Villa Bunker (French Literature) (6 page)

67.
In the villa, my father could again devote himself to his passion, a passion that had remained intact all these years, and perhaps had even grown stronger, I imagined, owing to the simple fact that he’d completely stopped taking pictures in the intervening years; for some reason unbeknownst to my mother, he’d one day put the camera away, downgrading it to the category of useless objects that one keeps without knowing why. But now, armed with the camera again, he’d even given up his diligent inspections; he was apparently so engrossed in taking pictures that he’d completely forgotten about the renovation project. Like a weary tourist lost inside his own home, my mother had said, he would turn the camera in various directions, as one might an optical instrument, a second organ of sight capable of letting him see what his own eyes could not.

68.
He hadn’t lost his knack for taking the same picture again and again, always from the same angle, photos that only he could tell apart, once they were developed and arranged on a table so he could examine them closely. Each week, he would entrust my mother with several rolls of film, which she would take to the express lab in the shopping center where she bought groceries. Each week, she would wander the aisles of the grocery store, mechanically filling the basket while she waited for the photos to be ready.

69.
Was he planning to reconstruct a comprehensive view of the villa by gluing dozens of photos end to end? It’s quite possible he’d had this project in mind in the beginning, my mother said, but he must have given up on it later, pointing the lens at random, photographing almost without discrimination, without method, zooming in on a detail, tracking the smallest clue liable to put him on the path to a new discovery. During this same period, he’d brought out the old photo albums, and he would often talk to her about these family photos, carefully examining each one. The older we get, the dearer these photos are to us, he would say as he slowly turned the pages, as though they were the pages of some rare and precious book; in our eyes, these photos are worth more than the most precious work of art, they are our works of art, the only works that matter to us. One day we begin to doubt our memories, we realize that our memory is faulty and that most of what we remember is distorted, and since our memory is flawed, we decide to reject outright everything we remember, relying instead on photographs, which have become in our eyes the only true memories; we consult these photographic images more and more frequently, and by examining these photos in the light of our critical judgment, we forget our own memories—that’s why we’re so attached to photos of ourselves as children, and to ones of our parents, but we’re also just as attached to other family photos, and in a general way to every photo in our possession. It’s not unusual to find, among these family photos, pictures of people we can’t identify, beings we can’t name and who are strangers to us. We’ve glued their photos to the album’s pages, next to the other photos, and soon, after contemplating their image, we get to know these beings, who wind up almost becoming part of our family. A photo of a perfect stranger can make us think we know and understand this stranger’s personality, as though we had a relationship with the person depicted in this photograph. We come across a picture of a stranger and we are immediately engrossed and caught up in this stranger’s world, we begin to have a certain feeling about him, and we act as though we know this being from a prior period in our existence. Once we’ve looked at this photo carefully and immersed ourselves in it, we can no longer forget it, we don’t know who took this photo, and we don’t have any information about the person in it, we examine his clothes, relying upon their style to date the photograph, and more often than not we can’t even manage to track down the stranger’s name. This stranger’s name and personality have been erased, all that’s left is his image in an old snapshot, which we consider without being able to look away—and frankly we can no longer feel indifferent to this photo. The stranger in the photo can smile all he wants, but we aren’t fooled by this smile, we grasp right away that this stranger feels an infinite sadness; in a flash of insight, we get in touch with the stranger and read his thoughts as though in a book. So it’s impossible for us to destroy a photo like this, even when it’s out of focus and hasn’t come out right—that is the one sacrilege we refuse to commit. Destroying this photo would amount to a serious affront to the person found in the picture, it would be like a crime committed against this unknown person who has become in our eyes strangely familiar. And when all is said and done—after we have stared at these photos of some stranger or another—we turn our attention back to the photos of our parents, and we tell ourselves that they’re the ones who have become strangers, they’re the ones we now don’t recognize and who seem distant and strange. I realize the photos are of my parents, but I also realize that what I am looking at is not my parents, but rather actors or extras who merely resemble them; these people have put on my parents’ clothes and are simply imitating my parents’ gestures. And try as they might to look just like them, they aren’t my parents anymore, they are instead fictional characters with the grace and composure of immortal beings, they are two inaccessible beings striking a pose for eternity.

70.
By chance, she found one of the first snapshots of the villa on the floor, slid under a bedroom door. Had the photo fallen out of his pocket, or had he left it there intentionally? The photo reminded her of a bookmark left inside an old tome. It was, in my mother’s exact words, the first clear sign of an illness that had taken years to develop.

71.
So that in a couple of weeks, shots of the villa were piling up more or less everywhere. She used to find some on the ground, discarded, others tacked to the walls, on the doors. Interior shots in which she would recognize a bedroom, a bird’s-eye view from the top of the stairs. The photos quickly spread, like a disease. There were probably even more in the room at the top of the tower, she thought. The room must have been chock-full of photos, underexposed shots, crossed out, stained, strewn upon the floor, photographs arranged like tarot cards on the camping cot, she thought. She used to imagine my father leaning over the bed, examining each photo carefully as though with a magnifying glass, pointing to a detail, running his finger one way and then the other over each row of photos, as though trying to find the key to an enigma. The photos became stained and ruined. He used to sleep on them sometimes. He also used to wedge them under tables and chairs. And when a photo found favor with him, among the hundreds neglected and forgotten, he would glue it to a piece of cardboard, sometimes sketching in a frame around it with a ballpoint pen.

72.
But far from offering a stable, definitive image, something he could hold onto and store, the photos were having the opposite effect. Shot from every angle, the villa had seemed to fall to pieces, scattering to the four winds, lost beneath its infinite contours. It’s like the villa’s getting away from us a second time, my mother said.

73.
These fits, these bouts of illness were getting worse; they’d intensified during the course of their stay and had ended up becoming quite pronounced, first as isolated symptoms and then as outright illness, even grave illness.

74.
One day, when he was by himself in a bedroom on the third floor, opening a dilapidated armoire, he’d discovered the spiral staircase. The armoire (an antique) was likely to contain old, moth-eaten clothes, he’d thought, damp rough sheets; he has no idea what made him open the armoire, he wasn’t usually curious about the contents of old pieces of furniture, he was mostly content to look without touching, fearful that he would end up crushed under a rain of rubble and rotten planks. As a matter of fact, as he was opening the armoire’s large doors, he’d felt a cool breeze on his face, as though he were standing at the entrance to a mine, in front of its shaft. He might well have never noticed this secret passageway leading directly to the top of the tower, he explained later to my mother (at the time he was in a state of extreme agitation), and for good reason, it wasn’t just that the staircase was invisible, it didn’t figure in any of the plans, plans he’d studied many times before destroying them. Why had someone concealed this staircase, what secret could they possibly be hiding, questions nagging inside my mother’s head, while my father kept repeating that he’d found the ideal environment upstairs; my mother was unsure what he’d meant exactly by ideal environment (and she would probably never be sure)—she’d noticed my father’s extreme agitation and wondered if it wouldn’t be best to leave him to his ravings. She should go have a look, he would say, attempting to reassure her, speaking to her as to a frightened child—she couldn’t possibly imagine the significance of the discovery as long as she refused to follow him up the stairs and see for herself how the air up there was clean and pure. You win, she’d said, realizing she was fighting a losing battle. She finally agreed to follow him up the spiral staircase, in order to end the argument, in order to stop his agitation as well; she’d pushed open the baroque armoire’s heavy doors and she’d started climbing the stairs with unimaginable difficulty—more than once she’d almost missed a step and nearly fell, because of the dark, she said. He was already far ahead, she could hear his steps on the stairs, but her own legs weren’t responding, her limbs were heavy and stiff, she was having to make a concerted effort to put one foot in front of the other. She could feel a cool breeze on her face. Her steps were making a sharp cracking sound, the sound of tiny dead branches being broken (was she crushing a microscopic forest beneath her soles), it was impossible to make out the shapes around her, she was trying to imagine the surface she was stepping on, just dirty steps, covered with a thick film of dust or trash dropped over the years—she’d tried to count the stairs to slow her heartbeat, but that strange sound was growing louder with every step. Even the least slip or fall on the spiral staircase, she’d said, would spell certain death; she knew that of course, and at that moment she was convinced he was trying to kill her, or at least cause her accidental death. Climbing the spiral stairs was a real ordeal for her since she’d always suffered from vertigo, an ordeal that could have easily ended in tragedy; she’d been forced to stop on the stairs, she’d called for my father but he hadn’t answered, he’d already forgotten about her, he must have closed the door behind him after he’d entered the room. She ended up going back down on her hands and knees, she’d felt strange things under her hands as she went, the touch of a dry substance mixed with dust, not simply dust, but something desiccated and crumbly that was bothering her skin, perhaps causing a slight irritation—she’d immediately thought she would catch a skin disease, a rash, and she said to herself: I’m calling a doctor as soon as possible. She’d caught her breath at the bottom, unable to figure out how much time had elapsed, she’d gone up to a window to examine her hands, and seeing a crushed fly’s corpse in the crevice of her palm, she’d finally understood the cause of the uncomfortable sensation; she’d remained there staring at the mummified insect, its severed legs embedded in her palm, as though reading her future there in her open hand, the insect’s tiny dismembered body forming a lone word, but no matter how hard she tried, turning her hand toward the daylight, she was unable to decipher it.

75.
One thing was for sure, from the moment he’d set up his headquarters on top of the tower, in a tiny room filled with books and brochures and all the materials necessary for the work of thought, he’d stopped frantically measuring the villa, as though he’d given up for good the idea of making drawings based on actual measurements. Were we really supposed to believe that the air was somehow purer at the top of the tower, or that his lungs had found there something like a favorable amount of humidity, an atmosphere particularly suited to the work of the mind?

76.
In the tower reigns a silence suited to thought, he said, up there he can escape the sound of the waves and pursue his reflections under the best circumstances. He had finally found the ideal atmosphere, he said several times, he told himself he would finish his work right there, and that he wouldn’t leave the tower—where this ideal atmosphere reigns—until he’d put the final touches on his plans for the renovation. For some elaborate reason, which he is at a loss to explain, he has decided to stay holed up on top of the corner tower—to be honest, he spends most of his time up there, cut off from the rest of the villa and the world at large. At first it was merely well suited to his thinking, to his attempts to clarify matters, but now the tower’s atmosphere has—after several weeks of intense intellectual activity—become necessary, even indispensable to his endeavor to think through and explain, to his ceaseless work that sooner or later would allow him to discover the mathematics of the ideal villa, as he was fond of saying. If it wasn’t for this room at the top of the tower, he’d never have been able to move forward with his work, never have been able to develop all those useful ideas that were necessary for him to proceed with his plans—that’s why he’ll likely never leave the tower, which has become for him the site of his ideal life.

77.
Was his thought-work just an excuse to isolate himself? Still, there’s no denying he’d seemed increasingly strange since moving into the corner tower, irascible and unpredictable, as though he’d become a caricature of himself, my mother had said.

78.
And though it was seemingly built of the same materials, and according to the same principals of engineering that had guided the construction of the villa, the corner tower had always struck him as being separate in some way from the rest of the building—that it was built on the edge of a rock overlooking the sea was probably not unrelated to this impression. They couldn’t avoid it, nor figure out exactly how the tower was meant to fit in with the rest of the façade. But this sense of strangeness had only grown from the moment my father had—so to speak—set up his headquarters there, spending most of his time in this room at the top of the tower, where everything was askew, the objects and furniture having apparently come to a precarious arrangement. So his trips to the corner tower had become more frequent and lasted longer, the day he installed a cot recovered from one of the bedrooms on the third floor, my mother understood that he’d turned a corner and that there was nothing she could do to change his mind. From that day forward, he’d stopped wandering the villa, restricting his trips to a minimum; he’d become sparing with his own movements, measuring his words and breath as if henceforth his new life would obey a strict accounting. When she would enter that cramped room, she would feel threatened, besieged by the idea that she might disappear at any moment. She couldn’t help but think that he’d taken up residence there not to think but simply in order to get away from his own thoughts, he was cut off not only from the outside world there but from himself as well, the renovation project probably now amounted to little more than an empty murmur in his brain. He was following a completely different design, she couldn’t help but think, while still fearing that he might secretly have decided to get rid of her in order to achieve his ends. She thought she probably meant nothing more to him than a deformed reflection of an unjustifiable presence, each day receding more into the background, her presence rendered in part necessary by the habitual nature of her visits. And indeed every time she would get close to him and lean toward him, she would feel like he was staring—perplexed—at her soul, not just her image; my mother saw herself in my father’s eyes as a stranger.