by Adrien Goetz
I was witness to it all, right up until 1908, the date of the inauguration of the villa. There was no ribbon cut with a small pair of gold scissors by the elegant Fanny Reinach, no photographer was summoned, the rabbi of Nice did not recite prayers in front of the house, no one burst into song in honor of Poseidon. There were no closets in the bedrooms, there were boxes of books still to be unpacked, the curtains had yet to be hung, but the Reinachs began to come down regularly: Kerylos was ready.
I was arrogant and ignorant, but I had the advantage of being aware of it. I knew that I had changed for the better. Year after year, I had made hundreds of drawings, which I sent to the Reinachs in Paris or kept for myself. I drew the foundations, the construction, surrounded by loose stones, the trees wrapped in wicker to protect them from damage, the arrival of blocks and beams, the painters and plasterers at work, deliveries of fabric. This was what I had been asked to do, and my original function, before I made myself indispensable. “Monsieur Theodore Reinach, of the Institute of France,” “parliamentary deputy of the Savoie region,” did not intimidate me. Seen from Beaulieu, this little man in a topcoat, with a goatee and a slightly stooped gait, who always had a book sticking out of his pocket, was a character, not a human being. I only began to think of him as a man when I saw him living in the house he had built. I liked him a great deal when I first met him.
Kerylos became the town’s main attraction. I adored it as a family home, though the Reinach family was not mine. Later I lived through two wars, and saw my friends die. I saw wounded men and heroes. It was in this setting, which represented the peak of civilization, that I saw the triumph of the barbarians. During the last war, the Germans behaved as though they were at home in Monaco. It was said they had ransacked the Villa Gal, in Villefranche, one of the richest houses around, and two or three others that they settled into. I was there when the Nazis came to arrest Julien Reinach, one of Theodore’s sons, whom I had known since childhood. He was five years younger than me. He always came to see exhibitions of my paintings and had encouraged me when I decided to become an artist. I can still hear him: “So Achilles, you’ve gone from bodybuilding to Cubism? I suppose one might call that progress.”
He had an austere demeanor, and at twenty-five seemed older than me. During the difficult period before Theodore died, when he no longer wanted to see me, Julien carried on regarding me as if we were cousins. He was Councilor of State. He had dedicated his life to the law, and to the study of what he called “comparative legislation.” When he took the time to talk about it, it was very interesting. He was appointed Councilor of State in 1940, the same year he was de facto excluded from the civil service because of the anti-Jewish laws decreed in October. Not so long ago he told me, in his terribly distinguished voice and carefully chosen words: “Twenty years ago I took the competitive examinations for the civil service, and I became a young auditor, full of passion for the Republic. They had no choice but to appoint me councilor; normally, you know, it is a question of seniority, but they appointed me a Councilor of State straightaway; so you see, truth really can be stranger than fiction!”
He was in the library translating Gaius, the classical author of works about the laws of ancient Rome, when he was arrested. The Croix de Guerre he had been awarded after the 1914 war offered him no protection from the French police.
He was interned at Drancy, the concentration camp outside Paris. His wife, Rita, presented herself to the authorities and requested to join him. Was she aware that this might lead to their deaths, as was the case for Léon, her husband’s brother, who was at the beginning of his career as a composer, and his wife, Béatrice?
Julien told me that he saw the architect Pontremoli’s two sons at Drancy—they were killed in 1944. What must they have talked about? They surely spoke of Kerylos, and happy memories. The Council of State is the highest institution in the country, and those who sit there guarantee the rights of all citizens—and when he uttered the word “citizen” I immediately thought of Athens, and he, too, no doubt. In Drancy they wore the yellow star, they were French citizens and the guards were Frenchmen too. Julien was kept there out of sight of other prisoners, before being sent to Bergen-Belsen in a cattle car. He escaped death by a miracle. Freed by Allied troops, he resumed his work with rigor and zeal. Outwardly, it was as though nothing had happened.
6
FIRST ENCOUNTER
“Achilles, hurry, I need some help!” I went over, reluctantly. I never liked assisting my mother at work when she wore her white apron, but that day, I shall never forget it, was the most important day of my life, the end of my childhood. She knew exactly what she was doing when she called, a little too loudly, “Achilles! Achilles!” I was afraid she was going to show me off like a monkey in a circus, I knew her look at moments like that: even in front of the Eiffel family, she always wanted them to say, “How good looking he is,” or “Is it true that you make him recite the Fables of La Fontaine, Madame Leccia?”
It was because of my name, and the fact that I was “Greek”— though really I felt Corsican, I loved it when I heard someone call me “a proper little Corsican bandit”—that Monsieur Reinach, as I referred to him, never suspecting that one day I would call him by his first name, chose me. If it hadn’t been for my mother, who used to say, brandishing her iron, “you have to strike while the iron is hot,” I would never have been able to seize my chance. I’d have become a hotel manager in Nice or Ajaccio, or an orange seller, or a gymnastics teacher at the Lycée Masséna in Nice. I was determined to meet Monsieur Reinach, but had so far failed to do so. Without mentioning it to me, she’d had the same idea, which infuriated me; I was still at the age when one obeys one’s mother—except when it came to standing through three hours of Easter Mass chanted in Slavonic.
My mother’s bedroom was on the first floor of the servants’ quarters, a small house on the grounds of the Eiffels’ villa that overlooked the Pointe des Fourmis. I slept in a small adjoining room; our two windows were side by side, and I left mine open whenever I could. Today I still have trouble falling asleep if I can’t hear the sound of the waves. I took to sneaking out at night, wandering through construction sites—the village, which fifteen years ago didn’t have even five hundred inhabitants, was filled with half-built houses. I would borrow the priest’s bicycle, which he habitually failed to secure properly, and dash off to Nice, getting there around midnight. I’d wander around the port, Place Garibaldi, observing everything, but I never became a thief or a libertine. I just loved to feel free, not dependent on anyone. I was suffocating in the domestics’ citadel: I wanted to meet people, to talk, to experience different things. I imagined myself at the head of a fleet, I was an admiral; I imagined becoming an architect; I wanted to become a general and save France, open a fishmonger’s, drive a locomotive, marry a Spanish dancer. I spent all my time spinning yarns to myself. Nowadays, the domestics’ little house, where the gardeners also lived, would be the most coveted, because you can go straight over the blue rocks to swim, but back when the Eiffel family moved in, the main house was surrounded by a large garden—it would not have been elegant to build it right by the water.
In the huge grounds of the villa, Eiffel installed rain gauges, barometers, thermometers, a seismograph, a Campbell heliograph and a Robinson anemometer, which he concealed behind fake Roman arches and Medici vases. To me they were toys with needles and numbers. These machines in the garden were “scientific.” Monsieur Eiffel himself set up his contraptions, and compared the results with the other meteorological stations he had built, which were, I believe, located in Bordeaux and Meudon. Waving sheets of graph paper, he demonstrated to all his staff what everyone here knew already: Beaulieu has a most agreeable microclimate. A person who kept to a healthy diet might reach the age of a hundred without much difficulty— my mother caught my eye, expecting gratitude. When I knew Eiffel he no longer rode horses, as he had done for years, though he continued to flaunt his love of sport by organizing fencing to
urnaments like the ones they wrote about in Le Petit Niçois, which his friends followed with enthusiasm, lying on their blue and white striped deckchairs. I loved his boat, too, called the Aida, in which he took us all—members of the family and the household staff—without trumpets and drums, for picnics in the surrounding coves. All the crew would hum, mouths closed, the great triumphal march of Verdi’s opera.
My mother had gradually managed to inveigle herself into the kitchen, where she rapidly took the helm: she inspired respect, knew how to give orders, liked variety, invented dishes that were quite different from Parisian recipes. Her diet of fresh products pleased Monsieur Eiffel, who had been advised by his doctor to eschew sauces, fat, and heavy dishes. It was thanks to my mother that he discovered the Corsican cedar, which he loved. He planted arbutus, myrtle, and heather. When I was a child I loved picking citrons, hard and bitter, heavy in my hand. They were soaked for a week in one of the big stone sinks, then boiled in eight successive sugar baths to turn them into candied fruits. My mother slipped pieces of them into fresh fish, caught the same day: nobody had ever tasted such a thing! Except perhaps, as Monsieur Reinach said one day, Alexander the Great, when he arrived with his army in sight of the foothills of the Himalayas: “Madame Leccia’s candied citron is rarer than caviar from the Caspian Sea!” My mother didn’t even blush, for she knew it was true.
The walls of our bedrooms were whitewashed with lime, like in the monasteries of northern Greece that I was to visit a few years later. The interior of the Eiffels’ villa, in comparison, seemed to me a real palace: Venetian chandeliers, tapestries from Flanders, Gothic chests, carpets from Smyrna, Henri II tables collapsing under the weight of Sèvres porcelain, porphyry bowls overflowing with flowers, paneled ceilings and woodwork in the style of an English manor house. I was fascinated by a panel of tortoiseshell inlay that ran the length of an imposing chest of drawers. There were embroidered and starched tablecloths, cunningly folded towels: nothing to suggest this was a seaside house, or that one was in the home of the genius who had designed the Eiffel Tower. While my mother was making herself indispensable, I was receiving an education; I attended a small lycée in Nice, to which I traveled each morning in a horse-drawn cariole paid for by Monsieur Eiffel to transport the children from the village. I didn’t yet have a bicycle; it was all I dreamed of, that and a fishing rod that I saw in a shop window in Villefranche. I went in one day, clutching my coin purse—how the seller laughed when he realized that I had mistaken the length, displayed alongside the most beautiful rod, for the price. Otherwise my passion, since the age of ten, had been for lead soldiers. Monsieur Eiffel had some very beautiful ones—he let me take them out of their boxes and set them up on the dining room table when they didn’t have guests—and he bought me some as well. I made Joan of Arc’s companions and Napoleon’s grenadiers fight each other; I had twenty warriors from the Macedonian phalanx, my elite troops. I spent entire evenings having Joan of Arc captured by Alexander the Great’s soldiers, who demanded a ransom; I launched my Marshal Ney against the Cantonese vases in the grand salon depicting sites of the battle of Waterloo; I played the Marseillaise on my harmonica. I should never have been permitted to play in the master’s apartments, but no one bothered me: “Unhappy man, thou wert reserved for French bullets,” Monsieur Eiffel said, quoting Victor Hugo, whenever he walked past the bravest of the brave, “But please be careful of my pots.” My mother was proud they let me play in the salon, and she would come in for no reason, carrying a silver tray, and I would pretend not to see her.
Our surname was Leccia, like many Corsicans, but my mother’s maiden name was Stephanopoli, and she never forgot it. That famous day, toward the end of lunch in the Eiffels’ garden, my mother had the idea of calling my name over the hedge. She had a pretty voice. Monsieur Reinach lifted his head: “Is there someone here called Achilles? He is not very swift to obey. Tell me, is this Achilles a tortoise?”
I peeped out from my shell. He uttered something that I didn’t—yet—understand.
Sing, Goddess, of Achilles’ fury,
Black and murd’rous, that cost the Greeks
Immeasurable pain, cast the countless souls
Of brave heroes into Hades’ dark . . .
He drew on his cigar and added: “You recall, my dear Gustave, that very dusty translation, it sounds so much better in Greek! Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος.” Later I learned that these were the first lines of Homer’s Iliad, telling of Achilles’s anger. I stood silent as I listened to him; he watched me, as if waiting for a smile or a frown. “This Achilles does not understand Greek, Gustave, he wants to learn his real language, no? It shows! First lesson this afternoon, in the shade of the olive trees on my new land. We shall have coffee with the ants.”
Piqued, I replied, Κατάλαβα, catalava, “I understand.” My mother’s face glowed. She didn’t drop her pie dish; an excellent actress, she continued serving. A young boy who spoke modern Greek was just what Theodore needed, and living right next door to his future home. That’s how I remember it today at seventy years old. Like every man of my age, I have lived through the worst horrors, cowardices, bombardments, deaths. I had friends who were tortured, others whom I loved at school who ended up as collaborators in the Milice; I saw my mother die when the ration cards ran out. I have as many memories now as old Homer behind his hollow eyes. But that day has remained intact.
During my first encounter with Theodore Reinach, I wasn’t overly timid. My ignorance was my armor. I vaguely knew that a different world had existed, populated by dead writers, by gods whom no one believed in anymore, and by epic heroes. I just needed to get close to them, and I think I vaguely wanted this even before I met this strange tribe. I had only read Jules Verne and several Lives of Napoleon, written for young people and given to the children in the local schools back home in Corsica, with illustrations of the Battle of Arcole, the coronation, and Waterloo. My father had received all this in books he had been awarded as academic prizes, and he gave them to me, along with my harmonica, my lucky charm. I left Corsica at the age of eight. I saw in the Pointe des Fourmis a sort of blend of that mysterious island and the island of St. Helena. The building that was going up would be my dream palace.
I was resourceful, clever, and amusing, so people said. The construction site was my playground. I was one of the few who had the right to follow the work, to look at everything, to wander around as if I were part of the family. I had been asked to make drawings, my mission was to observe everything, and I called the villa that was under construction, loudly, in front of the dairywoman, the postman, the priest, and the whole choir of ancients, by its real name, “Kerylos,” the Greek word for halcyon. The halcyon swoops over the waves; it is the bird of sadness, the bird that weeps in poetry. Halcyon is also the ornithological name for the kingfisher, that odd creature with its sarcastic and smug little cry that ends in a trill. The three Reinach brothers, Joseph, Salomon, and Theodore, born with beautiful regularity each two years apart, rather resembled kingfishers, birds that build their homes on the water, twig after twig, to raise their families poised upon the sea. Everyone said that the Reinach men were very ugly, and had married pretty women who were all even richer than they. I always thought that Theodore Reinach had a noble head, his turned-up nose making him look like Socrates. He had fire in his eyes—my mother’s expression, I think of her as I write it down. When he spoke to me he was straightforward, and I immediately understood whatever it was he was explaining to me. He proposed a deal to me. I was to send him my drawings twice a week, so that he could, from Paris, follow the construction.
My first lesson in archaic Greek took place that day among the bees and surrounded by rosemary bushes. My mother followed us with cups and a coffee pot, while the Eiffels remained behind chatting and Monsieur Eiffel, in a straw hat, made giant strides to measure what would be the width of the building. The vegetation had already been significantly cut back, and everything sm
elled of grass. Cerberus sat placidly sunning his muzzle at his master’s feet. I perched on a rock in silence. Monsieur Reinach, seated on his folding leather chair, looked like a soothsayer: he had dust on his gaiters, his cuffs, and his hat; his white shirt was black and his black jacket was white. He didn’t bother me with grammar; he chose two words, democracy and demagoguery, and explained the differences between them, telling me about the Chamber of Deputies, elections, and speeches. I loved listening. I was a grownup. I saw the sun, the sky, and the birds. I gazed at the horizon.
