the rare free weekend, we spend hours walking along the promenade, idly watching the nodding yachts. Even just bowls of water soothe me, which Annette, having quickly read a book on feng shui, places uncomprehendingly each night beside my bed.
Nothing makes sense. My condition challenges everything they believe in. Everything outside of reason is coincidence, illusion, mystery—like chicken entrails that faith healers pull out of sick bodies, Annette says; like Madame Aumont’s visions of the holy cross.
Street scenes, Cannes. Rue d’Antibes, packed with cars and pedestrians. One morning, en route to the lab, Annette asks Sylvain to park for just a few minutes. She wants to get out and call home, to make sure the Moroccan nanny they’ve hired doesn’t forget to place the bowl of water beside my bed.
There’s nowhere to park. Sylvain lets her out and keeps the motor running. She dashes into a tobacco shop, frantically places a call, and for some reason has a hard time explaining to the nanny exactly what to do.
A traffic cop tells Sylvain to move on. Sylvain has already backed up traffic all through the street. He honks, she glances quickly, a look of panic in her eyes.
The cop has lost his patience now, slams his fist against the roof of the car, and suddenly Sylvain is yelling at him, telling him this is an emergency and he shouldn’t slam the car so strongly like that, because it will leave a dent. He gets a ticket, drives around the block, hoping to catch Annette by the time she’s done.
When he reaches the same spot, after a grueling cruise around three or four jam-packed blocks, Annette is nowhere in sight. He heads slowly past the tobacco shop (the same cop is eyeing him with suspicion), then moves on, taking the same congested route, and drives back again. Annette is still missing. He drives on.
Finally, in the rearview mirror, he sees her running after the car. She catches up, breathlessly opens the door, and slips in, annoyed that she has been walking round and round the block, looking for him. Caught in the morning’s interminable traffic, the car hardly moving from the same spot, they argue heatedly, their voices heard all across the street.
By the time they reach the lab, they are exhausted, unable to even think of work. Sylvain finally says what they’ve been trying not to say. The options are clear. For the sake of the boy, they will have to abandon the restoration altogether.
* * *
In the summer before I turn fifteen, my parents take me on a short cruise to Île Saint-Honorat. In the chapel, I keep my eyes shut as the Cistercian monks chant the liturgical service. Sylvain and Annette quickly usher me out, thinking I’m about to have another seizure.
It’s impossible to explain what has happened. I feel as if my entire being has been turned inside out, and every part of my body is susceptible to the slightest sound, to softness, to this wonderful mystery that is assaulting me, for which I can think of no other word but beauty. My eyes brim with tears, my body trembles all over. I have begun to feel the first pangs of love. But this love is directed toward something abstract and ungraspable—almost, in a way, inhuman. And I realize, also for the first time, the sorrow that such a love can bring. Because it can never be expressed or shared, it condemns those it has ensorcelled to a lifetime of solitude.
From then on I can bear to go nowhere else. Here are clips of the chapel. Bare and austere, the walls a pristine white, the stained-glass windows unspectacular, the altar a single slab of ancient wood, bare-bones and ascetic. There is nothing to hold a visitor in thrall, but like a paramour who has idealized his lover to the point that no imperfection is possible or admissible, I am hopeless, deranged by the fervor of my desire. There is no way to placate me but to keep bringing me back to the place where that fever began, to let me sit through the entire service, which to me is as exquisite as it is torturing. To leave me, in short, mesmerized by my infatuation. CDs are no good. They’re only as good as a lover’s photograph—it evokes the lover’s memory, maybe some remembered happiness. But it also underscores the absence, and creates a deeper melancholy for the beloved.
Over time Sylvain and Annette conclude, against all logic, that the chanting produces a startling effect on me: I am starting to heal. They begin to look for signs that things are turning providential, that everything good is going our way. They want to believe it so much they’re willing to accept anything. Forced to accept what they can’t explain, for them everything has become serendipitous.
It so happens that at this time the monastery is in dire straits and has been sending out calls for support. They have begun to offer board and lodging to people who want to escape from the bustle of the Côte d’Azur, for a minimal fee. Sylvain and Annette offer them substantial financial support if the monks will watch over me and expose me to a healthy dose of daily chanting.
It’s supposed to be for just one summer. I stay three years, the time they need to finish restoring the film.
* * *
One afternoon, a novice catches me lying prostrate before the Eucharist in the chapel. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just something I suddenly feel like doing. I tell him I’ve been replaying in my mind the final scene from Dreyer’s Ordet, a film I once found in my parents’ library. I’ve been projecting that scene, through my mind, to God. I want to get God’s opinion, to ask if that scene was, in God’s view, credible. It’s a joke, a kind of serious joke. But the novice doesn’t get it. His mind has been dulled by faith, the unconditional surrender of reason that God demands. He walks away, shaking his head.
I check my watch and notice that quite some time has elapsed. Sylvain and Annette should have been here an hour ago. In another hour, it will be sext, lunch will be communal in the dining hall, and the rule of silence will mean we can’t talk till sometime before nones, when I’ll be asked to clean the barns. At vespers, they’re still not around, and by the end of the day, all I can think of is the novice who caught me lying prostrate in the chapel, and how, walking away, I heard him mutter, “You better shape up soon or they’ll send you back to Cambodia.”
Sylvain and Annette do come, but not till the following morning. Yesterday’s conference took longer than expected, and they missed the last ferry. Highly in demand in the digital restoration business, they already have a backlog of about half a dozen films. They tell me how happy they are, how great their work is going.
Nothing registers in my head. I am consumed by an emotion that floods my entire body, so potent I feel it coursing through my veins. I taste something bitter lingering in my mouth. I want something that can’t happen—that everything be turned back to the day before we first took the trip to the island, back to the point before all this truculent, sickening happiness began.
And so, abruptly, as Annette talks about yet another new project (her voice fades in and out, “. . . might have to go away,” “in Paris for another couple of weeks . . .”), I tell them exactly what I feel.
“I don’t give a fuck. You don’t have to come see me again.”
These words have the intended effect: both my parents burst in tears. Inelegant as my few well-chosen words may seem, I am satisfied that I have made myself clear.
But Sylvain tries to placate me and says he has an idea. He suggests to Annette that they transfer me to a couple of aunts in Fréjus who can look after me. They drive directly to Fréjus to make arrangements. I can imagine them snaking through the sinuous roads of the Massif de l’Estérel, which they loved to shoot, over and over, mounting the camera on the car’s dashboard, the reckless daredevils zipping past in their open convertibles. The southern air must have become suddenly more soothing, the view even more breathtaking. The mistral, a brief squall of gloom, is lifting off the Mediterranean.
