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outline sketches), Mama decided to accede to her son's request, find the painter, and arrange for private lessons to remedy Jaromil's inadequacies, which were spoiling his report cards.
    So one fine day Jaromil went to the painter's apartment. It was a converted attic consisting of two rooms; the first contained a big collection of books; in the second, windowless but with a large skylight in the slanting roof, there were easels holding unfinished canvases, a long table with sheets of paper and small bottles of colored ink scattered on it, and on the wall strange black faces the painter said were copies of African masks; a dog (the one Jaromil already knew) lay motionless on the corner of the daybed watching the visitor.
    The painter seated Jaromil at the long table and began to leaf through his sketchbook. "They're all the same," he finally said. "They don't take you anywhere."
    Jaromil wanted to reply that these were exactly the figures with dogs' heads that had captivated the painter and that he had drawn them for him and because of him, but he was so disappointed and upset he couldn't say anything. The painter set a blank sheet of paper in front of him, opened a bottle of India ink, and put a brush in his hand. "Now draw whatever comes to mind, don't think about it much and just draw." Jaromil was so frightened that he had absolutely no idea what to draw, but since the painter insisted, he again, dying a thousand deaths, fell back on the head of a dog on top of an ill-formed body. The painter was dissatisfied, and Jaromil, embarrassed, said that he would like to learn how to paint with watercolors, because in class the colors always overflowed his outlines.
    "So your mother said," said the painter. "But forget about it for now, and forget about dogs too." He set a big book in front of Jaromil and showed him pages where awkward black lines wiggled whimsically over a colored background, evoking in Jaromil's mind images of centipedes, starfish, beetles, stars, and moons. The painter wanted the boy to use his imagination and draw something comparable. "But what should I draw?" he asked, and the painter replied: "Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it's not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper." And Jaromil drew lines he didn't like at all, covering sheet after sheet with them and finally, according to Mama's instructions, giving the painter a banknote and going home.
    The visit had thus been different from what he had expected, not having led to the rediscovery of his lost inner world but rather the contrary: it had deprived Jaromil of the only thing that belonged to him alone, the soccer players and soldiers with dogs' heads. And yet, when Mama asked if the lesson had been interesting, he talked about it enthusiastically; he was being sincere: the visit had not validated his inner world, but he had found an unusual outer world that was not accessible to just anyone and had instantly granted him some small privileges: he had seen strange paintings that had bewildered him but offered the advantage (he understood immediately that it was an advantage!) of having nothing in common with the still lifes and landscapes hanging on the walls of his parents' villa; he had also heard some strange remarks that he appropriated without delay: for example, he understood that the word "bourgeois" was an insult; bourgeois are people who want paintings to be lifelike, to imitate nature; but we can laugh at the bourgeois because (and Jaromil was delighted by this idea!) they were long since dead and did not know it.
    And so he gladly went to the painter's, passionately hoping to repeat the success he had gained in the past with his dog-headed people; but in vain: the doodles that were meant to be variations on Miro's paintings were forced and entirely lacking the charm of childlike playfulness; the drawings of African masks remained clumsy imitations of their