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.
21. Perhaps my mother had taken up writing in order to block out the noise, I thought, looking at her letter. I was holding it in my hand (it was the first time I’d ever received a letter from my mother), I’d carefully inspected the handwriting on the envelope, I was still looking at the letter itself; there was no need to read it to know what was inside, and I knew then I would be receiving more letters just like it, letters containing all sorts of information about my mother and the life she was leading in that villa, letters which would let me know how my parents were doing in their seaside retreat. She’d lo
cked herself up in a remote bedroom, and in the privacy of this now-cherished room my mother was able to collect her thoughts as tranquilly as possible for her first letter. I was imagining her sitting in a chair, her head bent, her back ramrod straight, considering her words calmly before scribbling them on the page in her childish and crude handwriting, the handwriting of someone who hasn’t written for ages, I thought at first, or rather that of someone who is afraid to write, and who at the same time feels the suppressed rage lurking behind all those signs on the page, signs that represent a kind of power in the process of being born; I could easily imagine her satisfaction with this, I knew that, from now on, she’d be hooked; with this thirst for a newfound power in words, she was going to find her way back whenever possible to the small, dimly lit room where she felt safe; there she would compose the rest of her letters, wrapped in the same silence, and she would again gauge the effect she might have, as though weighing her words upon some lunatic scale, perhaps even imagining my face as I read her sentences: She would see my expression, by turns annoyed and anxious, laughing at my confusion and concern as she continued to compose, still as absorbed and determined as ever, applying herself like a studious, stubborn schoolboy, yet still incapable of quelling her nerves or controlling her actions—that’s why she won’t be able to stop her hand from scribbling more and more ungainly, more and more deformed words, words that will look, themselves, like bundles of nerves, metastases, then entire sentences written in a frenzy that will grow from the unreadable body of her text. The above is what I told myself later, turning the envelope over repeatedly in my hand, looking in turn at my hand, which was holding the envelope, and then at the envelope itself, as though I couldn’t accept that both could be real at once.
22. Still, the ample dimensions of the ballroom had allowed them to store their furniture and all of their belongings on the first floor; they were able to set up headquarters in this one room alone, and right away. They’d figured initially that the renovations would only take a few weeks, which is why they thought it more practical to put all their furnishings in the ballroom, arranging the cardboard boxes in such a way as to create separate subspaces. However long the renovations take, they’d thought, they could easily camp out in the ballroom until the work was finished, without worrying about feeling cramped. Given its size, the ballroom could easily accommodate their furniture, as well as function as sitting room, bedroom, and kitchen, or anything else you might imagine, such were the practical if disturbing storage options provided by the room. So, from the start, they were no longer residing in a room, but rather a giant storage facility containing dozens of pieces of furniture, moving boxes full of clothes and other possessions, in short a warehouse whose capacity seemed endless. A ballroom that had originally been intended for receiving guests was transformed in a matter of hours into a storage space stuffed with cardboard boxes; still, they never forgot their first impression of the room, and despite the familiar mess of oddly arranged furniture and boxes piled high, they retained this memory of a stately salon whose atmosphere was both cold and majestic. In the past, the gigantic chandelier hanging in the middle of the room had likely lit sumptuous furnishings arranged in a room meant for giving parties, a room that had once resonated with the sounds of Viennese waltzes, but at present this light was flooding down on our furniture in a jumble, and the dozens—or rather hundreds, my mother had quickly corrected herself—of cardboard boxes piled in the four corners of the vast room. I couldn’t stop worrying that our stay in the ballroom, meant to be temporary, might drag on and on, my mother had written, that it could become permanent, that the sight of the boxes and oddly arranged furniture would become constant and immutable—in short, a depressing scene. All they had to do was look into the ballroom, she’d written, and in one glance they could see all their possessions gathered together as though for a still life. Everything we possess, everything we will possess, displayed in one place, all of it exposed to the eye as in a museum. The sight of their furniture, not to mention the various objects that had been removed from boxes and placed on the dusty floor, had more than once made her feel sick; she’d felt hemmed in on all sides, surrounded by the multitude of objects summing up their life together. She’d remarked that they’d have to find a place for it all, she’d have to think for hours in order to find the right spot for each object. She was there inside this loneliness, waiting gloomily among all these things that sent her back to their former life together, she held court in the midst of their property, striking a pose, both resolute and puzzled, as if on display herself, in an invisible case among those objects. She had a feeling she wouldn’t be leaving the ballroom, she sensed she’d become a prisoner inside her own life.
23. My mother hid the fact she was writing these letters, not because she felt guilty about it, nor was she concerned about what my father would think if he found out (she’d never much cared about my father’s opinion, nor about anyone else’s for that matter), rather she’d always preferred deeds performed surreptitiously to those left in the light of day. My mother had always had a taste for secrets, and she’d always acted in the most secretive way possible, making of secrets a veritable religion, encouraging their cultivation whenever possible. And thanks to her, ever since I was a child, I shared this propensity for secrecy, this intractable, quasi-pathological compulsion; I grew up in a difficult and guilt-ridden environment, I was convinced that something, everything needed to be hidden, I too felt the need for secrets.
24. The individual characters on a page: just as wild as ever, as though they’d fallen or been dropped like bombs on the sheet of paper; that first letter almost looked like a devastated cemetery, with graves unearthed, crosses toppled.
25. And later, still not having read the letter, I wondered if I shouldn’t tear it up, or at least stick it in a drawer somewhere (just until I decided what to do with it); I could also have slipped it into a book taken at random from my shelf, that way putting off reading it until who knows when, but instead I weighed it in my hand again, an archeologist’s careful gesture, as if I was holding a relic freshly exhumed from an Egyptian tomb. And honestly I couldn’t even be sure the letter was addressed to me, and there was no way of knowing for sure, since the name written on the envelope was illegible and distorted, as if her hand had been trembling as she formed the letters, and I told myself my mother had been tempted, for some reason, to write another name in place of mine. For a long time I contemplated the jumpy edges of the letters, their rapid, uneven strokes, I guessed at the rage behind her movements, her relentlessness in writing to me, wondering if she was capable of faking such a frenzy, wondering whether my mother was at least aware that I was the one she was writing to—I couldn’t even be sure of that. Well, she’d certainly written whatever name it was in a tormented and hostile script, one that acted immediately on my nerves, so in the end I decided that the name was my own.
26. Well, of course, I’d unsealed the envelope, I’d opened the letter, since I was convinced it was meant for me after all, but I’d still read the opening lines with a kind of superstitious mistrust, all the while wondering if I wasn’t making a serious mistake, and I had the uneasy feeling I was myself acting somewhat suspiciously, as though I was guilty of something, I even had the nagging conscience of a guilty person. My heart pounding, I’d turned the pages, not daring to decipher what was written there, that’s why I’d been careful to first remove my glasses, my myopia for once protecting me from the world, from its harshness, from its too precise contours, I’d skimmed the pages like a bomber on a reconnaissance mission, flying low over the devastated ground, but I’d noticed the letters scribbled on the page were getting larger, as if my mother had anticipated my ploy, as if, to annoy me, she’d wanted to drive her sentences into my head, and so now I had no choice but to read them: I was seeing the swollen sentences, feeling their hostility—they were like warnings, like alarm bells going off in my skull. I then said to myself, once they grow past a certain size, all words sta
rt to look like insults.
27. Has my mother figured out that my dissertation on Foucault is at a standstill, or does she think she’s the only one fighting a losing battle? She didn’t mention my dissertation in the letter, I know she’ll never bring it up, she acts like it doesn’t exist. I can’t concentrate (I still haven’t written the first word), but notes keep piling up on my table. I’m killing myself taking notes, rereading them, underlining and crossing out, yet the pointlessness of this busywork continues to haunt me. I bet she would be thrilled to see me like this, sitting at my desk, depressed and at loose ends, unable to write even a single line.
Villa Bunker (French Literature) Page 2