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refrigerator, opened it, and reached in for a bottle of milk and something else. She closed the fridge by giving it a little shove with her elbow, because her hands were full. And although I couldn’t hear it, I distinctly felt the click of the door as it closed, precise, metallic and slightly warm. I have never heard anything so exact, and definitive, and redeeming. So I looked at the house for a moment—at the whole house, the garden, the chimneys, the chair on the porch, everything. And then I burst out crying. My mother was frightened, she thought something had happened, and in fact something had happened, but what she thought was that I had wet my pants, it was something that often happened, when I was a child, I’d wet my pants and start to cry, so she thought that was what it was and started dragging me to the bathroom. Then, when she saw that I was dry, she began asking me what was wrong, and she wouldn’t stop. It was torture, because obviously I didn’t know what to say, I could only keep saying that everything was fine, that I was fine. Then why are you crying?
    â€œI am not crying.”
    â€œYes, you are crying.”
    â€œNo, I’m not.”
    It was a kind of
piercing, painful amazement.
I don’t know if you know, Colonel. It’s rather like looking at toy trains, especially if there’s a model landscape, in relief, with the station and the tunnels, and cows in the fields and lighted signals at the grade crossings. It happens there, too. Or in a cartoon when you see the house where the mice live, with matchboxes for beds, and a painting of the grandfather mouse on the wall, and bookshelves, and a spoon that serves as a rocking chair. You feel a kind of comfort inside, almost a
revelation,
that opens your soul, so to speak, but at the same time you feel a kind of pain, the sensation of an absolute, irremediable loss. A sweet catastrophe. I think it has to do with the fact that at those moments you are always
outside,
you are always looking in
from the outside.
You can’t go in and get on the train, that’s a fact; and the house for mice is something that’s on television, while you are inescapably
in front,
all you can do is look. That day, you could go inside the Ideal Home if you wanted, you waited in line for a while and then you could go in to see the rooms. But it wasn’t the same. There was a whole lot of interesting stuff—it was weird, you could even touch the knick-knacks— but you no longer had the same sense of wonder as when you saw it from the outside. It’s a funny thing. When you happen to see the place where you would be
safe,
you are always looking at it
from the outside.
You’re never in it. It’s
your
place, but you are never there. My mother kept asking me why I was sad, and I would have liked to tell her that I wasn’t sad; on the contrary, I would have had to explain to her that it had to do with something like happiness, the devastating experience of having suddenly glimpsed it, and in that idiotic house. But how. Even now I wouldn’t be able to. There’s also something a little embarrassing about it. That was a stupid Ideal Home, which had been built just to con people, it was a big stupid business of architects and builders, it was a deliberate trick, to tell you the truth. As far as I know, the architect who designed it might be a complete imbecile, one of those guys who on their lunch hour wait outside schools to rub against the girls and whisper Suck my dick and stuff like that. Besides, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but generally, if something strikes you as a
revelation,
you can bet that it’s bogus, I mean, that it isn’t
true.
Take the example of the toy train. You can look at a
real
station for hours and nothing happens; then just glance at a toy train and,
click,
all sorts of good things start up. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s the damn truth, and sometimes