Narcisse on a Tightrope

By Olivier Targowla and Warren Motte

For seventeen years, Narcisse Dièze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called "cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.) But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside world. Narcisse is floored, yet he gradually summons the will to try. What follows is an account of this naïve and timid patient’s adventures in the realm of the so-called sane. An endearing misfit in the tradition of Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump, Narcisse is destined to totter precariously on the highwire of his existence. Will we see him fall?
A quirky fable that pokes holes in the accepted mental health verities and pleads for a touch of madness. With an introduction by Warren Motte.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781628973815

Olivier Targowla

Olivier Targowla is the author of six works of fiction, all published by Éditions Maurice Nadeau. Narcisse on a Tightrope is his first novel.

Book preview

Narcisse on a Tightrope

Chapter 1

ALL OF NARCISSE Dièze’s children had nurses for mothers. This was an acknowledged fact: he’d been living at the hospital for seventeen years.

At age forty, he was the presumed father of thirty-five children. This precious piece of information was conveyed to him during a New Year’s Eve party when several nurses—with whom he enjoyed fairly close relations—came to lift their glasses and wish him a happy New Year. He wanted to say, How do you know? but he didn’t dare ask. He put on a knowing expression and blew into his champagne glass.

A nurse called for silence and declared that Narcisse Dièze was actually the father of seventy-two children. She had this from a reliable source, and after all it was a very low figure when you considered the number of nurses who had passed through the hospital, in one unit or another, during the past seventeen years.

Everyone thought about this. A quick mental calculation on that basis could easily support the conclusion that Narcisse was the father of one hundred and seventy-one children. And even that took account only of the nurses who had left the hospital on maternity leave and never returned.

To Narcisse Dièze, the reasons that drove those nurses to get themselves pregnant by him seemed strange, to say the least; but he was so bored by the question that he made no effort to understand.

The first nurse who seduced him had waited less than forty-eight hours to do it. She was young and lithe, and Narcisse, who had just arrived, had found her interest flattering. It wasn’t until six months later that he understood the goal of those maneuvers. Exhibiting her rotund stomach with a jubilation he found misplaced, Mademoiselle Dunant had announced that she was sleeping with him solely for the purpose of having a child without being stuck with a partner. His only response had been to gape at her. Naturally, he wasn’t taking any precautions and had not inquired about the contraceptive method that Mademoiselle Dunant might be using. That she used some method seemed self-evident, and it would have been unseemly, he felt, to quiz her about such matters.

But then what will I have to do for the child?

"You’ll never hear a word about it. You already have more than enough to worry about. And you’ll have to spend a certain amount of time here before you can leave. You’re pretty sick, after