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By Root 722 0

from one landing to another, scrutinizing at each floor the labels on the doors. Flats One, Two and Three; Flats Four, Five and Six; Flats Seven, Eight and Nine; Flats Ten, Eleven and Twelve. This was the staircase, I could not help thinking, as I arrived at last at Flat Thirteen on the fourth floor and pressed the bell, this was the staircase up and down which Cecilia went every day when she came to see me or returned home again. What would I have found out about this staircase if I had asked Cecilia? Nothing, less than nothing. She would have answered me, with characteristic tautology, that “the staircase was a staircase,” and that would have been the end of it. And yet upon this staircase she had left a part of her life, and this gray light, these white marble steps, these red tiles on the landings, these doors of dark wood, all these must have remained in her memory—just as others, more fortunate, retain a memory of the smiling landscapes among which they have passed their years of childhood and youth. As I was thinking these things I heard on the far side of the door a step which, though light, made a loud sound on the loose bricks of an old floor. The door opened and Cecilia appeared on the threshold. She was wearing the usual green, hairy sweater that came down below her waist, with the deep, triangular neckline allowing a glimpse of the beginning of her breasts; her short, tight black skirt was stretched in deep, concentric folds over her belly. As I greeted her, she leaned forward in the doorway and I was a bit surprised because I thought she was intending to kiss me, and it would not be like her to do so in such a place and at such a moment. Instead she whispered: “Remember it’s a lesson day today, and after lunch we go to your studio.” For some reason this unusual urgency made me almost suspicious, and it crossed my mind that Cecilia intended to make use of me and of our appointment in order to conceal some other engagement.

The hall was furnished like a room of the same kind in an old-fashioned family boardinghouse at a resort: chairs and table of wickerwork, a rubber plant in one corner and a plaster statue of a nude woman in another. But the chairs and the table looked old and decrepit, the statue, wherever there was a curve or a hollow, was gray with dust and lacked a hand into the bargain, and the plant, of the species called ficus, was reduced to a couple of leaves at the end of a long stalk. The walls were white but with a suspicion of dust everywhere, a kind of old, sticky dust which seemed thicker in the corners of the ceiling, where there were little dark, dense cobwebs. It suddenly occurred to me that this was a house of which, rightly or wrongly, any ordinary girl would be ashamed, at a moment when she was bringing in her lover; any ordinary girl, but not Cecilia. Meanwhile she was leading me down a long, empty passage; then she opened a door and beckoned to me to follow her.

I saw a big, rectangular room with four windows, veiled by yellow curtains, in a row along one wall. The room appeared to be divided into two parts by a couple of steps and an arch; the larger part was the living room, and in it was the furniture which Cecilia had once described as being without color, that is, gilded. This furniture, actually, was imitation Louis XV style, as had been the fashion forty years ago, and it was arranged in ghostly groups around little circular tables and meager lamps with shades adorned with beads. With my first glance I noticed white patches where the gilded plaster had peeled off, dirty marks on the flower-patterned arms of the chairs, damp stains on the small pieces of tapestry depicting episodes of gallantry. But the shabbiness of the place was evident not so much in the worn look of its furnishings as in certain almost unbelievable details which seemed to indicate a long-standing, unjustifiable neglect: a long, narrow strip of wallpaper with a pattern of little bunches of flowers and baskets, for instance, hanging down in the middle of the wall and showing the raw plaster behind it; a wide,