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By Root 735 0

tied to its bars and a red coverlet well tucked in under a thin mattress, two kitchen chairs with yellow straw seats, and a small wardrobe of rough wood, constituted the furniture. I was at once sure that this almost empty little room must be Cecilia’s; I knew it from the smell that hung in the air, a rather sharp, unsophisticated feminine smell that I had encountered in her hair and on her skin. I opened the cupboard to make more sure, and there I saw on their hangers the few clothes, so well known to me, of which Cecilia’s wardrobe consisted—the little ballet skirt she had worn during the summer when I first met her, a two-piece suit of gray wool which she put on in cold weather, a black coat which she wore in the evening, a black dress of the kind known, I believe, as semi-evening dress. On a shelf lay something wrapped in white tissue paper—the bag I had given her on the day that should have been the day of our parting. I closed the cupboard again and looked around, trying to define to myself the feeling which the room inspired in me, and finally I understood: the room was bare and squalid, but its bareness and its squalor were natural and as it were untamed, like those of a place—of some hollow or cave—lived in by wild beasts. It was the bareness, in a word, not so much of a poverty-stricken house as of a lair.

I tiptoed out and opened the next door. Here the darkness was almost complete, but from the vague outline of a big double bed and from a stuffy smell very different from that in Cecilia’s room, heavier and less healthy, I concluded it was her parents’ bedroom. I closed this door and opened the third.

This was the bathroom, more like a long, narrow passage than a room, with the window and the half-closed shutters at the opposite end to the door. In a row along one wall stood the bath, the bidet, the washbasin and the toilet. The bath was old-fashioned in shape, with deposits of rust on its yellowed enamel, the washbasin was crisscrossed with thin black cracks, the bidet had a gray, greasy patina at the bottom of it, and finally my eye, jumping with increasing disgust from one to another of these tarnished instruments of sanitation, detected on the inside rim of the toilet something fresh and dark and shining which had obviously resisted the insufficient rush of water from the antiquated flushing apparatus. I went to the basin, took a tiny piece of soap from the dish and started washing my hands. While I was washing I recalled all the questions I had put to Cecilia about her home and the answers I had received, those formal, abstract answers; and this confirmed what I had previously supposed: Cecilia had not been able to tell me anything about her home because, in point of fact, she had never seen it. Then the door opened and Cecilia herself came in.

“Ah, you’re here,” she said, without showing any sign of surprise that I was not keeping her father company in the living room, as she had asked me to do. She walked behind me, straight to the toilet and, pulling up her skirt with both hands, sat down and made water. As I saw her sitting like that, her knees bent and her legs apart, her bust thrown forward and her face turned toward me—seeing, especially, her beautiful, dark, expressionless eyes fixed upon me with an innocence like that of an animal which, unconscious of the man watching, quietly relieves the needs of nature—the idea of the wild creature’s lair, which had occurred to me shortly before when I was in her room, came back to me again. Yes, I said to myself, this flat made one’s heart ache if one considered it as being inhabited by human beings; but the moment one imagined a wild animal living there, a small, graceful animal such as a fox, a stone marten, an otter, it became normal and acceptable. Cecilia by now had finished. She transferred her bare buttocks from the toilet to the bidet, squatted down and washed herself thoroughly with one hand. Then she got up again and, spreading her legs wide apart, wiped herself vigorously with a towel. Finally, pulling down her skirt, she said: “Out of the way