Retour aux Sources – Part 6, Antibes

Our house, at the summit of our street, our house… – Antibes, present day

About Antibes, there is so much to conjure I hardly know where to start. My first memories in life solid enough to be grounded in a location are set there. Our parents rented a small two-bedroom apartment in the outskirts, tucked on the side of a modern-looking villa which housed a total of three families at the top of a short and steep cul-de-sac called Allée des rosiers. We had a garden running along two sides, L-shaped and rather narrow. At the front was a tiny common gated entrance planted with cacti and roses.

It was modest to say the least. In hindsight, and having judged the garden through an adult gaze, I realize how tight the space was for a family of four. However, by my standards then it was but an entire universe, and like all children who live close to the ground and spend most of their time playing, I knew every inch of it like the back of my hand.

This playground galaxy had mountains for my soldier figurines to climb My name was Nobody – Antibes, circa 1970and my little Matchbox cars to hurtle down from. It had caverns, jungles and deserts, as well. And when, later, I became a cowboy, an explorer or a secret agent, mimicking Terence Hill and Lieutenant X’s Langelot¹, I built hide-outs, dug out caves, improvised refuges and organized stake outs the likes of which only Robinson Crusoe or James Bond could have claimed.

My sister and I grew up in an enchanted world of sea, mountains and flowers. We lived within walking distance of the beach where we spent the essence of our summers. The sea provided plenty in those days, and while our childhood fishing efforts at the nearby Port de la Salis (see below) yielded questionable results, adults would provide and we’d often eat urchins and octopi from our own waters.

Proudly showcasing my catch—yes, it’s the inch-long silver thing at my waist level (notice nuanced jealousy to my right)

Our father had incredibly creative hands. He built the vast majority of our furnishings, out of necessity as much, I would assume, as pleasure. We would collect driftwood and I watched, mesmerized, as it was slowly wrestled into practical items such as a sofa doubling as a day bed, a wine bar, a wall-wide bookshelf, a chess table, various chests of drawers, a lectern on which sat our Encyclopedia Britannica. A copper toilet floater would be polished, cut in two, pierced with dozens of small wholes and a rose vase was born. An older car engine carburetor, painted dark gold and mounted on a wooden socle would become an incense burner, and the smoke would ooze out through each orifice like as many ghosts. A soft stone would be carved and mounted on a wall plate, with a sculpted Inca profile worthy of an archeological find. Our coffee table was circled with wrought iron, a seventies’ staple, and ceramic black and white tiles were set in cement to give the table the double duty of a chess board. Our heavy dining-room table, along with two long benches—we never had chairs—were also homemade.

All this was achieved with a basic panoply of tools that included saws, a chignole or hand drill, a carpenter’s plane and a vice. I think the hammer was Apprentices and masterfrowned upon, nails being akin to blasphemy. The elements of a piece were adjusted carefully, fitted and held together by glued pegs and recessed bolts. The entire wooden furniture would then be coated with walnut stain, and varnished.

I learned a lot from him although I never created as much as he did with my bare hands, my long drift through life and places rarely allowing for the luxury of a workspace, but I owe him an understanding and respect of one’s tools. He would grease his sharp blades with lard, kept everything tidy, and showed me how simple manual labor could be a gift to oneself, and an ode to creativity.

Now, I am aware that I must sound like Pagnol describing his father’s metamorphic transformation of the derelicts purchased from the old junk dealer. It is possible I am even doing so somewhat voluntarily, as a tribute. After all, his Souvenirs d’enfance trilogy was a cornerstone of my youth, and it was recited to us before we could even read or write, in the evening before our early bedtime, while light lingered and birds chirped the day away, and my sister and I would relish our nightly rendez-vous with the garrigue.

• ♦ •

Originally founded by the Greeks as a trading post called Antipolis, Antibes is tucked on the pristine Mediterranean shoreline in the shadows of the Alps. It is flanked on both sides by its famous sisters Cannes and Nice, and Monaco is just a little further to the east, before the Italian border. Yet Antibes has retained the charm of a small town. It is the city of flowers. A carnival used to be held yearly where enormous floats were entirely covered in flowers. Those were days of careless spending of our valuable resources. We would excitedly throw confettis and serpentine streamers at the world and people danced in the streets as a band played the kazachok, who knows why.

The old town is surrounded by an iconic wall, “les ramparts”. To the immediate north, a bay is home to Port Vauban, one of the largest and wealthiest marinas in the Mediterranean.

The weather was unfortunately moody when we visited this year. Our trip was rather short for what needed to be covered, and I only had two opportunities to visit the city, the sun finally making an appearance on our second attempt. To my absolute chagrin as I had dreamt about that moment for years, multiple storms had trashed the shoreline and my idyllic beach was covered in driftwood, its waters murky and unrecognizable.

We made the best of our time and retraced my childhood footsteps through the old town and its cavernous covered market, by my first college deep into a maze of century-old streets, along the remparts and to the beach, then up a steep path with stations of the cross to the lighthouse and adjacent chapel that throne at the top of the Cap d’Antibes, that jagged peninsula home to the rich and famous which separates Antibes from its sister Juan-les-Pins.

But something unexpected happened, while I was revisiting Côte d’Azur after such a long time. Or rather, something didn’t happen. Nothing clicked. While my jaw dropped repeatedly, as so many memories came rushing back and all the places I knew paraded in front of my bewildered eyes, the shock stronger than I had expected, that trip did not yield any conclusive outcome. It raised more questions than I had asked, answered fewer than I had hoped. I did not pick my jaw up. It remains slack to this day.

I have always thought that we leave a little bit of ourselves behind in each place we visit and care about, in exchange for the memories we gather. Being in Antibes made my heart pound. It made me cry a few times, all grown up that I am. It was like stepping through a time machine, one both geographical and emotional. I could trace my steps back through a plaza, along an avenue or across a street as I had done a thousand times. I could run my hand–and I did–on a wall, a parapet, a door, a fence I had known, and to my surprise, they remembered. Wow, they whispered, how you’ve changed. Yes, I answered, but have I grown?

Looking back, growing up in Antibes–despite the occasional family crisis that momentarily shook my world–is probably the best description I could give of happiness. Like all children, I existed in the present. The past was insignificant and the future intangible. I was “here and now”, living with one foot firmly planted into an imaginary world of role playing, and the other in the perfumed reality of a flowered seaside town. We were poor but I didn’t know that. We liked adventure, traveled, explored abandoned houses, descended into dried water wells, strolled on the side of open air dirty water canals because they had the best fruit to forage, gathered driftwood to take home, went on nighttime drives to witness the aftermath of storms, bivouacked in the mountains listening to open-air classical concerts, toured live nativity scenes on Christmas Eve, and rescued hedgehogs. My universe was shaped from the inside out, and documented in reverse. There was no need to worry about the future because it all felt solid and immutable.  

Yet, a few years later, our family went supernova. In what I can only describe as an extraordinary display of utter desperation, sheer determination and motherly love, our mom single-handedly steered us across an ocean and reshaped three lives including her own. The rest, as they say, is history.

And now fifty years later in early 2024, there I was, back where I had belonged, in the south of France, with a tale to tell². But I am really talking to myself, I mused writing this post. One’s convoluted journey only seems to matter to themselves.

So the question remains. Would I be happy in Antibes again?

Only life can answer.