Villa Bunker (French Literature) (5 page)

48.
In a room on the top floor, abnormally small pieces of furniture, as though they’d shrunk, or were built for dwarves.

49.
It was out of the question to store all that broken furniture, those out-of-order relics, in the basement. Chairs, jugs, broken dishes, empty suitcases, or rather suitcases filled with moth-eaten clothing—the basement was already full of rubbish from the past. A wheelchair, various canes, books swollen by humidity, old newspapers—the basement was so cluttered, so saturated with heavy and cumbersome prehistoric objects, it was virtually impossible to enter. She often said: It’s all got to go, destroy it all, but he never so much as answered—it’s possible he hadn’t heard my mother’s complaints, and was simply continuing his deliberations as though my mother hadn’t said a thing. She would’ve liked to sell all the furniture; even better, she would’ve loved to throw it out the window, light a fire in the front yard, and watch everything disappear in flames. He wouldn’t give her an answer, and she knew he would never allow the villa to be cleared out, he seemed attached to the furniture, convinced that they had to keep the villa just as they’d found it until the renovations could begin. Then, one day, he’d suggested they could make some money by selling the furniture, thus recouping part of the cost of the renovations, but he’d done nothing to make this happen, and would do nothing until he was done correcting the blueprints—this she’d known full well, she would have to get used to the furniture, get used to living in those dreary surroundings. In the meantime, my father was against altering the arrangement of the furniture, forbidding my mother to touch anything, he wasn’t even going to let her take down the wallpaper, he was issuing all sorts of diktats to which she would grudgingly submit. Everything is to stay exactly where it is. For months, maybe for years, my mother thought, the villa would remain exactly as it was, and they would do nothing to change it; on the contrary, they would do everything in their power to maintain the villa in the state in which they’d found it, being careful not to alter whatever it might be, attenuating by any means possible the effects of their presence, erasing their tracks as if to stop time.

50.
They had to repeat their inspections of the villa to get their bearings and familiarize themselves with the place. These successive and painfully slow trips had taken on a disturbing, exploratory quality. Each time, my parents would discover a new aspect of the villa, and a detail that had previously escaped their notice would suddenly spark their imagination. One day they were uncovering a hidden door that opened onto a string of strangely small rooms, the next they were discovering a tiny staircase that apparently led nowhere. They would try in vain to explain these anomalies, they were beginning to doubt the evidence of their senses, or they would blame their faulty memory. A crack detected in the ceiling of a bedroom, whose walls they’d already measured and carefully examined, could plunge them into deep confusion. Surrounded in sudden darkness at the end of a corridor, they would bump into a piece of furniture, trip over a broken object, and they would remark to each other that this object hadn’t been there the last time, each blaming the other for having moved it. They had to take along a flashlight in order to make their way through the parts of the villa that were without electricity. The extra batteries in my parent’s pockets reassured them, they would say to each other that they couldn’t get lost in the poorly lit villa, they had a light source and hours of battery life left. But in the darker areas, where it seemed the air was thinner, they still proceeded cautiously, feeling their way with their free hands. The poor state of the floors and windows, the strange changes in light from one room to the next, they smelled a trap at every turn. Even after having lived there for several weeks, they still felt as though they were wandering around inside a house no more familiar than on the first day; the house seemed more hostile with each passing night, and inside it they themselves felt like two perfect strangers.

51.
He would come and go in the villa the way thoughts come and go in an overworked brain, she said. She accompanied him sometimes, when he would ask her to. Was he afraid of getting lost? He took the same hallways, climbed the same stairs several times a day. They were two characters in a silent film, making uncertain, jerky movements, as though they were walking the deck of a boat in a storm. They would enter tiny rooms that would seem to contract even further around them, and their hearts would begin to race; they would rapidly inspect the walls while holding their breath, exiting again one or two minutes later, exhausted. There was intense cogitation going on in my father’s head, my mother had written, the gears were spinning, and she could tell that he was agitated. Jogging behind, she’d follow his outline through the corridors. She could see his thoughts just by looking at him from behind. They were racing through his head, she would say, each thought bumping into and nipping at the one before it, separated only by a thin partition.

52.
His slight smile as he poured the contents of an aspirin packet into a glass of water told her of his strange happiness. In moments like these, he seemed to get a mysterious pleasure out of lauding his own incomprehension.

53.
They were growing apart little by little, irresistibly, they almost never spoke to one another anymore, exchanging useless and empty comments when they did, and at first she was tempted to attribute this distance to the size of the villa, a house that was too big for them, she often thought, and which was keeping them from communicating normally, from living normally. Only when we know each room, and can situate it in relation to the other rooms, can we then inhabit a house, not before, my mother had said. When we don’t know how many rooms a house contains, inhabiting it is humanly impossible, living in such a house would soon make you sick. The sad state of the villa was making their stay more difficult, the villa was showing all the signs of being unsound, and in its present condition it had all the features, all the drawbacks of a vacant and condemned building. She’d imagined all kinds of potential accidents, due to the poor condition of the floors in certain rooms, and the lack of adequate lighting. She was afraid of getting lost, but it would be even worse to sprain her ankle or fall to her death in a stairwell—that’s why she’d restricted her movements to certain areas inside the house. But seeing as this decay had been at work for years, the villa was unlikely to be fazed by mere human attempts to refurbish it (that is what she was telling herself): It would remain an inhospitable and uninhabitable villa until the bitter end, no matter what their attempts to renovate it and make it to their liking, or simply better suited to their needs. She’d often thought of those elated home owners who end up hanging themselves from a metal beam, men and women who had lived for years with the dust, surrounded by rubble and plastic tarps, people who had done the rounds of all the banks and building contractors, and who in the end gave up on living in this house, which had closed in upon them like a carnivorous plant, sucking away their strength, killing their hopes—the following words could often be found in their pockets, on notes scribbled by way of apology: We hate this house (words they’d screamed in their heads hundreds of times before the end of their days).

54.
Various alterations in my father’s physiognomy: At times he seems extraordinarily old, at others extremely juvenile. His wrinkles seemed to disappear, then reappear, and even his skin tone apparently changed as he made his way through the house. Like a surface sensitive to the influences of its environment, sensitive to the subtle variations of temperature and light in the rooms and corridors through which he wandered without purpose, my father’s changing face seemed to fall prey to this erratic weather. My mother used to stare at that climatic face of his, thwarted in her efforts to arrest its image in her memory.

55.
She’d examined the clothes she found, turning over the collars in hopes of reading a name there, or finding a clue, which might have finally settled the matter.

56.
It was as though the villa were growing, expanding gradually, constantly. The rooms were multiplying, forming something like a long snakelike dwelling space, whose coils extended over several floors. My mother and father were still getting lost, and their almost daily forays weren’t exactly helping, the villa was like a Chinese puzzle, my mother said, an unsolvable puzzle whose pieces refused to fit together, a game of patience seriously testing their nerves, forcing them to go around and around in circles. You should have seen them, my mother scurrying after my father (he’d picked up the pace on their daily trips). The more they inspected the villa, the more difficulty they had finding their way and getting their bearings. At any moment they could feel as though they were in the middle of nowhere, even when they were in the ballroom. But the dread was even worse when it would catch them alone, by surprise. My mother would try to concentrate on a book and suddenly she would become giddy at the thought that the room she was in was separate, isolated from the other rooms; she would have to go see for herself, she would turn the doorknob, darting a nervous glance outside, as though she were expecting to find herself on the edge of a cliff. If you ask me, they were victims of an architectural curse.

57.
He was moving faster and faster, barreling down the hallways, opening and closing the doors, giving the rooms a quick once over, estimating at a glance the size of the bedrooms, length and breadth of the corridors, the height of the ceilings and steepness of the stairs, the incidence of light at this or that time of day, and the consequences thereof. And after nightfall, when he was about to fall asleep, new doors would open in his brain; he would climb stairs in his head, visiting the bedrooms one by one in a depressingly predictable order, inspecting his memories the way one mechanically shuffles a deck of cards, double checking the placement and size of each room, all the while still wandering through his dream villa, as though it were the backdrop for a play.

58.
The relative placement of the furniture, the arrangement of a table and chairs, the number of armchairs and the incline of their backs, the amount of space between the shelves, faded rectangles left behind by paintings now taken down; the precarious arrangement of objects, flasks around the sink, makeshift knickknacks on makeshift sideboards and end tables, a pink rubber glove partially turned inside out on the rim of the tub. My father had spontaneously begun taking notes in a small notebook that he’d carry around with him everywhere. At his request, my mother would aim the flashlight at the point of his pencil, all the while trying in vain to make out his jumbled writing. What use did he hope to make of these annotations?

59.
They would hear noises coming from upstairs. Sometimes the villa was like someone sleeping, someone who might twitch a few times in the night, trying to wake up, but who then falls back asleep.

60.
He’d begun to mistrust his memory. He was convinced the villa was changing each day, taking advantage of their time asleep, or even a moment’s distraction, to give birth to a new room, or to alter the layout of the premises. He would enter a room through one door one day, only to discover another door to the same room the following day, and this change in perspective would make him think he was in a different room entirely. He would inspect the walls, check the height of the ceiling, contrast the variations of light “here” as opposed to “there.” The rooms in the villa were like memories, he’d commented. When each time we remember something, we take a different path to it each time we recall it, and in this way each memory ends up eventually leading us to the same thing—but at the same time each new memory makes the journey longer.

61.
There was a simpler explanation, however. They’d noticed that walls had been put up all over the place, probably in an attempt to partition the space of the villa into more rooms by making each individual room smaller. These walls—which had leaped up everywhere, to excess, subdividing the existing rooms—had systematically altered the dimensions of the living space, so as to make it (by accident or design) uninhabitable. It was no surprise that the overall plan of the villa seemed so complicated. Moreover, these new walls made it difficult to access certain rooms. This architectural aberration, my father had said, could only be the product of a sick mind. The man responsible for these walls had likely suffered from some pathological need for isolation.

62.
Or perhaps he was a psychologist who liked observing the behavior of rats in a maze.

63.
They would sometimes have to go through several windowless adjoining rooms, rooms which were like cells in a prison or an asylum, before finding daylight again. In these rooms light was provided by rudimentary fixtures at best, probably not up to code. And when they would flick the switch, a bare bulb would spill harsh light on their heads. Frayed extension cords ran along baseboards with chipped paint.

64.
It seemed the journey would never end.

65.
Were his senses playing tricks on him, when he would enter a bedroom and recognize the furniture, was he really standing in the bedroom he thought he was in, as he calculated the square footage and rearranged the furniture in his head; had he really perceived something when he knew full well that come evening he wouldn’t be able to locate this room again, nor recall through which corridor he’d traveled to get there? Come evening, he would have trouble saying if the room existed at all.

66.
She’d recognized the camera immediately, an old model that she’d thought lost or broken. And it’d actually looked like a makeshift toy, completely ridiculous, my mother said, the strip of tape wound around the base of the lens had only added to the sense that it would never take a clear picture. The camera, she’d said, had hardly looked like a real camera, but instead was like a crude copy, completely lacking the qualities required of a piece of photographic equipment—that’s why at first she’d thought my father wasn’t really going to take pictures, but instead was only playing a trick on her. Seeing the camera, my mother had winced; she remembered my father taking pictures, remembered how manic he had gotten, in the old days, bringing out his camera at the slightest instigation, in order to capture this or that scene. She’d seen his face from long ago, that sweet and frantic face he made while adjusting the lens, and she’d remembered how posing for his shots always took forever. He used to take dozens of portraits of her, giving her directions, how she should stand, what expression she should have, he would speak to her as though she were a model, and he a professional photographer, giving her added direction and suggestions so the picture would be perfect, but in the end all he ever got out of her in these sessions was irritation. She would tell him she was through with these shoots, shoots that she found as grotesque as they were exhausting; she would declare—as she had so many times before—that she didn’t want to be his model anymore, that he could just go get himself a professional model if the photos weren’t to his liking, yes, and while he was at it he could find somewhere else to practice his talents, too—that’s what she would repeatedly tell him, all the while posing, that is until my father finally had to give up photographing her, abandoning portraiture for landscape photography, but my father wasn’t deterred, far from it, he’d started taking even more photos now that he was free to train his lens on the motif of his choosing. Every detail was apparently worth his trouble, every situation deserving of immortalization in my father’s eyes. Absolutely anything would find favor in his photographer’s gaze, some small detail that would’ve appeared banal or pointless to anyone else constituted for him something worthy of being locked inside the camera obscura. For my father, the visible world was a warehouse of images, images of things that he had to capture, as though to make sure that these things really existed—at least that’s what I think now. Truth is, my mother had never been able to stand the constant presence of his camera, and she’d gotten in the habit of systematically objecting whenever my father would point the lens in her direction—purely formal objections, I often thought. My mother used to hate to have her picture taken, in any case that’s what she would always maintain—and I thought about all the times my mother had tried to flee the lens with a wave of her hand, and all these times made up a single image of her, a photograph of my mother pushing the lens away with her hand, an image that’s engraved in my memory, I thought, and which exists only there. And when faced with the camera that had been missing for years, now suddenly resurfaced and in my father’s hands, thinking back to all those useless photos my father had taken of us, my mother could only have put her hand in front of her face again, instinctively obeying the irresistible and irate impulse lying intact inside her; yes, twenty years after the fact, how could she have done otherwise, my mother had once again escaped the lens, I told myself, and the photo would again be blurry.