Villa Bunker (French Literature) (2 page)

12.
So she hadn’t mentioned her apprehension, and she’d avoided talking about the villa at all in the days following their arrival, for fear of disappointing my father and setting off any sort of negative reaction. She had yet to utter the word “villa” aloud, she’d buried the word as deeply as possible, telling herself, as things stood now, it was best not to mention it, the word “villa” would never cross her lips again—instead, she acted as though they’d been living there for years, and really there wasn’t much to say about it. Given their present situation, however, she’d decided it was best to warn me off: Above all, she wrote to me, I wasn’t to try and see them, I was even to avoid seeing them, that is unless I was expressly invited. I must inform you of the potential risks you would run by visiting the villa, she wrote, which in its present state has every possible and imaginable problem, to the point of being considered inhospitable or even dangerous. Accidents happen so easily, my mother said.

13.
I knew immediately, just by looking at the handwriting, that she wanted the letter to seem pathological.

14.
The villa was uninhabitable, or so my mother kept saying, yet my parents had decided to stay there all the same, contrary to common sense, regardless of the risks; they’d moved all of their furniture, all their possessions, into a house lacking all comforts and seemingly ill-suited to them. So I wondered what could have gotten into my parents’ heads to make them undertake the fatal project of living in a remote villa isolated from everything, a house possibly about to collapse. The precise moment when our parents become strangers to us, just like the moment when we become perfectly inscrutable in their eyes, cannot be pinpointed, and we don’t, by and large, even try. One day, we no longer recognize our parents, on one level we know these are our parents, yet we’re still not quite convinced that our parents are actually these two beings who have become so unpredictable, uncanny, and try as we might to tell ourselves that our parents are perfectly free to do as they please, we begin to fear that they’ve embarked on a foolhardy, even suicidal course, and at every turn we worry that our fears will be realized. So we tell ourselves that we don’t understand our parents at all, that we have long since ceased to make sense of their behavior, and that we can’t even guess at the motives that lie behind their deeds—we watch our parents act, lamenting the arbitrary and absurd nature of their decisions. We begin to regard our parents as foreigners, indeed speaking to them as we would foreigners, employing words that seem borrowed from a tourist’s phrase-book. Wouldn’t it just be simpler and more sensible to let our parents do what they want? (We wonder about that, but then we realize we don’t actually want to hear another word about them, we tell ourselves it would be best to remain oblivious to as much as possible.) Do our parents show us their true selves, we wonder; did we ever really know them? We witness the moment when our parents decide to undertake some catastrophic project, and we understand that realizing this project is absolutely vital and imperative in their eyes; and yet we wonder, why did it take so long for them to embark upon this plan? We talk to our parents about Derrida and Foucault, names they’re familiar with since we’ve discussed them thousands of times, we want to make sure that our parents are actually the same beings with whom we have so often in the past discussed Derrida and Foucault—we can see, however, that these names no longer ring any bells. We have the feeling we’re speaking in a strange, foreign language; our parents listen politely, but they don’t understand, they look at us the way foreigners would, silent and impassive, they’re simply waiting for us to finish talking about Derrida and Foucault—that is what we read on their faces. We try to imagine our parents on the cliff, but, really, no, we can’t bring ourselves to believe it, we absolutely can’t wrap our heads around the idea that they bought this villa perched on a precipice. We try again, this time endeavoring to imagine what their new life in the villa must be like, we imagine them eating meals in the villa, wondering, for example, if they eat at a set time, or if they talk to each other at the table—indeed, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen our parents eat. We make our parents act out all kinds of domestic scenes, in hopes of picturing for ourselves their new life, but in doing so we only become more aware of the distance between our parents and ourselves, and we sense we’ll never be able to bridge this gap that separates us from them. It’s impossible to know when we stopped feeling close to our parents, or at what decisive moment they began to seem strange to us, undoubtedly this distance has been developing for a long time, but we were too weak or too cowardly to notice it. As children, we’re connected to our parents through love, and then one day we lose this emotional tie, we understand nothing when it comes to our parents and our childhood suddenly seems incomprehensible to us. It’s impossible to bridge the gap that separates us from our childhood; once in place, this separation seems permanent and irreversible, and we have given up hope of overcoming it. We remember that we were once children, and when we recall this child that we once were, nothing about him makes any sense, he has now become a little stranger; we feel removed from this child whom we mentally dispatch to his own solitude, and in this way we take part in the disappearance of our own childhood.

15.
They inspected the second floor, slowly traveling the length of the hallways leading to the various bedrooms. Isolated from the other rooms by these narrow corridors in which my parents were always getting lost, each room formed a kind of islet one could enter from different directions. Had the architect responsible for this layout wished to create a private space in each room, a sealed off accommodation where one could feel completely isolated? Yet another architectural detail that did not slip their notice: Depending on its location, each bedroom had a different number of doors, ranging from two to four. For example, each corner bedroom was accessible by two doors, whereas the four middle rooms each had three. The master bedroom was devoid of windows and had four doors. At first glance, the bedrooms all seemed modeled on the same plan: They had the same dimensions and were each completely vacant. As my parents entered each room, they were immediately overcome by a dusty smell, the air they breathed got stuck in their throats, the way air does when it has been shut up for a long time, and it seemed to have a pharmaceutical odor, further highlighting its impurity. They decided, nonetheless, not to air these rooms out, because the dilapidated windows, their chipped paint eaten away by humidity, were on the verge of collapsing. In every room, a light exhausted from making its way through dirty windowpanes prevailed over the clinical whiteness of the early morning, my mother said. They detected, on the faded wallpaper, come unglued or torn in places, the outlines of furniture and, likewise, the places where paintings had once hung. They inspected these walls without saying a word, contemplating for several minutes the dark spots on the floor, which were like elongated shadows at their feet. They couldn’t gain access to the master bedroom, whose four doors were all locked. Because of the ever-present darkness in the corridor (they hadn’t yet found the light switches), they circled this sealed-up room, feeling their way by following the cracks in the wall. They had the feeling they were circling a vault inside a bunker.

16.
When they inspected the second floor again, the next day, to take more precise notes, nothing looked familiar. Everything now seemed much darker and more depressing than the day before. Had the look of the rooms changed in just a matter of hours? Despite their reluctance to admit these irregularities, they had to agree that the rooms gave rise to contradictory impressions, so much at odds with their recollections from the day before that they were having trouble accepting that they were standing in the same place. Were these changes to be explained by the fact one could enter the same room via two or three different doors? They did, however, recognize the wallpaper motifs as well as other innocuous details: a small pile of dust carefully formed in the shape of a cone in the corner of one bedroom, a crack in the ceiling, the body of a fly mummified between two windowpanes, a cloth rolled around a doorknob. That’s impossible, he said shaking his head. She wasn’t sure she heard the sound of his voice so much as read the words on his lips, despite the poor light. He seemed to have forgotten she was there, inspecting the floors, walls, and ceiling with an unsettled look, going back and forth, his hands behind his back. They thought about the alterations of light and temperature, and later, comparing their impressions, they were tempted to attribute these sensory anomalies to subtle variations in their moods.

17.
We have to consult the plans, my father said. That day he was speaking in a calm and delicate voice, though grimacing almost imperceptibly, my mother had noted. They were standing in the ballroom among the furniture and stacks of cardboard boxes, it was the first time he’d spoken to her directly since arriving.

18.
They’d quickly decided to live in the ballroom. The first time they’d entered this space, my mother had felt she was walking into an airplane hangar rather than a room in a house, a huge deserted hangar big enough to house the burned-out husk of a warplane, she’d said. Every time I enter the room, I’m scared: It’s so cold and formal, with high ceilings, and walls that seem to go on forever; it’s hard for me to catch my breath in there, my mother said. Hundreds of people could easily have been put up in that one room, she’d remarked the first time she’d gone in; she’d felt lost in the midst of the vast vacant space, feeling like a mere passerby in the rubble of a city in ruin, a city leveled by bombs. I’d never seen a room that large before, or that austere, which was the sense I had of it, due to its dimensions and absolute severity, my mother said; it could have housed a war machine capable of destroying an entire city. If the ballroom was beautiful, this too was due exclusively to its extraordinary coldness, its bareness. The question we ask ourselves when we enter this room is how long will we last, how long will we be able to stand the room’s harsh chill. We’ve only just left the vestibule, and already we’re in a war zone, and we think we hear the sounds of battle, all the while knowing that our senses are playing tricks on us, that we’re dupes of an architectural illusion. As long as we’re still in the vestibule, we don’t suspect that, merely by pushing open the ballroom doors, we are going to find ourselves in the middle of a war, not for one second do we anticipate the sense of alarm hidden in the ballroom. The room’s whitewashed walls are bare, there isn’t the slightest ornamentation on these high walls, which, like the façade, have something merciless about them. On these chalk-white walls you can make out the places where large paintings must have hung for decades. The paintings are gone, but every time my mother’s gaze happened to fall on one of those large faded rectangles, she would feel a pang of terrible anxiety, as though she had accidentally caught sight of something truly horrible. She would never learn what those giant ballroom canvases depicted, and anything she might imagine was no doubt far from being accurate; it was just that, judging from the space they took up on the walls, she was for some reason certain they could only have depicted horrific scenes, macabre settings. Perhaps they had been nothing more sinister than portraits of ancestors, but in that case, she was thinking, they’re still big enough to give you the willies. She’d imagined a gallery of ancestors depicted as grotesque giants with monstrous heads measuring at least twice or three times the size of a normal human head, portraits of beings so excessive they’d lost all vestiges of human form. There, where others would have only seen the white surface of the walls, my mother could make out horrific heads in the spaces between the windows, heads hastily suggested with large brushstrokes against a background of garish, loud colors, invisible portraits she could nonetheless imagine and which, because she could not see them, had upon her an even more powerful effect.

19.
Ever since their arrival, she’d felt like she was waiting for some climax to come.

20.
She recalled how, on the first day, she’d immediately been frightened by the sound of the waves, a deafening roar that was impossible to escape. The villa seemed to have been built in the midst of the surf, battered on all sides, she said. A roar that was not only an aberration to the senses, my mother had added, it subjected thought to a constant and intolerable oppression. It was impossible to escape this incessant noise; in some parts of the villa, its volume could reach unimaginable proportions, a crashing sound that was not simply unbearable, it also prevented thought, inhibited concentration. She clearly had the sense the villa was built right in the middle of this noise; I often thought, my mother said, that the waves had laid siege to the villa, and now, living in constant fear of being swept away by the rising waters, my dreams have become dreadful, or rather nightmares. My mother would dream of the villa being swallowed by that mass of water, the millions of cubic meters of salt water bringing down the walls and carrying away the furniture, their possessions, carrying away their lifeless bodies like contorted mannequins, but when she awoke the terrifying noise would be gone; upon waking, I don’t hear the slightest sound, I feel completely rested, as though I’d just slept fourteen hours straight, and I don’t have to worry anymore, don’t have to live in dread of a disaster; I feel much better in fact, almost relieved, writes my mother, I can imagine the villa is located in the middle of the desert, in the midst of a desolate landscape, out of reach, I can convince myself that the villa is in no way threatened by the waves; we’re in the middle of nowhere, a barren expanse, sand stretches as far as the eye can see, and the silence is total; for days on end, the crashing sound disappears and a worrying silence, perhaps just as terribly heavy and oppressive, pervades the place in its absence. She dared not move an inch for fear of setting off the racket again, she remained at loose ends, incapable of finding anything to occupy her, or even sleep. Silence seemed to have taken possession of the villa once and for all, taken possession of their souls, but my mother couldn’t help but wait for something to happen, a slight sound or occurrence, she’d written, that would break the spell and bring this hostile silence to a close. At first the silence had weighed on them like a cloak of concrete; eventually it would extinguish their recollections of what they had said to each other inside the villa. Soon she wasn’t sure if she’d really heard the waves or if she had just imagined them; in the end she couldn’t say for certain whether the villa was loud or quiet, whether it was pervaded by silence or exposed to the incessant roar of the waves; I wound up telling myself that the crashing of waves amounted to silence, my mother said. Such a silence, she’d come to understand, could only be explained by the fact that people who are subjected to a particular noise without respite eventually end up not even noticing it; they perceive as perfect silence what is in fact an unbearable racket.