Villa Bunker (French Literature)

Content

Villa Bunker

1.
Perched on a cliff above the sea, looming and hostile, secretly opposed to anyone staying is what she’d written about the villa.

2.
We see a house and we know immediately what sort of life is possible there. We contemplate its façade for a few minutes, we don’t need to think rationally, nor linger before this unfamiliar house, she’d also written (in her chaotic and crude handwriting, full of careless and ill-formed letters). It takes less than a minute to understand everything. If we’re going to be happy and lead an idyllic existence in this house, we already know it. If we’re going to be unhappy and have a miserable life there, we know that as well, just as surely, just as quickly. We know right away if we’ll be able to live in this house, or instead if we’ll be forced to abandon the idea of living there. Its fitness or unfitness for habitation is immediately apparent. Everything we’ll experience, everything we’ll think and feel there, we can see it already as though we’d already lived it. In a matter of seconds, we can imagine our entire future existence in this house, we can see this life in minute detail and contemplate it as though it were over and done with. This perception (she’d written) constitutes for us a truth, a certainty that will never be refuted, that we can’t seem to get out of our heads. We imagine our possible lives in strange houses and, in the end, these existences pile up, one upon the other, somewhere deep inside us.

3.
She turned on a faucet. The water, which was likely contaminated or poisoned by years spent in rusty pipes (she thought), ran red for several minutes. She’d made several trips to the supermarket during the day to stock up on cases of mineral water, now stored under the stairs.

4.
She’d often stopped in the street to stare at the façades of houses, trying to imagine what life she’d lead inside; in the past she’d wondered many times while contemplating the front of an unfamiliar house: What would I have become if I’d had to live between those walls, what would I be thinking right now if I wasn’t here in the street but rather on the other side, enclosed in one of those rooms? She would stop in front of expensive houses, it’s true, but she was just as likely to stare at ugly, poorly maintained ones; in truth, she was liable to engage in this imaginary exercise in front of virtually any house. Now she couldn’t take her eyes off the façade, she was counting the windows, calculating the number of rooms, she was imagining the wallpaper motifs, trying to perceive as many things as possible without getting any closer. Sometimes she would hear a musical instrument, she would listen to the sound of a piano and quickly gauge the ability of the person playing; she would guess all kinds of things about the house’s occupants. Some façades were alarming and would bring thoughts of misfortune to mind. She would perceive the noxious character of these sordid dwellings immediately, picturing her own life there, under a pall of sadness and boredom; she would see her possible life as an empty succession of dark and dismal days.

5.
We are in a kitchen with peeling paint on the walls, condensation on the windowpanes obstructs our view of the outside. The yellow light of the florescent bulb above the sink, the dripping faucet, the mop on the floor, so many details assaulting us in this kitchen smelling of disinfectant and boiled meat. The conversations next door, the noise of the trays and the scraping sound of chairs being moved. The words they speak seem so strident, so oddly chosen, they make our heads spin. And long afterward, condensation still lingers on the windowpanes, and gives only a hint of the grounds beyond. We don’t know how this is possible. Time has passed, we’re not sure how much, we know that, in a way, the time spent in the kitchen doesn’t count, we know of no measuring device capable of accounting for this time. We move to make sure we’re still alive, but if we leave this room all these sensations might collapse, no longer having anything to refer to, and then we will have to devise other thoughts, form an entire system of new thoughts in order to continue.

6.
And in that same street, when we happen to glance at a stranger, we sense that stranger’s personality immediately, we sense his moods, his qualities and faults; he doesn’t stay strange for long, this creature. It’s enough to glance at him and his soul will open like a book, revealing the truth to us; now we know everything about him and are immediately in a position to judge the possible interactions we might have with this being, the kinds of relations we might maintain with him. If these relations are likely to turn ugly, become dangerous or simply intolerable, we know it immediately; we instinctively know we must avoid, even flee this potentially noxious being. There’s no point striking up a conversation with someone we dislike at first sight, any such conversation will always be disappointing and sterile; actually, there’s no point in having any kind of relationship with such a being, for it will be torturous from the outset, a shipwreck. When it comes to those supposedly enigmatic and secret entities (our fellow creatures), the secret is there’s no secret at all. We penetrate at a glance the murky depths of such beings, their supposedly inviolable interiors. Before even speaking with them, we break into their interiority and we know everything about them, the real nature of their thoughts and desires, the fundamental reasons for their actions, their unspeakable dreams. We penetrate to the core of such beings, floating unsuspected in their interiority; there, we move through vacant fortresses like flying saucers in space.

7.
The villa’s front was completely without ornament, bare like a prison gate. The architect who had drawn up the exterior plan had certainly demonstrated his implacable hatred of ornamentation, systematically eliminating anything that could’ve been mistaken for aesthetic ambition. Every façade is a statement, the front of every house a conscious intention. It was impossible to mistake it for something accidental, innocent, is what she’d written. And a façade like that is hard to take when it’s without the slightest hint of decoration, or so she’d thought while standing next to my father. They were there in front of the villa, they hadn’t said anything for quite some time, captivated by the sight of it. They were probably searching for something to say, though they were sure there were no words to describe what they were feeling. My parents were standing silent in front of the villa, sheltered under the umbrella my mother was holding in her hand (it was raining constantly and, eventually, her arm would go numb); they were contemplating the façade as though it were a sinister painting depicting their life to come. At that moment, they weren’t sure what to think, it was as though their will was caught in an invisible net; perhaps they felt secretly attracted to this picture before them, as they measured for the first time the degree to which their life together had been determined by fate. Tired from the car ride, which had taken longer than expected, they had trouble concealing their reluctance as they turned down the uneven path. Everything about the façade’s design seemed the product of an ill-will, inexplicably opposed to even the mere suggestion of luxury or comfort, so she’d thought glimpsing the façade through the windows of the car as it crawled slowly, like a hearse, down the gravel path, lined on both sides by overgrown hedges—this path had given her the feeling she was traveling down a long narrow corridor leading toward death. In a sense, the façade was something of an architectural feat, she’d said (or, rather, written) later while trying to recall her first impressions. Every line of thought began to aspire to its own erasure at the mere sight of this façade. The words “lugubrious” and “cold” had come to mind, and she was struck again by her inability to convey her exact impression. According to her, “lugubrious” and “cold” were too weak, they’d quickly become engulfed in a torrent of contradictory reevaluations. She’d experienced, she said, the limits of language, had foreseen her future wretchedness.

8.
A seaside villa, though the use of the expression made you wonder. It would have been more accurate to speak of a former prison, or an abandoned one, she’d added (in writing), and she’d gone on to say that the impregnability of the place was an illusion. Locked bars on the first floor and cellar windows, windows partially barricaded with boards and corrugated metal sheets, she saw these as an apt expression of a feeling she couldn’t otherwise have articulated. The bars had been put there as a precaution, my mother had said, in order to stop someone from breaking into the villa, yet in her mind this preventative measure had become punitive, designed to prevent anyone from ever leaving the villa, no matter what their reasons.

9.
None of the other villas on the coastline had such a sinister appearance. Moreover, there weren’t any other buildings visible in the surrounding area; the villa seemed completely isolated, cut off from the world, cut off even from those passersby who might discover it there, on the edge of the cliff, at a bend in the pebbly path. My mother had interpreted the villa’s location, on the outer edges of the world, as yet another reason to despair.

10.
She was never able to rid herself of this image of a prison, or forget its walls blackened by dripping rain. And yet she’d tried everything to efface this unpleasant notion, dressing the façade in multiple ways so as to dissolve or bury it. In her imagination, she’d superimposed the geometry of a chalet, of an Indian pavilion, of a Norman manor on the villa, without ever managing to effect a lasting change in her impression of the façade. The mask was crumbling and would soon fall, then the prison façade would resurface again. Her first impression was reasserting its rights; underneath the rubble of the chalet, the pavilion, and the manor, the villa was being put back together, darker and more alarming than ever.

11.
We are worn down by dread, standing in front of the villa, as well as by the effort it takes to conceal this dread from ourselves, my mother had said; we are struck by the idea that people lived for years in the villa as recluses, and that we’re soon going to take their place. Standing in front of the villa, my mother’s first impression had been one of sudden hopelessness, brought on by the realization that they would soon be going inside. She’d begun to feel a senseless compassion for those who had stayed in the villa, and she’d even thought, absurdly, that someone might still be trapped inside, before realizing that this was just a new way to feel sorry for herself. But the villa was definitely theirs, theirs alone, and they would soon be living there, there was no way around it, that’s what she’d told herself. For years they’d lived, comfortable and oblivious, never suspecting that someday they would find themselves here, in this precise place, on that cliff exposed to the wind, staring at that sinister façade. They hadn’t yet been inside, and frankly they knew next to nothing about the villa, about its atmosphere, but it had dawned on my mother that they would both be the villa’s prisoners as soon as they crossed the threshold. She’d tried to fight this vague uneasiness, or at least keep it from my father by attributing her apprehension to fatigue and the nervous tension brought on by the car trip. And yet your father had seemed happy, all at once, when he first saw the villa, she’d said. Even though he was desperately trying to hide his excitement, his face had let a whole host of positive emotions float to its surface; these were so powerful that he even seemed younger. He’d been wholly won over by the look of the villa, she’d thought while observing these subtle, rapid variations in his demeanor, which resembled little nervous earthquakes. That day, she’d shown amazing docility. And in the following days she’d tried to get over her apprehension, showing unusual patience, as much to fool my father as to conceal her anxiety from herself. She’d gone outside numerous times to look at the front of the villa, and each time she’d run into the same image of a penitentiary. Sometimes she’d lock herself in the car and listen to Mahler’s
1st
over and over again, she would watch the sea through the windshield while my father was wandering through the bedrooms, down the halls. The wind would whistle around her and the car seemed about to take off, ready to be lifted and carried away like some insignificant object. She could just make out the ghostly shape of a fishing boat in the far off distance, then her thoughts returned to him, he was floating through another world, or so she would think as she listened to Mahler, he didn’t suspect a thing, but already he was no longer part of this world.