The Rain Watcher Read online

  THE GATES TO VÉNOZAN stand on the road to Nyons, when one exits Sévral from the east. The nearest village is Léon-des-Vignes, renowned for its olive oil and truffles. The house cannot be glimpsed from the road. The pale, pebbly path winds up, weaving its way like a long ribbon though stretches of apricot trees, vineyards, and lavender fields. It is a quiet area, with only the occasional rumble of a nearby tractor infringing upon the silence. Tourists do not venture up here—they fear the rocky path might damage their car wheels—but hikers sometimes appear, sticks in hand. Up and up, the path turns and twists steeply, so that cars need to shift gears, so that the walker or cyclist might become a little short of breath. The house can now be glimpsed, and those who have never laid eyes upon it are frequently awestruck. Vénozan looks like it was built in the Renaissance, when it was, in fact, erected in 1908. Maurice Malegarde, Linden’s great-grandfather, wanted it to resemble the Tuscan hunting lodges of the Medici family. Maurice had never been to Italy, had never seen a Medici hunting lodge; he was a humble farm boy born in a cottage near Sévral. But the significant wealth due to his money-spinning carton-packing factories gave him, at age thirty-five, a certain folie des grandeurs. Nothing could be too good for him and for his becoming wife, Yvette, also of modest extraction. His thriving chain of factories produced carton boxes, the first ever to send live silkworms worldwide, thanks to ingenious holes punctured in the sides, which prevented fragile larvae from suffocating during the long journeys. The silk industry had caught on swiftly; then the perfume and cosmetic companies had ensued. Malegarde boxes were all the rage; they were prettily decorated, handy, easy to craft, and they generated jobs. At the turn of the century, the flourishing production of these cartons was a boon for Sévral and its area, not only for Maurice Malegarde, who was one of the first to set up his factories, but for all those who followed suit. Entire trains supplied with boxes left Sévral station twice a day, heading for Marseille, Paris, Lyon.

  When Maurice Malegarde decided to build his house, he searched high and low for the perfect spot. It did not take long for him to find it, a large terrain at Vénozan, a farming locality not far from Léon-des-Vignes, just below the arboretum of limes planted by an inspired farmer before his time. One tall linden appeared much older than the others. Its beauty had no doubt drawn the nature-loving farmer to the place, and had given him the idea to plant fellow trees around it. Acquiring the land demanded a subtle pulling of strings, envelopes lined with wads of banknotes administered unceremoniously under tables. Maurice appointed a stylish Parisian architect who worshipped Italian art and the Quattrocento. The house, which took two years to construct, was a sturdy fortress built of creamy stone with a crenellated roof. It sat with a weathered indolence beneath the arboretum, facing the valley as if it had been there for centuries, its flanks adorned by an oak, a maple, an elm, and two plane trees, the northwesterly wind blowing powerlessly at its mighty back.

  Maurice Malegarde, a gregarious, mustachioed fellow, hosted lavish parties with comely Yvette, which were the talk of the county. People came from far and wide to attend them, making Vénozan the place to be. With a swagger and a top hat, Maurice greeted his guests on the steps of his property, a rented orchestra playing a waltz, waiters offering champagne. A decade later, he added the locality name to his own and invented a false title, flaunting “Baron de Malegarde-Vénozan” on his calling cards and on the label of a white wine he had the audacity to produce for a couple of years. The ostentatious Maurice died of a heart attack at seventy-nine, in 1952. His son, François, born in 1908 with the house, did not inherit his father’s panache. He was a quiet, self-conscious man who never felt at home in his father’s vast domain. His wife, Mireille, from Montélimar, was struck with ennui in such bucolic surroundings. She missed the busy town she was from. Nothing went on here, she felt, no excitement; just trees, lavender, and wind. When she had her two children, Paul, born in 1948, and Marie, in 1952, she felt she had accomplished her duty. Mireille remained at Vénozan long enough to raise them, but when her son, Paul, turned twelve in 1960, she started a discreet affair with a neighboring farmer from Visan. Five years later, François placidly agreed to a divorce. Mireille remarried and moved away. François met a widowed schoolteacher called Brigitte and had a peaceful relationship with her. Never would he have dared use his father’s false title, which conniving Maurice had managed to incorporate in property and family documents.

  Under François Malegarde’s hesitant directive, the splendor of Vénozan faltered and faded for twenty years. François did not possess his father’s golden touch, did not exploit the factories with such a sure hand. The reign of carton packing had peaked and was slowly drawing to a close. François found the house difficult to run and maintain. In winter, without central heating, the large rooms were freezing, in spite of the oversized fireplaces. Vénozan was situated high above the village, and snow was not a surprise come December. The gardens Maurice had been so proud of were neglected, taken over by brambles and weeds. The house was damp, not tended for. There were leaks in some ceilings.

  In 1970, François Malegarde succumbed to liver cancer at age sixty-two. His son, Paul, was by then in his early twenties, installed at nearby Buis-les-Baronnies, where he made his living working for a landscaper. Paul and his sister, Marie, inherited the house, but it was soon decided that Paul should take it on. Marie was engaged to a surly cultivator called Marcel, from Léon-des-Vignes, who had no intention of investing a centime in Vénozan. Paul moved back in the winter of 1970. An enormous task lay before him: tending to the gardens, to the arboretum, to the house, with limited means. It was an unhurried process, but he gave it all his attention. He worked day in, day out with his bare hands and the help of his friends, lads from the area who knew and loved the land as much as he did. There was no question of reproducing his grandfather’s extravagance, of hosting fancy cocktail parties.

  Six years later, when Paul met Lauren, he had already succeeded in shaping the domain into what it is today, a little paradise on earth.

  * * *

  The silver curtain of rain is still fizzing outside the window when Linden awakes. It is a few minutes past nine. He sends a text message to his mother to find out how Paul is. Lauren’s answer is swift: Fine! Having breakfast. Why don’t you join us? After a shower, he goes downstairs to the dining room near the lobby. His father still looks pale, he notices, and strangely puffy. He is eating cereal, bent over his bowl. Every movement he makes seems to be in slow motion. Lauren appears jaunty, her smile slightly too bright. So what if it’s raining? They can still make it to the museums—she reserved all their tickets online—and if anyone is tired, they can rest, she says, plenty of places in the museum to do just that. Tilia? Still asleep, as usual. Linden talks to his father gently, asking him how he feels. It’s his birthday, after all, and they will celebrate tonight. Paul responds with a feeble, croaky voice. His eyes are watery, red-rimmed. He looks so unlike himself that Linden cannot understand why he has not seen a doctor.

  “I don’t need a doctor,” his father tells him in the same wispy tone. “I’m fine.”

  Linden wonders for how long he has been looking and sounding like this. He wants to ask his mother, but he is aware she will not answer him now, at least not in front of Paul. She is already changing the subject, artfully, reaching out to pour her husband another cup of coffee. Linden marvels that she should act so natural, as if nothing at all were wrong with Paul. Has Linden seen the news, she asks. No, he came straight down. Lauren prattles on as Paul silently munches his cereal, his spoon moving in the slowest-possible manner, all the more surprising, since his father usually wolfs down meals, finishing what’s on his plate before others have even started. His mother sounds uncommonly loud this morning, he finds. God knows how all these people are going to manage, she blares on, waving a bit of croissant in the air. Surely the authorities are going too far, canceling everything at the last minute, sending everyone packing, all those models, those hairdressers, m
akeup artists, photographers.… Linden realizes she is talking about fashion week. All the designers are livid, apparently, and one can imagine that they would be. Linden picks up his phone to check Twitter. Fashion week, which was supposed to start today and last till next Thursday, has indeed been canceled by order of the prefecture. The Seine’s level is still mounting, splattering at the Zouave’s calves now, well over four meters, and the authorities are taking measures, just as Oriel said they would. There is no way the shows can be accommodated elsewhere, at such a key moment, just when the government is waiting to determine which steps to take. All fluvial navigation has ceased, he reads, and some museums will be closed today, like the d’Orsay, the Branly, and no doubt the Louvre (he reads this out loud to his mother, who groans). Bulwarks are being constructed around certain Métro stations in order to protect them, and the quai de la Gare, near where the Seine enters Paris, has been flooded. A problem due to the water spill has been reported in the sewers, and the situation could worsen within a couple of hours.

  His perusal of the worrisome news is interrupted by Tilia’s entrance. Her hair is tied up in a straggly bun. She is wearing a loose-fitting sweater and baggy jeans. It must not be easy being Lauren’s daughter, Linden thinks (not for the first time), not having inherited those looks, always being compared, unfavorably, to her mother. Does Tilia care? She never shows it, but Linden imagines she must have suffered, and no doubt still does. At nineteen, Tilia also left Vénozan and went to live in the Basque country with Eric Ezri, whom she married soon after their daughter’s birth. Yet Linden knows how strong the bond is between Tilia and her parents, how tender and caring she is for them, and he sees it now as his sister takes Paul’s hand, obviously disturbed by his swollen, fatigued face. Paul grumpily mutters the same response to his daughter: He is fine, no doctor needed, he is just fine, could they please stop worrying? Oh well, they have the river to worry about now, says Tilia, reaching for a pain au chocolat. Aren’t they lucky to be in a hotel that won’t be flooded? Clever Lauren, figuring that out two years ago, when she booked! Lauren replies she had no idea the rue Delambre was in a water-safe district, and come to think of it, so is the restaurant they are going to tonight. She checked on one of those online maps. Mother and daughter chat exactly like they used to, while father and son shut up. It was always that way in their family. Yet when Linden left home, settled down in Paris, he stopped being silent. The awkwardness he felt at Sévral when he used to walk into the school and bear the weight of critical eyes thawed away. It had a lot to do with Candice. His aunt resembled his mother, in the sense that she, too, was also a tall, shapely blonde, but she had a feature his mother lacked: She was an extraordinary listener. When Linden settled down in the apartment on rue de l’Église, she asked no questions; she was even-tempered and warmhearted. She made him feel welcomed the minute he arrived. He noticed she was more sophisticated than his mother, both in her appearance (hair cut in a stylish bob, pencil skirts, and stiletto heels) and in her everyday life. Books lined the walls of each room of the flat, and many a time he would come home and find her reading on the sofa, engrossed, her cat Muffin curled up in her lap. They spoke in English, although Candice’s French was remarkably good, with only a faint trace of an American accent. She had been living in Paris for a while now, over fifteen years. There had been talk of marriage with a Frenchman with a fancy name, whom Linden had never met, but it had not happened. Candice seemed to wait, and wilt. She gave English lessons at a French university, made friends, but time slipped by, and in 1997, when Linden moved in, she was in her early forties, and had, as she wryly put it herself, “lost her bloom.” She never asked questions, and he did not, either, but that suited them. In the beginning, they talked about everything but themselves. Linden soon understood she was unhappy, although she never mentioned it. She was still seeing the Frenchman, who had married another woman. She did not reveal any of this to her nephew, but he soon figured the situation out, noticing how some evenings she’d leave with a spring in her step, her cheeks flushed, elated, wearing a pretty silk frock, only to return at midnight, dress and hair rumpled, head down, trailing sadness in her wake. Linden never knew the Frenchman’s name, only his initials, J.G. Somehow, Candice understood Linden more than anyone else did. Perhaps it was her empathy, her discretion. He was comfortable in her presence; he always had been, ever since she came to spend summers with them at Vénozan and raced him to the end of the garden and back. She did not like being called Aunt Candice. She was always “Candy” to Tilia and him.

  “Dude, what are you thinking about? You look sad.”

  His sister’s voice jolts him back to the present moment. Linden says, “Candy,” and regrets it when his mother’s eyes tear up. He murmurs he’s sorry, that being here in Paris inevitably brings her back; he can’t help it. He misses her. His mother says nothing, dabbing at an eyelid with a napkin, but he can hear her voice clearly, just as if she had uttered words out loud: Sure, you miss her, Linden, but you didn’t even make it to her cremation. You were on a photo shoot you supposedly couldn’t cancel, and you left me and Tilia to deal with Candy’s death and the horror of it. No one speaks for a long moment, and the only sound Linden hears is the slush of the rain, Paul’s spoon clicking against the porcelain, and voices coming from the lobby. He does not speak, either; he balks at the idea of evoking the painful subject of his aunt’s death, in 2012, the shocking text message he received when he was on another continent, in another time zone, but that he would never forget: Please call, urgent. Candy dead. The remonstrance in his mother’s eyes is unfair; he did try to fly back as swiftly as possible, but the photo shoot, which was for a perfume brand and involved an enormous budget and a famous American actor, could not be postponed. By the time he landed in Paris, Candice’s body had been cremated. She had left a clear letter: no Mass, no ceremony, no grave, and no flowers. Her ashes were to be disposed of by her parents and sister, as they saw fit. For a long time, the ashes remained in a small urn in Lauren’s dressing room at Vénozan, until she mustered enough courage to scatter them near the wild roses that Candy loved.

  * * *

  Huddling beneath umbrellas, they trudge along boulevard Raspail in the downpour. Lauren and Tilia march on ahead, while Linden slows his step to match his father’s bizarrely dawdling one. He is accustomed to Paul’s brisk pace, and this new rhythm unsettles him. Yet his father looks better, he notices, less pallid, less bloated. The Louvre, Branly, and d’Orsay museums are closed, so Lauren switched to plan B: shopping in Saint-Germain-des–Près. The monsoonlike rain appears to have put off passersby, and even the traffic seems fluid. By the time they reach the Bon Marché, Linden’s feet are wet and cold. He imagines the others are suffering in the same way, but none of them complains, so he doesn’t, either. The luxurious department store is heated; waves of warm perfumed air waft by them. The shop is full of bedraggled, wet customers rejoicing in the hot haven. His father’s arm is still tucked into his own.

  “Everything okay?” he asks Paul in French, leaning down to him. He and Tilia never speak to their father in English, just as they don’t address their mother in French. Paul nods. He seems content, slightly dazed. His cheeks are flushed, two little red spots that look like they have been painted on. Linden asks his father if he wants to sit down, and Paul nods. Tilia says there is a place to have coffee on the second floor. They manage to find a table in spite of the throng. Linden looks at his father’s hands nursing his mug of coffee. Fascinating hands, both powerful and graceful. Now he notices how the skin on them is puckered and spotted. They are no longer the hands of a young man. He takes out his Leica and photographs them. His family is so used to this, they hardly notice.

  Linden started to photograph them when he was twelve, at Vénozan. He had a summer job with a wedding photographer in Sévral, old Monsieur Fonsauvage. It had started out as a chore, but the attraction emerged swiftly. The ambience of the darkroom delighted him. He observed the elderly photographer choose the ri
ght images on contact prints, bending down to glue his eye to the linen tester, pushing his glasses up over his wizened forehead. Monsieur Fonsauvage was always finicky about the final choice. He did not want his clients to be disappointed. After all, their wedding was the most important day of their lives, n’est-ce-pas? The trick for developing was managing the deed in total darkness. Monsieur Fonsauvage painstakingly showed him how, lights on, using leftover bits of film. Linden watched the old hands cautiously wrangle the top off the film canisters, holding the feeder between gnarly index and middle fingers, deftly inserting, handling, and cutting each spool. Linden learned by practicing. The old man, delighted with the progress and zeal of his young apprentice, offered him a battered but operational Praktica L2 camera, manufactured in 1979. It wasn’t an easy camera to master for a beginner, but Linden soon became enthralled with his gift. His parents and sister were his favorite models. At first, it bothered them, this business of him constantly shoving the lenses at them, but he soon learned to become less obtrusive, and they got the hang of either forgetting him or learning how to pose. He shot his mother sunbathing, his father watching his trees, his sister playing clown and giving him the finger. He shot his friends, the few of them he had. He preferred black-and-white, and developed his prints himself under the tutorship of Gaspard Fonsauvage. He learned about light and shadow by experimenting, all by himself, by trial and error. He hadn’t meant to become a photographer. It was just a hobby. He hadn’t realized how much space photography took up in his life. When he was fifteen, the family went to Venice for a week. Paul, Lauren, and Tilia were equipped with disposable cameras. Linden stuck to his Praktica. When they got home, all the photos were assembled into one album. There were three identical sets, and one that was entirely different: Linden’s. He had not gone for the obvious shots of the Bridge of Sighs, of the Rialto, of the Piazza San Marco. He had preferred to immortalize an old woman in black sitting on a bench, watching the sheeplike tourists lumber by, stray cats frolicking in a damp Dorsoduro alleyway, the typical Venetian brass doorbells, a waiter having a quick cigarette behind Harry’s Bar, and running a hand through his unctuous combed-back hair.