develop.
71. So that in a couple of weeks, shots of the villa were piling up more or less everywhere. She used to find some on the ground, discarded, others tacked to the walls, on the doors. Interior shots in which she would recognize a bedroom, a bird’s-eye view from the top of the stairs. The photos quickly spread, like a disease. There were probably even more in the room at the top of the tower, she thought. The room must have been chock-full of photos, underexposed shots, crossed out, stained, strewn upon the floor, photographs arranged like tarot cards on the camping cot, she thought. She used to imagine my father leaning over the bed, examining each photo carefully as though with a magnifying glass, pointing to a detail, running his finger one way and then the other over each row of photos, as though trying to find the key to an enigma. The photos became stained and ruined. He used to sleep on them sometimes. He also used to wedge them under tables and chairs. And when a photo found favor with him, among the hundreds neglected and forgotten, he would glue it to a piece of cardboard, sometimes sketching in a frame around it with a ballpoint pen.
72. But far from offering a stable, definitive image, something he could hold onto and store, the photos were having the opposite effect. Shot from every angle, the villa had seemed to fall to pieces, scattering to the four winds, lost beneath its infinite contours. It’s like the villa’s getting away from us a second time, my mother said.
73. These fits, these bouts of illness were getting worse; they’d intensified during the course of their stay and had ended up becoming quite pronounced, first as isolated symptoms and then as outright illness, even grave illness.
74. One day, when he was by himself in a bedroom on the third floor, opening a dilapidated armoire, he’d discovered the spiral staircase. The armoire (an antique) was likely to contain old, moth-eaten clothes, he’d thought, damp rough sheets; he has no idea what made him open the armoire, he wasn’t usually curious about the contents of old pieces of furniture, he was mostly content to look without touching, fearful that he would end up crushed under a rain of rubble and rotten planks. As a matter of fact, as he was opening the armoire’s large doors, he’d felt a cool breeze on his face, as though he were standing at the entrance to a mine, in front of its shaft. He might well have never noticed this secret passageway leading directly to the top of the tower, he explained later to my mother (at the time he was in a state of extreme agitation), and for good reason, it wasn’t just that the staircase was invisible, it didn’t figure in any of the plans, plans he’d studied many times before destroying them. Why had someone concealed this staircase, what secret could they possibly be hiding, questions nagging inside my mother’s head, while my father kept repeating that he’d found the ideal environment upstairs; my mother was unsure what he’d meant exactly by ideal environment (and she would probably never be sure)—she’d noticed my father’s extreme agitation and wondered if it wouldn’t be best to leave him to his ravings. She should go have a look, he would say, attempting to reassure her, speaking to her as to a frightened child—she couldn’t possibly imagine the significance of the discovery as long as she refused to follow him up the stairs and see for herself how the air up there was clean and pure. You win, she’d said, realizing she was fighting a losing battle. She finally agreed to follow him up the spiral staircase, in order to end the argument, in order to stop his agitation as well; she’d pushed open the baroque armoire’s heavy doors and she’d started climbing the stairs with unimaginable difficulty—more than once she’d almost missed a step and nearly fell, because of the dark, she said. He was already far ahead, she could hear his steps on the stairs, but her
71. So that in a couple of weeks, shots of the villa were piling up more or less everywhere. She used to find some on the ground, discarded, others tacked to the walls, on the doors. Interior shots in which she would recognize a bedroom, a bird’s-eye view from the top of the stairs. The photos quickly spread, like a disease. There were probably even more in the room at the top of the tower, she thought. The room must have been chock-full of photos, underexposed shots, crossed out, stained, strewn upon the floor, photographs arranged like tarot cards on the camping cot, she thought. She used to imagine my father leaning over the bed, examining each photo carefully as though with a magnifying glass, pointing to a detail, running his finger one way and then the other over each row of photos, as though trying to find the key to an enigma. The photos became stained and ruined. He used to sleep on them sometimes. He also used to wedge them under tables and chairs. And when a photo found favor with him, among the hundreds neglected and forgotten, he would glue it to a piece of cardboard, sometimes sketching in a frame around it with a ballpoint pen.
72. But far from offering a stable, definitive image, something he could hold onto and store, the photos were having the opposite effect. Shot from every angle, the villa had seemed to fall to pieces, scattering to the four winds, lost beneath its infinite contours. It’s like the villa’s getting away from us a second time, my mother said.
73. These fits, these bouts of illness were getting worse; they’d intensified during the course of their stay and had ended up becoming quite pronounced, first as isolated symptoms and then as outright illness, even grave illness.
74. One day, when he was by himself in a bedroom on the third floor, opening a dilapidated armoire, he’d discovered the spiral staircase. The armoire (an antique) was likely to contain old, moth-eaten clothes, he’d thought, damp rough sheets; he has no idea what made him open the armoire, he wasn’t usually curious about the contents of old pieces of furniture, he was mostly content to look without touching, fearful that he would end up crushed under a rain of rubble and rotten planks. As a matter of fact, as he was opening the armoire’s large doors, he’d felt a cool breeze on his face, as though he were standing at the entrance to a mine, in front of its shaft. He might well have never noticed this secret passageway leading directly to the top of the tower, he explained later to my mother (at the time he was in a state of extreme agitation), and for good reason, it wasn’t just that the staircase was invisible, it didn’t figure in any of the plans, plans he’d studied many times before destroying them. Why had someone concealed this staircase, what secret could they possibly be hiding, questions nagging inside my mother’s head, while my father kept repeating that he’d found the ideal environment upstairs; my mother was unsure what he’d meant exactly by ideal environment (and she would probably never be sure)—she’d noticed my father’s extreme agitation and wondered if it wouldn’t be best to leave him to his ravings. She should go have a look, he would say, attempting to reassure her, speaking to her as to a frightened child—she couldn’t possibly imagine the significance of the discovery as long as she refused to follow him up the stairs and see for herself how the air up there was clean and pure. You win, she’d said, realizing she was fighting a losing battle. She finally agreed to follow him up the spiral staircase, in order to end the argument, in order to stop his agitation as well; she’d pushed open the baroque armoire’s heavy doors and she’d started climbing the stairs with unimaginable difficulty—more than once she’d almost missed a step and nearly fell, because of the dark, she said. He was already far ahead, she could hear his steps on the stairs, but her
Similar Books
