My grandparents had a large, old house, a dark house, a mansion on a hilltop, overlooking the village. I was there often, and spent many hours roaming the wild gardens around it. The gardens seemed to exist in a shadow, there were no seasons, the sun shone and it rained at the same time. I think everyone has a “secret garden” in their lives, a magical place, a Strawberry Fields, and this was mine. I’ve seen things there you’ll never believe. I’d roam and observe, and listen to the birds, the strange voices, the whisperings. My brother and I once buried a plastic toy soldier there deep in the ground, to punish him for being such an ugly toy. My brother then left again to watch a movie, but I’d always stay, preparing for something.
There was an abandoned barn in these gardens. Marjory the Trash Heap lived behind it. Sometimes you could hear the ghosts of children giggling from behind its half-opened doors. Mostly it was very quiet. On one of the walls, tucked away, there was a poster of someone who looked like a good faerie to me. She had a pink towel wrapped around her and one arm raised. I understood the pose was meant to be alluring—I didn’t feel it, but I understood it; I understood human behaviour quite early—and I wondered who she could be. Whenever I came near the barn, I had to go inside and look at the poster and mentally greet it. It was always there. It stared at me from another world. Unlike the barn, which was falling apart, the poster was remarkably well-preserved, like it still had something left to do in this world.
I come from a small, religious village; everyone was strict and serious, artless. There was nothing except the dirt on the ground and the Lord above. Then, one day in kindergarten, she appeared: an intern, a free spirit, who knew the art of laughing. She had luscious, lionesque blonde hair and cat-like eyes, and she took a special interest in me—she saw it. And she knew that I knew, as young as I was. She marvelled at my drawings and raved about them to everyone in the village. Most teachers were stern, sparse with compliments—they thought of themselves as worms in the face of God—but not she: she was kind, and generous with generosity, and she made you feel there were a million great things to live for. In my mind, she had something to do with the poster. Because that was me: I saw glowing strings, veins and nerves everywhere, everything was connected with everything: I suspected John Lennon had been killed on the gloomy parking lot of the local supermarket, and Elvis had done a puppet show singing “Wooden Heart” on the football field that bordered my grandparents’ gardens.
This intern left when I left, and I never saw her again; many years later I heard she had been married and divorced. “She looked sad,” my friend said.
“Brigitte Bardot,” my mother said in a slightly amused voice, bringing her face closer to the poster to inspect it. Other family members were scattered around the property, some were in the barn, others were walking around in the gardens. “This will all have to go,” my father said, making a gesture that indicated the whole barn. It was snowing, my grandmother had died (my grandfather had preceded her years before), and my parents were making plans to take over the house. I guess my mother had never seen the poster. She glanced at it, smiling as if my grandfather had played a posthumous trick on her, then joined my dad.
They never took over the house. Too much work. Whenever I can’t sleep, I think about those strange, uncertain weeks that followed my grandmother’s death. I hear myself trying to convince my parents to go through with it—move in, we belong here! But I said nothing, and now it sometimes feels I’ve abandoned the sisters of fate, who so desperately were trying to arrange it so that I could keep watching over the secret garden, and the poster.
“Brigitte Bardot”. Of course, that had to be her name. It couldn’t have been Gertrude Hicklestein, or Deirdre Mudd. —Brigitte Bardot, Brigitte Bardot, the name sounded like a song to me. Suddenly she started to appear in my life: I caught one of her films on TV, someone referenced her somewhere, there was an article in a magazine. I started to understand she had been very, very famous once, probably the most famous European in the world. That didn’t surprise me. To me though, it felt as if the destruction of the barn—the new owners demolished it, first thing they did—had unleashed her upon the world. No longer confined to the barn, she was everywhere now, her magnificent spirit roamed free.
My great-grandmother once said, out of the blue, “I have an obsessive personality.” And I thought: “Damn, that’s me too.” I’ve shown that photo recently of George Harrison’s house that I took during a visit to the UK: I have that pilgrim side, I’m someone who expresses their admiration. I like altars and pedestals. I never see the point of scheming or manipulating, or holding back. So naturally, I wrote a fan letter to Brigitte Bardot once; her hand-written reply, accompanied by a loose, graceful drawing of a flower, is displayed in a glass cabinet in my bedroom (it glows when I turn off the light at night). I’ve learned to be kind, and be generous with generosity, and make people feel there are a million great things to live for. When I marvel at something, I’ll rave about it to everyone, and this blog currently is my special place for such inspired, magically overcooked ramblings. So when someone is so interwoven with my life as Brigitte Bardot, you’re going to notice it in my little corner in cyberspace here, and that’s why you see photos of Brigitte Bardot every day.
My grandparents’ mysterious garden is where I was born, and it’s where you can find me long after I’m gone.
