Aix, Montreux, Villa Triste
Reading Patrick Modiano
The melancholic refrain of an alpine resort: always a lake and mountains, hotels like grandes dames of another century with their velvet curtains, the casino, the lake shore boulevards, the Café de Quelque Chose, the beauty pageants and summer open-air concerts, old world grandeur no longer in fashion. Alpine resort towns with their aspirations to fading glory nestled all along the mountain chain, replicated on a smaller scale with a certain oppressive provincialism, always a café with its regulars, always a hotel de ville, always empty rooms, always a train leaving.
Last summer in Aix-les-Bains: the casino we never visited, the now-gaudy facades of the blocky grand hotels with their Italianate ornaments. The marble floors and pillars and mirrored foyer of the residence where we rented a basement. Fresh boule from the bakery, cow cheese of deep butter hue. The myriad steps up steep hills, gardens overlooking the lake, a late-night Tango convention in the bandshell. A small lakeshore beach and milky waters, dusk fading over the chain of hills, pines of late summer, a Moroccan restaurant in someone’s backyard.
Five summers prior, an inn with a little balcony in a town on Lake Geneva. That time we did visit the casino, its interior bleak and discordant, the carpets not unlike Las Vegas’ most off-strip gambling dens. Here the error was the existence of windows, late afternoon light pouring in and bringing out the dark mustiness of the interior. We had already been drinking white wine on the tiny balcony of our pension, so we went back out along the lakeside promenade, the water an otherworldly turquoise. The promenade bustling with summer tourists, a lot or Middle Eastern families, and us on the bench drinking the remnant of the wine out of water bottles, lulled into the stupor of old world aristocratic locales, their perpetual draw, where beyond the aerobic activities of the day there was little tradition besides drifting into a drunken daze as the lake water turned to ink and lights on the hills glimmered in the distance.
My mother and I, off-season at a lakeside motel in Avigliana, not far from Turin. The lake was green, though under clear skies it could reflect a blue hue, and nearby were the Alps, though the mountains surrounding the town were still modest. On one was perched San Michele, the monastery on a high cliff that inspired Umberto Eco’s fictional necromantic fortress in The Name of the Rose. Our motel room had a little balcony, just slightly above ground level, but it did look over the lake. We tried to look for an open, decent restaurant, but ended up having cheese and bread and supermarket food out of mugs. It was somewhat like catching a summer camp off guard, when it hasn’t yet been infused with the pretense of life, everything a little abandoned. The boat clubs looked off limits. My mother started observing intensely, over days, what she insisted were the same trio of ducks, in the throes of a love triangle.
First memory of its kind: I was six. My aunt’s alpine ski chalet. Interiors of warm wood, the freezing snow outside, wood logs and spiders, the older girls sneaking off at nights, a beauty pageant had been happening in town then too. Did they attend, did they participate? I cannot remember. Only that during that time there were circles on my hands, a strange fungal infection that had stumped the dermatologist in Alès, the mining town where we’d lived then, from where we’d traveled to this alpine chalet. I had skied a hours every day, and loved it. I have never quite skied again in my life. If there had been a pinnacle of my time on the slopes, it was then, though at the time it was only the beginning of a possibility. 1999, a six-year-old Asian girl in a purple ski suit, her mother watching, her hands ringed with fungus beneath her mittens, clenching ski poles, and in the chalet all the adults were drunk, and a millennium was about to turn.