Villa Bunker (French Literature) Read Free

be simpler and more sensible to let our parents do what they want? (We wonder about that, but then we realize we don’t actually want to hear another word about them, we tell ourselves it would be best to remain oblivious to as much as possible.) Do our parents show us their true selves, we wonder; did we ever really know them? We witness the moment when our parents decide to undertake some catastrophic project, and we understand that realizing this project is absolutely vital and imperative in their eyes; and yet we wonder, why did it take so long for them to embark upon this plan? We talk to our parents about Derrida and Foucault, names they’re familiar with since we’ve discussed them thousands of times, we want to make sure that our parents are actually the same beings with whom we have so often in the past discussed Derrida and Foucault—we can see, however, that these names no longer ring any bells. We have the feeling we’re speaking in a strange, foreign language; our parents listen politely, but they don’t understand, they look at us the way foreigners would, silent and impassive, they’re simply waiting for us to finish talking about Derrida and Foucault—that is what we read on their faces. We try to imagine our parents on the cliff, but, really, no, we can’t bring ourselves to believe it, we absolutely can’t wrap our heads around the idea that they bought this villa perched on a precipice. We try again, this time endeavoring to imagine what their new life in the villa must be like, we imagine them eating meals in the villa, wondering, for example, if they eat at a set time, or if they talk to each other at the table—indeed, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen our parents eat. We make our parents act out all kinds of domestic scenes, in hopes of picturing for ourselves their new life, but in doing so we only become more aware of the distance between our parents and ourselves, and we sense we’ll never be able to bridge this gap that separates us from them. It’s impossible to know when we stopped feeling close to our parents, or at what decisive moment they began to seem strange to us, undoubtedly this distance has been developing for a long time, but we were too weak or too cowardly to notice it. As children, we’re connected to our parents through love, and then one day we lose this emotional tie, we understand nothing when it comes to our parents and our childhood suddenly seems incomprehensible to us. It’s impossible to bridge the gap that separates us from our childhood; once in place, this separation seems permanent and irreversible, and we have given up hope of overcoming it. We remember that we were once children, and when we recall this child that we once were, nothing about him makes any sense, he has now become a little stranger; we feel removed from this child whom we mentally dispatch to his own solitude, and in this way we take part in the disappearance of our own childhood.
    15. They inspected the second floor, slowly traveling the length of the hallways leading to the various bedrooms. Isolated from the other rooms by these narrow corridors in which my parents were always getting lost, each room formed a kind of islet one could enter from different directions. Had the architect responsible for this layout wished to create a private space in each room, a sealed off accommodation where one could feel completely isolated? Yet another architectural detail that did not slip their notice: Depending on its location, each bedroom had a different number of doors, ranging from two to four. For example, each corner bedroom was accessible by two doors, whereas the four middle rooms each had three. The master bedroom was devoid of windows and had four doors. At first glance, the bedrooms all seemed modeled on the same plan: They had the same dimensions and were each completely vacant. As my parents entered each room, they were immediately overcome by a dusty smell, the air they