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D.M. has spent his whole life giving his throat, stomach and intestines the food that the butler serves him on neat plates, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner because that is what he has to do, even though he is not hungry, because his throat, stomach and intestines have never demanded anything more than that. Hunger to him was something forgotten decades ago, when he ceased to be a baby who cried because he wanted to consume and possess, because he wanted to satisfy that primal appetite that has been buried in him, in everyone, since the first apple was bitten.
This absence was of no importance to D.M., not when he was such a busy man with so many plans and priorities, but the fact that it was not important did not make a slight pity, perhaps sorrow, that pressed delicately on his chest disappear, because hunger and love were one and the same, and by lacking one, he lost the other.
It is not the hands, fingers, touch, grasping and squeezing, that really express love, though at one time in his life, when he was a child, D.M. thought it did. When he felt like squeezing the little cat he kept as a pet, he thought it was because he loved it; when he wanted to press Siegfried's cheeks, sometimes so hard as to bury his fingers in his skin and caress his flesh, he thought it was because he loved his brother. He never loved them, neither the cat nor Siegfried, because hands don't love – not D.M.'s, which only feel tenderness for something vulnerable and small, for something that he could easily break.
When he abandoned all traces of any naivety that lingered during his short childhood, D.M. understood that it's his teeth that love, his tongue and lips, his mouth incapable of not eventually succumbing to humanity's first sin—hunger.
The first visits he made to one of his many properties, the Lone Moon Girl's School, could be likened to routinely going to a museum only to admire the same artwork. The mere existence of this ghostly knight had D.M. completely fascinated, a man who read so many books and knew so much about science going at least three times a week to this school just to study this being, to listen to the stories that were born from a hundred-year-old voice.
Afterwards, the ghost gave him a name, Antonio, and some words that would destroy the frame that separated him from D.M.
(Since you play the violin, why don't you bring it? We could play a piece together.)
And D.M. brought his violin, and it was the music that transformed that one-sided museum into a mutual stage. From that day on D.M.'s visits to the school became much longer, the literature professor showing clear confusion on his face when he eventually saw him arrive with a bottle of wine for the first time. It's not as if Antonio could drink, but D.M. enjoyed doing so in his presence, it felt more comfortable, as if he were with someone he could call a friend.
It would be a lie to deny that D.M. hasn't had dreams starring a living figure of Antonio, a corporeal being, willing to touch and be touched, black hair and pale skin as Antonio has told him he looked in life in one of the many anecdotes he shares with him. And in his dreams Antonio touches him, presses him in his arms, rests his hand on D.M.'s waist and drums his fingers against his skin to the rhythm of some piece he is humming.
Every touch of those hands that used to carry a sword are soft, too soft, not seeking to break or destroy like D.M.'s, and in those same dreams D.M. caresses his face, his shoulders, not pressing hard to see if he can leave a mark, not digging his nails in to hurt and see if a ghost can bleed.
It was during the winter, the large window showing a cold painting that made Antonio look even more ethereal, that D.M. heard the question that would ruin him.
"What would you do to me if I were alive?"
D.M. for the first time was at a loss for words, the quick-witted man who would always say the perfect answer didn't know what to say to a fictitious, hypothetical case question. He could say something as simple and obvious as to touch Antonio, feel his skin, hold his hand, drink with him, but every possibility felt so empty in his chest, in his stomach. Touching wasn't enough, touching wasn't loving. D.M. loved him so much he craved –needed to consume him.
I'd devour you.
What was at first a museum, then a shared stage, became a banquet that D.M. could only admire strapped to a chair, straining, starving, but there was nothing in the world he could do to eat Antonio.
The dreams stopped being soft, turning into desperate fantasies where his teeth would bury themselves in neck and shoulders, so many many times until his mouth, throat, esophagus, all his insides were filled with Antonio's pure essence. D.M. wanted to feel it all over his body, inside his ribs, in his veins, because for him that was the most human love a beast like him could feel, and it was killing him to know that Antonio would never feel it, a disembodied being that cannot be consumed.
"In a hypothetical case, just to talk about it," D.M. was finishing his second glass, he used the wine to feel something inside him to distract him from the pain that was to look at Antonio, like a dying man staring at an exquisite plate of food on the other side of a glass, "if I were to bring you a body, dead if necessary –I insist it's a simple scenario– could you possess it?"
Antonio chuckles, sweet sound that orbits around D.M. until it melts in his ears. D.M. thinks his laughter would taste like honey. "Please don't bring a corpse, Servais would end up killing you."
"Then the possibility that you could have a body is out of the question, I assume."
"Why would you go to such lengths to make me touchable? It would be great if it could happen but I think our meetings, and time together in general, satisfactorily fill the absence of contact."
D.M. disagrees, and there are many things where the two of them clash from opposite sides, something that used to make their interactions even more enriching but this time it just hurts.
Eventually he would have to face the other side of hunger, to not just eat, but be eaten, and D.M. would have to process the fact that Antonio doesn't want him that way, doesn't love him with teeth and tongue.
"Being with you is nice, yes, but I would like to return the question you asked me some time ago: what would you do to me if you were alive? – Or rather, wouldn't you like to be alive so you could do anything to me?"
If the ghost had saliva D.M. would have seen how hard he swallowed. Antonio blinks. "Ah,— of course I would like to overcome these limits imposed on me by my non-existent flesh. So many times I have wondered what your hair feels like or what scent permeates your body, but I try to avoid such ideas, because thinking of you will only bring me pain. And I see we haven't followed that same path, Earl."
D.M. smiles sourly, "How can you avoid thinking about me so easily, when you even visit me in my dreams. Isn't that unfair?"
It's devastating, as D.M. not only dreams of biting Antonio, but of being bitten, devoured, loved, satisfying the hunger of someone who desires him as he desires them, and Antonio intentionally avoids that.
"I've been living for years, centuries. I know the eternal pain you will bring me if I let you, because your existence is mortal, just as I do not want for anything in the world to be the cause of your own agony, because my existence is incorporeal."
"You are afraid, aren't you?"
A sigh, "I am too tired to spend another few centuries with an ache in my heart."
D.M. can't help but think of when he was a child, of Father's gaze, his hands behind his big back, not even on one of his small shoulders to comfort him for the words he would tell him.
(Désire, you are unlovable.)
Antonio doesn't love him, doesn't want to love him, doesn't want to bite him, doesn't have the need to feel D.M. in his mouth, between his ribs, in his veins, for he lacks all that, he lacks stomach and hunger, dirty flesh like D.M.'s that desperately longs to feel something he can't have. Antonio has only a dead and weak heart that closes itself to D.M., because D.M. is unlovable.
D.M. pours himself another glass of wine, takes a big sip. "Then what proceeds, what should I do when I think only of you and do nothing but chase you, like the waves of the sea follow the moon." He laughs, "My moon knight, I thought you were so close but in truth you are trying to get away from me."
And he looks straight into Antonio's eyes, for they show pain, as close to love as they will ever get.
"I think you should leave, Désire."
A pause.
D.M. feels all the wine revolving in his stomach. There's finally something inside.
"Say that again," he orders, "my name."
Antonio doesn't understand the intention, but he obeys, because he feels guilty that he didn't push D.M. away sooner, because it was his fault to be so sure that a great man with a great intelligence would not fall into such a cruel trap as falling in love with a ghost.
"Désire."
Dé-sire.
Each syllable lands in Antonio's mouth and leaves his lips with care, with the fondness that Antonio tries to extinguish, and D.M. feels full, because in the fraction that those syllables last before they leave he is in Antonio's mouth, he is on his tongue, he is between his teeth.
His name is the only thing a ghost can consume.
"Again."
Antonio doesn't understand, "Not without you telling me why."
"You saying my name is the closest I get to being in your mouth, close to your throat, close to your stomach." D.M. softly closes his eyes, recalling, "it makes me think of the first lines of Orsino... have you read that play?"
Twelfth Night, by Shakespeare. Antonio shakes his head.
"Recite me his lines, if you know them by heart."
"It would be a pity if I didn't," D.M. smiles, as he always does. Antonio never knows when he's in pain. "He's a lovesick duke. At the beginning of the play he says to the musicians around him: If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die."
A silence, Antonio thinks about the lines for a moment. "You want me to say your name in excess."
D.M. tentatively hums, "Food, love, music, there's a relation between the three, and you give them all to me. Not just music in a literal aspect, when we play the violins, but my name coming from your lips is too, and it feeds me, and I feel loved because I've never been called with such tenderness. I need excess, I need you to make me sick so that I may finally leave you."
"It will not do, for your appetite will never be satisfied," Antonio lowers his gaze, "never by me. Which is why I need you to leave and find someone, or something, that will make it happen. If I lock you in here with me you will end up being more dead than me."
It's his own teeth that bury themselves inside his cheek, pain suppressing the knot in his chest. Sometimes D.M. has to hurt himself to remember that he can bleed, that he can suffer.
"And if I don't want to leave."
The window opens. It is easy for Antonio's body to slowly disappear into the winter painting. D.M. clenches his fists.
"You can come back, anytime you want, but if your eyes are still hungry and you call my name through the moonlit night,
there will be no answer."