26

THE CLOGGED HEATING SYSTEM

In May 1920 I was passing through Paris. I stopped in front of an art gallery. The painting I saw in the window made me want to start painting again. It had been several months since I stopped drawing; I hadn’t been able to do it anymore. I forced myself to stop thinking about the daughter or son of Ariadne— it was too unbearable—and I chased away the image of Ariadne too, whom I had been drawing obsessively from memory. It was killing me.

I went inside. That day I met Kahnweiler, who told me about Picasso; three months later, he sold my first painting. I liked Picasso straightaway, I understood him, Picasso the Cubist as much as the Picasso who painted bodies of monumental women. He reminded me of what Adolphe had said about his family, the way Picasso combined classical rigor—that of the academic masters that Theodore had brought to Kerylos for the peristyle—with the art of African masks. A little barbarity, a kind of primitive force, was what was needed to brutalize and bring the dusty plaster casts to life. That’s what I learned at Kerylos, where I never dared show any of my paintings. I surprised them all during those years: a rough mountain peasant polished up with a bit of Greek grammar. I owe it to Adolphe more than to Theodore. They invite betrayal, all of them, Grégoire told me, advising me to flee, as he had fled—“There’s something about them.” There you have it, I betrayed them.

It took me one week to decide to become a painter and to forget all about classical inspiration. But I don’t disavow any of it, the paintings in the church in Cargèse, what Eiffel taught me, the Pointe des Fourmis, the frescoes on Mount Athos, my drawings of Ariadne naked. I created my own alphabet from it all, have inscribed my own clay tablets. Today, I exhibit alongside Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris. I suppose I wanted to shock the Reinachs, with whom I no longer have much of a connection. I find collectors who buy my work and a gallery in Nice exhibits them. I won’t say any more, it’s all in my catalogs anyway. When Picasso began to paint nymphs with pale thighs and boys playing panpipes, I realized that my revolt against Kerylos had been perhaps a little naïve, but I carried on. The master, the great Pablo, told me to my great surprise, when we met for the first time at Kahnweiler’s house, that he had always dreamed of Greece. He’s always been very generous to me, and owns several of my paintings.

After my early success, I moved to Paris. I still went to see the Reinachs from time to time. I bought books. And now suddenly here they are again, all my friends, so old now.

Sacrilegious thought: they were ignorant. They didn’t read novels; they said they were a waste of time. I would have liked to go to the bookshop in Nice and buy a Giraudoux or a Morand, something by André Gide or Valery Larbaud, but I didn’t dare because I was afraid of what they would think of me. They missed out on all the great writers of their time, one by one, stayed loyal to Demosthenes and Thucydides, and when they wanted to frighten themselves, they read their friend Rostand or one of Corneille’s brother’s forgotten plays. What might have happened if Theodore Reinach had invited Cocteau to visit Kerylos when he was staying on the coast at Lavandou with Georges Auric and Raymond Radiguet, when Radiguet was writing Count d’Orgel’s Ball ?

It’s unimaginable. Cocteau would have rather liked it, he would have turned up with his drawings of the Sphinx, perhaps he would have thought up Oedipus in The Infernal Machine in the 1920s, they could have talked about Sophocles and Euripides. But no, my poor Theodore would have quickly decided that he was wasting his time listening to this worldly illusionist, and he would, with his exquisite manners, have politely shown him the door.

One day, about a year after Theodore’s death, I bought a fat book. I didn’t know what it was, but I was taken by its white cover and blue lettering: Ulysses, by James Joyce. I read it in confusion, without understanding it, though I was entertained. I thought it was going to be a modern adaptation of the Odyssey, which it is in a way, but it’s a hundred other things as well. Theodore would have liked it, there was something of his spirit that I recognized, the art of laughter in books. I thought it was a comedy, a cabaret. I skimmed through some chapters because I didn’t understand a thing; I read every word of the brothel scenes. And then I began to underline entire passages. I still have it, it’s legendary now, and my first edition is worth a lot of money.

On page 150, a professor with owlish spectacles speaks. I imagined the delight of the three brothers if they had read it:

“I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus! Lord Salisbury. A sofa in a westend club. But the Greek!”

A few pages on is a pastiche of a play, with stage directions in italics, in a schoolboyish humor that is very Reinach: “Bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration. All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.”

Greece continued to live, though the Reinachs had no role in it. Ariadne and I shut ourselves up in the house to draw, to draw each other. The evening that I turned on the hot water faucets in the thermal baths, she posed for me, naked, in the position of Ingres’s bather, in front of one of the great slabs of tiger-striped marble. The drawing looked a little like a Picasso, though at the time I had never heard of him. I loved Ariadne’s neck, her damp back, the tilt of her head. A preparatory drawing for a painting that I never finished, I never even sketched it, for this house was constructed to live out love affairs that never happened, for writers who were never invited, for artists who didn’t appreciate it until it was too late.

Back then all the artists were flocking to the Villa Noailles, in Hyères, which was the height of fashion in 1925. After my first exhibition, my paintings furnished me with a passport to this world. It took me a while to enjoy the Roaring Twenties; I had been badly wounded, I thought it was all over, so I did not plunge into this new era right away. Picasso I came to know in more recent years, after the Second World War. Whenever we meet we embrace. People do not dare approach him; he is very intimidating. After the Liberation I began again from scratch. I became the most radical of abstract painters. Now I make minimalist art. More and more collectors are buying my most recent paintings.

Meanwhile, I still have not found my treasure: Alexander’s crown. I decided that I had to unthinkingly obey the anonymous postcard’s tacit injunction; taking it home with me is the only real reason for my return. Or perhaps I am lying to myself and I wanted to see all this one last time. Nothing prevented me from trying to find the crown the day I came back to the villa after the Germans looted the house. But I didn’t dare. It’s taken me years to dare. In the adventures of Arsène Lupin there’s always a moment when the hero finds himself with an hour, not a minute longer, to locate an object. Instead of beginning methodically, with the tension mounting, he sits down on a chaise longue and smokes a cigar. At the last second, he gets up, adjusts his monocle, and goes straight over to the hiding place. I fear I don’t have that level of expertise. I’m an amateur. There are so many potential places to stash something away in this house: all the rooms have false ceilings concealing beams and secret hiding spaces. I know where the trapdoors are in the system Pontremoli invented for keeping the rooms cool in summer and warm in winter.

I had one idea left. The huge hot water balloon that Theodore was so proud of. He showed it triumphantly to Eiffel to prove that he really was the last of the Greeks, the most modern of men.

I descended the staircase to the laundry. The basement was full of old trunks holding clothes and toys—nothing had been moved. The Germans hadn’t touched a thing down here. The furnace was where it always was, painted white, with a lever and wide steel pipes. Hot air used to be pumped out from here and sent around the house, imprisoned by the marble.

I wondered if under the cover there might not be enough space to conceal a box with the conqueror’s crown inside. The hot water system doesn’t work very well anymore, which hardly matters since Kerylos is now a summer palace. I couldn’t unscrew the large metal disc, all clogged up with limescale. I tapped the tank, which sounded full. I didn’t have the strength. It would have to be taken apart, sawn into rings. If the last treasure of the Macedonian king really had been hidden there, it must be wedged right inside and I don’t know if it would even be possible to get it out. Pontremoli had warned me that the whole system needed to be serviced and the tank emptied every two or three years; it was done in the early days, then forgotten.

I still occasionally see Pontremoli, the dear man. He’s not in good shape, and I think he senses he is going to die soon. He has received every honor, not that he cares. I don’t know if Prince Rainier invited him to the wedding, though how apt it would be to have the creator of the Monegasque architectural style sitting in the nave of the cathedral. But probably nobody thought to invite him, and anyway he is too frail to go to such occasions.

He has one particular obsession. He can go on about it for hours at a time, in an utterly scathing tone as if he were lecturing his students at the Beaux-Arts: he detests Le Corbusier. He says that if one were to listen to this prophet, this dictator, this man who knows nothing about history or the major architectural movements, about ornamentation or formal restraints, of which Kerylos is in a way the most beautiful and simple expression, this man who knows nothing about the art of living in a beautiful house, everyone would end up living in rabbit hutches. Pontremoli is tireless on the subject. He sees that young architects are drawn to Le Corbusier, considering him to be the successor to the master builders of the Parthenon and Chartres. But every time he hears that, the old lion awakens and flies into a rage: “‘Corbu,’ as they call him, is an opportunist, a schemer, a friend to all the Vichy clique, a bloody Swiss man who’s only good for building prisons—he should have ended up in one himself . . . ” I have not dared to tell him that I am going to visit Le Corbusier in his little cabin in Roquebrune. He lives there as if he were on a boat, a naked, barrel-chested Diogenes, an old wise man with whom Monsieur Reinach would have had lots of lively disagreements. His monk’s cell is the most beautiful 150 square feet imaginable, with the sea and the trees right within reach.