Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.
When I went home from Edinburgh to visit my mother it was to a different room in a different house, and even a different country; for her home was no longer in Switzerland, but across the border, in France. Subsequent to a series of rent hikes by greedy landlords, she and old Pete Toy had at last moved out of the "English" villa on Chemin Bonvent in Geneva, with its sheep field and ambivalent neighbors and purple mountains’ majesty, and into an old two-storey row house in the French border town of Ferney-Voltaire, under the benign gaze of the eponymous Voltaire, the town's most famous resident, and his elegant chateau, in the département of the Ain in historic Burgundy, a few miles and a cultural light-year from the city of Geneva and its ever-growing suburbs (of which Ferney hardly formed part back then, but does now). My mother’s house, the sellers claimed, had once accommodated watchmakers and their families imported from the High Jura by Voltaire as competition for Geneva’s keystone industry. The house allegedly dated to the great philosophe’s time, to be precise to the last year of his life: 1778. This made it two years younger than the United States and eleven years younger than the first French Republic and contemporaneous with my spiritual university life in Edinburgh. I was seduced. The house had little but charm, but charm it had in abundance. When I first pushed open the groaning old front door and descended two steps into a narrow hallway at the end of which was a soft pool of ethereal light from a recessed monastery window, I was transported into the aloof, provincial French world of Daudetor Bernanos, or the early films of Clouzotand Renoir. With its heavy creaking shutters and swaybacked tile roof and teetering chimney and deep-set windows that peered out like the eye-sockets of a skull, the house was la France profonde undiluted. Inside, a steep staircase ascended abruptly from the narrow entrance hall to the upper floor, itself divided into a kitchen and an apartment, with on clear days a tantalizing view across the verdant bassin lémanique to Mont Blanc and its sliver of Italy beyond, all of which—including the swishing waves of greenery and, in the distance, the blue line of the lake—could be seen to even better advantage from the skylight of the enormous attic, or grenier, on the top floor. One mounted a rickety ladder, pried open the rusted skylight, dodged the sudden rain of roof grit and dried bird droppings, and took a deep breath. Beyond slanting rooftops and chimneys and a pear tree towered the Alps, and shimmering on the horizon Switzerland, Italy, and the Midi: all the world I wanted then (or now). Two minutes’ silent contemplation of this view would reveal the faint rustling of mice and the burbling of wood pigeons in the eaves and all around the sussurating hush of provincial France, broken on long summer evenings by the faint ringing of the Angelus from the village church or the snarling of Citroens in the street below or the low rumble of a plane taking off from the nearby airport. It was an odd, poorly-planned, outmoded, dusty, and decrepit house, and my mother loved it more than anywhere else she’d ever lived and it loved her back so much that in the end, like the house in Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One,” it became both companion and captor, and eventually, in its fashion, it killed her. But not until she was 80 and content to be living in her dreams.
