VILLA AIR BEL
Harper – Oct. Pub
BEHIND THE BOOK by Rosemary Sullivan
The genesis of a book is often as mysterious to the writer as to the reader. I remember Michael
Ondaatje telling me that In the Skin of a Lion began in a library when he discovered the story of a millionaire
missing for five year. Anxious to claim their inheritance, the millionaire’s family hired bounty hunters to find
him. In the end the man who was the catalyst became a single page in Ondaatje’s book.
When my husband asked me where my book Villa Air-Bel began, I spontaneously said: “In Chile in
1985.” I was surprised myself, but indeed that is where the first seeds of the book were planted.
1985 was still a few years before the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. My husband and I
were in the town of Talca where Juan was born, a very conservative town—in the first days of the coup d’etat
so many people were arrested that they were held for days in the empty municipal swimming pool. In 1985,
Talca was under curfew. It was December, high summer, beautiful weather. One night we went to a café.
When the café closed at 1 AM and the doors were locked, a young guitarist came on stage to sing the illegal
songs of Victor Jara, who, twelve years earlier, had been murdered in the Nation Stadium in Santiago.
There was a legend that the guards had cut off his hands to prevent him from playing his music to the other
prisoners.
A group of people at the café invited us home. Young people. They would have been as young as
twelve when the coup happened. I remember slinking through the dark streets, seeing soldiers shoving
people out after curfew into the backs of paddy wagons. At the house we drank cheap wine, and as the
atmosphere warmed, one young man left the room and returned carrying something. As he unwrapped the
objects carefully bound in cloth, I saw that they were books: one by Oriana Fallaci. I don’t remember the title.
But I do remember the other: Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. These were banned books.
To be caught with them would mean prison. Then the young men turned to Juan.
“We were kids at the time of the coup. We live in a dictatorship, but we don’t know it all happened.
You are the first person we have met who has come back. What can you tell us?”
There was silence. All Juan said was: “Who do you think I am?”
I remember at that moment the air froze as solid as ice. Cold, cold fear. Terror. Suddenly the young
people realized they had revealed themselves, given away their secrets, and they had no idea who they
were talking to.
1
VILLA AIR BEL
Harper – Oct. Pub
Juan immediately put them at ease, but he had delivered his lesson in the most dramatic way
possible. “They had been too trusting, too innocent,” he was saying. In 1973, the government of Salvador
Allende was a democratically elected government. The students were demanding reform, not revolution.
After the coup they discovered the watchman at the university was a secret police informant, as was the
woman in the cafeteria, or the student who sat beside them.
For me, that moment, when the world turned from amicable comfort to terror grafted itself onto my
mind, permanently.
Juan came to Canada as a political refugee. In 1974, he had produced a play. It was an epic story of
the history of theatre which he staged in the central stadium of Talca. There was comedy—the Comedia del
Arte; there was tragedy—the story of Oedipus. The Generals were in the audience. When King Oedipus took
his eyes out and they ran with blood, the generals applauded. But a week later a reviewer in the local paper
asked: What was this man, this Juan Opitz, trying to say? The reviewer declared that the play was
defamatory of the military. When Juan heard the police were searching for him, he sought refuge in a safe
house. When they threatened his family, he gave himself up and was jailed for three months. He was
conditionally released through the intercession of a Relief Agency. He fled to the Peruvian border and went
into exile, arriving in Canada in 1976. I understood the meaning of political exile. It is the deepest violation of
a fundamental human right, the right to home and country.
In 1994, I went to Mexico City. I wanted to meet the remarkable writer and painter Leonora
Carrington. Though she was by then a recluse and protected her privacy, we had a close friend in common,
the poet PK Page, and Leonora immediately invited me to visit. I had read her short story, Down Below, the
account of her escape from France in 1940. She, along with millions of others, had fled before the German
army which was relentlessly advancing from the North. Between six and eight million people fled to the South
of France, a number so unprecedented that it was called La Pagaille—the great turmoil.
In those days, Leonora was the young lover of the painter Max Ernst. In September 1939, as soon
as Britain and France declared war on Germany, the French government rounded up all German nationals
as enemy aliens. Max Ernst had been living in Paris since 1922, but he still held a German passport. Along
with thousands of others he was interned in the hastily improvised prison camp called Le Camps des Milles
2
VILLA AIR BEL
Harper – Oct. Pub
outside Aix-en-Provence. He was freed after three excruciating months. Once the Germans invaded France
in May 1940, he was arrested again and returned to Les Milles.
“Why didn’t you leave France in 1939?” I asked Leonora. “We should have left France after Max was
arrested the first time,” she said. “But we couldn’t imagine a world other than Paris. You must remember
what Paris was in those days, before the war. Paris was wonderful. Paris was freedom.”
Wars build slowly, cumulatively, often years before the history books date their beginnings. In
Europe, long before the bombs fell and soldiers and civilians died, long before extermination camps do their
work of horror, there was the war of nerves, the propaganda war being fought for people’s minds. Despite
the stories that are told in retrospect where everything is clear and predictable, it is never easy to decipher
where the real enemy is or who will be the victim. In France, the illusion of normalcy was sustained for
years. And then, in a moment, the world collapsed like a burnt husk. Millions of people were blind-sided.
Despite the ominous signs, they could not believe a world war could happen. Not a second time.
Leonora introduced me to the work of the Catalan/Mexican painter Remedios Varo. I read her
biography. She too had to escape France, in 1941, but it took her and her lover Benjamin Péret a year of
waiting for exit visas before they could leave. By that time, the French border was sealed and one needed
an exit permit from the new Vichy government to get out of France. The couple were helped by Varian Fry
and his Emergency Rescue Committee. This was the first time I’d heard of Varian Fry. Oddly, in a story I
wrote in Mexico in 1995, which eventually became the basis of my book Labyrinth of Desire, I used Fry’s
name for the main male character. The character is a shadowy romantic figure with whom the protagonist
falls in love and he has no relation to the real Fry. In retrospect this seems a curious choice, but at the time I
found the name compelling. Perhaps Fry sat in the bottom of my mind, awaiting my attention.
I read Fry’s biography and was struck by a photograph reprinted in it, the one you saw in the film.
What moved me about the uncannily beautiful photograph was the frivolity of the adventure—Varian Fry and
Consuelo de Saint Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry were hanging paintings in tree branches at Villa Air-Bel. Yet
the world outside the photo’s frame was a world at war. How do you live during a war? Do you carry on? Is
protecting your art itself a form of defiance? I once asked Leonora Carrington: “Why are totalitarian minds
afraid of art?” “Because it gets inside,” she replied. “It can terrify you or give you joy.”
3
VILLA AIR BEL
Harper – Oct. Pub
Who were the artists at the Villa Air- Bel, I wondered, and how did they get caught in the deadly web
of war? How did they not see the war coming and escape in time? Did they refuse to believe war could
happen, or did they believe that, if it did come, it could only touch others? Nameless, abstract others.
And who were the young rescuers at the villa? What convinces young people to risk their lives
saving others? Is it a matter of temperament or does this transformation happen gradually, by a series of
spontaneous decisions, until there is no other choice, until the risk has already been taken? As in every war,
there are victims and there are rescuers. And there are the murderers and those who stand by passively and
watch.
In France in 1940 people soon learned how quickly everything could change. Suddenly destinies
ceased to be a matter of personal control. The life and death of any individual became merely something to
be haggled over in bureaucratic ministries: who was an alien, who should be imprisoned as an enemy alien,
who should be deported to certain death. Not chance, not contingency, but someone else, a stranger,
arbitrarily decided who lived and who died.
I wanted to ask what it feels like to move from freedom to occupation: to feel threatened,
administered, restrained? Suddenly bits of bureaucratic paper control one’s life and death. The words
forbidden, investigated, imprisoned enter one’s vocabulary and everything is uncertain—life, home, children,
lovers. All can be taken away or left behind.
The story of World War II has been told thousands of times. It is one of our core stories. I realized I
needed to find parameters to limit my story—I wanted it to be about art, artists in war, and about the courage
it takes to go against the stream, to take a stand against totalitarian systems. It occurred to me that the villa
itself could be a metaphor of sanctuary in war. The book would begin with a dinner party—the twelve people
at the dinner table at Villa Air-Bel. They would provide the thread of the narrative.
But I needed to start the story way back. I began it in 1932, when one of the young Americans who
eventually worked for Fry arrived in France. Then I followed two stories, the web of connections that brought
these people together to that dinner party and the story of how war creeps up slowly, inexorably. Even if you
see it coming, you are paralyzed. You cannot imagine what can be done to stop it. Even as you sense the
danger, war remains a phantom threat. Until it happens.
4