Boullan now seems to have lost his head. He laughs. «Perhaps it’s better down here than in the world out there, where Guaita is waiting for me. May I stay here with Diana?»
«By all means, Abbé,» I reply. «I could not wish for more.»
I draw the pistol and shoot, hitting him in the center of his forehead.
Boullan falls crookedly, almost over Diana’s legs. I have to bend down, pick him up and place him beside her. They lie together like two lovers.
And here, at this very moment, through recounting, I have rediscovered, with troubled mind, what happened an instant before I lost my memory.
The circle is complete. Now I know. Now, at dawn on the 18th of April, Easter Sunday, I have written what happened on the 21st of March, late at night, to the person I thought was Abbé Dalla Piccola…
25. Sorting Matters Out
Diary for 18th and 19th April 1897
At this point, anyone looking over Simonini’s shoulder to read what Dalla Piccola had written would have seen the words come to an abrupt halt, as if his hand, no longer able to hold the pen, had of its own accord drawn a long scrawl that continued beyond the paper, marking the green baize of the desk, as the writer’s body slumped to the floor. And on the next sheet of paper it appeared that Captain Simonini had resumed writing.
He had woken up dressed as a priest, wearing Dalla Piccola’s wig, but now realizing, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he was Simonini. There, open on the table, he immediately saw those last pages in the handwriting of the supposed Dalla Piccola, written in a hysterical and increasingly confused hand. He sweated, his heart palpitating, as he read and recalled all that had been written up to that very moment when the abbé’s handwriting stopped and he (the abbé) or rather he (Simonini) were—no, was—struck with panic, and had collapsed.
As he regained consciousness, the cloud of confusion gradually passed and all became clear. Recovering, he realized that he and Dalla Piccola were one and the same.
He was now able to recall what Dalla Piccola had written the previous evening—in other words, he could remember that it was he himself, dressed as Abbé Dalla Piccola (not the one with the protruding teeth whom he had killed, but the other he had brought back to life and impersonated for years), who had been through the terrible experience of the black mass.
What happened then? Perhaps Diana had had time to grab his wig during the scuffle, perhaps he had needed to remove his cassock to drag her wretched body as far as the sewer and had returned, by then almost out of his wits, to his room in rue Maître-Albert, where he had reawoken on the morning of the 22nd of March, unable to find his clothes.
The carnal contact with Diana, the revelation of her vile origins and her necessary, almost ritual death had been too much for him, and that same night he had lost his memory, or rather Dalla Piccola and Simonini had both lost their memory, and the two personalities had alternated over the course of that month. In all probability, as had happened to Diana, he must have passed from one state to the other through some form of crisis—an epileptic fit, fainting, who knows—but without being aware of it, so he awoke each time thinking he had simply fallen asleep.
Doctor Froïde’s therapy had worked (even though the doctor would never know of its success). By one self recounting to the other self those memories which he had laboriously extracted from the recesses of his mind, as if in a dream, Simonini had reached the critical point, the traumatic event, that had plunged him into a state of amnesia and transformed him into two distinct people, each of whom remembered one part of his past, without either he or that other, who was also him, being able to bring themselves back together as one, and even though each of them tried to conceal from the other the terrible, unthinkable reason for that erasure.
Remembering had left Simonini feeling exhausted, of course, and to reassure himself that he was truly reborn into a new life, he closed his diary and decided to go out, prepared for any encounter, knowing now who he was. He was ready for a good meal, but couldn’t yet allow himself any excessive indulgence that day, seeing that his senses had been so sorely tested. Like a hermit from the Thebaid, he felt the need for penitence. He went to Flicoteaux, and for thirteen sous managed to eat badly, but tolerably so.
Returning home, he put down on paper several details that he was still piecing together. There was no reason for him to continue a diary—he had begun it as a way of recalling what he now remembered—but the diary had become a habit. Believing, for just under a month, in the existence of someone called Dalla Piccola, he had created the illusion of someone with whom he could converse, and through this conversation he realized how much he had always been alone, ever since childhood. Perhaps (the Narrator wonders) he had split his personality for that very reason—to create someone to talk to.
It was time to accept that the Other did not exist. The diary, moreover, is a solitary entertainment. He had, however, become accustomed to this monody and decided to continue. Not that he felt any particular love for himself, but his dislike of others induced him to make the best of his own company.
He had created Dalla Piccola—his Dalla Piccola, after he had killed the real one—when Lagrange had asked him to deal with Boullan. He thought that for many assignments a priest would arouse less suspicion than a layman. And he liked the idea of resurrecting someone he had killed.
When he had first bought the house and shop in impasse Maubert, at a very low price, he had not used the room and its entrance from rue Maître-Albert, preferring to establish his address in impasse Maubert so he could use the shop. As soon as Dalla Piccola arrived on the scene, he furnished the room cheaply and used it as the illusory abbé’s illusory address.
Dalla Piccola had been useful not only for prying into Satanist and occultist circles, but also for deathbed appearances, when he was called by the close (or distant) relative who would later be the beneficiary of the will that Simonini had forged—and if anyone were to raise a doubt over that unexpected document, there would be the evidence of a cleric who could swear the will reflected the last wishes expressed to him on the man’s dying breath. Then, with the Taxil affair, Dalla Piccola had become essential. It was he who had dealt with practically the entire scheme for over ten years.
And Simonini’s disguise proved so effective that, dressed as Dalla Piccola, he could easily meet Father Bergamaschi and Hébuterne. Dalla Piccola was beardless, blondish, with bushy eyebrows, and wore blue-tinted spectacles that concealed his gaze. As if this were not enough, he devised another style of handwriting, which was smaller and almost feminine, and altered his voice. Indeed, when he was Dalla Piccola, Simonini not only spoke and wrote differently, but thought differently, so he fell completely into that role.
It was a shame, then, that Dalla Piccola had to disappear (the destiny of all abbés of that name), but Simonini had to wash his hands of the whole business, not just to erase the memory of those shameful events leading up to the trauma, but also because on Easter Monday, according to the plan, Taxil was to make his public confession, and with Diana now dead, it was better to remove all evidence of the plot in case someone began asking difficult questions.
He had only that Sunday and the following morning left. He dressed up once again as Dalla Piccola and went to meet Taxil, who had been visiting Auteuil every two or three days over the past month and had found neither Diana nor him, but just the old woman, who told him she knew nothing and feared they had been kidnapped by the Masons. He explained to Taxil that Du Maurier had finally given him the address of Diana’s real family in Charleston, and he had found a way to send her back to America—just in time for Taxil to prepare for the public exposure of the fraud.
He gave Taxil a five-thousand-franc advance on the seventy-five thousand promised and arranged to meet the following afternoon at the Société de Géographie.
Then, still dressed as Dalla Piccola, he went to Auteuil. He was welcomed with amazement by the old woman. She too had lost sight of him and Diana for almost a month and hadn’t known what to say to poor Monsieur Taxil on his frequent visits. He told her the same story: Diana had returned to America and been reunited with her family. The old hag was silenced with a generous payoff, and she gathered up her paltry rags and left that afternoon.
That evening, Simonini
