Villa Bunker (French Literature) (3 page)

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 locked 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 start 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.

28.
The degree to which these letters were a distraction from her boredom and loneliness, I couldn’t guess; all I could figure out was, given the frequency with which they arrived, and their length, she’d found in them a favored and perhaps necessary activity. In any event, a writing frenzy had clearly taken hold of her, and she’d given in to this epistolary penchant without the least hesitation. Each letter was supposed to describe the progress of the work being done on the villa, and the pages were indeed crawling with architectural details relating to the villa’s renovation. She was utilizing the specialized vocabulary of architects and builders, and she often resorted to certain impenetrable terms of art, clearly getting great satisfaction from her use of such technical language. My mother included all kinds of superfluous details, she would pile into each letter a wealth of minutia in hopes of describing the villa as precisely as possible, but this only gave rise to more confusion.

29.
The remodeling of the villa couldn’t possibly start immediately. Such an undertaking, my father had said, required careful study and oversight, well in advance. Such an undertaking couldn’t be taken lightly, without forethought; on the contrary, it demanded the utmost seriousness and a well-developed methodology. Several weeks, or indeed several months, were obviously needed to prepare for the work, several weeks or several months that would be entirely devoted to observation and reflection, in order to be sure the work got off on the right footing. If it’s done in a hurry and without set guidelines, my father had said, it will all be doomed from day one. To start the work now, without having thought about it several weeks or even several months in advance, could be considered absurd, even suicidal. Generally speaking, my father had said, renovations like this are even more involved and daunting than building something from scratch—that’s why remodeling can in no way be compared to construction. We rush into a particular endeavor without being prepared for it, and we don’t admit to ourselves that this endeavor demands from us a long period of preparation, and as a result we multiply the chances that our endeavor will fail. More often than not, we rush into something without really asking ourselves if we’re capable of successfully completing it, without asking ourselves if we’re up to the task. We buy a house, knowing full well that it doesn’t suit us in its present state, but we have high hopes of fixing it up and furnishing it to our taste. We’re going to redo everything (we think with the best intensions), transform everything, and immediately we come up with all kinds of plans, with the idea of furnishing this house and making it habitable. We have this house in front of us, but it isn’t the house that we see, already we see another house just like the one we hope to be able to make. We project ourselves into the future without reflecting a single second on the likelihood of our actually realizing our plans, and more often than not we don’t see the difficulties waiting for us in this future, and we don’t suspect for an instant the obstacles that are about to keep us from realizing our plans. When we begin a certain project, we are more often than not optimistic, we tell ourselves it’ll be easy to realize our plans, and we do everything we can to maintain this superficial optimism. Self-deception is the secret goal of every undertaking. From the beginning, we sense that we aren’t up to the task and that we will be thwarted at every turn, but we want to remain oblivious, and so we charge ahead, throwing ourselves into our work in hopes of concealing our own doubts. And soon we will be forced to admit to ourselves: What a terrible idea, but we can’t stop now, and we are forced to pay for the consequences of our haste. We say to ourselves: What an unbearable project, and what’s worse, we’ve only just begun, we haven’t even traveled a tenth of the way and all kinds of unavoidable obstacles and ordeals lie before us. From now on, our most cherished skill will be our ability to bear everything unbearable and hellish about our project without facing it head on, our entire lives devoted to concealing the absurd and disingenuous nature of our undertakings.

30.
It’s not so much that my mother found these comments ill-considered, only surprising coming from a person she’d known in the past to be taciturn, prudent, and skittish—yes, she’d lived for years with this being who simply exuded silence, putting up bulkheads of silence the way others wrap themselves in words, opinions, and rumors, someone who had turned silence into an art form, getting us all quite accustomed to life in his silent temple; for we all considered silence to be superior to words—you might say silence had become our preferred mode of communication—which is why she’d been shocked by this unprecedented profusion of words, and she immediately blamed it on the villa, immediately saw this as a sign of the villa’s influence on his usual mode of thought, which is why she’d begun observing him (my father) more and more discreetly, spying on his reactions, following his reasoning, the way a lab technician would.