The Song of the Swan

See also the explanation of the context

- I -

An easy prey. It was so easy for a predator to dissimulate his intentions on Internet, to clothe the wolf with a prince’s garments.

And here, he had cornered her, and she was in his net.

Now, he wondered… How could it be that she had become so obsessing when she was so ordinary? Perhaps because her obstinate silence howled in his face his own mediocrity which he hated.

Even her first name was so commonplace. Paul now resented a little to have chosen her, that Marie, to have followed her, spied on her, anticipated her every move…

But it mattered not, it was time to bring an end to it. He had to eliminate that nurse which had become invading. Definitively.

The hell with the scenario, the drama set which he had imagined; the excitation of acting could not suffer from petty preparation. His murdering her was going to be horrible, daunting.

He was here to transfigure mediocrity in a masterpiece of blood.

- II -

Twenty-five years old, the eye sharp and character wry, Dagomard de Jerphanion was an unusual sight.

He had kept a solid humour since the day when it had been said to him that his parents had been facetious enough to christen him with a girl’s name. To which he answered that Dagomar meant above all “glorious day” in Old Germanic and that it reflected perfectly his joie de vivre.

In fact, underneath his slightly odd appearance, Dagomard had more than one talent. His scholarship which was allowing him to blacken at full speed his crosswords grids had him win some contests in the past — and lots of sighs exasperated by his explanations which were oftentimes taken as pedantry.

But the reason why Dagomard was in this little filthy private clinic was not glory. He suffered since childhood from obsessive-compulsive disorders —OCD as they call it in the medical jargon. Thanks to the patient work done with his psychiatrist, he had had some success in limiting their impact, somewhat. But those remaining ones were not the least of them.

It still occurred to him –well too often for his taste — to be caught by an irrepressible desire to run after cars to tear off their rear view mirror or their radio antenna —in fact, all that protruded from the rotund forms of the cars. His shrink saw that as a demonstration of a disorder related to his birth or his childhood. And he dearly paid him for such nonsense!

Personally, he did not care much, the compulsion was quite as real as incomprehensible and all that mattered to him was to manage to control it in order to continue to live a life as normal as possible. His therapy helped him, somewhat…

The patient before him finally left. He was surprised not to see the regular nurse who usually dealt with the patients.

Dagomard was saddened a little, because he would have liked to see her again. A beautiful woman in her forties with a bright presence, large grey eyes full of compassion.

Smiling sadly, he reconsidered what she had said to him last week, when she was accompanying him back…

- III -

The radio was airing an old sizzling tune by Presley Elvis. In his nursing home “the Beautiful Shores”, Fernand Lotissier immediately recognized the tune which made him leave his torpor. Ah yes, this music, which had the power to bring forth in his mind his youth and his immoderate passion for the King, whereas his more recent memories frayed and slipped like sand between his numb fingers.

He had discovered the King thanks to this title, which had been adapted for the French rocker Johnny Hallyday to sing.

He could not help noticing the bitter irony of the title. I Forgot to Remember to Forget.

That Johnny sang… J’ai oublié de me souvenir.

The music and awkward rhymes seemed to surround him

J’ai oublié de me souvenir de l’oublier (I forgot to remember to forget her)

Je ne peux un instant l’effacer (I cannot erase her one moment)

Si je joue l’indifférent (When I pretend to be indifferent)

Chaque jour, chaque instant (Each day, each moment)

Mon cœur se souvient d’elle tout le temps… (My heart remembers her all the time)

The irony was cruel indeed, because Fernand was suffering from Alzheimer disease. Or rather, it was what was told him unceasingly when people invoked “his disease” as an excuse for his forgetfulness.

Granted, he also benefited from this trouble to flirt with the nurses taking care of him. Not that at his age (84 years old, God forbid) he still had some thought for frivolous things, no. It was merely his way of lighting up a gleam in their empty eyes.

It should be said that one cannot automate everything, especially the most ungrateful tasks. Fernand understood well the nurses’ reasons for their taking some distance and could not be upset with them. But he had had too much of his share of lack of human warmth during his professional life as an lawyer, to tolerate it in his old days.

- IV -

When he returned to their apartment in the 5th district, Paul Ducossier noticed a note written by his wife on the table of the room.

The children and I are at my mother’s place for holidays. The refrigerator is full. You’ll be able to work quietly.

This note did not surprise Paul. His feline wife must have felt the tension at the tip of her whiskers, and had fled with her pups in her mouth. In any case, they would not have come across one another much, since Paul had arranged his office not to be disturbed.

And in any case, he would preserve his peculiar work rhythm. Paul Ducossier, when his writer incomes had allowed him, had indeed chosen this eccentricity: in its obsession not to be stopped in the middle of one crucial moment and for fear to lose the stream of thought of the first version, he worked exclusively during the night, pretending that the subconscious was more receptive during these hours.

That accentuated the gap between him and his family, but Paul was not to be mollified, and his wife had quickly understood that he would always favour the books he wrote.

He was famished, exhausted by the trip he had just made; this solitary retirement which he regularly did to supposedly find his connection with the Source of inspiration.

He opened a can of raviolis, and started to wolf it down.

His wife was hardly easily deceived by these escapades, and thought that he was certainly going out to for some kind of female affair. In a way, she was not completely wrong. It was rightly a kind of affair for him, and at his beginnings, ten years ago, he enacted these same murders that he described afterwards, in order to better understand and convey with as much meticulousness as possible.

He had put an end to these activities with the birth of his children, but not to his retirements. Curiously, he had never been bothered by the police, undoubtedly thanks to his sharpened mind which assimilated new techniques of investigation much more quickly than the police officers…

The raviolis had an unpleasant taste of iron. He poured himself a glass of red wine to wash it down.

In fact, the things changed, and whereas he was highly praised at his beginnings, the sales became less and less good, and his editor worried some.

When he hammered that he needed more dramatic staging, more macabre, he could not help having the deepest scorn for him. As for this new intrepid generation writing of gruesome serial-killers while drowning under floods of burgundies the vacuity of their prose. So… he wanted fresh blood…

- V -

Quivering, Sabrina closed her book after having read the final chapters frantically.

The tension fell down gently, and the noisy world around her was again present in all directions. Rattling of keyboards, chattering, crumpling of paper, crackling of the printers of the police station where she took her lunch break, a book in her hands, locked up in her bubble…

She always left the crime fictions of Ducossier with a feeling of fear mingled with satisfaction. That one was no exception.

It was soon time to go back to her work in the thirteenth district. The daily routine of police constable was hardly exciting, but her thirst for adventure was partly satisfied by her reading. And paradoxically, she thanked Ducossier for his capacity to cast her life under a new light, where each overlooked detail became a source of satisfaction.

While passing in front of the bulletin board, a face caught her attention. A serene face with large eyes standing out in the middle of the other portraits, like a rose in grassland of nettles, that even the bad photocopier had not managed to make ugly. According to the note accompanying it, it was about a forty year old woman reported missing since nearly two weeks.

Anguish caught her in an unexplainable way. Empathy perhaps? She felt inexplicably connected to this woman. One can belong to the police force, and still remain above all a woman. One learns very early how to protect oneself, especially when like Sabrina one is a young person, fair and rather attracting. To be discrete when alone, to try to be absorbed in crowds when possible, with this tearing anguish in the belly, fleeting.

I already overcame these fears she told herself, crossing the threshold with a resolute step.

- VI -

His wife returned after one week, but Paul hardly realized it. He saw that the empty cans strewing the table had been removed, and understood.

His wife left him short notes, undoubtedly by automatism, explaining to him inter alia that the children had remained in their grandmother’s home.

Foreigners, it is what we are, he told himself. However his wife never complained. How she loved him. And she loved him enough to come back to face his bad mood, and to take care of him, like an invisible and caring hand.

These last days, she saw him regularly, waking up to watch the 8 PM television news, apparently concerned with the case of disappearance that was now hitting the main news. She did not raise any question, but he felt her alarmed incomprehension.

But his interest for this matter was visceral.

Especially since he had dreamed last night of a rain made of blood that had coagulated into a book…

- VII -

Quickly urged on by journalists in lack of juicy titillating news, the matter had swollen to cause an intense emotion.

Sabrina Marneihm had quickly seen the soft face multiplied on television sets and newspapers.

Then, the private tragedy soon became public thing.

Everyone soon knew that the husband of the disappeared, apparently of fragile health, had suffered from an emotional shock when he discovered that she had left, and had been allowed in intensive care.

His daughter had made a short appearance on television to ask for cessation of the media din around her father to get information on her mother. Her mother had supposedly left without informing anybody, willingly.

The newspapers relayed that Marie’s daughter had placed her father in a specialized institute, to withdraw him from the media attention and to avoid a new traumatism to him which could be fatal.

The anguish of Sabrina had not returned. All this was undoubtedly a very human history of treason. The husband was not very young any more, his brilliant career was behind him, and his wife could dream of another future.

Sabrina precisely had in her head that song by Dalida, which her mother softly sung with her beautiful accent: La grande passion (The Great Passion).

- VIII -

Darn weather, mumbled the greying man, at the wheel of his grey station-wagon.

Fortunately, he had located the place; it should be said that there was almost nothing else in that ditch, apart from pigs farms and their mephitic stenches.

But it was not yet the right hour, and it would be necessary for him to be patient to be able to enter. He caught the magazine under the seat and his pen went flying on the paper. Exasperated, he started to vituperate “Darn her, don’t she try to interfere again!…”.

He calmed down while thinking of the reason why he was there.

Finally, the hour of the lunch break had come, and the place should be almost deserted by now.

He entered not showing any hesitation, walking inside the hall all the while locating himself from the wall panels indicating the rooms. The one he sought was probably at the end of the corridor.

He heard a familiar tune as he progressed.

Without really knowing why, he let himself being guided by the music. The room where it came from was empty, and he quickly located where the sound itself came from.

The disc jacket was there, enormous, bearing a name which made him smile. Remembering the newspaper cuttings, he knew that he was in the right room.

He moved towards the bedside, and opening his overcoat, drew a book, which he placed there.

Leaving the nursing home, he stops one moment in front of his station-wagon, and thoughtfully, softly touches the rear view mirror where the rays of light dart through the clouds. Age quod acted. It was what she had said to him. What had opened his eyes —not so much because of these words, than because of the way they had been pronounced. Without the least judgement, with a radiant kindness. She had seen death, he was now sure.

Age quod agis. Ever since, it had become his maxim. Do, well, what you do. It had cured him.
He has tried a few moments ago to testify his gratitude, posthumously, but convinced that this gift to look after a broken heart that she has to some extent transferred to him, he has to share it —which he tried in all earnest to do since so many years.

Switching on, he realizes that a message was left for him. His wife, worrying for him.

He opens the videophone, and is delighted to see the merry face of Sabrina.

- Dagomard, is everything alright?

- Yes beloved, don’t worry. Everything went marvellously well.

- Fine! But hurry up to come back, you know that we are going to see Marylise and the children tomorrow.

- Like every week. I believe that you cannot live without your daughter!

- Mocker…

-… You know what, dear

- What?

- That song that you always sing to make fun of me?

- Car l’autre jour / Entre ses bras / Il m’a juré cent fois ce monsieur-là / Que j’étais son seul mon amour / Je savais le nom / De sa grande passion… (Because the other day/In his arms/He swore me a hundred times, that sir/That I was his only my love/I knew the name/of her great passion…

- Yes, that one.

- So what?

- You know that it’s a song from the King?

- IX -

Paul had spent several weeks to overcome it.

This history however seemed to magnificently respond to the book that he was writing.

His Marie Légier, and Marie Lotissier; two faces of the same personality, and yet so different: the first, simple being of paper subjected to his writer’s frustrations had never really had the depth of the second.

The story of Marie Lotissier, he would have liked to have imagined it.

She was also at the dawn of her forties, feeling the time accelerating, without her…

It was not a simple history of murder as he used to conceive them, but a true Greek tragedy which had been played in front of France — and Belgium, where euthanasia is legal, where Marie had taken refuge.

But he now had all the time necessary to mourn both Marie’s. The real Marie touched him, had him so deeply upset that he had felt with an unknown intensity the torments accompanying the approach of death — this death which he had been giving so many times without flinching, without a thought.
Having finally touched this immense void, Paul Ducossier feels born anew…
And now, he is again inspired, like the first day.

He will write and document the story of this woman.

A woman deciding out of love for her husband to disappear, to spare him the consequences of a long and debilitating disease to him, and thus to let him the choice to imagine her dead or alive.

It will be surely be his song of the swan, but it will be a majestic crime fiction, an ultimate homage.

- X -

Fernand does not know why, but this song deeply moves him. He has sung it all morning long, Marie’s the name of his latest flame… He does not know who Marie is neither, but he thinks of her, imagines her perhaps with the features of Priscilla.

He tried to speak about her with his daughter, but she closes herself like an oyster when he questions her.

Or he had perhaps forgotten. Once more.

Moreover, this book, he does not remember to ever have possessed it.

The dedication is not very readable, but he manages to decipher Sabrina, and a date, 2024. He does not know a Sabrina and he is puzzled… Damn disease. Besides what good is it to read this book? He had perhaps already read it for that matter…

Tomorrow perhaps.

He caresses the embossed letters of the crimson cover. MARIE.

He knows that this evening, he will dream of her…

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