Villa Bunker (French Literature)

by Brebel, Sebastien

  82. And little by little, his almost insignificant quirks, which took the form of forgetfulness, losing things, and occasional outbursts of anger, were rearranged into symptoms of a profound derangement.

  83. Once he’d decided to set up shop there, he never wanted to leave the room, as though he feared someone might gain access in his absence. Was he afraid she might disturb his notes, was he hiding something from her? His schedule, his habits, his infrequent movements, the way he could make her understand him without moving his lips: she guessed that from now on his movements would be economical and painstakingly planned. He stuck to a careful set of coordinates, which probably allowed him to maintain a semblance of control in the face of a deeper disorder. Yet she’d done nothing to dissuade him from altering his life in this way, speaking and acting in his presence as though nothing had changed; since she too was convinced the villa would close in on them like a trap if she showed the slightest sign of weakness.

  84. And indeed he felt like he was leading an entirely abstract existence, one that was separate from her own, for he was lost in a world of thoughts, of sounds and sensations that bore no relation to her world, and which weren’t even distant allusions to the thoughts she was having, to the sounds and sensations she was experiencing, and in those moments when she would join him in the tiny corner bedroom, which almost hung on the edge of the world outside the villa itself, it was as though she was there to make certain he was still alive, to make sure she could recognize his voice when he criticized her or complained, but neither the brightness of his wide-open gray eyes nor the features of his face could convince her that she was with him. At moments like this she wouldn’t know if she was his wife or rather a nurse keeping up a strained relationship with a stranger, hopelessly trying to maintain a banal and rambling conversation whose structure was threatening to collapse with each new sentence, but at the same time she was sure they were fighting a common enemy, thinking I’m not going to stop fighting, I’m not going to give up on him, convinced that they were both confronting the same existential difficulty—she was finding it comforting to behave with him as she would a sick child.

  85. That’s why, once it was clear he wasn’t coming out of his den, she’d opted for raising indoor plants. Besides, she’d found on the premises—in the basement of the villa—all the tools necessary for their cultivation. Her trip to the basement, flashlight in hand, hadn’t been in vain; far from it, since she’d discovered dozens of flowerpots among the jumble of prehistoric, broken-down things, and a collection of seed packets, sealed away in hermetic metal boxes, in glass jars marked with labels now eaten away. Exploring basements was never disappointing, she said, it could even be highly instructive—as proof she’d even uncovered several treatises on botany, as well as diverse scientific works dealing with the vegetable world. It was always amazing what you could store in basements and cellars, objects that would dwell for years tucked away down there—that’s what she’d always thought. You’d sometimes find entire libraries, hundreds, sometimes thousands of books stored under a house in conditions disastrous for their preservation. The high levels of humidity typically found there causes books to decay, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but always without fail. She’d grabbed the botany book and continued to search around, convinced that there were other treasures to be found in the cellar. Basements, she’d said, can conceal all kinds of things, for the most part broken and useless, but sometimes you find things that are perfectly fine, objects that could wind up being incredibly valuable to the person who finds them. One day these objects ceased to be useful and, as a result, they became something that’s only in the way, which is why it was decided to put them in cellars and basements. It’s impossible to imagine a house without a basement, just as it’s absurd to want to dig a cellar without a house. All these objects that have lost their usefulness sink into oblivion in cellars, their common fate is to be forgotten, forgotten in cellars that form a parallel universe under apartment buildings and houses, whose existence most people never suspect. These objects are liable to remain forgotten for years, and then suddenly they’ll be rescued from oblivion by some circumstance, an unexpected event that allows them years later to regain their function and escape being forgotten. The objects warehoused in the villa’s basement were of no use to anyone, yet, nonetheless, someone had kept and stored them under the villa, on basement shelves, in damp boxes.

  86. She’d fetched the pots, arranging dozens of them, of various shapes and sizes, around the outside of the villa—artistically—so that the rain could rinse them off; and while she was waiting for the rain to do its job, she’d deciphered the names of plants, the warnings on packets, and without delay she’d immersed herself in the treatise on botany. She’d turned the damp pages of the book she’d brought up from the basement, taking advantage of the moment to develop and perfect her understanding of nature, and more precisely of plants, assimilating the name and characteristics of each species of plant—and so, thanks to the botany treatise, she was able to accumulate all the knowledge necessary to realize her gardening project. A few days later, she’d arranged the flowerpots and window boxes at various strategic places inside the villa, places she’d determined in advance by taking into consideration the ideal lighting conditions for each species. She’d placed different-sized flowerpots on the windowsills and in the bay windows, still going about things like an artist, not simply according to scientific principals, as she made sure to point out. Thus she’d taken advantage of the numerous windows and other light sources in the villa in order to cover each floor with dozens of flowerpots, in this way she’d created an indoor greenhouse, transforming the entire villa into a botanical garden in a matter of weeks. She would wander the villa each day, armed with gardening implements and botanical precepts, going into rooms to check her flowers’ growth—and the villa’s corridors had become garden paths that reached across many floors. She’d watched over her crop with the severity of a boarding-school mistress, looking after each potted plant as though it were a tiny being—threatened in some way—that she was supposed to protect with all her skill. Several times a day, she would lean over a particular plant as though at the bedside of a sick child demanding her care and constant attention. She was totally devoted, attentive to each plant’s growth, as if her own existence depended on it.

  87. For weeks, this activity had effectively taken up all of her time; she hadn’t thought of anything else for weeks, and she was finally able to ignore and forget all the unpleasantness of her new existence. As long as she was devoting herself to the task of planting and gardening, she was able to turn a blind eye to the villa’s faults, and more or less acclimate to living there—she’d been granted a respite, at last she’d been able to reside comfortably in the villa, without being tortured by the ugliness of the worn wallpaper or the sight of cracks in the ceiling. And as it turns out, after a few weeks the results were greater than she could have hoped for, her plants had grown remarkably. It seems the villa had encouraged the plants to grow, to the point where it was almost inconceivable—the villa had become a giant greenhouse. The plants, she’d said, were showing that she was capable of incredible things. Certain plants had reached extraordinary and unexpected dimensions, greedily absorbing the window’s light; she was transfixed by these plants at first, their hues taking on variable intensities depending on the time of day, they would exude these dreamlike images, she’d said, visions she couldn’t quite describe. She’d felt a certain pride at being the author of these dream visions, and in the beginning at least the growth of the plants had reawakened her aesthetic impulse. But the success of her crops soon turned sour. She’d become dizzy on several occasions and she was tempted to attribute these spells to the different subtle scents emanating from the various plants. She’d developed a hypersensitivity to smells, and she’d begun to fear that each plant’s fragrance was delivering a coded message, the toxicity of which was growing by the day, or perhaps hour. It wasn’t long before the sight
of the lush indoor plants had become a negative influence; she’d felt oppressed, and she’d been frightened to see just how far this invasion would go, to the point where she was beginning to think someone was playing a trick on her by adding even more plants while she wasn’t looking. The vegetation was always in her thoughts, she used to wake up in the middle of the night thinking she could hear foliage rusting in the villa, she would listen carefully in the dark and she would think she could hear leaves knocking against the windows and doors. The leaves were forever shuddering, she’d thought, as though expressing some kind of terrible exaltation. And she’d imagined a heart was beating inside every plant, a tiny obstinate heart, always demanding more oxygen, more light. During the day, her eyes were in the habit of looking for this rustling, and every time she would enter a room an unfathomable fear gripped her—she was convinced the plants would start shaking the moment she came in, and to her the leaves were so many tongues—hundreds or even thousands of little sardonic tongues, looking to lick her body. She decided to give up gardening, overnight; she poured bleach in the pots, feeling strangely happy to administer the poison, she wasn’t even brave enough to dispose of the dead flowers, she couldn’t bear to hear another word about plants.

  88. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even sure who was worse off, my mother or my father. Even in her first letter, she’d sounded depressed to me, like a depressive, hunted by something malicious. And you know I wasn’t even that surprised, since I’d always known deep down that my mother was somewhat prone to melancholy. A depression that had taken its time before making its move, or so I was telling myself, employing various ruses and diversions so as to go unnoticed, growing quietly in the dark, until one day you have no choice but to see yourself in it.

  89. She was sitting in the armchair, the one covered in threadbare mustard velvet, while all around her pots containing wilted flowers were forming a magic circle. She was aware just how ugly and uncomfortable this chair was, without quite being able to get up. She would have liked to not touch the chair, her elbows tight against her body, her spine a few centimeters from the back, knees held together and ankles crossed beneath her, so as to touch the floor with only the toe of a slipper, completely focused on her efforts to take up as little space as possible. She would have liked to close her eyes and wake up somewhere else, as though it were all a bad dream—then she would just have to get up and take a shower, and with clean, fresh-smelling clothes against her skin, she would be ready right away to resume a normal life. But she was still muttering to herself that they’d stolen it all, that all this furniture, that the villa’s contents would never belong to them. She was worried her belongings were getting mixed up with these things that had belonged to strangers, strangers who were perhaps now dead—one day her own effects might end up the same way. She was afraid her things were becoming infected, contaminated through contact with this worn-out stuff. She dreamed of leaving for a safe place, someplace pristine where she could wash her hands, take a shower, put on fresh clothes.

  90. When she found the keys just hanging there, on a nail in the closet under the stairs, she’d immediately thought of the abandoned bedroom on the second floor—this thought had crossed the dark closet like a spark. Since finding the bedroom door locked that first day, they hadn’t tried to open it, they had never mentioned the room again and never once had they tried to get inside; they’d acted as though the room didn’t exist and they’d actually managed to forget about it. How could it be that she’d only noticed the keys now, each week she would stack cartons of water under the stairs; despite his reassurances, she’d never been able to drink the tap water—no, she wouldn’t have drunk that water for anything in the world, water she still thought infected, a carrier of germs and disease. Without thinking, she’d grabbed the keys and climbed straight to the second floor; she’d acted on a sudden impulse, as though she already knew what she would find there—at least she wasn’t afraid, or anxious; gripping the keys in her hand she’d slipped on a step, and as in a dream she’d suddenly found herself in front of the door, she’d grabbed a key at random, there were all kinds of different keys, flat keys, old-fashioned round keys, covered in rust, but she’d found it on the first try, and with the key now in the lock, it was all she could do to stifle a scream, meanwhile the door had opened almost by itself, and as in a dream she’d entered; the first thing she’d noticed was the hospital smell, a neon bulb was emitting a uniform light, this light had switched on just as she had turned the doorknob, she thought. She’d proceeded cautiously, looking around at walls the color of gray sand. There was nothing to discover here: no clue, no crack. The smooth walls made it seem as though the room had just been repainted. And perhaps because of the impeccable cleanliness, the uncharacteristic odor, she’d felt far away from everything, sealed inside a watertight world, with thick bulkheads, having forgotten the secret code to the metal door she’d unlocked on the way in.

  91. Then, looking down at the floor (she didn’t know how long she’d been there), she discovered a row of jars, dozens, perhaps hundreds of transparent jars, all the same size and diameter, each containing a reddish liquid, the color of bricks. The level of the liquid varied imperceptibly in each jar, so that the whole formed a diminishing wave: a kind of indoor oceanic garden, she thought, a sterile wave, biopsied and captured (as though for observation in a lab), cleverly divided among the receptacles arranged on the polished floor. A disturbing arrangement at that: The preserved wave, motionless, arrested in its movement, seemed to span two moments in time separated by an abyss. And this liquid, probably a pharmaceutical solution, but who knows, it could also be unstable and corrosive, perhaps even explosive if you shook it or it came in contact with air. The reality of what she saw didn’t seem to want to register in her, she was having to concentrate to preserve it, so that the sight would be etched in her. And because she was having difficulty assembling this image, her experience of it lacked a unified tonality, as though separated by a pane of emotions, desires, deep inside her: as though she were seeing the wave in some forgotten distance.

  92. In her moments of exhaustion or boredom, she would find it a relief to think about the laboratory bedroom. She’d imagine the rigid discipline, the bittersweet control found in careful, precise gestures, those belonging to the person who had arranged the jars, poured the brick-red liquid, being careful not to spill a drop, noting an infinitesimal difference in the level from one jar to the next, pouring out the excess liquid when necessary, measuring a new amount, perhaps redoing the operation several times over, until the perfect amount was reached. She would always see the scene in black and white, and the images would appear to jump, as in a silent film, disturbing the calm order of the gestures, producing an uneven cadence, like that of a heart. Wiping each jar first with a coarse cloth to eliminate all traces of dust and fingerprints (but surely he was wearing rubber gloves), then pouring the sterile preparation, taking stringent precautions, using measuring vials of various sizes, bending down to the floor to check the level, almost kneeling as though in prayer, and placing the jar in its precise place, determined to the nearest millimeter, repeating the identical operation without once departing from his self-possessed manner. He’d likely proceeded just as calmly when sculpting this lone wave, as though he were performing a ritual, a scalpel’s precision delineating each movement within a monotonous succession, held taut by secret threads.