Villa Bunker (French Literature) Read Free Page B

when we enter this room is how long will we last, how long will we be able to stand the room’s harsh chill. We’ve only just left the vestibule, and already we’re in a war zone, and we think we hear the sounds of battle, all the while knowing that our senses are playing tricks on us, that we’re dupes of an architectural illusion. As long as we’re still in the vestibule, we don’t suspect that, merely by pushing open the ballroom doors, we are going to find ourselves in the middle of a war, not for one second do we anticipate the sense of alarm hidden in the ballroom. The room’s whitewashed walls are bare, there isn’t the slightest ornamentation on these high walls, which, like the façade, have something merciless about them. On these chalk-white walls you can make out the places where large paintings must have hung for decades. The paintings are gone, but every time my mother’s gaze happened to fall on one of those large faded rectangles, she would feel a pang of terrible anxiety, as though she had accidentally caught sight of something truly horrible. She would never learn what those giant ballroom canvases depicted, and anything she might imagine was no doubt far from being accurate; it was just that, judging from the space they took up on the walls, she was for some reason certain they could only have depicted horrific scenes, macabre settings. Perhaps they had been nothing more sinister than portraits of ancestors, but in that case, she was thinking, they’re still big enough to give you the willies. She’d imagined a gallery of ancestors depicted as grotesque giants with monstrous heads measuring at least twice or three times the size of a normal human head, portraits of beings so excessive they’d lost all vestiges of human form. There, where others would have only seen the white surface of the walls, my mother could make out horrific heads in the spaces between the windows, heads hastily suggested with large brushstrokes against a background of garish, loud colors, invisible portraits she could nonetheless imagine and which, because she could not see them, had upon her an even more powerful effect.
    19. Ever since their arrival, she’d felt like she was waiting for some climax to come.
    20. She recalled how, on the first day, she’d immediately been frightened by the sound of the waves, a deafening roar that was impossible to escape. The villa seemed to have been built in the midst of the surf, battered on all sides, she said. A roar that was not only an aberration to the senses, my mother had added, it subjected thought to a constant and intolerable oppression. It was impossible to escape this incessant noise; in some parts of the villa, its volume could reach unimaginable proportions, a crashing sound that was not simply unbearable, it also prevented thought, inhibited concentration. She clearly had the sense the villa was built right in the middle of this noise; I often thought, my mother said, that the waves had laid siege to the villa, and now, living in constant fear of being swept away by the rising waters, my dreams have become dreadful, or rather nightmares. My mother would dream of the villa being swallowed by that mass of water, the millions of cubic meters of salt water bringing down the walls and carrying away the furniture, their possessions, carrying away their lifeless bodies like contorted mannequins, but when she awoke the terrifying noise would be gone; upon waking, I don’t hear the slightest sound, I feel completely rested, as though I’d just slept fourteen hours straight, and I don’t have to worry anymore, don’t have to live in dread of a disaster; I feel much better in fact, almost relieved, writes my mother, I can imagine the villa is located in the middle of the desert, in the midst of a desolate landscape, out of reach, I can convince myself that the villa is in no way threatened by the waves; we’re in the middle of nowhere, a barren expanse, sand stretches as far