by André Aciman
Outside of that bookstore the uncanny questions had bubbled up before I could quell them: What was Rome without me? What would happen to Rome once I no longer lived there? Would it go on without me, Baudelaire, Lawrence, Lampedusa, and Joyce? One might as well ask what happens to life when we’re no longer there to live it.
I was like someone who comes back to life after being dead and finds traces everywhere of how naïvely he’d imagined death. For a moment, it was as if I had never been to America at all yet, as if all those years away from Rome had never happened. But I also felt like someone who comes back to life and has no recollection of death. I didn’t know whether I was here or there. I knew nothing. The pitch-dark center of hell is a cloud of unknowing where words are tongue-tied and where writing, as I discovered that evening, is useless. I’d settled absolutely nothing, and the work that remained to be done here hadn’t even started, might never start, was never meant to be.
I had been preparing myself for this return trip, even before leaving Rome. In those days it was going to be a permanent return. “This thing with America,” I’d imagined myself saying, “never really worked.” Being back would not hurt nor would it surprise me. By rehearsing failure in America, I had made my return to Rome seem easier, unavoidable, imminent, which in its turn made leaving for America seem a fantasy, an unnecessary whim almost, something that might never happen, could never happen, had yet to happen in an unreal and distant future that suddenly became less scary because I had found so many ways to deny it was ever going to happen.
Now I was back to a place I had never really left.
Correction: I was back to a place I was never coming back to again. Or if I were to one day, I’d come back on the number 85 bus—alone. And remember, among other things, coming here with my family. I told my wife and sons I was happy they had come with me. I told them it was good to come back, good to be heading back soon, good they didn’t let me come back alone. But I spoke these words without conviction, and would have thought I hadn’t meant them had I not grown used to the notion that speaking without conviction is how I speak the truth. What roundabouts, though, for what others feel so easily. Roundabout love, roundabout intimacy, roundabout truths. In this, at least, I had stayed the same.
My Monet Moment
The romance begins for me with a picture of a house by Claude Monet on my wall calendar. More than half the house is missing and the roof is entirely cropped. All one can see is an arched balcony with hints of another balcony on the floor above. Outside, wild growth and fronds everywhere, a few slim trees—palms mostly, but one agave plant stands out—and beyond, along a wide, unpaved road, four large villas and a dappled sky. Farther out in the distance is a chain of mountains capped with what could be snow. My instincts tell me there is a beach nearby.
I like not knowing anything about the house or the painting. I like speculating about the setting and imagining that it could easily be France, Italy, possibly elsewhere. I like thinking that I’m right about the wide expanse of seawater behind the house. I stare at the picture and fantasize about the torpor hanging over old beach towns on early July days, when the squares and roads are empty and everyone stays out of the sun.
The caption, when I finally cheat and find it at the bottom of the calendar, reads “Villas in Bordighera.” I’ve never heard of Bordighera before. Where is it? Near Lake Como? In Morocco? On Corfu? Somewhere in Asia Minor? I like not knowing. Knowing anything about the painting would most likely undo its spell. But I can’t help myself, and soon I look up more things, and sure enough, Bordighera, I discover, lies on the water, on the Riviera di Ponente in Italy, within sight of Monaco. Further research reveals the villa’s architect: Charles Garnier, famed for building the Opéra de Paris. Finally, the year of the painting: 1884. Monet, I realize, was still a few years away from painting his thirty-plus views of Rouen Cathedral.
I know I’m bit by bit demystifying the house. As it turns out, the Internet reveals more paintings of gardens and palm trees in Bordighera, plus one of the very same house. It is a copy of the image on my wall calendar, painted by Monet, not in Bordighera but later that same year in Giverny and meant as a gift for his friend the painter Berthe Morisot. The second painting, Strada Romana, depicts an identical view of the same unpaved road with villas farther off but with one exception: the large house built by Garnier is altogether missing. Monet might be playing at omitting the house only to have it resurface in another painting, trying the scene “now with,” “now without” the house. Monet might be interested in neither the house nor the road. All he cares about is the lull that settles on the Mediterranean around noontide and that he is not even sure he’s not making it up. Which is also why he needs to paint it. If it’s there, he’s captured it; if it isn’t, well, it’s there now. What he is looking to capture may be a shape, an arrangement of colors, a pattern, a rhythm, a perspective, an instantaneity, as he called it, or just the transit of light, which Monet frequently complains changes no sooner he attempts to paint it. It spells the difference between impressions of morning and noon.
* * *
Monet went to visit Bordighera for the light. His intended visit of a couple of weeks ended up lasting three laborious months in the winter of 1884. He had come the previous year with the painter Renoir for a brief stay. This time he was determined to come alone and capture Bordighera’s seascapes and lush vegetation. His letters were filled with accounts of his struggles to paint Bordighera. They were also littered with references to the colony of British residents who flocked here from fall to early spring each year and who transformed this fishing and agrarian sea town famed for its lemons and olive presses into an enchanted turn-of-the-century station for the privileged and happy few. The Brits ended up building a private library, an Anglican church, and Italy’s first tennis courts, to say nothing of grand luxury hotels, precursors of those yet to be built on the Venice Lido. Monet felt adrift in Bordighera. He missed his home in Giverny and Alice Hoschedé, his mistress and later wife; and he missed their children.
As far as he was concerned, Bordighera promised three things: Francesco Moreno’s estate, containing one of Europe’s most exotic botanical gardens; breathtaking sea vistas; and that one unavoidable belfry with its dimpled, onion cupola towering over everything. Monet couldn’t touch one of these without invoking the other two. Lush vegetation, seascapes, towering belfry—he kept coming back to them, painting them separately or together, shifting them around as a photographer would members of a family who were not cooperating for a group portrait.
If he was forever complaining, it may have been because the subject matter was near impossible to capture on canvas, or because the colors were, as Monet liked to say in his letters, terribly difficult—he felt at once entranced, challenged, and stymied by them. But it was also because Monet was less interested in subject matter and colors than he was in the atmosphere and in the intangible and, as he called it, the “fairylike” quality of Bordighera. “The motif is of secondary importance to me,” he wrote elsewhere. “What I want to reproduce is what lies between the subject and me.” What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere. Earth, light, water are a clutter of endless, meaningless things; art is about discovery and design and a reasoning with chaos.
In the end, perhaps, what Monet liked best of all was the ritual of painting, and what he wanted to capture was not just Bordighera but the ritual of painting Bordighera, perhaps in memory of the first time he’d seen Bordighera and had thought of painting it, or of the second, when he finally came with his easel and brushes, or of the third, when he realized that he liked painting this town more than he loved the town itself, because what he loved was more in him than in the town itself, though he needed the town to draw it out of him.
* * *
Many years after seeing the reproduction on my wall calendar, I finally happen upon Monet’s third painting of that very same house at an exhibition in the
Wildenstein gallery in New York. Same missing back of the house, same vegetation, same sky, same suggestion of a beach just steps away, except that the third floor, which is absent in the first two canvases, is quite visible here; one can almost spot the balusters lining the balcony. And there is another variation: in the background looms not the snowcapped mountains but Bordighera Alta—the città alta, the oldest part of the city—which like so many old towns in Italy is perched on top of a hill and predates the borgo marino on the shore. This inversion is also typical of Monet. He wanted to see how the scene looked from the other side.
I want to be in that house, own that house. I begin to people it with imaginary faces. A plotline suggests itself, the beach beckons ever more fiercely. Like a fleeing cartoon character painting escape routes on a wall, I find my own way into this villa and am already picturing dull routines that come with ownership.
* * *
Then one day, by chance, I finally find the opportunity to visit Bordighera and to see it for myself. I have to give a talk on Lake Como, so rather than fly directly from New York to Milan I decide to fly to Nice instead and there board a train to Italy. The bus from the airport to the train station in Nice takes twenty minutes, purchasing the train ticket another fifteen, and as luck would have it, the train to Italy leaves in another fifteen. Within an hour I am in Bordighera. The train stops. I hear voices on the platform. The door opens and I step down. This is exactly what I expected. Part of me is reluctant to accept that art and reality can make such good partners.
I don’t want a taxi, I want to linger, I want to walk to my hotel. Before me, leading straight from the small train station and cutting its way through the heart of the town, is a palm-lined avenue called the Corso Italia, once known as the Via Regina Elena. I’ve arrived, as I always knew I would, in the very early afternoon. The town is quiet, the light dazzling, the turquoise sea intensely placid. This is my Monet moment.
I’ve come to Bordighera for Monet, not Bordighera—the way some go to Nice to see what Matisse saw, or to Arles and Saint-Rémy to see the world through the eyes of van Gogh. I’ve come for something I know doesn’t exist. For artists seldom teach us to see better. They teach us to see other than what’s there to be seen. I want to see Bordighera with Monet’s eyes. I want to see both what lies before me and what else he saw that wasn’t quite there, and which hovers over his paintings like the ghost of an unremembered landscape. Monet was probably drawing from something that was more in him than out here in Bordighera, but whose inflection we recognize as though it’s always been in us as well. In art we do not see, we recognize. Monet needed Bordighera to help him see something he’d spot the moment he captured it, not before; we need Monet to recognize what we’ve long sought but know we’ve never seen.
My first stop, I tell myself, will be the house on the Via Romana, my second the belfry, and my third the Moreno gardens. Luckily, my hotel is on the Via Romana too.
As I walk, I cannot believe what I am seeing: plants and trees everywhere. The scents are powerful and the air pure, clean, tropical. Right before me is a mandarin tree. Something tells me the potted lemons are false. I reach out through a fence and touch them. They are real. A huge late-nineteenth-century building, surrounded by tall palm trees, sits on a hill where the Corso Italia runs into the Via Romana. I should have booked a room there instead. It turns out that what was once a grand hotel in the posh Victorian style is now the front entrance of an emergency room. This demotion annoys me; but the restoration work is impeccable, and the façade bears the lingering resonance of bygone times.
I force myself to think positively of the hotel I booked online. I even like the silence that greets me as I arrive and step up to the front desk. Upstairs, I am happy to find I have a good room, with a good-enough balcony view of the distant water, though the space between the hotel and the sea is totally obstructed by a litter of tiny brick houses of recent vintage. I take out clean clothes, shower, and, camera in hand, head downstairs to ask the attendant where I can find the Moreno gardens. The man at the desk looks puzzled and says he’s never heard of the Moreno gardens. He steps into the back office and comes out accompanied by a woman who is probably the proprietress. She has never heard of the Moreno gardens either.
My second question, regarding the house painted by Monet, brings me no closer to the truth. Neither has heard of such a house. The house is on the Via Romana, I say. Once again, the two exchange bewildered looks. As far as they know, none of the houses here were painted by Monet.
Monet’s Bordighera is gone, and with it, most likely, the house by the sea. On the Via Romana, I stop someone and ask if she could point me in the direction of the town’s belfry. Belfry? There is no belfry. My heart sinks. Minutes later I run into an older gentleman and ask him the same question. Shaking his head, the man apologizes; he was born and raised here but knows of no campanile. I feel like a Kafkaesque tourist asking average Alexandrians where the ancient lighthouse stands, not realizing that nothing remains of the ancient Greek city.
Yet, as I’m walking, suddenly something interesting appears within sight. It’s a huge building, yet another one of those immense hotels in the grand style. I’m sure they’ll know about the campanile, and Villa Moreno, and about Monet’s villa.
But the huge hotel building, which has Thomas Mann written all over it, is not only totally locked up but also in a shambles. The grounds have gone totally feral. The building is in tatters, its walls peeling, the windows broken in; even the windows are either gaping holes or their wooden planks are sagging and about to fall off. Those windows that have retained their old weather-beaten shutters are in no less parlous a state of decay; the balconies look as though they are ready to teeter, and their ancient banisters are reduced to a wasted filigree of rust so thin and flaky that they’d crack if you so much as brushed them with your pinky. One wonders what fowl and wild cats run free inside. Appropriately enough, the name of this large establishment is Villa Angst, once a luxury hotel, built and owned by a Swiss man.
Everything I look at here seems suddenly touched by the ghost of a beckoning past. This, it occurs to me, is not even a ruin. A ruin is a building that has died and stopped decaying. This one is crumbling still, has a few more years to go before extinction, still tussles with the specter of bitterness and shame on its ramshackle features. I don’t want to find Monet’s house if this is what has happened to it.
I walk away. The words Hotel Angst resonate ominously, though I am totally unable to fathom the meaning of the encounter. I have come looking for the source of art and find decrepitude instead. Everywhere I look now has suddenly acquired an air of irredeemable decay; I stare at Bordighera through a film that is no longer Monet’s; it’s my film, my mirror, my cipher now—perhaps my narrative all along. I feel like someone visiting the land of his ancestors for the first time. He knows better than to expect the spirit of lost forebears to rise up and lead him back to the old homestead. But he still hopes to connect to something. What he finds instead is wreckage and phantom lanes and a locked gate to a defunctive world.
* * *
From the Via Romana, I make my way back to the train station, where earlier I had spotted a few restaurants on the long seaside promenade called Lungomare Argentina, probably because Eva Perón loved it. Yet along the way—and I barely have time to realize it—there it is: the belfry I’ve been searching for. It looks exactly as in Monet’s paintings, with its glistening, mottled, enamel rococo cupola. The name of the church is Chiesa dell’Immacolata Concezione, built by none other than Charles Garnier. It’s probably the tallest structure in town. How could anyone not know what I was referring to when I kept asking about a campanile? I snap pictures, more pictures, trying to make the photos look like Monets, exactly as I did twenty minutes earlier when I stumbled upon a public garden with leafy dwarf palms that resemble those Monet painted in Moreno’s garden. An old lady who stops and stares at me suggests that I visit the città alta, the town’s historic center. It’s
not too far from here, she says, impossible to miss if I keep bearing left.
Half an hour later, I’m on the verge of giving up on the città alta when something else suddenly comes into view: a small hill town and, towering above it, another belfry with a bulbous cupola almost identical to the one I spotted on the chiesa by the shore. I can’t believe my luck. Bordighera, I realize, has not one but two steeples. The steeple in Monet’s paintings is not necessarily that of Garnier’s church by the marina but probably another one that I didn’t even know existed. Coastal towns always needed towers to warn of approaching pirate ships; Bordighera was no exception. A steep, paved walkway flanked by old buildings opens before me; I’ll put off my visit to the historic center and walk up to the top of this minuscule town instead. But this, it takes me yet another delayed moment to realize, is the città alta I came looking for. My entire journey, it appears, is made of uninformed double takes and inadvertent steps.
Bordighera Alta is a fortified, pentagon-shaped medieval town full of narrow, seemingly circuitous alleys whose buildings are frequently buttressed by arches running from one side of an alley to the other, sometimes creating vaulted structures linking both sides. Laundry hangs from so many windows that you can scarcely see the sky from below. The town is exceptionally clean—the gutters have been covered with stones, and the clay-tiled paving is tastefully inconspicuous. Except for a televised news report emanating from more than one window lining the narrow Via Dritta, everything here is emphatically quiet for so packed a warren of homes. As I make my way around the square, I see the Santa Maria Maddalena’s clock tower again, and to my complete surprise, once I step into a large courtyard that might as well be a square behind the main square, another belfry comes into view. Then a post office. A church. A barber. A baker. A high-end but tiny restaurant, a bar, an enoteca, all tucked away serendipitously so as not to intrude on this ancient but glitzified town. A few local boys are playing calcetto, or pickup soccer. Others are chatting and leaning against a wall, all smoking. A girl, also smoking, is sitting on a scooter. I can’t decide whether this town is inhabited by working-class people stuck on this small hill all year or whether the whole place has been refurbished to look faux-run-down and posh-medieval. Either way, I could live here, summer and winter, forever.