Villa Bunker (French Literature) (7 page)

79.
He’d carried upstairs and stored in the tower a jumble of objects and furniture recovered from various other rooms in the villa; he’d so easily taken possession of these things, which from now on would form an integral part of his universe, creating around him an unreal, suffocating atmosphere. What kind of man had he become? What was he doing, stuck for hours, and soon for days, surrounded by that stultifying decor? The clock on the wall behind him didn’t tell the time. The project to renovate the villa was apparently little more than a vague memory, and even that was about to vanish, escape. The cot, the camping stove, the small worktable, but all sorts of useless things as well, brass doorknobs, a three-masted ship in a bottle resting on a console, a cane, several shells as well as the murmur they contained, stacks of booklets tied with a string—she used to look at all this as though through a shop window. Even the cans and jelly jars on the shelves had looked like museum pieces, she’d noted.

80.
When you enter the room, it takes a minute to get used to the strange ambient light, but once your eyes adjust, it seems everything is slowly, inexorably converging toward the center. The shelves buckling under the weight of books and cans, the lamp with its olive shade, boxes filled with sketchbooks, the camping stove, the framed black and white photo of the villa: All the furniture is moving, millimeter by millimeter, toward the midpoint of the room, right where my father has put his worktable. He has always insisted that nothing be touched inside this room devoted to reflection, and that nothing be added either, unless it was some waste product of his work or part of the cascade of dust endlessly falling, which was quickly becoming—so to speak—what he cherished most in this world.

81.
She was still reluctant to enter, holding her breath on the threshold. Please turn out the light, he would ask in a distant, almost mechanical voice, a voice in which you could feel the pain of his exclusion. That voice, she was thinking, could belong to an animal. The sound of her footsteps on the stairs must have been a nagging tendril digging into the margins of his thoughts, and now that she was only a few feet from him, standing motionless behind the half-open door, he surely took the sound of her breathing as the herald of an approaching threat, whose nature was as yet uncertain, concealed in a corner of her brain. For an instant, she imagined how he would criticize her once he found her there, and the idea that he might get angry or simply sulk at her in his typical black mood made her consider just turning around. He gave her that same vacant, skeptical look, the one he’d greet her with every evening; in that look she’d many times read his wariness when it came to anything that might suggest how pointless their efforts had been since moving into the villa. You’re pale, she stammered, as she noticed the elongated shape of his bony feet sticking over the edge of the small bed. He asked her: What time is it? She ignored his question, it was all she could do to reconstruct it mentally, as though she were checking its structure, experiencing its solidity in the rarified air of the room. Daylight was fading outside the window. She turned off the lone bulb hanging from the ceiling and she turned on a small shaded lamp, which was sitting on a chair. She felt further discouraged by the sight of this cheap lamp recovered from somewhere in the villa, but even more so by the dozens of snapshots strewn across the floor, under the cot, stuck between the pages of books. Arranged in this dim light, the objects and furniture appeared strange and hostile to her. Again she looked at his face: His migraines made him unrecognizable, inaccessible. His exhaustion was being transmitted to the furniture, which was slumped in dark recesses of the room, furniture whose own breathing she was sure she could hear. Now she wanted to get closer to him, to touch him (perhaps to make sure that he was real and that they were both in the same room); she wanted to prod him to get up, but she saw his closed lids, his lashes, the unshaven patches around his cheeks, and she noted that these overly detailed visions nauseated her. She thought for an instant that my father was perhaps made out of a substance different from that of other men, and that if she were to brush up against him, she might disappear. Still, she couldn’t get mad at him. He was ashamed, angry at himself for appearing that way, she thought right away, and as she moved in the half-light, she had the impression the objects were receding within the cramped space, worrying then that she too would end up swept away by their movement. He’d pressed his back against the headboard, trying in vain to get up. It wasn’t the first time she’d found him like this. He’d been forced again to stop in the middle of the afternoon because of his headaches, and it suddenly struck her, whenever she came to see him, not without a certain dread, that he might simply explode; she was always pretending she could help him piece together the plans that the migraines had scattered. When he got like this, did he still believe it was possible to improve their situation, even in the slightest? She was seeing things for what they were, she imagined his brain saturated with noise, itself become an overbearing nuisance. His migraines would sometimes bother him for days, not allowing his tired body to sleep, to the point where his personality seemed irrevocably changed. You can’t stay like this. She heard her own voice, perfectly calm yet exterior to her own person. She knew he would refuse to see a doctor, no matter how hard she tried to tell him that he needed to rest, to get his mind off of things. And maybe I’m talking to a mirage, maybe we’re in a dream, she said to herself. All the same, she made him get up and wash his face with cold water. Just like every evening, all he said was: I’ll be down later.

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.