Villa of Delirium

by Adrien Goetz

  A few days afterward we had to cancel our visit to Delos because of headwinds. This upset Theodore, because he knew that there had been a recent discovery near the Temple of Apollo of houses that could be of interest to him for Kerylos—I add that to moderate the opinions a little of those who insisted that the villa in Beaulieu was a copy of the ones in Delos, which were discovered around the same time. All those people who knew nothing about it, those semi-savants—“the worst,” as Fanny Reinach always interjected, and who enthusiastically feigned unwavering admiration of her husband—said that Kerylos was the identical copy of an ancient Greek house. Affecting great wisdom, they would add, foolishly, “Exactly the same as those discovered in Delos, where there are entire neighborhoods of them.” The houses in Delos are smaller, less well designed, and they were only written and talked about just as the construction of Kerylos was coming to an end. Admittedly, the person who discovered them was Joseph Chamonard, a friend of Pontremoli, Grégoire, and Ariadne—who didn’t accompany us to Greece—but to conclude that they were the sole inspiration for the house is to simplify everything. Were there music rooms in the Delos houses? The two-story houses were only discovered on the hill in 1904—after Pontremoli had sketched out his plans. He was delighted to discover that both he and the Greeks had arrived at the same conclusions about the layout of rooms, in particular the vestibules where the staircases were located. Delos confirmed what Theodore had found at Kerylos, rather than the other way around. The villa was open on all sides, and you could see the sea from every room, which was the opposite of what was unearthed in the alleyways of Delos. There was electricity throughout the house. How many porcelain light switches were found in Delos? And what about the hot water cylinder, that marvel of human genius!

  The first time I spoke Greek in front of Adolphe and Theodore, there was a burst of laughter: the Cretans only understood half of what I was trying to say. The Greek spoken in Cargèse was so sullied with Corsican that it was like a foreign language. “I don’t think anyone can interpret our interpreter,” said Theodore. “Articulate more, less iou, more os, speak in simple sentences, we need you!” Adolphe laughed too. I was mortified. My mother had taught me her patois letting me believe it was the language of the gods.

  After Valletta, we sailed to Chania, where we saw the beginnings of the museum where objects dug up during the excavations of the Cretan palaces were collected together. I didn’t know at that point that Knossos was a folly quite worthy of Kerylos. The famous Arthur Evans, who would soon become “Sir Arthur,” welcomed us to the ruins of this palace that he had decided was that of Minos, with the famous Labyrinth, porticoes, great halls, and horns of consecration. He treated Theodore as his equal. He was not an awkward intellectual like the Reinachs: he wore his shirt open, without a tie but with a beaded tie-pin at his neck, a beige linen suit with a waistcoat, a pink flower in his buttonhole, quite a different school of archaeology. He showed us the bedrooms, described the sumptuous bathrooms he was reconstructing—his concrete mixers were running at full speed. An army of painters from Athens, some of whom spoke warmly about the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the museums of Basel and Munich, were completing the fragments of frescoes that had recently been discovered. From a loop they constructed a face; two hooves became a great bull-fighting scene; an arm, a foot, and a neck were assembled to become The Prince of the Lilies—it was superb. Theodore wasn’t fooled, and he had fun, over tea, seeing how they had avoided the classical style to return to the beauty of simple, primitive contours. Nobody was asking the fundamental question about truth and fakery. This was the invention of Minoan civilization, before our very eyes. Soon afterward, in Paris, women began wearing dresses inspired by Cretan fashion, without wondering if it wasn’t in fact the Cretan frescoes that were inspired by their elegance rather than the other way around. In the throne room, Theodore sat and posed for a photograph that I still have framed in my house, which has survived all my moves and all my anger toward him. He is posing like an Olympian—he is ridiculous.

  During the few days we spent in Cyprus, rather touchingly, he almost seemed to justify himself to me: “You know, Achilles, when I was your age, at school, where my father ended up enrolling us after all those years of home schooling, I hated sports. I hated the gym teacher who came once a week to the Lycée Condorcet—at the time it was still called the Lycée Fontanes— with a whistle around his neck in the courtyard that was once the cloister of a convent. A veritable agent of law and order. We called him the torturer. He had a stooge, the supervisor, who always used to say to me: ‘Go on then, run away, go play ball with the others.’ No one ever says to a young man kicking a ball, ‘Go on then, pick up a book, go read with the others, look how happy Theodore is with his book, doesn’t that make you want to do the same thing?’ I found it terribly unfair. I think deep down that I haven’t changed your mind. But you are made for sports, there’s nothing to be done about it. We’ll keep you anyway! Here, catch, it’s a book!”

  While we were in Cyprus, we visited Famagusta and Othello’s tower, that monument to the glory of jealousy. Adolphe and I were not very sensitive to this emotion that drags a man down and leads him to crime, and still less seduced by Theodore’s intolerable idea of having us translate Shakespeare’s play in order to “clear the rust off our English.” We slipped away to visit a few places that had nothing to do with archaeology. Then we sailed back to Crete; from Kalami, we went by mule to Phaistos, another ancient palace, more authentic and wild, because less invaded by British archaeologists. The site had been taken over by Italians, who yelled to each other from one low wall to another, drank a great deal, and didn’t over-restore, which in my opinion was far better. Alongside the great spectacle of Knossos, Phaistos was a black and white movie. At the heart of this complex that had barely been unearthed, turtles were shuffling from one pool to another. The beach was glorious, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in my life. At sunset I swam for three hours, as happy as a demigod.

  In a storage area away from the main site, we were shown a terracotta disk that had just been unearthed, its inscription coiled like a snail, in a writing system that nobody recognized. Theodore looked at it cautiously, saying that it is never a good thing to find an object like this of which there is no other example—I did not pay much attention at the time, but he mentioned it again, furious, at the time of the painful Glozel episode that I shall have to recount as well. I could not help but wonder if he didn’t suspect a hoax by the Italians.

  He was very alert to trickery, though I didn’t understand why. He said to me once, in a dreamy tone of voice that I can still hear, “A beautiful find, that is everyone’s dream . . . You’ll see, if you persist a little in the study of ancient civilizations . . . The discovery might come . . . Adolphe, I am sure he fantasizes about such a thing.” The “Phaistos Disk” became wildly popular in Crete, and there were even key chains and charms made of it, but it still hasn’t been deciphered—some people think it’s a game of snakes and ladders. Adolphe took the time to copy out a lengthy inscription, a traditional kind, which he published. He was proud, almost as much as he was of our memories, which we kept to ourselves, of the disreputable houses we visited in Famagusta. One of our companions bought a fragment of a woman’s profile, certainly authentic, for the Louvre. It’s still there, and nobody knows that we owe it to the creator of the costumes of our wild cabaret where our greatest scholars shouted in chorus, “Come on, baby!” Whenever I talk about those sailing trips, no one believes a word.

  On the voyage home, I was still doing pushups and Swedish gymnastics like a sergeant major, but I was also listening out for the voices of the gods. Kerylos was growing clearer to me. My Greek was improving, though I still struggled. I forced myself to memorize pages of Greek tragedy. We hadn’t visited Athens. I wanted to. I was drawing better than ever, I tidied up my sketchbooks, my watercolor technique was becoming rather good. I had learned things that would be useful to me years later.

  The
mosaic anchor on the floor of the villa had been planned before our departure, and now it made sense. Today I look at it, enclosed within the dark red geometric lines of the tesserae that break the ground into a thousand pieces, and it reminds me of our travels. Humming tunes from Herewego—I had no idea they were still stored somewhere in my memory—I sketch it in this volume of my recollections. Theodore once explained to me that he’d had the anchor copied from some Greek paving uncovered in Delos in the House of the Trident, which had been written up in a scholarly journal, but he insisted on the fact that the original mosaic was located on the edge of an interior courtyard, “rather stupidly” on the main axis, while here it was better positioned between the vestibule and the great peristyle: the movement of the dolphin that wrapped around the anchor prompted guests to turn right, as though the house itself were in motion—and it signified that this was where he had moored his family. In his mind, it was clear: by placing the fragments he had chosen in places where they rang true, better than the originals, he had improved on the Greeks. According to Adolphe, the Kerylos anchor was placed in a location “that wasn’t remotely in the Greek style.” However according to Theodore, on the contrary, his anchor would have aroused the admiration of the Delos mosaicists, and nothing pleased him more. There is no billionaire today who would be capable of this combination of good taste, historical knowledge—he always found the perfectly apt, if entirely unexpected, recently unearthed quotation to illustrate his point in a conversation—and playfulness. He went on, apparently just for my sake: “You’ll see, in a hundred years people will dare to say that neo-Gothic is an improvement on the Gothic, that the neo-Renaissance of the Eiffel villa is an improvement on the Renaissance, that Renoir’s women are even better than Fragonard’s, and that our Greek house is more beautiful than the houses of ancient Greece, and it will be true. Never forget, my friends, the archaeologists from the year 4000: we are doing this work for them!”

  17

  DREAMING OF THE THERMAL BATHS AT KERYLOS AFTER SPENDING SEVERAL DAYS IN A MONASTERY FROM THE MIDDLE AGES

  Fanny Reinach concealed bottles labeled Coty or Guerlain in small boxes made of sandalwood. She whispered, “Naiads,” which is the name that Pontremoli gave this luxurious room, built around an octagonal pool, with hot water faucets and steam vents, the last ancient baths built anywhere in the West to honor the naiads, those young women who loved swimming, surrounded by bearded tritons and gods crowned with fresh seaweed. Pontremoli procured fittings in Budapest and Istanbul and added technology worthy of the fastest locomotives. Today, none of it works anymore. I saw, glancing in briefly, cracks in the ground. I’m not even sure that there is still water. In the village, people gossiped that Theodore bathed there naked with Sarah Bernhardt, and I let them say it . . . The actress had long since passed the age of splashing around with members of the Institute.

  In the early days, I did not use these facilities; I merely adjusted the temperature, ensured that the pressure was not too high, and disappeared while Madam Reinach settled in there to chat for hours with her friends. I was not worthy of such luxury—my mother did not think it very suitable at all to install a hammam in one’s home. A young girl came from the new Negresco hotel to give massages. The small pool was designed so that people could sit upright in it, like in the mosaic baptistery discovered at Ravenna, except that here the decor was not Christian; there were dolphins, fantastical marine animals, a frieze of tiny waves. When everything was ready, I would leave a towel at the door, which meant that no one should enter. It was Adolphe who first dared to push me into this sybaritic cave—was Sybaris not the most famous Greek city in the world for the baths that softened the skin of its inhabitants?

  It was late afternoon, the whole household had gone on an excursion, and we had done two hours of gymnastics and one hour of swimming. Adolphe turned on the steam, and we ended up like two Olympian athletes splashing about in the huge cistern, making salacious jokes. The ritual was established, and we accorded ourselves the right to steam once a week. Theodore approved; Fanny contented herself, laughing, with banning us from touching her ointments and summoning the masseuse from the Negresco.

  After the war, the doctor advised me to do exercises in the water, to rehabilitate my legs. Naiads was at the end of the small corridor that led to Philemon, my bedroom. In the early days of my “affair” with Ariadne—what an awful word—when she came to see me every day, I surprised her. This is one of my fondest memories of love. The house was empty and she let herself in with her husband’s keys, careful not to be seen by the caretaker—but she didn’t find me in my usual quarters. I had left the door of the thermal baths open, and the scented steam was flowing out of the room. She understood the invitation; she undressed, left her sandals in front of the statue by the entrance. I saw her appear, naked, framed by the wooden doorway.

  I believe that Theodore’s project to see antiquity reborn was never more fully achieved than at that moment. Sitting in the water, facing her, I watched her step into the pool. White marble with dark veins, glowing in the light of the candles I had lit, projected warm reflections onto her skin. She threw herself at me, I closed my eyes, felt her body outstretched on mine. We made love without thinking of Greece, and I managed to completely stop thinking about the war. We stayed at least three hours in the heat, lounging by the side of the pool, holding hands, gently massaging each other, listening to the trickle of the water. That day I told her something I had never told anyone before: the details of the journey we had taken, Adolphe, Theodore, and I, into the most secret sanctuary of Greece, the holy mountain of Athos that still followed the rites of Byzantium.

  At the back of the room, a mosaic-covered half-dome gave the room an uncannily religious atmosphere; it had an air of Venice’s Saint Mark’s Basilica equipped with a bronze soap dish. Ariadne asked me a lot of questions, and she dared to force me to talk about Adolphe, about whom I had been unable to speak since he had died. It was here, for the first time, in this place where he and I played as young men, that I was finally able to talk. Ariadne was intrigued by our secret sojourn in the forbidden place, where we were able to spend a few days. I told her that what we missed the most at Mount Athos, much more than women, who are not permitted to go there, were the bath oils at Kerylos, scented with iris. On Mount Athos we were treated like thirteenth-century paupers. We were fed boiled beans and lentils, made to sleep on mattresses in dormitories with thirty other impoverished people. We were woken up for endless Masses of which we understood not a word. Even I, trained in these rites by my mother, was lost. After a few days of this diet we were filthy, permeated with dirt and the smell of incense, stinking like old priests—horribly sanctified. We dreamed out loud, all three of us, under the vaulted ceiling of the Dionysiou monastery, of the villa’s baths. I can still hear Adolphe: “What if we managed to bring the masseuse from the Negresco? Wearing a false moustache? Would the monks behead us? They might rather like it, the filthy old bastards.”

  We kept the purpose of the expedition secret. Adolphe and I let our beards grow. Before 1914, worldly men wore beards and mustaches; it was the servants who were clean-shaven. This detour through the Orthodox church allowed me to make headway in society: I kept my beard for two years, clipping it in the style of Edward VII. Adolphe kept his mustache, the one you can see in the last photograph taken of him in uniform. It was agreed that I would be the one who spoke to the monks, and to their leaders, the famous Hegumenos. I was not to tell anyone that the other two were Hellenist scholars—to ensure that we were not mistaken for traffickers in antiquities. The idea of being taken for a merchant horrified Theodore. Adolphe threw me a look and grinned within his freshly sprouted beard. I had recently found out one of the secrets of this family—the dairy-woman, the notary, and the postman were not entirely wrong— and I now knew that they had been the cause of a huge scandal at the Louvre, though I continued to act as if the “Reinach affair” had never taken place.

  Ariadne asked me question
s about the secret monasteries. I loved that she liked the same things I did. I could teach her something. And I especially loved watching her when she asked me questions. I enjoyed explaining things to Ariadne, I wanted to show her Athos through my memories. Lying on my back, eyes closed, I talked to her as she stroked my hair. It was not easy to reach this wild peninsula, where twenty monasteries and an infinite number of chapels, not to mention caves where hermit saints lived, perpetuated an ideal of rustic and ascetic life. It is not Greece, it is not the Ottoman Empire, it is a republic of monks. In Athens people mocked them, saying it was wise to avoid bathing naked there in the mountain streams. Ariadne wanted details. But I saw only holy people there—no satyrs chasing young athletes. They had the features of Professor Barbenfouillis in those films by Méliès. They were unfriendly, even aggressive, convinced theirs was the only true faith. Before the Great War, Athos had not yet garnered the fame it has today, and there were no doubt many monasteries in Russia and the valleys of Romania where people lived like this, close to nature, cleaving to holy doctrines. In Cargèse I had long heard talk about such places. All the priests knew that there, where entry is “forbidden to any woman or female creature,” faith remained as pure as it was at the time of the Virgin Mary, who, according to a passage in the Gospels disregarded by serious people, journeyed to this place and made her garden there.