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figures loose like the ghosts of three mummies. The more uncomfortable their hard motionlessness made me, the more they reminded me of mummies. They were emerging as if they’d gradually oozed from the wall, slowly coming from the center until they’d sweated through the rough lime surface.
    None of the figures was connected, and the three did not form a group: each figure looked forward, as if they’d never looked to the side, as if they’d never seen each other and didn’t know anyone existed beside them.
    I smiled uncomfortably, I was trying to smile: because each figure was there on the wall exactly as I myself had stood rigidly in the doorway. The drawing wasn’t a decoration: it was a writing.
    The memory of the absent maid constrained me. I wanted to remember her face, and to my astonishment couldn’t — she’d managed to exclude me from my own house, as if she’d shut the door and left me a stranger to my own dwelling. The recollection of her face escaped me, it had to be a temporary lapse.
    But her name — right, right, I finally remembered: Janair. And, looking at the hieratic drawing, it suddenly occurred to me that Janair despised me. I was looking at the figures of the man and woman with the palms of their forceful hands open and exposed, and who seemed to have been left there by Janair as a crude message for when I opened the door.
    In a way my discomfort was amusing: it had never occurred to me that, in Janair’s muteness, there might have been a reprimand of my life, which her silence might have called “a wanton life”? how had she judged me?
    I looked at the mural where I was likely depicted . . . I, the Man. And as for the dog — was that the epithet she gave me? For years I had only been judged by my peers and by my own milieu that was, as a whole, made of myself and for myself. Janair was the first truly outside person of whose gaze I was becoming aware.
    Abruptly, this time with real discomfort, I finally let a sensation come to me which for six months, out of negligence and lack of interest, I hadn’t let myself feel: the silent hatred of that woman. What surprised me was that it was a kind of detached hatred, the worst kind: indifferent hatred. Not a hatred that individualized me but merely the lack of mercy. No, not even hatred.
    That was when I unexpectedly managed to remember her face, but of course, how could I have forgotten? I saw her black and motionless face again, saw her wholly opaque skin that seemed more like yet another of her ways of being silent, her extremely well drawn eyebrows, I saw her fine and delicate features barely discernible against the closed-off blackness of her skin.
    Her features — I discovered without pleasure — were the features of a queen. And her posture too: her body erect, thin, hard, smooth, almost fleshless, lacking breasts or hips. And her clothes? It wasn’t surprising that I’d used her as if she had no presence: beneath her small apron, she always wore dark brown or black, which made her entirely dark and invisible — I shivered to discover that until now I hadn’t noticed that the woman was an invisible person. Janair almost only had an external form, the features within her form were so refined that they hardly existed: she was flat as a bas-relief stuck on a board.
    And was it unavoidable that she saw me as she was? abstracting from that body of mine on the wall everything that wasn’t essential, and also seeing only my outline. Yet, curiously, the figure on the wall did remind me of someone, and that was myself. Constrained by the presence Janair had left of herself in this room within my house, I sensed the three angular zombie figures had in fact held me back as if the room were still occupied.
    I hesitated at the door.
    Also because the unexpected simplicity of the dwelling disoriented me: I really didn’t even know where to start arranging things, or even if there was anything to arrange.
    I looked despondently at the nakedness