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things like that. Smiling. Sometimes even film stars came, or famous singers, and they did the same thing, while photographers took pictures and the next day the pictures were in the paper. I remember one woman, all in furs, a singer, I think, with diamond rings on her fingers, who gazed at the camera while she ran a Hoover vacuum cleaner up and down. We didn’t even know what a vacuum cleaner was. This was another great thing about the Ideal Home Exhibition: when you left, your head was full of things you’d never seen before and would never see again. It was like that. Anyway, the first time I went with my mother, and right at the entrance there was an exact replica of a mountain village, with meadows and paths, it was something. Behind it was an enormous painted backdrop, with mountain peaks and blue sky. My head began to feel very queer. I would have stood there looking forever. My mother dragged me away, and we went to a place where there was nothing but bathrooms, one after another, bathrooms you wouldn’t believe. The last was called “Now and Then,” and there were a lot of people watching—it was like a play, on the right you saw a bathroom from a hundred years ago, and on the left the identical bathroom but everything was modern, very up to date. The incredible thing is that in the bathtubs were two models, no water but two women, and here’s the clever part, they were twins, you see? Two women, twins, in the exact same position, one in a copper tub, the other in a white enameled one, and the really crazy thing is that they were
naked
, I swear, completely naked, and smiling at the public, and they held their arms very carefully so that you could get a peek at their tits but not really see them, and everyone was making serious remarks about the bathroom fixtures, but the fact is their eyes were continually darting away to see if by chance the twins had moved their arms just a bit, just enough so their tits were visible; the twins, by the way—you see the odd things that one ends up remembering—were called the Dolphin sisters, although now, thinking back, I suppose it was a stage name. I’m telling you this story about the bathroom because it has something to do with the fact that I burst into tears at the end. I mean, it was a whole combination of things that disconcerted you, from the start, a stratagem that wore you out and predisposed you, so to speak, to something special. Anyway, we left the naked twins and entered the central hall. There were the Ideal Homes, one after another, all in a row, each with its yard, some antique, or old, and others more modern, with a sports car parked out front. It was marvelous. We walked slowly, and at one point my mother stopped and said Look how lovely this is. It was a two-story house with a front porch, a peaked roof, and tall red-brick chimneys. There was nothing extraordinary about it—it was ideal in a very ordinary way— and maybe that was why it struck you. We stood there looking at it, in silence. There were so many people passing by, chatting, and so much noise, the way there always is at the Ideal Home Exhibition, but I began not to hear it any more, as if, little by little, it were all fading from my mind. And at some point I happened to see through the kitchen window—a big window on the ground floor, with the curtains open—I saw the light go on inside, and a woman came in, smiling, with a bunch of flowers in her hand. She walked over to the table, put down the flowers, got a vase, and went to the sink to fill it with water. She did all this as if no one were looking at her, as if she were in a remote corner of the world, where there was only her and that kitchen. She picked up the flowers and put them in the vase, and then she placed the vase in the center of the table, nudging back a rose that was escaping from one side. She was blonde, and her hair was held in place by a headband. She turned, went to the