Villa of Delirium by Adrien Goetz

Author:Adrien Goetz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939931818
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

18

THE LIBRARY

“You mustn’t disturb your father, you can go into the library later. Walk around the back of the house if you want to go down and swim with Achilles.” Every morning Fanny made sure that her husband was left in complete peace when he sat down facing the sea to write, having first spread out over the table the engravings he was focusing on. Folios of illustrations of Greek vases from the museum in Naples and the English catalog of the Parthenon sculptures sat open on the lecterns. The library was the room inside the labyrinth that was the most difficult to leave.

In the early days, as I watched it being built, furnished, stocked with beautifully bound books, although everyone kept saying that I was free to go in whenever I wanted, I never felt entirely comfortable. All the rooms in the house had words inscribed on the door: some had a Greek name paying homage to a mythological figure, others translated their function. But on the door to this room there was no specific name; the Greek word βιβλιοθήκη was the same word in French, bibliothèque, a term that remained unaltered and proved that we were still Greek. It took me a long time to make this simple observation. In this room I experienced hours of suffering, hours of study that drove me to despair. It was so complicated. I used to think to myself, “And people are surprised that such a language died out!” And then one day, at the end of a week of dreadful exercises, Theodore said to me, “There you are, you’ve got it, you see.”

I hesitated to go into the library today. I walked through the door and rushed—almost ran—straight over to the windows to look at the view. I shouldn’t have; I collapsed, exhausted, into one of the chairs. I’m a broken man. I can’t go on much longer. I usually manage to hide it, but I have no stamina any more. I do three strokes of breaststroke in the sea and I can’t carry on. I am the antiquity now: I have no arms, no legs, no color left; I could be on display in a museum, like my paintings. It has been a long time since I have had any desire to read. I took a few deep, slow breaths, to recover a little, and looked around. I closed my eyes, opened them just before I fell asleep. I took out the special Royal Wedding edition of Paris Match from my camera bag and leafed through it in a state of absolute exhaustion, then dozed a little. I’ve brought with me the strange anonymous postcard that inspired this return to Kerylos. Is the stylized wreath an allusion to Alexander’s crown? Or is it merely a victory wreath for the Olympic Games? They are taking place this year in Melbourne, and the emblem looks a little like this . . . I wondered if perhaps one of the Reinach grandchildren wanted to play a joke on me, or one of the dairywoman’s nieces or the pastrycook’s daughter.

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