Impromptu labyrinth

construction site saga continues

this drawing kind of feels like this imaginary fancy

When I’ve ingested enough iron from pills that taste like the railing I used to put my tongue on when I was a child, I can work on cleaning the layers of plaster and colour from the walls of the apartment that serves as my current home. I’ve never owned a place, but I’ve always felt the ache for a place to return to, a space of rest, a refuge from the world. Now this work forces my sweat, my breath and sometimes my blood to mix with the granulation of the concrete. I find it both poetic and desperate to strong arm the space to breathe me in, to make me a part of itself, but I’ve found that this is the only way I can get a crumb of the things I long for.

While scraping the walls and fixing the little things I can fix, while waiting for the big work that would dress those same walls in the two and sometimes three layers of materials that will make them themselves, I notice unusual occurances.

When I walk from one wall to another I sometimes get lost and instead of the empty rooms, dust a palm thick on the floor, irregular slabs of concrete denuded, revealing sharp stony protuberances where the concrete slipped out of the mold, or holes as big as my fist, equipped with finger-thick iron loops, ready for mysterious hooks to be attached to them, I stumble, quite unceremoniously into other kinds of rooms.

Once I entered a dark ante-room, I call it that because it only contained bookshelves, more like displays, all with glass doors protecting rows and rows of volumes. The books waited in the dark wood containers, in the dark room, just like my mother’s and my grandmother’s favourite china figurines used to. Nothing else occupied space, the hardwood floor was dark and smooth and I was wearing sock so I glided a little relishing the clean, even surface. Even if the room was dark, I knew everything was shiny, laquered, without a trace of dust.

There were no windows, so it made sense, where could the dust have come from without an egress to the outside? On my left a doorway, the light coming from that other room allowed me to glimpse as much as I did of the one I was in. I stepped on the soft persian carpets welcoming me there, so like the ones in everyone’s houses in my childhood, except the one under my bare feet was pristine and soft and I could have lain down sniffed it and my allergies wouldn’t have even noticed.

No door stood between the two places, only a wide entrance, the wall opening up to me. The next room continued with the same type of book displays, and I could see much better how many wonders were hidden inside. The room was larger and as I moved into it cupboards and dressers made of shiny dark wood arranged on each side of me against the walls made me deliciously curious. I could barely contain the happiness that anticipation always ferments inside my belly. On top of them a variety of objects, a looking glass with a carved handle, a map in a frame of a place I didn’t recognize, a compass-like object with the lid open, other tools I didn’t recognize but I wanted to touch, drawn by their beauty, and inspect all their elements, their delicate details, their intricate ornaments. I trembled a little at the thought of everything hidden under the doors and inside the shelves. But I couldn’t stop if I wanted to explore as much as possible.

As I walked on, armchairs, partly hidden by the aforementioned bulky pieces, surprised me with their lushness and I wondered why was I seeing objects I’d consider kitsch in real life. I was afraid to even touch them, they looked so luxuriously upholstered in intricate jacquard, but I allowed my fingerpads to brush the material and map its pattern. It was an old room hidden to time and perfectly preserved with furnishings belonging in another era.

The most stunning of views opened up on the wall in front of me, a huge, round window, as if I were looking inside a sort of gigantic submarine, exposing another room filled to the brim with even more mysterious objects, with cabinets and cupboards I itched to rummage through.

On that side even the plants on the wall shelves elongated down as if in a liquid, distorted and oddly vivid. Was the window making them look that way or was the other side immersed in something I might not be able to breathe?

To my right another opening, I wanted to rush toward it, to find a way to the room beyond the window, I didn’t want to lose momentum, and be pushed out of the illusion or whatever this thing I was walking through was. An instinct told me I wouldn’t have enough time to really understand what I was seeing, to touch everything. Reality was already starting to intrude and to push me out into the dust of the hallway and the white, spongy aerated concrete block wall dividing it from the kitchen.

The next moment, as I feared and sensed, the other place abruptly disappeared leaving me bereft, almost inside the next room, almost able to get lost there.