I have been asked to produce a set for a beautiful play written and directed by Selma Alaoui in Brussels. The piece deals with melancholia and stages the life of a tormented soul: Angus and his relationship to love, utopia, a glamorous past in a castle, an alcoholic mother, a vampire-like old lover, an unfortunate life trainer and a job that he ‘would prefer not to’ do. Set design involves visual research and a great excuse for scouting. In this case, I took myself to a video exhibition in Flanders, a 3 hour walk in the forest, a dusty museum in Paris and a seriously damaged castle in Normandy.
I knew the castle from childhood, I only remembered a couple rooms, a terrible story about a giant rat monster living in the cellar, a tea party and walking through the nearby woods full of angst at the thought of being charged by vicious wild boars.
Anyway, as I soon realized a couple years later, the reason I had only seen a couple rooms was linked to the fact that the family physically occupied less than a quarter of the castle for heating purposes. When I started working on Selma’s show, I thought I needed to visit some sort of semi-abandoned castle. Since I was in France at the time, I thought about going back there.
I called my childhood friend’s grandmother, a certain ‘Vonvon’, who accepted to take me on a tour. My mother and sister came along, one to entertain Vonvon while I took pictures and the other to pose in the frame to represent scale. Vonvon welcomed us with a singular mix of warmth and impatience. My mother had deemed it relevant to specify Vonvon’s long lasted semi-madness while stuck in the car, half way to the castle. Vonvon, a tall and quite beautiful woman for an 80 year old, was wearing a bright red skirt, a fisherman’s jumper, 1950s golden rimmed glasses, some long necklaces and a couple thin gold bracelets. Her hair and posture were quite perfect and her tall figure was framed by two neckless and rather excited pugs.
Without further introductions she took us on a tour of the site. After telling us the history of the wood paneling in the dining room, we soon enough got into what I was to find the most interesting part of the building and what Vonvon was to systematically complain, grumble and gossip about. As we moved through the downstairs rooms, all sorts of humidity stains and improbable water damages started shaping the walls, remnant tapestries, old furniture and decorative wall paintings. Every time Vonvon opened a new door with one of the numerous keys hanging on a chain as thick as a jailer’s, she huffed and puffed and proclaimed some ‘Ah!lalalala’ and ‘Oh!’ at the decrepitude of the rooms.
A grandiose staircase pointed at a miraculous past and a private sitting room on the first floor still emanated some sort of precious elegance if one were to ignore the black plastic tarpaulin covering the card table and the delicate velvet quilting of its chairs.
Then we snaked up some sinuous stairs to the second and the third floors. We traveled from one room to another in a breath, I took as many shots as I could: mildew gnawing at an antique wall paper, an oxidized mirror, turn of the century dolls crushed under broken bookshelves, dead flowers in a stained vase, my sister sitting on a mouldy canopy bed, dust covered logs organized in a bedroom fireplace. Thousands of dead bees piled up on the wooden floors, Vonvon explained to us that there were a couple of hives upstairs that no one was particularly interested in dealing with. Once in a while a dead rodent in a corner would be snobbishly ignored by the pugs.
Suddenly, Vonvon had a little shriek, my sister mother and I turned to ice. Every room and corner seemed to point to a new corpse of sorts whether it be furniture or animal, we waited for Vonvon’s development: "Henry’s mother’s coat! What a waste! WHAT a waste!". We came closer to see what the woman was pointing at, she continued : "Do you realize that at his mother’s death, Henry brought her favourite coat up to the last floor of the castle and simply left it here. An Astrakhan coat! Look at it, it is absolutely ruined!", my mother asked : "Why on earth did he do such a thing?
-Oh! Laziness, what can I say…" The coat looked more like a dried up cadaver of a black sheep, the floor was covered with shavings of black wool and shriveled up leather. The fabric had gone back to its primal origins.
We continued our tour fairly rapidly and ended up back downstairs now officially bound to share a drink with Vonvon and her friend Henry, the actual owner of the oddhouse. Vonvon grabbed a tray in the kitchen and brought us to Henry’s den, an overheated study full of hunting books. Henry, a small dinosaur of about 90 years old, offered us a prickly cheek and humbly received our gratitude for opening up his house this way. Then he sat right back where we found him, clearly expecting to be entertained. Following her abrupt fashion, Vonvon served us to some unevenly dosed grenadine, opened a pack of biscuits with controlled irritation and passed them around without notice. Started a rather constrained conversation that became more and more relaxed as Vonvon slowly monopolized the attention and soon enough proceeded to declaim a long monologue with a small break for a second serving of cookies. It appeared that she is quite taken with the history behind royalty. My sister and I couldn’t help exchanging amused looks when Vonvon started talking about the English royal family and said to my mother: "Patricia, do you know what the secret of the Windsor family is?" without letting her respond: "Impotence! That’s right! Impotence! Without artificial insemination, there would’ve been no Charles, nor Andrew, and I’m pret-ty sure Diana needed some of science’s help for William… As for Harry, one has to admit that he has nothing of a Windsor". I was quite surprised by Vonvon’s crude language but her later suspicion was even more savoury: "And Camilla! I hate Camilla, I just, I don’t know, I just don’t trust that woman. But clearly, most evidently, Charles loves her because she is the only one who knows what he likes, and HOW he likes it!"
The sexual allusions sort of dissipated after a while when she got on the subject of princess Diana whom she had been a great fan of: "And then I saw that picture of Lady Di and Mother Theresa, and you could tell, I mean I could feel it, that there was something between these two women. What I think, is that Mother Theresa asked God to protect and carry Lady Di and in that particular picture, you can see that Lady Di recognizes that, reads it in Theresa’s eyes. And I mean it’s no wonder that Mother Theresa died a month later than Diana." Then Vonvon started nervously playing with her necklaces: "But you see, I feel these things too, I’m a little bit like a medium myself. I’ve often been told that I had special powers I could’ve developed, but I didn’t. I don’t know why."
My mother and I stared at each other clearly sensing that things were getting a little out of hand. Henry had grown so bored with the conversation that he had fallen asleep in his seat and my sister was plainly starring at the wall. But as we were suggesting a retreat, Henry woke up, reached into his bookshelf and started taking out a number of antique books he was determined to show us. We obediently came back to his desk and started looking at these, actually, splendid works of art, when one is fond of very old books. Yes, the engravers in them were delicate. Of course, the highly decorated leather bindings were admirable. And one has to admit that things are just not made this way anymore. The tragic of the situation is that this sort of faint enthusiasm only contributed to encourage Henry to show us more and more dusty old books. Until he took out The Songs of Bilitis, a collection of erotic poems from the late 1800s which Vonvon immediately tried to censure.
Amused by Vonvon’s reaction, I insisted on seeing the book. Vonvon said: "Well, yes, I suppose you and your sister are in age after all". The more pages she turned the more the engravers became pornographic. What had started as some depictions of nude women slowly become some nude women kissing and later on nude women having sex with each other and close to the end, many many nude women kissing and having sex with each other at which point Vonvon closed the book and said : "Ok, then, well we get the point don’t we!" My mother, sister and I laughed which relaxed Vonvon and got the pugs all dribbly and excited yet again.
After a tedious polite conversation between Vonvon and my mother at the front door of the castle, during which the pugs kept drooling and rubbing themselves on my trousers, the three of us eventually got in the car and left Mussegros with great shots and odd impressions.
