by Adrien Goetz
I was a pleasant, uneducated boy whom he set about civilizing. A good boy. I drew and sang—gradually the Corsican folksongs of my childhood were replaced by the operatic arias whose scores Madame Reinach used to lend me. She’d noticed that I sang quite well, I could hold a note for a long time without quavering. I began as a page-turner. Two years later she was accompanying me on the piano. We practiced Nadir’s aria from The Pearl Fishers: “Yes, it is she, it is the goddess,” which I sang as a duet with Adolphe, whose voice dropped soon after mine. We sang it as we walked toward a copy of a statue of Athena Lemnia, in the vestibule with the staircase leading up to the bedrooms, cackling with laughter. Back then we didn’t have many distractions. I sang La Belle Hélène, my triumph: “I am the fiery Achilles, the ardent Achilles, and I would be perfectly tranquil, were it not for my heel . . . ” I played it all to my advantage. I think I knew how handsome I was, with my wide, dark eyes and my hawker’s smile, a lock of hair slicked over my forehead, I certainly intended to make the best possible use of it all to forge ahead in life. I bought myself a pair of spectacles, because I was also self-conscious about my intelligence. I was a nasty little brat really. I used to steal Adolphe’s cravats, not that he cared. What could be worse than a young man who reads in his mother’s eyes how handsome and special he is, and who has a clear conscience, for after all his mother is right (which is why she so rarely pays him a compliment)? When I said this to my beautiful blue-eyed Ariadne, she answered, unsmiling, “I suppose a child whose mother tells him he’s ugly.”
At the age of sixteen I was barely presentable—which didn’t matter, since I was never invited anywhere. It was my good fortune to know the Reinachs, who brought me down to earth, and whom I so revered. Sport was the only area in which I could easily best them. I worked even harder at it, to infuriate them, because they dared not tell me it wasn’t worthwhile. Soon I was reciting my declensions as I swam, or conjugating the famously difficult “mi-verbs,” one of the pitfalls of Greek grammar. I would go down to the kitchen where little Justine, who was sweet on me, would grill me a steak, and into the garden, still reciting, to lift sandbags and do pushups.
I dreamed of Athena and Aphrodite. I exulted at the thought of Poseidon splashing about with mermaids, I devised new ruses for Odysseus, I recounted Solon’s laws to myself and invented new ones, even more just, for the people, the army, the slaves, for the dairymaids and the pastry cooks, I made cutout paper models of the monuments of the Acropolis, I read aloud tales from Alexander’s youth, I broke in Bucephalus by turning him to face the sun, I killed Penelope’s suitors with my bow, I made the prettiest girls from Sikyon pose for a painting of the most beautiful woman in the world, I crossed the Bosphorus on a bridge made of boats. I cried, “Evohe, Evohe!” in the waves and strode naked along the beach at night, I memorized prayers to Persephone and Hades, god of the underworld, smoked bay leaves in an incense burner in my bedroom, fought the Lernaean hydra and slayed the Stymphalian birds on the marshes. I was so happy.
I was not in love. That came a little later, and I couldn’t tell a soul about it. I’ve had a long time to think about this: how this house also gave birth to love. I could only ever have met Ariadne, Homer’s Ariadne with her beautiful braids of hair, at Kerylos. She looked just like the young Greek women of my imagination. She liked to wear sandals and dresses by the great couturier Fortuny (who drew inspiration from the Charioteer of Delphi), with draped silk falling from her shoulders to her ankles, like Artemis the huntress. She also liked to draw. My love for her was like my love for Kerylos: it grew slowly. The difference is that today my love for Ariadne remains intact.
It was to Ariadne that I first sketched out a glorified version of my family’s history, dissimulating the fact that my mother was a cook and my father a gardener. I didn’t lie, but I stressed the elements that I thought would please her most. My parents had moved to Beaulieu when I was eight. It wasn’t easy to find to work in our village in Corsica. Cargèse is quite probably the only Greek village in France. My mother used to tell us the story of our odyssey for hours at a time, like the other mothers from Cargèse, each of whom must have embellished her story in her own way, but the basic facts were true, what happened to us was a historical fact, just as much as the Trojan War. It’s a terrible thing to seduce a woman by telling the very same stories that you hated to hear coming from the mouth of your mother. I knew it was all probably only half true. Ariadne was enthralled by “our” history. In the sixteenth century a boat pursued by the Turks arrived on an unknown shore, parched but beautiful, somewhere between the banks of the Liamone river and the mountains. I don’t know how many pilgrims were on this Mayflower filled with Orthodox priests, but by the end of the nineteenth century several hundred intrepid people were living there—not necessarily all related to each other, for a fair number of them married Corsicans—peasants who had altered their Greek names to make them sound Corsican or French. I used to wish I’d been named Stéphane, like my cousin, or Nicolas, or Paul, Alexander, or Alexis. Achilles was a little farsighted. In the France of the Third Republic, such a name wasn’t entirely unheard of, people my age might have an Uncle Hector or Nestor—I once met an old duke named Sosthenes at the Reinachs’ house, who told me we ought to set up a club for people with Homeric names. He had a cousin named Antide, which was extremely rare. I laughed when I saw Proust had given one of his characters the name Palamède.
In our village, Cargèse, there were two churches opposite each other, one Catholic and the other Byzantine. We followed the “Greek” liturgy, which was a little complicated because when they arrived on the island the Greek Orthodox monks had been forced to pledge allegiance to the pope, after which they were considered to be Catholics practicing eastern rites. The Archimandrite had the good sense to also serve as the curate; he simply changed his regalia depending on the ceremony. He maintained links with his fellow Orthodox priests in Athens, Saloniki, and Corfu, with whom he corresponded rather more than he did with the bishop of Ajaccio who was supposed to be his superior. Whenever we were in Nice, my mother would go and light candles in the Russian Orthodox cathedral.
The Thyroreion glowed red in the early morning light when the front door opened onto a view of the sea and the rocks. The walls on each side are painted with frescoes whose symbolism is not hard to interpret. Reinach for beginners: on one side, a basin, with birds, on the other, a shield. As if Theodore had wanted to site his creation between war and peace. The book I might write, were I to continue filling this notebook, would be some version of War and Peace; there are so many characters, stories, fights, and love affairs. It’s as though this adventure encompasses a whole world.
We have lived through more wars than any generation since Napoleon and the tsar. Theodore, for all his plumpness and fine manners, was a fighter. He and his brothers faced real enemies at the time of the Dreyfus affair. He lived through the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, the siege of Paris, the battles of a vanquished France, when the raging fires of the Commune added so dramatically to the humiliation of defeat. Theodore told me of the loss, in the Tuileries fire that almost destroyed the Louvre, of Napoleon III’s entire library, illuminated manuscripts and incunabula, a huge part of the legacy of the kings of France. Prosper Mérimée’s house in Paris was burned down, with its great library and all his paintings. He came to Cannes to die, so as not to have to witness the end of his era. According to Theodore, war and peace was the story of mankind. Sometimes he would bring up the case of Gilles de Rais, going over his trial to show how he had been wrongly accused and dragged through the mud, portrayed as a sadistic and bloodthirsty Bluebeard, simply because everyone was jealous of his prodigious wealth. He knew by heart whole pages of dialogue from the trial of Joan of Arc. He knew who did what in the battles between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. He lived and breathed history as religious people live and breathe prayer. He told me, laughing, of monasteries where monks, ignoring the passage of time and keeping only eternity permanently in the
ir sights, continued to pray for the conversion of Saint Paul or that Saint Augustine should renounce lust.
None of this prepared us for winning the war.
The 1914 war horrified the Reinachs, though it came as no surprise. Forget historical documents; now families received telegrams with the names of those who were missing or killed in action. One morning it was Adolphe Reinach’s turn, my best friend and comrade. How I wish he could have seen how happy I became, that he had been at my first exhibition, that he could have read the first articles written about my paintings. Theodore did not live to see the next war, he died in 1928. He never knew about the yellow star. He didn’t see his grandchildren perish in a death camp.
In the summer of 1945 I happened to be in Paris, where I saw a documentary about Nazi war crimes. It showed everything. I stayed till the end. After the Liberation I had imagined mere prisoner of war camps, and I supposed the conditions there had been a little harsher than in the others. I’d thought we would celebrate the return of the survivors. But when we saw them they said nothing, and we didn’t want to ask questions. It wasn’t until I sat through this long film, in which I first heard the names of the sites of death, that I understood how Léon, Theodore’s son, Béatrice, his wife, and their two children had died. And that I understood that they had not been the only ones, there were millions.
The narrator barely mentioned that the majority of those whose bodies had been piled into mass graves were Jews. It’s hard to admit what occurred to me then—I have to write this, I need to be scrupulously honest with myself—that all the Reinachs’ culture, all their knowledge, all that they knew and taught me, had not protected them from hell. Their genius was of no use. They believed that ideas, beauty, enthusiasm, knowledge had been passed down from generation to generation, going all the way back to Athens. They had fought to recover the links in this chain in order to revive it. All this to end up in mass graves. As I left the movie theater, I thought about how wrong they had been. How their lives had only served to revive dead things, before they themselves died in a horror that cannot be compared to any other. Everything I believed in died with them. It even occurred to me that I had been right to flee Theodore, to reject Kerylos, to live only for myself, to create abstract art, for the path on which they had set me led only to mass murder. I don’t want to think like that anymore, of course. I am not so bitter now, but it is difficult. I feel terrible that I almost felt angry with the victims, who suffered so much, as no one had ever suffered before. I have not erased these images from my memory. If I hadn’t seen that film, I wouldn’t have believed it.
I still tell myself that if my children know nothing about Kerylos, nothing about ancient history, after all . . . I never handed any of it down to them, I didn’t want to inflict an entire useless culture on them. Let them sell my books to the first second-hand dealer who comes along. But I did tell them very early on about what had happened in the camps, about the Nazi genocide. I knew Theodore and Fanny’s grandchildren well. I still dream about them sometimes. They were like my nephews. In my dreams I can hear them, telling me I have grown too old.
After the Normandy landings, I found an essay by Salomon Reinach that I was once given by his brother, who was always telling me to take home various books and pamphlets, perhaps hoping that I would eventually understand something or at least be entertained. The barefoot boy from the Corsican mountains ended up with a library in Nice worthy of that of the university, and I’ve kept it all. In Salomon’s essay, published in 1892, I underlined a sentence in red that must have been noted by other people, and ought to have been read by many more: “To talk about an Aryan race that existed three thousand years ago is to make a gratuitous hypothesis: to speak of it as if it still existed today is quite simply absurd.”
10
“REJOICE”
By the age of seventeen, armed with a little culture and burnished with classical literature, muscular as a god on a sarcophagus, I was certain of one thing: I was not going to stay at Kerylos. I dreamed of adventure and travel. The house would soon be finished. I had learned a lot, now I wanted to go to sea, to see the world. I didn’t stop telling my mother I wanted to leave. She was apprehensive, but knew she could do nothing to stop me; I had grown tall and strong, as she said. I wanted a boat, a voyage, to live as they did in The Mysterious Island, Two Years’ Vacation, and Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen—no one pointed out to me that while he was writing my favorite novels, Jules Verne barely left his house. I wanted to be a sailor. I would have liked to be an architect, but I don’t think I would have had the necessary precision. I didn’t inherit the organized spirit of my mother the cook; if she had been allowed to study she could have become a chemist. She became the Marie Curie of ratatouille, a rather less dangerous recipe than the one for radium. The Reinachs believed that radium would heal humanity and all its ills, long before we understood the consequences. She was the only person who knew how to cook each vegetable separately and for how long, and in which copper pan. My father, the gardener, died shortly after my brother Cyrille’s birth, leaving us penniless. I owe my stamina and my strength to him. I often think about him. He knew almost nothing about my life. I used to wonder if he was watching over me from on high, what he would have thought of me, of my paintings, my exhibitions, if we would have looked alike if only he had been allotted time to become an old man.
XAIPE, pronounced kirie, is the word written on the threshold. It means “rejoice,” and it can be read both upon entering and upon leaving the house. One can believe it, or not believe it now. When the Reinachs weren’t here, I sometimes found myself alone in the house for a few weeks at a time, and then I did indeed rejoice. The servants would take advantage of their absence to take time off, and I was left looking after everything. Sometimes during the holidays Theodore would have me come to Paris, where I would see the whole family, before happily decamping with a suitcase full of books.
For Theodore Reinach and his children, especially after we first sailed around Greece, I was like Passepartout in Around the World in Eighty Days: their factotum, and occasionally their friend. Once I have found what I have come to look for this morning, I’ll leave by the spiral staircase that goes directly down to the courtyard at the back, and then I will continue to write my chapters, piece by piece, like a puzzle, from memory, on the terrace of the café in Beaulieu, on one of the green benches, on the beach, looking from afar at this gilded palace at the tip of the headland.
Then the awful person that I am will deliver these pages to the notary. I will make sure that one of my descendants publishes them, after everyone involved has died. Because I also intend to reveal a secret, concerning Greece, historians, and archaeologists. A fortune could be made from it . . . A secret even more shocking than the Glozel site and the inscribed tablets discovered there, which the academic world still insists are fakes, and that I believe should be in the Louvre or at the Museum of National Antiquities—now they can only be seen in the little private “museum” that the owner of the field where they were dug up (among the skulls, a whole field of the dead) has opened at the side of the road, with an entry fee of four francs. I need to talk about this too, though I find the story extremely troubling. I used to dream that I would be the person who deciphered the Glozel tablets.
How amusing would it be if my great-grandson—especially if he is not particularly bright—ends up making his fortune with this notebook, in which I intend to reveal everything. Reinach will at last have been useful for something: making the cook’s descendants rich.
And how stupid it would be at my age to die like that, swallowing the key, how inelegant, lacking all panache, as Rostand would say—still my favorite writer, even if no one reads him anymore. Like me, he was born on April 1; he even founded a club for people born on that date. I’ve always had a feeling of fraternity with the great master, who should by rights have supplanted Victor Hugo.
11
PHILEMON AND BAUCIS RESTORED TO YOUTH
; It was in one of the two ground floor bedrooms called Philemon and Baucis—all the bedrooms had names—that opened onto the passage to the peristyle that I experienced my first night of love. Not my first night with a woman; I had already slept with several dozen, though rarely more than once—that was the difficulty. I had stayed in just about every big hotel in and around Beaulieu. I could grade the level of service, the quality of the breakfasts, the plushness of the carpets. I could compare English, Scottish, Spanish, even German girls. None of them set out to make a play for me—I was poor, I was vain, and I thought Greek grammar and gymnastics were acceptable topics of conversation.
Still, I had plenty of affairs. I’d seduce a girl then never see her again. I used to confide in Adolphe, who was envious of my easy conquests. This was all during the happy period when the house was finished and death had not yet made an appearance. We thought the world belonged to us. Love didn’t interest me particularly. I supposed I would get married one day, it might be a little hard for my mother, but she would get used to it. I didn’t really think about falling in love, and wasn’t even sure I wanted to.
I’d seen the two rooms on the ground floor when they were just finished and still redolent of fresh plaster. Because they were intended for older guests, they bore the names of a couple of aged mythological characters, Philemon and Baucis, simple folk who had become close to Zeus. It was time to dust them off. I thought about it every time Fanny Reinach, with her sly humor, opened one up for some distant aunt. In Kerylos, the rooms were never allocated definitively. Philemon, Baucis, Daedalus, and Icarus were—depending on the time of year and whether the house was full or not—for friends and visiting cousins, following the rules of Greek hospitality. From time to time I slept in one of them, especially in the winter, when Theodore found it convenient to have me close by so he could dictate texts to me, which he had taken to doing more and more—my archaic Greek was now of a decent standard—or tell me his latest hypotheses, and also, or so I liked to think, to do me an honor. I loved sleeping in these beautiful bedrooms, rather than in my cell next to the kitchen scullery: falling asleep with the embroidered curtains half-open, drifting off looking at the painted garlands and the stylized stars, waking up to the morning sun filtered through the beige and pink silk. I loved the colors of the walls in the evening light, the gray tones as they grew warm and deep, with an orange glow against which the roses and palm trees stood out in red. Every time I pulled open a drawer I felt exhilarated, and from the window I could hear the sea and the wind. I no longer suffered the nocturnal anxieties I had when I was younger. I stopped going to Nice at two in the morning. I felt like I was on a boat, but sheltered from any storm, or all at peace inside a lighthouse that was also a library, a garden, and a diving platform. I don’t think I have ever been happier than in Philemon, where I slept quite often, and used to spend hours watching the boats in the bay. I have just pushed open the door, trembling.
