Villa Bunker (French Literature) (4 page)

31.
Again this morning, my mother writes, his voice is sounding so affected, I’m having trouble recognizing it. This voice is, however, clear and irrefutable, like the movement of the hands around the dial of the alarm clock sitting on my bedside table.

32.
My father’s every sentence, and soon his every gesture, every movement, will be described and analyzed, and she’s not going to spare me any of the details, I say to myself as I attempt to decipher her opening pages—and that’s just for starters. In the future, she’ll not only describe the progress made on the villa and their difficulties getting used to their new life, she’ll also scrupulously record all these symptoms, from the faintest to the most flagrant, following their progression, or their decline, measuring, day by day, week after week, on a somewhat erratic curve, the changes affecting my father’s personality. And I was inflicting each letter on myself as though it were a medical report, a medical report from which I gleaned absolutely nothing, I would read, I would swallow it all, without having the slightest idea what my parents were really going through, I would sink into a world of hearsay and antinomy, in which everything seemed falsified, improbable, secretly designed to ruin my life.

33.
I would eventually come to see each letter as a kind of work of art, complete with their periodic bright points, vivid blue, their desert passages riddled with capitals. I would say to myself: My mother the artist; or else: My mother is going mad.

34.
They were no longer using the word “villa,”and related expressions like “villa on the coast” and “seaside villa” had disappeared from their vocabulary as well. One day we stop saying such and such a word, and having completely given up the use of this word, it drops out of our vocabulary entirely. We continue to talk, of course, finding ways to speak about anything in the villa as if nothing has changed. In the villa, my mother wrote, we never say the word “villa,” and we weren’t quite sure at first what was keeping us from saying it, it’s just that, every time the word “villa” comes to mind, we instinctively get around it by saying “house” instead of the word “villa,” which has now been banished and forbidden. The word “villa” is there somewhere in our brains, of course, most likely in a fairly remote part, getting more remote by the day, each passing hour only drives it farther away. Soon we won’t need to remind ourselves that this word isn’t to be uttered, and we’d be at a loss anyway to explain the unconscious mechanisms at work whenever we reject this term in favor of another—and, actually, we don’t really know why this word has become taboo for us, but the simple fact is it never crosses our lips. For fear of my father’s reaction, she’d begun to refrain from using the word “villa,” and he’d done the same, without consulting her. Meanwhile, they continued to speak normally and on the surface nothing changed, as the days went by their voices played opposite one another in the villa. They would breathe, take their meals, remove their clothes, sleep, completing all sorts of tasks just as they would have anywhere else. And even though the word “villa” was no longer spoken, it continued to exist, and they found themselves in between its walls, two flesh-and-blood intruders moving about in a shadowy, secluded world to which they had forced entry. But now they could only designate this world by alluding to it, communicating in innuendo about a world each day more confused, more unstable, a world whose boundaries and contours were increasingly unclear.

35.
And I began to look forward to these letters, even though I knew they would end up annoying me and eventually make me sick. I was already well acquainted with their annihilating power. And how, hours after having read them, I was still in the grip of my mother’s sentences, and for my part I couldn’t write a single one of my own, I was unable to concentrate on anything, I was stuck with hers: sentences that sometimes seemed dictated by sluggishness, written in handwriting permeated by fatigue and boredom, while at other times they could be extremely elegant, filling my head with her hysteria; sentences that haunted me in dreams; they weren’t so much words I was deciphering as obscure signs, individual letters, or things crossed out; sometimes they were only stains, sometimes insects, intermingled and frenetic hybrid beings whose monstrous marriages crawled across the page, denying themselves to my intellect—that’s why I’d often get up in the middle of the night to reread the letters under my lamp’s orangey arc light, as if to make sure I hadn’t dreamed them; but no, I hadn’t dreamed them up, nor were they the fruits of my imagination, but still I was having trouble focusing, and in the end all I could make out were formless little corpses, sticky and shriveled-up pieces of flesh bathed in orange light.

36.
But at other times, I would hear this dark, dissonant music coming from nowhere, and it was as though I was reading in my mother’s discordant notes the echo of some funeral march.

37.
According to my father, the kind of thinking it took to renovate the villa wasn’t something you could do just anywhere, everything had to be just right; what was required was a carefully selected place, or even an ideal place, he’d added for my mother’s benefit. One day, they’d just shown up at the villa, without having the slightest idea how much time and effort would be required for its renovation. Their life had taken a decisive turn, they knew there was no turning back now—they knew the time for regrets was over. The day they’d arrived, they’d put all their furniture and other possessions into the vast ballroom on the first floor. They’d spent the following days sorting through a few things, opening and closing the cardboard boxes numbered with black marker, pushing the furniture this way and that—it was now essentially a furniture warehouse. They weren’t sure how long they would have to stay in that part of the villa. They organized their new life with every intention of not giving in to the inevitable disappointment that comes with a task as immense as their own. They’d have to get used to camping among the wrapped-up armchairs, the shafts of rolled rugs, they’d have to learn to live with the crates and cardboard boxes piled high.

38.
She couldn’t even listen to Messiaen or Fauré anymore, she was no longer able to indulge her musical impulses in the villa—these habits were broken for good. She would glance distractedly at her sheet music, turning the pages as though leafing through a book she wasn’t interested in. She would approach the piano. The movers had placed it in the middle of the ballroom, following my mother’s precise instructions. For several minutes my mother would remain dumbfounded in front of the instrument, wrapped in its thick gray blankets. The piano on which my mother had played and replayed Bach, Fauré, and Messiaen resembled a wounded pachyderm, sentenced to silence beneath its dusty jacket.

39.
The villa needed to be explored, each room paced back and forth in, every last corner rummaged through, in order to uncover that most propitious place for the work of thought.

40.
So she’d gotten into the habit of constantly quoting my father in her letters, letters signed with her name yet filled with sentences not her own, sentences she would put on like clothes perfectly suited to her taste and style, thus sentences spoken by my father, which my mother would memorize, and then scrupulously transcribe as soon as she was alone again in that part of the villa where she’d found a semblance of peace and security. And when I read these letters, I couldn’t be sure who their author was, of course I would recognize my mother’s writing and try to imagine her bent over the page, as focused as ever, as though playing the piano (I often thought), but I’d still harbor doubts about the origin of those sentences written by her, what secret score was my mother composing (I wondered)—she had to be terribly lonely to have filled up all these pages.

41.
The bedrooms weren’t all vacant, though. In fact, as my mother and father worked their way through the upper floors, they noticed that the number of objects and pieces of furniture left behind increased with each story they climbed, as if the previous owners, forced to leave in a hurry, had given up on emptying out the rooms upstairs. This gave us the uncomfortable feeling we’d broken into the villa, my mother had said, as though we were somehow trespassing. The majority of the bedrooms on the third floor contained only one shabby piece of furniture in a sorry state: a chair, a mattress lying on the floor, a table filled with glasses and vials, that’s all. They discovered neither photos nor traces of writing, there was no way of knowing anything specific about the bedrooms’ prior occupants, instead you had the vague sense of walking through a dormitory, of visiting rooms in a boarding house. In one of the rooms they found only an armchair, arranged slightly askew next to a window; it seemed its occupant could retake his place at any moment and continue his daydreaming just where he’d left off before exiting the room. More troubling still for my mother was the taste of the objects, their style, and the way the general layout varied from room to room, as if the various parts of the villa bore no relation to one another. She’d even thought perhaps the villa had been home to several boarders, boarders whose tastes and preoccupations were so different they’d all coexisted in complete indifference to one another, forming a kind of invisible community made up of disparate and singular parts, royally unaware of their fellow tenants, probably never speaking, communicating only through the unavoidable daily sounds of their mere presence. According to my father, the furniture and objects were without question part of the villa, it was impossible to distinguish between the villa and the things left inside it, which as a result now formed an integral part of the house—in certain respects, the house was already being lived in, or at least they would have to think of it that way for the time being. When we buy a house, and this house is not vacant as expected, we’re well within our rights to consider that everything inside it now belongs to us, and as a result we have to get used to the idea that we are now the owners of all these possessions, we must think of these possessions as our own, reflecting calmly on how we might put them to use, without making any rash decisions.

42.
At first glance, the layout of the bedrooms on the third floor followed a simpler plan, common to hotels and corporate apartments. The bedrooms facing north and south were situated on either side of a central corridor. The square footage, however, and even the height of the ceiling, seemed to vary noticeably from room to room, possibly an optical illusion due to the odd placement of the furniture, or the number and styles of the objects present. Still, as my mother and father went from room to room, they noticed differences of light and temperature so extreme as to give the impression the seasons had suddenly changed, they would get very hot and begin sweating only to be frozen from head to toe a few minutes later, they would shiver as though they’d just walked from summer to winter, their bodies subjected to harsh and unpredictable temperature fluctuations, and they said to each other that, in the future, they’d better bring a backpack with hats and sweaters and powerful flashlights.

43.
They began to pay close attention to their own reactions, listening for their heartbeats when they entered a bedroom, paying attention to the way the light affected their retinas. Their eyes half-closed, they would always exchange a few brief comments, as though they were testing the acoustics.

44.
Certain doors, which had been stuck closed the first time they went through the house, opened a week later with a simple push of a shoulder. All the doors in the attic were ajar.

45.
After she learned of these furnished rooms, my mother was constantly on edge; she was now convinced she would never be able to live normally in this house that seemed to grow bigger by the day, a house so immense she could never recall just how many rooms it had. These rooms and their furniture were giving her a guilty conscience, she’d said, they were keeping her awake at night. She was convinced each room was conceived for a specific purpose, furnished and decorated for staging a particular drama at a given moment in the life of a being she would never meet. She would open a door and immediately be submerged in a hostile universe, at once cold and arbitrary. She would experience a feeling of isolation, as though she were locked in a ship’s cabin, lost in the middle of the ocean. She would see a man’s jacket on a chair, and this abandoned article of clothing would haunt her thoughts, this individual thing among so many others would dispossess her of herself; the old jacket would come to life in the silence of a bedroom (someone had left it there), and all around the chair things would stir, one by one, things roused from their sleep, awakened by her mere presence, she’d thought, and now these things wanted her to notice and recognize them. And when she was asleep, these inhabited spaces would go on frightening her, and she would dream she was in a bedroom surrounded by strange and ugly pieces of furniture. In this room, everything was green and cracked and yellow. She would sit at a small vanity, opening the flasks, inspecting the contents of the small boxes. She would look up and contemplate her image in the mirror. Behind her, an unmade bed that was not hers. And on the ground, at her feet, women’s clothes covered the entire surface of the floor, forming a mosaic of multiple colors and fabrics, clothes that had been worn by someone no longer there and perhaps now dead. She was wondering why she’d scattered all these clothes on the floor, as she contemplated her work, speculating that she’d just committed some sort of sacrilege. She was wondering if these clothes might not be hers.

46.
On the fourth and fifth floors, things got really complicated.

47.
The plans left by the lawyer after they’d closed the sale were faulty, erroneous, even absurd. After having carefully examined them for hours, trying in vain to make a connection between the obscure indications found there and the actual layout of the villa, my father had destroyed these illegible plans, calling them architectural aberrations.