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By Root 708 0

and a rather alarming tramp at that: bald pate encircled with curly fair hair that badly needed cutting, a blur of reddish beard on the cheeks, charcoal-colored sweater showing a shirt without a tie, shapeless, worn-out, olive-green corduroy trousers. Tall, too, very tall in relation to the very low ceiling of the shop, with a forehead that looked like a vizor lowered over blue, bloodshot eyes, a short nose and a prominent mouth: a big ape, in fact. At the same time I realized, as I looked at myself, what a great proof of affection my mother had given me in inviting me to lunch, dressed as I was, in company with the Minister and her other guests. But then I reflected that my mother, with her sensitivity to what she called “good form,” must have felt that I was dressed like a painter, that is, I was wearing a kind of uniform which indicated my position, a by no means dishonorable position in a social circle such as hers, where a man had as much right to wear an artist’s sweater as a minister’s double-breasted jacket. I was startled out of these thoughts by the voice of the shop assistant as she handed me the bag. I paid, took the parcel and went out.

It was one o’clock. The appointment was at five. Strange to say, although I had never been conscious of waiting for Cecilia on other days, when I knew that our relationship was going to continue, now that I had made up my mind to break with her I found that the waiting dismayed me. I therefore did all the things I could find to do until five o’clock as slowly as possible, hoping in this way to make the time pass imperceptibly and painlessly. I had lunch in a nearby restaurant and pretended to enjoy the food and to meditate between one mouthful and the next; I went into a bar and, after drinking a cup of coffee, hung about listening to songs on the juke box; I had a second cup of coffee in another bar and, perched on a stool, read a newspaper from beginning to end; I stood on the pavement for about twenty minutes conversing with a young painter whose name I did not know, pretending to be interested in his long diatribe on the subject of awards and exhibitions. But I succeeded, in this way, in whiling away only two of the four hours until the time of the appointment. In the end, with an aching heart, I went back to the studio.

There, filtering through the white curtain, came a mild, clean, clear light which was very familiar to me, that same light in which it seemed to me that my boredom—the lack of contact between myself and external things—assumed an aspect of supreme normality, although it was none the less painful for that; in fact, perhaps precisely on that account, more painful than ever. When I entered the studio and sat down in the armchair in front of the empty canvas which still glimmered white upon the easel, I said to myself: “I am here and they are there.” By “they” I meant the objects around me—the canvas on the easel, the round table in the middle, the screen in the corner to the left behind which the bed was concealed, the terra cotta stove with its pipe going up into the ceiling, the chairs with notebooks lying on them, the bookshelf and the books. They were there and I was here, and between them and me there was nothing, truly nothing, just as, perhaps, in the interstellar spaces, there is nothing between the stars, millions of light-years distant from each other.

I repeated to myself: “I am here and they are there,” and then I remembered Cecilia lying the day before on the divan, with her eyes closed and her head thrown back on the cushion, her belly thrust forward and offered in the most explicit, literal manner, like an object with no will of any sort beyond that of being possessed. I remembered also that as I went to her I had thought, as I was thinking today: “She is there and I am here,” and I had felt that between her and me there was nothing, and that I had to penetrate, to cross, in fact to fill, that void with the movement of my body throwing itself upon hers. And as I recalled the effort, like the breaking of a barrier, that I had made in order to