I want this place to be my home. It was an odd, disorienting thought to have, but I could not make it go away.
When he returned, we drove a short way down a hill, past mulberry and fig trees, and turned into the gravel parking lot of a tiny hamlet. We left the car and walked under a low archway, onto a medieval street cool as a pool and cellar-dim. Everything was built from anthracite-colored stone, the street itself and the houses that crouched along it. Across from where I stood, a cherry tree perched on a rock wall had dropped its dark red fruit in a gooey, shadowy circle. The air smelled of old dust and dry grass.
The house in La Roche (on the right), circa 1960.
“Look up,” Grandpa said.
I obeyed and saw an enormous rock, a prehistoric creature, tufted with clumps of grass and crowned with a sort of stone fortification. Here and there a tree or a bush slanted off it in an unruly tangle. “That’s La Roche,” he told me. “There used to be a castle at the top.”
To our left, the street dropped down in wide steps toward an arched portal in a fortified stone wall. We descended the steps and stopped in front of a recessed door, made of wood that had weathered to nearly the same gray as the stones. The lock creaked, and the door groaned open across an uneven floor. A chilly hush emerged from a whitewashed hall. We stepped inside. Gray light, slow as an old man, filtered through a dirty transom. “Wait here.” Grandpa took a key from a hook and disappeared. In a moment, a light appeared. We stepped forward into a room furry with dust.
The furniture, arranged around a gigantic hearth with a stone mantel, slept under sheets of cobwebs like a royal retinue under a spell: to the left, a table and a motley assortment of chairs; to the right, a bed with metal curlicues at its head and foot, a green basket chair, and a rustic stool. The mantel was crowned with an odd assortment of objects: a coffee grinder, a hurricane lamp in pale green glass, and a sailing ship made from some sticks and a Pelforth beer carton. I looked through the dirty windowpanes of the door on the opposite side of the room and saw a terrace covered in weeds, bordered by a stone wall. Beyond it, a path led from the hamlet toward a small river a few yards away. A cloud blew over the sun as I stood, transfixed, watching the wind brush over the earth and grass. That was when the bomb my grandmother had hidden so many years ago went off. My ears buzzed. I felt butterflies in my stomach. It echoed through the rational part of my brain, blinding me to the fact that the house was primitive, dusty, and cold inside, and flashing an alternate image of the place in my mind’s eye: fixed up and cozy, with me shelling peas on the terrace. I want to live here, I thought. I must live here.
I heard my grandfather calling and followed his voice to the hallway, where he was dragging open another door into a huge space. “The magnaneraie,” he said. “This is where they raised silkworms.” He pointed out a rudimentary stone niche he said had once been used to build fires to keep the silkworms warm. The room was wide and lofty, with ceilings two stories high and windows overgrown with vines. A petrol stove enameled in two shades of brown hunched in one corner. There was a large lumpy bed beside it; at the other end of the room were two twin beds and a round table with heavily carved legs. A wooden structure, like a loft but with no floorboards, overhung the lumpy bed and the stove, and a narrow walkway ran along the inner wall of the room, connecting the loft to two doors on the upper floor. The only way up was a crude ladder handmade from splintery scraps of wood. Grandpa gestured to it. “Climb up.”
I acquiesced. Not daring to forsake the relative safety of the ladder for the rickety walkway, I leaned far enough to one side to catch a glimpse of a room with a dirt floor and a sloping wooden ceiling. Through the door of the room, I could see a Turkish toilet squatting crookedly below a length of green hose attached to a faucet.
“You see?” he called up to me. “This house has all the modern amenities. I even put in a second toilet just in case the first one was ever occupied and someone had an urgent need.”
“How practical.” I tried to imagine a need so urgent I’d use the Turkish toilet. The scenarios were all unpleasant, so I climbed back down without anything else to say.
Grandpa had already left the room. When I found him, he was back in the entryway, unlocking another door, located to the right of the front door. He yanked it open, and I winced as the wood groaned across the concrete floor. We crossed into a structure that seemed wholly separate from the part of the house we’d just explored. “The tower.” He gestured up to the high ceiling. To our left, a poured concrete structure that resembled a bunker took up half the tower’s floor space; the remaining space in front of us and to the right was a dusty, cobwebby mess. “This is the wine cellar.” Grandpa indicated the bunker, whose walls were more than a meter thick. Inside, a bare bulb shone on empty wine racks and a few elderly-looking bottles. “There used to be wine here, but it was all stolen.”
“By whom?”
“By people here. The neighbors are thieves.”
I was eager to leave the wine cellar, which looked a little Bluebeard-ish, so I backed out into the light. Grandpa locked the door behind us.
He pointed up to a small opening in the wall, with what looked like a miniature window seat set into it. “Do you see that?”
I nodded.
“Once, long ago, a lady sat there with her handwork, watching for her knight to come home from the Crusades.”
“Really?” I had never heard my grandfather voice a flight of fancy before, and this only added to my love for the place.
He pointed again. “You see that little ledge? That’s where she would set her sewing so she’d have enough light.” This imaginary woman would have had to be elf-size to fit in the niche, but my grandfather’s authority was absolute and the idea was delightful, so I forbore to comment.
We looked, and then suddenly that was enough. Grandpa sent me back out to the entryway while he went to turn off the electricity. I stood in the doorway and gazed up and down the stone street, the vines making green curtains over the power lines, the young trees growing out of abandoned stone walls, the gray-green and yellow lichen and the tiny succulents creeping over everything. It was warmly, thickly silent.