I am in a great house. I go along the corridor. I open a door. A naked girl reclines against the pillows of a bed, her knees drawn up and open. A monkey squats before her. His paws are clasped together and raised, his grimacing face is lifted, towards heaven. It is the age-old attitude of supplication. The room is silent. A candle burns by the bedside, before the heavy curtains. The girl turns her head languorously to look at me in the doorway. On her face there is an expression of elegiac softness, a half-smile: languid, patient, tender.
I close the door quietly. I go down the corridor. “This place is full of wonders,” I tell myself. I pause at the window, to look down at an apple tree in the yard below. Under its boughs, a bestiary has gathered to watch a girl bathing herself from a porcelain bowl.