, Lucy collecting firewood and my heart jumping Menhir Bridge towards her, the cat Nile and all the cats in the good branches of a friend's arms, Miguel and his startled absence from the evening of October 10, John explaining that trees were sacred –I looked at the alders. Perhaps in the sidewalks walked in secret by their august shapes, I decided to leave the bridge and keep on walking−, Luke’s name together with that of his wife and his son −with whom he should always be joined, without my name as a stain for them− drawn on an elm tree. The little king with his tenderness, his smile and his love, leaving me the sentence: "Dad." I felt so drunk of pain that I feared I could fall into the water and I guess that's why I started the path of the alders. But to the river the dark roses of my tears must have fallen and the Kilmourne one day surely took them to the sea.

   It was not easy to walk among sacred trees and not to feel moved. The stars, the alders and the water got me away from gloomy visions, but perhaps my little subtlety moved away of despair a bit despite the contemplation of St. Alban and some other will-o'-the-wisp.


 

− “You were walking mad, but you had anchors to cling to beauty", I then said to Nike, "and once you told me that you didn't have real reasons to be desperate, but I think that you really had them. The thread on which depended your fate you could not see. There was valuable information which you were not told."

− "During my fifteen days there I had begun to understand that we beggars, in our pain, learn to escape through any door of our creation and I had the stars, the trees, the river. In those moments I could not think of Luke, let alone of Lucy. In my folly I thought that to focus my thoughts on the little king would calm me. To remove despair first you have to empty yourself, but my eyes were ponds that still kept many waters."

− "And then you came to that clearing among the alders..."

− "You know my story better than I", Nike smiled, "don't be impatient. I do not remember where I was walking or how long I walked, but some memory I have of which trail my mind was strolling."


 

  A frozen forest cannot protect you from the winds blowing from your own identity in rebellion. Perhaps the northern wind was blowing, or perhaps I think that because days ago my second mate had gone mad with it. And there was no light. Oh if the moon were full. But I could no longer stay with the calm of death, that mansion of lasting peace, that place where there is no pain. I had promised John that I would not do so and I did not relax knowing that I now I had to find a way to survive. But how welcome death would have been and annihilation. But with the weight of life on my shoulders, I continued walking. I couldn’t stop crying.

   An unexpected mound that during the day should be red reminded me of Lucy’s image. Actually I never lost that night her picture, an unsafe cane that clung me to the ground. She had just come into my heart, my home, and I knew she was a guest for the rest of my days. You get comfortable, my sovereign; search for an armchair in the desolate rooms of my lost soul and my mind, your maid, will regale you with viands of heartfelt emotions or delusions. And once both of us together... my alienation had made me for a second see her mine, without Luke. I wanted to slap myself. If my mind could not find any lights, at least I should not think wrong. Lucy and Luke belonged to each other. So it had been and so it should continue. I belonged to nobody, and if I could find a way to continue to love them from afar, I would always be happy that they were together. The fear to love had two directions: what could the redhead lady of my open furrows be thinking of me, and what would be the reaction, new stain on his sun, of his faithful knight. But I couldn’t stop seeing her, radiant in my darkness, in my long walking through the tree-lined darkness of that October night.

   Despair is tamper-proof metal, no white heat manages to remove the cold color of its ignoble substance, it does not turn into any creation, it is only a sign of inner decomposition, a slow destruction of dreams or hopes, until everything is a residue grinded without ore, without seam, filaments or drops through which a newborn can breathe, a new being that as a Phoenix has been transformed. Parallel to the cemetery, until the alders obfuscated me, my despair was forging a tombstone for me, but I was looking for a way not to enter its coldness.

  And therefore ruled out suicide, I did not have many alternatives. It was just an abhorrent flash that took me for a moment back to Deanforest and the Thuban Star, my life as an unworried millionaire. Anyone would think of me that I had just got crazy, not being able to see in all that gold more than a basilisk which really kills without giving you the time to incarnate in a second form. But in two months I had known sufficiently its angry breath, its furious vacuum, its fetid loneliness and rather than returning to its grim flowers I would rather perish among trees and waters in the memory of my seven princes and Regulus, my monarch.

   I hardly considered seriously remaining in the streets without them. In Hazington it would be impossible without seeing them every few minutes, and for that I could exhaust my soul in tears in the Torn Hand. Going to another city to beg had no sense. I already was a bait for charity, I was, but at their side. What sense could there be in outstretching my poor hand if it wasn't so that, suffering from what they suffered, I could feed them and share their hopes and failures?

   I still had a light. To return and make my feet take me back to the high plateau. Lucy and Luke had not despised me yet. I considered the possibility of finding some courage in myself and discuss it with them. But the idea terrified me. If your body dies, you get the rest of being insensitive; if it is your soul that dies, the pain of the surviving material is higher. I could not die this way. But if I had considered myself dead, I had nothing to lose; I could try.

   A new frozen thought made me stop walking, with some fortune because I was about to bump into some big alder. Another pain I had not seen was noticing the many times I had made a promise that I had not been able to fulfill. I remembered telling Olivia on October 5 while she healed my feet: "I won't go, Olivia. Now I'm not going away from here... But this time I will be stronger: I assure you that I will stay." Later, the morning of October 11, having breakfast with Miguel at the bonfire, before he went to the airport: "You will see me, Miguel, I promise. Whatever it is, on your return I will be here." That afternoon I had told Bruce: "if it depends on me, Bruce, I will never leave you all." And I had just told John that I could not withstand another two months without them, from what you can deduce that I would return. So all those promises would not end up being just empty words, so in my desperation they did not see the huge love I felt for them as a lie, perhaps I only had an alternative: returning, sleeping that night as best I could, and with the light of the day deciding whether I was strong enough to open my heart to Lucy and Luke.

   The wind turned fierce, skinning me with icy whips, merciless and wicked. I can’t remember a greater loneliness than that of those hours, without a smile, without a story, without a heart to embrace. I would have needed some firewood to light a bonfire that, even if it did not heat, it could at least enlighten my soul. I had seen all my possibilities. But I had only measured them. Now I had to opt for one of them.

   On some rock my feet must have rested, not my thoughts, in some cold and dark clearing I had flown into, when I felt the shadows move and the sounds echo. Maybe I was not alone. Someone walked by chance or determination on the same undergrowth, treading the same paths that I had stepped on, maybe looking for me. This rhythmic wandering, even in concern, urgent and somewhat startled, for a second made me tremble: they seemed Luke’s footsteps.