This her, G. H. in the leather of her suitcases, was I: is it I — still? No. I immediately figure that the hardest thing my vanity will have to face is the judgment of myself: I’ll have every appearance of a failure, and only I will know if that was the failure I needed.
Only I will know if that was the failure I needed.
I finally got up from the breakfast table, that woman. Not having a maid that day would give me the type of activity I wanted: arranging. I always liked to arrange things. I guess it’s my only real vocation. By putting things in order, I create and understand at the same time. But since I gradually, through reasonably good investments, became fairly well-off, that hampered me in my ability to use this vocation of mine: if money and education hadn’t put me in the class I belong to, I’d normally have worked as the maid who arranges things in a large home of rich people, where there is so much to arrange. Arranging is finding the best form. If I’d been a maid-arranger, I wouldn’t have even needed the amateurism of sculpture; if with my hands I’d been able to arrange things for hours on end. To arrange the form?
The always forbidden pleasure of arranging a house was so great that, still sitting at the table, I was already savoring the feeling in the mere planning of it. I looked around the apartment: where would I begin?
And also so that afterward, in the seventh hour as on the seventh day, I would be free to rest and enjoy the calm remainder of the day. Almost joyless calm, which would be a good balance for me: the hours doing sculpture taught me almost joyless calm. The week before I’d had too much fun, gone out too much, had too much of everything I wanted, and now I wished for a day exactly like the one this one promised to be: heavy and good and empty. I’d stretch it out as long as possible.
Maybe I’d start cleaning at the back of the apartment: the maid’s room must be filthy, given its dual roles as a sleeping space and storage room for old clothes, suitcases, ancient newspapers, wrapping paper and leftover twine. I’d clean and ready it for the new maid. Then, from the back, I’d slowly “climb” horizontally until I reached the opposite end of the apartment which was the living room, where — as if I myself were the finish line of the arrangements and of the morning — I’d read the newspaper, stretched out on the sofa, and probably fall asleep. If the telephone didn’t ring.
Better yet, I decided to take the phone off the hook and that way I was sure nothing would disturb me.
How can I say now that I’d already begun to see what would only become evident afterward? without knowing it, I was already in the entrance to the room. I was already starting to see, and didn’t know it; I had seen since I was born and didn’t know, I didn’t know.
Give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me, and I don’t know how to speak — reality is too delicate, only reality is delicate, my unreality and my imagination are heavier.
Having decided to begin with the maid’s room, I crossed the kitchen that leads to the service area. At the end of the service area is the hallway to the maid’s room. First, though, I leaned against the wall in the hallway to finish a cigarette.
I looked down: thirteen floors fell away from the building. I didn’t know that all this was already part of what was about to happen. A thousand times before this the movement must have started and then was lost. This time the movement would go all the way though, and I didn’t see it coming.
I looked around the courtyard, the backs of all the apartments from which my apartment too looked like a back. On the outside my building was white, with the smoothness of marble and the smoothness of surface. But the courtyard was a heap of frames, windows, riggings and blackened watermarks, window straddling window, mouths peering into mouths. The belly of my building was like a factory. The miniature of the grandeur of a panorama full of gorges and canyons: smoking there, as if on a mountaintop, I was looking at the view, probably with the same inexpressive look I had in my photographs.
I saw what it was saying: it was saying nothing. And I was taking this nothing in attentively, I was taking it in with what was inside my eyes in the photographs; only now do I know that I was always receiving the mute signal. I looked around the courtyard. Everything was of an inanimate richness that recalled that of nature: there too one could mine uranium and from there oil could gush.
I was seeing something that would only make sense later — I mean, something that only later would profoundly not make sense. Only later would I understand: what seems like a lack of meaning — that’s the meaning. Every moment of “lack of meaning” is precisely the frightening certainty that that’s exactly what it means, and that not only can I not reach it, I don’t want to because I have no guarantees. The lack of meaning would only overwhelm me later. Could realizing the lack of meaning have always been my negative way of sensing the meaning? it had been my way of participating.
What I was seeing in the monstrous insides of that machine, which was the courtyard of my building, what I was seeing were made things, eminently practical things and with a practical purpose.
But something of the terrible general nature — which I would later experience within myself — something of inescapable nature would inescapably leave the hands of the hundred or so practical workmen who had labored on the drainpipes, entirely unaware that they were erecting that Egyptian ruin that I was now regarding with the gaze of my beach pictures. Only later would I know that I’d seen; only later, when I saw the secret, would I realize I’d already seen it.
I threw my lit cigarette over the edge, and stepped back, slyly hoping none of the neighbors would connect me with the act forbidden by the administrators of the Building. Then, carefully, I stuck out just my head, and looked: I couldn’t even guess where the cigarette had landed. The precipice had swallowed it in silence. Was I there thinking? at least I was thinking about nothing. Or maybe about whether some neighbor had seen me commit that forbidden act, which above all didn’t match the polite woman I am, which made me smile.
Then I headed into the dark hallway behind the service area.
Then I headed into the dark hallway behind the service area.
In the hall, which forms the end of the apartment, two doors, indistinct in the shadows, face: the service exit and the door to the maid’s room. The
bas-fond
of my house. I opened the door onto the pile of newspapers and the darknesses of dirt and of the junk.
But when I opened the door my eyes winced in reverberations and physical displeasure.
Because instead of the confused murk I was expecting, I bumped into the vision of a room that was a quadrilateral of white light; my eyes protected themselves by squinting.
For around six months — the amount of time that maid had been with me — I hadn’t gone in there, and my astonishment came from coming into an entirely clean room.
I’d expected to find darknesses, I’d been prepared to throw open the window and clean out the dank darkness with fresh air. I hadn’t expected the maid, without a word to me, to have arranged the room in her own way, stripping it of its storage function as brazenly as if she owned it.
From the doorway I was now seeing a room that had a calm and empty order. In my fresh, damp and cozy home, the maid without telling me had opened a dry emptiness. Now it was an entirely clean and vibrant room as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed.
There, because of the created void, were concentrated the reverberation of the tiles, the cement terraces, the erect antennas of all the neighboring buildings, and the reflection of their thousand windowpanes. The room seemed to be on a level incomparably higher than the apartment itself.
Like a minaret. So began my first impression of a minaret, free above a limitless expanse. That impression was the only way I could for the time being perceive my physical displeasure.
The room was not a regular quadrilateral: two of its angles were slightly more open. And though that was its material reality, it came to me as if it were my vision that was deforming it. It looked like the representation, on paper, of the way I could see a quadrilateral: already deformed in its perspective lines. The solidification of a flaw in vision, the concretization of an optical illusion. Its not entirely regular angles made it appear fundamentally fragile as if the room-minaret were not implanted in either the apartment or the building.
From the doorway I saw the steady sun cutting half of the ceiling and a third of the floor with a neat line of black shadow. For six months a permanent sun had warped the pine wardrobe, and stripped the whitewash to an even whiter white.
And it was on one of the walls that flinching with surprise I saw the unexpected mural.
On the whitewashed wall, beside the door — and that’s why I hadn’t seen it — were nearly life-sized charcoal outlines of a naked man, a naked woman, and a dog that was more naked than a dog. Upon the bodies nothing was drawn of what nakedness reveals, the nakedness simply came from the absence of everything that covers it: they were the outlines of an empty nakedness. The lines were coarse, made with a broken-tipped piece of charcoal. Some strokes were doubled as if one line were the trembling of the other. A dry trembling of dry charcoal.
The rigidity of the lines pegged the blown-up and doltish figures on the wall, like three automatons. Even the dog had the mild madness of something that doesn’t move by its own strength. The coarseness of the excessively firm line made the dog something solid and petrified, more pegged to itself than to the wall.
After the initial surprise of discovering the hidden mural in my own house, I examined more closely, this time with amused surprise, the figures sprung upon the wall. Their simplified feet didn’t quite touch the floor, their small heads didn’t touch the ceiling — and that, together with the stupefied rigidity of the lines, left the three figures loose like the ghosts of three mummies. The more uncomfortable their hard motionlessness made me, the more they reminded me of mummies. They were emerging as if they’d gradually oozed from the wall, slowly coming from the center until they’d sweated through the rough lime surface.
None of the figures was connected, and the three did not form a group: each figure looked forward, as if they’d never looked to the side, as if they’d never seen each other and didn’t know anyone existed beside them.
I smiled uncomfortably, I was trying to smile: because each figure was there on the wall exactly as I myself had stood rigidly in the doorway. The drawing wasn’t a decoration: it was a writing.
The memory of the absent maid constrained me. I wanted to remember her face, and to my astonishment couldn’t — she’d managed to exclude me from my own house, as if she’d shut the door and left me a stranger to my own dwelling. The recollection of her face escaped me, it had to be a temporary lapse.
But her name — right, right, I finally remembered: Janair. And, looking at the hieratic drawing, it suddenly occurred to me that Janair despised me. I was looking at the figures of the man and woman with the palms of their forceful hands open and exposed, and who seemed to have been left there by Janair as a crude message for when I opened the door.
In a way my discomfort was amusing: it had never occurred to me that, in Janair’s muteness, there might have been a reprimand of my life, which her silence might have called “a wanton life”? how had she judged me?
I looked at the mural where I was likely depicted . . . I, the Man. And as for the dog — was that the epithet she gave me? For years I had only been judged by my peers and by my own milieu that was, as a whole, made of myself and for myself. Janair was the first truly outside person of whose gaze I was becoming aware.
Abruptly, this time with real discomfort, I finally let a sensation come to me which for six months, out of negligence and lack of interest, I hadn’t let myself feel: the silent hatred of that woman. What surprised me was that it was a kind of detached hatred, the worst kind: indifferent hatred. Not a hatred that individualized me but merely the lack of mercy. No, not even hatred.
That was when I unexpectedly managed to remember her face, but of course, how could I have forgotten? I saw her black and motionless face again, saw her wholly opaque skin that seemed more like yet another of her ways of being silent, her extremely well drawn eyebrows, I saw her fine and delicate features barely discernible against the closed-off blackness of her skin.
Her features — I discovered without pleasure — were the features of a queen. And her posture too: her body erect, thin, hard, smooth, almost fleshless, lacking breasts or hips. And her clothes? It wasn’t surprising that I’d used her as if she had no presence: beneath her small apron, she always wore dark brown or black, which made her entirely dark and invisible — I shivered to discover that until now I hadn’t noticed that the woman was an invisible person. Janair almost only had an external form, the features within her form were so refined that they hardly existed: she was flat as a bas-relief stuck on a board.
And was it unavoidable that she saw me as she was? abstracting from that body of mine on the wall everything that wasn’t essential, and also seeing only my outline. Yet, curiously, the figure on the wall did remind me of someone, and that was myself. Constrained by the presence Janair had left of herself in this room within my house, I sensed the three angular zombie figures had in fact held me back as if the room were still occupied.
I hesitated at the door.