Villa Bunker (French Literature) Read Free Page A

breathed got stuck in their throats, the way air does when it has been shut up for a long time, and it seemed to have a pharmaceutical odor, further highlighting its impurity. They decided, nonetheless, not to air these rooms out, because the dilapidated windows, their chipped paint eaten away by humidity, were on the verge of collapsing. In every room, a light exhausted from making its way through dirty windowpanes prevailed over the clinical whiteness of the early morning, my mother said. They detected, on the faded wallpaper, come unglued or torn in places, the outlines of furniture and, likewise, the places where paintings had once hung. They inspected these walls without saying a word, contemplating for several minutes the dark spots on the floor, which were like elongated shadows at their feet. They couldn’t gain access to the master bedroom, whose four doors were all locked. Because of the ever-present darkness in the corridor (they hadn’t yet found the light switches), they circled this sealed-up room, feeling their way by following the cracks in the wall. They had the feeling they were circling a vault inside a bunker.
    16. When they inspected the second floor again, the next day, to take more precise notes, nothing looked familiar. Everything now seemed much darker and more depressing than the day before. Had the look of the rooms changed in just a matter of hours? Despite their reluctance to admit these irregularities, they had to agree that the rooms gave rise to contradictory impressions, so much at odds with their recollections from the day before that they were having trouble accepting that they were standing in the same place. Were these changes to be explained by the fact one could enter the same room via two or three different doors? They did, however, recognize the wallpaper motifs as well as other innocuous details: a small pile of dust carefully formed in the shape of a cone in the corner of one bedroom, a crack in the ceiling, the body of a fly mummified between two windowpanes, a cloth rolled around a doorknob. That’s impossible, he said shaking his head. She wasn’t sure she heard the sound of his voice so much as read the words on his lips, despite the poor light. He seemed to have forgotten she was there, inspecting the floors, walls, and ceiling with an unsettled look, going back and forth, his hands behind his back. They thought about the alterations of light and temperature, and later, comparing their impressions, they were tempted to attribute these sensory anomalies to subtle variations in their moods.
    17. We have to consult the plans, my father said. That day he was speaking in a calm and delicate voice, though grimacing almost imperceptibly, my mother had noted. They were standing in the ballroom among the furniture and stacks of cardboard boxes, it was the first time he’d spoken to her directly since arriving.
    18. They’d quickly decided to live in the ballroom. The first time they’d entered this space, my mother had felt she was walking into an airplane hangar rather than a room in a house, a huge deserted hangar big enough to house the burned-out husk of a warplane, she’d said. Every time I enter the room, I’m scared: It’s so cold and formal, with high ceilings, and walls that seem to go on forever; it’s hard for me to catch my breath in there, my mother said. Hundreds of people could easily have been put up in that one room, she’d remarked the first time she’d gone in; she’d felt lost in the midst of the vast vacant space, feeling like a mere passerby in the rubble of a city in ruin, a city leveled by bombs. I’d never seen a room that large before, or that austere, which was the sense I had of it, due to its dimensions and absolute severity, my mother said; it could have housed a war machine capable of destroying an entire city. If the ballroom was beautiful, this too was due exclusively to its extraordinary coldness, its bareness. The question we ask ourselves