Villa of Delirium

by Adrien Goetz

  www.newvesselpress.com

  First published in French in 2017 as Villa Kérylos

  Copyright © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle

  Translation copyright © 2020 Natasha Lehrer

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goetz, Adrien

  [Villa Kérylos, English]

  Villa of Delirium/Adrien Goetz; translation by Natasha Lehrer.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-939931-80-1

  Library of Congress Control Number 2019940461

  I. France—Fiction

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE: THE BLUE ROCKS

  1 The Halcyon Terrace

  2 Murmurings in Beaulieu

  3 The Archaeologist and the Engineer

  4 Sketches of Villas by the Sea

  5 The Barbarians at the Gate

  6 First Encounter

  7 Conversing in the Enemy Tongue

  8 Facing the Red Front Door

  9 The Mosaic in the Entrance Hall That Reveals Nothing about the Future

  10 “Rejoice”

  11 Philemon and Baucis Restored to Youth

  12 The Peristyle, a Sepulcher for Adolphe Reinach, Killed in Action

  13 “Bring Nothing from the World”

  14 My First Paintings

  15 The Last Painter of Ancient Greece

  PART TWO: ODE TO APOLLO

  16 The Mosaic Anchor

  17 Dreaming of the Thermal Baths at Kerylos after Spending Several Days in a Monastery from the Middle Ages

  18 The Library

  19 A Scholarly Conversation in the Front Courtyard

  20 Sunlight on the Furniture

  21 The Morning When the Most Ancient Music in the World Was Heard in the Oikos

  22 All That Remained of Pericles in the Big Kitchen (Where at Last We Dared Talk about the Gold Tiara of Saitapharnes, King of Olbia)

  23 A Fake from Odessa?

  24 Nighttime in the Peristyle

  25 “I Have, Occasionally, Been Mistaken”

  26 The Clogged Heating System

  27 Echoes in the Garden and among the Rocks

  28 The Art of Dining Lying Down

  29 The Andron, Where the Reinachs Entertained Kings on Stormy Nights, and Where Theseus Fought the Minotaur

  30 Athena on the Staircase

  31 “Get Out!”

  32 Madame Reinach’s Bedchamber and Her Shower with Its Multiple Jets

  33 Ulysses’s Quarters

  34 Epilogue: Daedalus, Icarus, and Ariadne

  A Few Historical Clarifications and Acknowledgments

  Plan of the Villa

  PART ONE

  The Blue Rocks

  “The Greeks discovered glory, they discovered beauty, and they brought to this discovery such jubilation, such an overabundance of life, that a sense of youthful contagion can still be felt even after the passage of two or three thousand years.”

  THEODORE REINACH

  1

  THE HALCYON TERRACE

  I still have a set of keys to the house. During the summer months, every now and then, like today, I slip inside, my shadow merging with the shade of the portico behind the library, on the far side where there’s no risk of being seen by anyone from the village. I listen to the birdsong. This time, I have decided, will be the last. I won’t come back to Kerylos again. Over the years I haven’t been able to resist stealing in occasionally, not telling a soul, to touch the bronze statuettes, look at the furniture and paintings, listen to the fountain in the courtyard, gaze out at the sea through the open windows. This time I have not come to contemplate. I want to reclaim what is rightly mine. It is time.

  Kerylos, the Greek villa, has become legendary. Postcards of it are for sale at the tobacconist in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. I bought five or six, which I slipped into my camera bag along with some magazines. I haven’t been back for over a decade. Among the postcards there was one of the mosaic floor depicting the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth, being decapitated by Theseus. Theseus is holding him by one horn, blood flowing in tesserae of reddish ocher stones. Last week I received the same postcard in the mail, my address typed and instead of a message a stylized, slightly clumsy drawing of an ancient laurel wreath. There was no signature. This was no ornament representing Caesar’s triumph, it had a flurry of leaves and fruits hanging between the branches, it was a majestic Greek diadem—the golden crown of Alexander the Great that every archaeologist in the world dreams of discovering. This is what has brought me back. At least now I know where the postcard was bought. Did someone from here send it, someone I used to know? Had certain people held on to the habit of sending anonymous letters after the war ended? My address in Nice isn’t hard to find. Underneath the photograph is a simple caption: “Summer sun over the Greek villa Kerylos— mosaic in the reception room (Andron).”

  Kerylos is still a secret place, not open to visitors, and its owners haven’t thrown a party here for many years. When I was twenty it represented a kind of perfection. Today I find myself wondering how I could have ever found it beautiful. This morning all I can see is plaster cracking like old face paint, threadbare curtains, dead trees. The fountain isn’t working; the pipe that feeds it must be broken. If this were the first time I was seeing its architecture, I would find it absurd, a page of poetry read at school and soon forgotten.

  Since I left here and moved far away, I’ve liked houses that look like the pictures I paint: geometric volumes, bare walls. Inside I want only useful, everyday objects. All this ornamentation that I once looked upon with dazed fascination has lost its charm. How did people ever live in this place, which would have been my prison if I hadn’t managed to escape? No one lives here anymore, except, I believe, the Reinach grandchildren and great-grandchildren for a few weeks every summer; it’s the fashion now. They keep to themselves. They’ve left bottles of sunscreen and sun loungers on the top terrace. Everything has been reversed, and maybe it’s better that way: when I was young, “the season” was winter.

  As I walk into the house, I feel my adolescent reflexes twitch, as though somehow I have to be young in the house where I spent my youth. I climb the two floors—stopping to catch my breath, my body even more exhausted than these walls—to the uppermost terrace, my terrace, the big square at the top of the central tower from where one could film the entire panorama of the Côte d’Azur: the Bay of Beaulieu, the Villa Ephrussi with its pink facade and exotic trees, and on the other side, La Réserve, now a famous hotel, the cliffs of Èze, as stunning as those that soar over the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and its millionaires. I haven’t brought my little tripod with me, so I must keep my hand steady. I want to leave these images for my children. The happiest people in the world might envy me. Once upon a time, I was happier even than they—and I left in time. Houses have been built, but at the very end of the promontory, where it disappears into the sea, if I turn my back on the villa I can still imagine I am on a Greek island. Today I have a clear view of the Tête de Chien and the Cap d’Ail, and I can even just make out the festivities in Monaco. If I were to stay here until this evening, I’d be able to watch the prince’s fireworks—but I know I mustn’t; by dusk I will be far away. I will have found it.

  I put on my sunglasses and lay down on the mosaic floor. I once watched it being laid with the tracing paper the craftsmen used as a guide: the tesserae compose a series of lines,
with the cardinal points like on old maps, the names of the winds written in Greek letters. I look at the sky, closing my eyes and opening them again, blinking regularly. The railings need a coat of paint. A couple of the bronze balustrades are coming off. Another few heavy gales and they will fall down onto the rocks below. Nobody knows how to make them anymore, I imagine. I can’t bear to think that one day this house will be a ruin. That would be the best that could happen to it. Once, in a fit of anger, I had a mad urge to set it on fire. I stopped myself. If I had spent my life here I’d have been trapped, I would never have become an artist, I would have remained the good little boy who admires everything anyone shows him. One of the treads on the stairs is cracked and needs fixing. Forty years ago I would have shored it up and then gone to search for the right can of paint in the boiler room. How proud my mother would have been of her Achilles, the good boy she had so enthusiastically recommended to this charming family, and how I would have blushed with shy delight. Today, I am going to leave the step to cave in, despite myself. Nothing must give any clue that I have been here.

  I open the door to one of the two bedrooms at the top of the house called “Daedalus” and “Icarus”—all the rooms here have names. I had forgotten how each latch was finely crafted in the shape of a palm, inspired by motifs from the ancient Orient, molded into shape and then burnished green to harmonize with the warm tones of the wood. The twin beds have been replaced with one large bed; the sun beats down on an ocher coverlet embroidered with sphinxes. A few more years and the faded, sun-scorched fabric will tear and there will be nothing left but tattered shreds. I recognize the odor of exotic woods, pass my fingers over the marquetry and inlay, then plunge my head into an empty chest, its perfume as intense as the day the first pieces of furniture were delivered. I was there when everyone was squealing with delight. When I think about the end of my childhood, here, it almost horrifies me.

  Walking through the rooms on the ground floor, I notice the way the light is reflected between the chairs: the floor has been waxed. Who could have done that? Who uses a floor polisher on marble? Stone needs to breathe, it will die if it is regularly treated like that, everything will flake and crack and turn yellow. In twenty years, Kerylos will be dead. Another house will be built on this spot. All that will be left are yellowing postcards in old albums.

  The mosaicists, who spent entire months on the floors, worked for the Oceanographic Museum in Monte Carlo. They fascinated me. I copied their designs for my own pleasure. On the floor of the dining room they created a great goggle-eyed octopus, my favorite animal. I copied it into my notebook, and later had it tattooed on my arm. People are always surprised when they see it and they ask if I used to be a sailor. No one ever dares ask me if I’ve served time. I had it done in Thessaloniki by an old tattoo artist in the port, in 1914, just before war broke out. It throbbed for a couple of days. I was glad to have a permanent trace of the extraordinary journey I had taken, away from Kerylos—without realizing that I had actually chosen, while on Greek soil, an emblem of Kerylos to accompany me throughout my life. When they finished, the craftsmen left instructions for cleaning the tesserae that must be written down somewhere among all the paperwork that the Germans pillaged. Theodore Reinach left detailed instructions for taking care of his house. What happened to this notebook, with its black leather cover?

  If I don’t write it down, no one will remember the December evenings in this house where Christmas was never celebrated, though everyone brought gifts; where heat rose up from the ground and the huge windows retained it like an orangery; no one will remember how when we were late, Adolphe Reinach and I, the “rascals,” would clamber over the rocks to get home, sneaking back through the subterranean corridors; no one will remember all our plans for expeditions, or the hundreds of books we read, or anything about the tangled lives we invented as though we had already lived them in the time of Pericles at the Acropolis or Alcibiades around the mountains and the temples of Sicily. No one will know anything about my life or my loves.

  I watched this white and ocher house being built, I lived here, worked here, fell in love here, knew every room as well as those of my apartment in Nice. The moment I walked in, these old familiar walls felt like home, in spite of everything, more so than for most of those who used to have their own rooms here, almost all of whom are dead now.

  The first time I found myself alone here, I took a bath in the master bathroom, like the shepherd Paris taunting King Menelaus. I had no interest in seducing his wife—I wasn’t fantasizing about Fanny Reinach as I lay back in the bubbles and hummed my favorite aria from La Belle Hélène—but I occupied his palace as if it belonged to my father and my ancestors, as if my chariot were waiting at the door with my armor, my shin guards and my shield adorned with legendary scenes, as if I had returned to my legitimate home.

  I might have turned my back on this machine that soaks up the sun, this refuge for reflection, this ship on the ocean of time, this fragment of rational madness—but it still stirs something in me. It was the setting for all the stories I made up when I was still a boy, and the place where a few years later I first caught sight of the woman I was to love more than any other. It is the mosaic of my life. Joy marked out in tiny fragments of stone. She is the reason I come back, though not too often, to avoid too much pain.

  We should never really have met. She was a little older, married, and I was poor—it took the wealthy Monsieur Reinach summoning an architect and asking him to build him a vacation palace, and a series of events that no one could have foreseen, for our paths to cross, for me to learn her name, Ariadne, and for her to notice me at all. Her name was surprising, especially when you think what pretty girls in 1956 are called, Nicole or Martine. Ariadne in the Labyrinth, Ariadne abandoned, Ariadne sister of Phaedra, Ariadne at Naxos. I cared nothing about all that; she was alive, she wore moccasins to the beach, she had a white cotton hat and a bicycle. She didn’t come out of a book. I was called Achilles, in a family where no one before me had even heard of the Trojan War.

  Our names, those of the men of that time—I was born in 1887—ended up chiseled on monuments to the dead: Jules, Antonin, Honoré, Paul, Simeon, Damien, Marius—all my friends from Beaulieu, I see you still, I know how you fell, each one of you. I owe to Ariadne that part of my intelligence that the illustrious Theodore Reinach, master of Kerylos, forgot to transmit to me. He only ever talked to me about antiquity, music, the poets he loved. As a young man I used to stand on the rocks below Beaulieu and recite poems from Les Fleurs du Mal:

  “But the buried jewels of ancient Palmyra. The undiscovered metals, the pearls of the sea . . . ” A red leather-bound edition that Adolphe, Theodore Reinach’s nephew and my closest friend, picked up for me when we were fifteen, with the six censored poems, copied out by hand on pages pasted in at the end, that gave us butterflies. Adolphe was smaller and punier than I was, but he had something about him, an equestrian’s elegant bearing, and a grave air that became instantly charming the moment he stopped being serious and began to laugh. I wanted to go and search for Baudelaire’s jewels for Ariadne, in the sand, beneath the sea, in citadels deep in the desert or the most secret vaults of Atlantis. I wanted to see strings of pearls and gold draped over her shoulders and breasts as I embraced her. I was tired of loving statues. Told like this, the romance that transformed my life sounds like a fairy tale. Our love affair never ended; I hid it from my children, and of course from their mother—but when I come to tell them of Kerylos I want to bequeath them that as well, in addition to what I have come to claim this morning. Why should my children know nothing of the great love of my life? This house, that doesn’t belong to me, that I stopped loving long ago, this absurd labyrinth that now seems quite grotesque to me, this house that will end up in ruins—I want to give it to them, room by room. This is where my life is.

  The prince is marrying Grace Kelly in Monaco today. When I got up this morning the gilded waves were already covered with boats—like in that famous
passage from the Iliad that I once had to translate—from cruise ships to fishing skiffs, all heading there to sound their foghorns. My little town of Beaulieu is quite empty. I thought I could come here without attracting attention. No one knows I am here. I suppose the caretaker and his wife will return from Monaco this evening around seven. I don’t know if they are the same people I used to know—I think not though, they would be so old—but perhaps they are, after all the climate is splendid. They most likely won’t venture beyond La Guitounette, their little house at the beginning of the promontory, but I don’t want to take the risk.

  I’ll have just enough time to find what I’m looking for. If only I knew which room to search. Surely Theodore Reinach, in the years before his death, had left some kind of sign or pointer that nobody had been able to interpret. The house was full of chests and cupboards that used to overflow with letters, plans, photo albums, drafts of scholarly texts, school books; the Nazis upended everything, emptied it all out, and took most of it away. I’ve always wondered if they did it for the pleasure of plundering a “Jewish” home, or if they were trying to find something specific—if they were looking for the same conqueror’s crown that I have come to find.

  Perhaps the Reinach papers, if they weren’t burned in Berlin in 1944, are still in sealed boxes in some Moscow archive. I can’t imagine anyone ever being interested in them. I shall have to proceed by deduction. I knew the whole clan so well, the three brothers, their wives and children. I know how they thought— especially Theodore, the most brilliant of all the family, the creator of Kerylos. I refuse to call him “my benefactor,” for he was far from doing me nothing but good. I don’t blame him anymore. I miss him. He would be so old now, a wise old man who could tell us all the stories in the world, all our odysseys and journeys, like Homer or Herodotus.

  I always go down the alleyway along the side of the house and enter through the vast kitchen, which is so cool. That is where I came in the first time, in 1902, when I was fifteen. Then it was the entrance to the site, though construction had barely begun. Among the deep holes everywhere it was impossible to make out where the foundations were. I’m not sure that the foundation stone had been laid yet. Rocks were smashed to pieces, some of the old trees left and new ones planted. I spent six years living in the midst of the construction work, alongside artisans, builders and painters, and then six more, the happiest of my life, in a Greek villa where I was often alone, like today. Then came the war. Everything changed. I became an adult. After 1918 life resumed, but it bequeathed us all more memories than plans for the future. I needed something new. I moved away. I couldn’t stand this absurd passion for Greek antiquity anymore. I became a painter, I wanted to be of my time, I exhibited many paintings, destroyed others. I loved purity of shape. I was a Cubist. It was not the simplest life I could have chosen.