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We lingered a while on these steps, talking some more; he still held my shoulder in a friendly grip, his eyes laughing. I laughed too and shook his hand, before heading home.
* * *
Opening the door, I saw myself in the mirror, a large round mirror leaning against the wall, reflecting the horizontal rectangle of the striped mattress, it too lying on the floor, and the vertical rectangle of the open door, red on the outside, white on the inside. In the mirror, the face framed by the jambs of this door was looking at me, smiling calmly; I found it somewhat beautiful, but of a vague, undefined, blurred beauty. Night was falling, I pressed the switch: light leapt out, harsh and bright, from a bare lightbulb hanging over the mattress, reflected in the round mirror too. I had bought this mirror, its glass all pockmarked and partially tarnished, from a second-hand dealer, and I liked it immensely. It must have had a defect that I hadn’t noticed; as time passed, a crack stretched out mysteriously from one edge; then another fissure began to branch off from the first, forming a little V at the bottom of the mirror, just like a woman’s pubis; finally, a long horizontal line came to cross this V. The mirror kept staring at me, impassive, a mute cyclops’s glum eye. Sometimes I would lay the mirror flat on the mattress and crouch along its edge, leaning on my hands. Depending on the angle, I would then see my features surprisingly abstract and very far away, or else just the lightbulb hanging on the ceiling, or else nothing, nothing at all, as if I were gazing not at a mirror but at a gaping, luminous pit, slightly purplish, carved into my bed, into which I could have tumbled head-first, to disappear forever. Sometimes too, I would put on female underclothes—stockings, dainty black lace panties, a padded bra—at times with a thin clinging dress, at others not, and for a long time I would examine this beautiful feminine form, elegant, aristocratic, its musculature subtle and well-defined, its skin white, beneath which snaked thick veins swollen with blood, losing in this way in the image all notion of time and place, of my person or of my thoughts.That a few tawdry rags bought in a hurry at the supermarket were enough to make a woman, a real image of a woman—that is what filled me with wonder, it was a spell, pure magic. Nothing could come to disturb this happiness. One time, though, a curious thing happened: a child, in the corner of my bedroom, said softly but clearly: “You shouldn’t be doing that.” I didn’t know who he was, or what he was doing there, but I replied kindly: “And why not?”—“I would prefer that you didn’t do it.” I gazed at him, smiling tenderly. In the mirror’s disk, the gossamer lace followed the arched loins of the figure reflected there, plunged between its buttocks; lower down, another band circled its thigh. I was still looking at the blond child, motionless and stubborn in his corner, his fists clenched alongside his legs; finally, without taking my eyes off him, I slowly stretched my hand out to the switch, pressed it, and everything, child and feminine form, circles and rectangles, vanished into the dark.
* * *
I also liked to go out in the street like that, with this lace underwear beneath my clothes: it produced a strange sensation in me—light and floating, as if both sexes at once were strolling in my body through the city. Sitting with a cold drink at a café terrace on a public square, I would examine the women passing by, think about their clothes, as light and airy as my feelings, about what they were wearing underneath, lace or fine fabrics, which they often showed glimpses of: for them, these delicate layers on their bodies added nothing, took away nothing, they were women in all simplicity, naked or clothed, with or without artifice, even coarsely dressed, or dressed like men, they remained women; these pieces of fabric, so maddening to me, were as natural to them as