Plowing the Dark

22

This is the room life lends you to sleep in.

Bedroom. Slaapkamer. Chambre à coucher. Simple accommodation, with all the basic fittings. Bed, washstand, chair, window, mirror: everything that you need to live. But closing your eyes, sleeping here may prove impossible. For this room fills with a relentless blaze. Clear sun pours in from all directions.

A canted floor meets the wall in a mock horizon: the joint of earth and sky, of wheat and azure. The life that sleeps here has scuffed permanent patches in the floor's varnish. The room's real inhabitant has just stepped out. He leaves his shirts draped on the shirt rack. Their short-sleeve billow remembers his body. A straw hat, his shield from this southern sun, waits on a peg for his bared head to reclaim it. He leaves his bottles, his brush, his book on the bed stand. His towel, scudded with dirty handprints, hangs on the hook by the bathroom door.

In the painted bedroom, the man's own paintings hang on view. The scenes his eyes have lived in cling listing to the drunken walls. They serve as this apartment's additions: tiny remodeled day rooms, cobbled onto this room of broadest day.

The tenant has bent this apartment with his breathing. He proves, before the scientists, that space is curved. The chairs, the bed, the tilted table: each stick of furniture passes its own law of gravity. Each would-be solid lays down its own perspective, its various vanishing points scattered like buckshot in the hinted distance. No two of these pauper's objects belong to the same cubic space. The foot of the bed juts mysteriously through the doorframe. The floor swells like the loose sea. Walls and ceiling amble together by the art of compromise. The shutters give up on accommodating their casement, by turns closing inward and throwing themselves open to the Provençal breeze.

Is he happy, living here? Does the work of his hands please him? Do his eyes read this light's simplicity, grateful for a chance to handle it? Or do the cracks in this pitcher, the tears in the chairs' caning spell some unlivable agony?

You know this fellow by his things. The shaving mirror above the water bowl holds his look, as surely as a photograph. His impression nestles in the wonky bed. The lay of this rented hideout explains him. There is a rhyme to how this bedroom works. It remembers the life it hides. This man's ways suffuse through his attic dormer. Sun assembles a life from these surrounding solids.

But entering this painted life overhauls it. Your eyes change the bedclothes just by settling on them. Looking leaves its fingerprints on his glass. His towels take on your hand smudges. His shirts start to memorize the creases of your body.

This will be your kamer, your chambre, for who can say how long. A place to enter and inhabit at will. A box whose every plank of wood furnishes your story. This life, now yours. These paintings, too, now belong to you. The bed, the chairs, the azure, the wheat, the window: everything this sleeping room speaks of will be yours, except — in such merciless light — for sleep.