Years ago in a dark night, when I was alone at home, I turned on the TV. The gleaming lights the screen radiates off colored my face, changing constantly. Soon I was watching a French film. Its name was Mother’s Castle.
I'd missed the first part of it, but the story seemed enchanting. I was mesmorized by the scence in the film–the warm and cozy days in the hills reminded me of the impressionist paintings I’d seen in books.
There was a family, the father was a school teacher who earned livings for her wife and the three kid. Marcel, a clever school boy who loved the hills of Etoile, where he'd encountered his beloved Isabell, daughter of a drunkard poet who made lame rhymes off every line he’d said. Every weekend they picked up their belongings and walked 9 kilometres to their small house up in the hills. It was a long and tiring walk under the harsh sunlight of August.
The father met his former student, a spike who inspected the canals that flowed across the estates of those nobelmen. With ardor he offered the father a key to open all the doors so they can pass thru the estates and cut the walk to within minutes.
So every week the family sneaked across the estates whose edifices stood reticent as they passed by. Marcel was forgetting his exam, only thinking of the dear summer days he spent on the hills, with family, with Isabell.
But when they got to the last magic door one day, they found it locked. In no time a lame old man with an even older dog appeared, the father tried to explain, but the man appeared infuriate. With the King’s Roses she received as a gift at her hand, the mother faints.
And the story went on, but not as happy as before. The family still chatted and laughed together, but the good days at hill was soon to be over.
Five years later Marcel and his younger brother Paul held hands firmly together as they followed the tall black wagon that borne their mother away.
“Then little Paul grew tall, he had a silky beard. He never wanted to leave the Etoile Hills, where he kept a herd of goats. He was the last of Virgil’s goatherds… But at 30, death carried him off.. My dear Lili had been waiting for years in the graveyard…under a blanket of flowers…in 1917, in a dark northern forest…a bullet cut short his young life. He fell on some chilly plants..whoes names he did not know…
Such is the life of a man…Moments of joy, obliterated by unforgettable sadness…”
Then another ten years gone by, Marcel bought a mansion and returned with his fellows and assets. As he stared down at the orchard he suddenly discovered something from his long forgotten memory. He ran down along the canal and at the end there was the magic door. He smashed the wooden door using a rock with all his might.
“Yes, it was there, it was the canal of my past. I walked back along the holiday path…and beloved shadows of my past were at my side. In the wall, near the canal…was the black door…the one that refused to open…and humiliated my father. I was breathing more easily, it seemed…and the evil spell had been broken. “
“On the other side of time, for years now, a young, dark-haired woman had been clutching…The King’s Roses to her fragile heart. She heard the guard’s shouts and the dog’s wheezing.
Pallid, trembling. Forever inconsolable. She did not know it was her son’s estate.”
And it was the sunny day in Provence, it was the rainy streets of Marseilles. It was, Le Chateau De Ma Mère.
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