Growing up, my sister and I went every year to stay with our French grandparents in Toulon. Their apartment was on the highest floor of a four-story building in a gated compound on top of a cliff on the outskirts of town, with a roof terrace and enormous windows looking out to sea. There we would run wild with a gang of summer kids, clambering down the cliff path to the beach, carving our initials in the aloes on the way; shouting, “Marco . . . Polo,” for hours in the pool (irritating the matrons with their careful breaststroke) and sunning ourselves on its slatted deck. After dinner, we would gossip and flirt by the big tree on the stone plaza or race around in games of hide-and-seek along the leafy pathways, our sandals’ slaps echoing on the concrete.
Our grandparents’ world was one of immovable routines, into which we kids slipped easily. Meals fell at religiously allotted times—lunch at twelve-thirty sharp, supper at eight p.m., with an aperitif hour beforehand—and the rituals of their preparation were, like the postprandial sieste, sacrosanct. Over breakfast, our grandfather planned the day’s menus for lunch and dinner, recorded in tiny, meticulous script in a spiral notebook (we could look up what had been eaten on a particular date years previously). He departed for market by eight a.m., carrying his list. In childhood, we would accompany him: to the butcher, the baker, and finally the bar/tabac, to buy the day’s newspapers, magazines for our grandmother, and cigarettes for our aunt. (He shunned the nearest grocer after she asked him to pay for parsley, which was not done, and ever after made a detour for vegetables and milk.)
Upon his return, Odet, the housekeeper, almost our second aunt, laid out the groceries and set about cooking lunch, the day’s main meal, always three courses, while our grandfather retreated to his study upstairs to read and to write. Our grandmother, meanwhile, elegantly gaga from early on, was arranged—beautifully dressed, coiffed, and maquillée by Odet, like a precious doll—in an armchair by the dining room window, where she could gaze out at the infinite, always-changing sea, or look down at the electric-blue swimming pool, or put on her glasses and pretend to read the magazine placed in her lap. In the late morning, around eleven, Odet brought her a tray bearing a little crystal glass of Coca-Cola fortified with blood from a raw steak, to keep up her strength and hopefully to ward off what were mysteriously referred to as her malaises.
My sister and I were free to roam with our friends, morning and afternoon. We were not required to lie down after lunch the way the old people did, in sepulchral silence, the metal blinds lowered against the Mediterranean glare, though we were asked not to swim for an hour after eating, for fear that we might suffer an unspecified attack and drown. It was requested only that we appear for lunch properly dressed; that we help clear the table and do the dishes; and that we resurface just before cocktail hour, to help lay out the little bowls of pretzels and nuts and to set the table for supper. (Dinner dishes were tidily stacked in the sink and left for poor Odet to tackle in the morning, which she tried to do silently so as not to waken us. The dishwasher, although present, did not function for as long as our grandparents lived: they did not believe in it.)
After our grandfather’s death, in 1998, my father hoped to sell the place: Expensive to maintain, it needed updating and was difficult to get to. Even within the compound, to reach the apartment required climbing seventy-two steep steps from the nearest garage; both of our grandparents had been housebound in their last years. Our aunt sold her interest in the property to my sister, and my sister and I begged our father not to sell.
My niece was just born then, and although my husband and I didn’t yet have children, we planned to. My sister and I wanted passionately to retain this beautiful place we had always known and loved. Our father agreed to help defray the costs, and over the years that followed, we brought our kids to fall asleep to the sounds of the waves on the shore far below and the cicadas’ saw, to play the games we’d played ourselves, to climb over the same rocks and swim in the Mediterranean, to sit in the same restaurants and eat the same meals. Our maiden aunt lived in another, smaller flat in the compound, and she bestowed upon the children, in a modest way, their French birthright: endearments and simple sentences in French, snippets of culture (when they were infants, she gave our daughter a Bécassine doll and our son a stuffed Milou, a.k.a. Snowy, the dog from Tintin), a sense of belonging.
But our aunt died in 2012, and the apartment felt as though it were dying also. It sat empty almost all of the year, tended only by a cleaner who stopped by twice a month, or said she did. We finally decided we had to sell the flat and went to visit it a final time, in the summer of 2015. We arrived late at night, having flown from London and driven from Nice. The hot-water heater was on the fritz, apparently irreparably, as it transpired, and we hadn’t been there twenty-four hours when the entire antique fuse box blew. The Wi-Fi my brother-in-law had set up a few years before proved defunct, and at some point a phone bill had been overlooked, so we had only our American cell phones. Busy ants formed an unbroken convoy from the kitchen terrace to the pantry cupboard. The woman paid to clean the flat had been ill and had instead sent a friend: The wrong-size sheets barely covered some beds and dangled to the floor over others. Dust bunnies skittered eerily across the marble floors.
We strove to see it as an adventure—like camping!—heating water to bathe on the gas stove and dining on baguette and cheese by candlelight. But, in fact, much time in the subsequent days was spent trying to locate plumbers and electricians (trickier than you’d imagine, with no local phone or phone book, and no Wi-Fi) and awaiting their visits. Not only did the water run cold, it trickled lamely from the tap: the pressure, never good, was reduced almost to nil. The blinds upstairs in my grandfather’s study hung in tatters, and somehow one of the large windowpanes there had cracked. In the terrace planters, the skeletal remains of shrubbery clattered in the wind. Dust billowed up from the bookshelves if you moved a single book.
In spite of the beautiful burning sunlight, the air redolent of lavender and rosemary, the delicious sticky salt water drying on our skins; in spite of the nightly winking lights of the ferry to Corsica crossing from the harbor to the inky horizon; in spite of the softness of the ancient worn sheets on which my grandmother had embroidered her initials as part of her trousseau—in spite of it all, we knew, on that last visit, that it was time to go. Without a fortune, we couldn’t fix time’s damage (the electrician, in his thirties, had never seen a fuse box as old); we couldn’t even slow it down. Just like a person, the apartment needed to be loved, to be inhabited, to be filled with routines and with life—just as my grandparents, my aunt, and Odet had done for so many years. I didn’t need to memorize the pathways or the vistas; I knew them as well as I know my own fingernails. For all of us, saying goodbye weighed, a great sadness; but it felt inevitable, even necessary, like burying an aged relative after a long illness.
I returned just once, the following January, with my sister, to sign the papers. Our neighbor opposite on the landing bought the flat for her daughter’s family. It was winter, and we walked hurriedly through the emptied apartment on the eve of the sale, pausing to sweep the dust left by the movers and to fill a garbage bag with a pile of our grandfather’s precious papers, somehow overlooked. Bare of its familiar objects and clutter, illuminated only by the wan overhead lights, the apartment looked forlorn. The metal blinds on the floor-to-ceiling windows, fully lowered against the blustery night, rattled slightly. My sister and I climbed to the roof terrace and stood leaning against the rail, looking out one last time upon the most glorious view I know: the vast, incessant sea, the enormous canopy of sky, mutable and immutable, eternity itself.