The Passion According to G.H. Read Online Free PDF Page B

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