But all my bitter sadness over Simonida’s deterioration was nothing before the astonishing evidence of my eyes that, entirely without my approval, a square hole had been cut in the fence around the garden and blocked off with a three-paneled iron shutter across which, in black tarred letters and split into syllables, was written GA RA GE. Needless to say, I went over to remove that vile scrawl. Apart from my fragile gloves, I had nothing with which to erase it. Soon I began to pant so hard that I had to go back across the street to a park and find a bench on which to sit and calm myself, and then decide — while never taking my binoculars off of her — what to do for her good.
Only there on the bench, under the blue, reposing shade of the trees — positioned just as if, armed with my binoculars and curiosity beside the west window, I hadn’t left my armchair, I realized that this house was no longer the house which, held in the spell of my uncertain memory and my lawyer’s false photographs, I had imagined her to be. Despite the identical likeness of the exterior, she was not my Simonida, but another building, perhaps another Simonida, perhaps even a building which merited a completely new name. Because of my failure to recognize her, I had a premonition of futility — one that would grow from then on and become even stronger, so that these farewell lines are poisoned with foreboding — a feeling that I shall have explained fully by the end of my testament.
I must also mention that a similar feeling of powerlessness had seized me when faced with the plans of my first house. From a freehand and for my taste slovenly sketch, fingermarked and smudged with erasures, I could hardly get a conception of any house, never mind recognize the one which its overenthusiastic creator warmly commended as mine. But it was my first investment, my baptism as a builder, so I didn’t utter a single one of those harsh observations which later would undermine so cunningly the inventive élan of those experts I hired subsequently. So the house was still a secret for me, carefully concealed under a veil of incomprehensible graphic figures. What she was really going to be like I found out only after her cross sections, basic plans, and frontal views, as well as her estimated costs, had been submitted for my approval, and I had put them together into a single three-dimensional view.
I judged houses as I judge a picture. I sincerely doubt that the whole turned out even as its own creator had imagined it, although on several occasions he tried to assure me that it had. In fact, he could only have surmised what the future house would be like. When the house appeared, it was nothing like the house I had visualized. It was a ponderous sculpture painted in the Greek fashion, before which I stood as before any other finished object, strictly excluded from its being, powerless to pierce the impenetrable surfaces with which it was hermetically sealed off on all sides. Only when I went into the house and wandered among perspectives permeated with the smells of paint and varnish, could I feel her inside me and see her. What I recognized from my first experience was that architecture is a sculpture that is hollowed out, so that man in movement can be situated in the empty space, that immediately afterward this sculpture becomes architecture by virtue of this hollowing out. This is what made of me the property owner that I am.
From then on I was remarkably mistrustful of those elegantly colored graphic representations, those unreal projections of future houses. A plan can never convey the true charm, but only hint at one of the possible realities of a building, while perspectives, despite Brunelleschi, can only timidly indicate an intangible internal territory, but cannot authentically reproduce it as an ordinary human step does, or can only reproduce it wrongly. So even the best drawings say less about a house than a web of transparent human bones from an X-ray image say about a man. Models too express an unreal volume; they could perhaps be successful if their dwarf-sized dimensions weren’t incapable of depicting a building’s spatial reality, which corresponds exclusively to the dimensions of a man.
Perhaps made drowsy by the sultry June air, I fell asleep for a short while. Suddenly I was awakened by the excited shout of a man who after a brief moment of puzzlement I recognized as Tomaž Šomodjija, Simonida’s concierge.
“In God’s name, esteemed Mr. Arsen, what are you doing here?”
If in Simonida’s deterioration I hadn’t detected Šomodjija’s sabotage, and if it hadn’t been my intention to resume control of my affairs, I might have shown a warmer welcome (in any case familiarity was not characteristic of my relations with inferiors) — all the more since this Tomaž or Toma, known as “maestro,” had been one of my first Hausmeisters. But all extenuating considerations had to be set aside, so as to reassert Arsénie Negovan’s authority as an employer. So I overlooked the elation with which Maestro Toma ran up to me, and said with some anger:
“Voilà, Mr. Šomodjija, as you can see, I’m sitting here regretting that I ever entrusted one of my favorite houses to you and allowed that shameless lawyer Golovan to supervise you. But before you hear what I think of your disloyal actions and what I intend to do, I’m willing to hear your explanation. If you have one, naturellement!”
But the former concierge (I say “former” because I had decided that his replacement was urgent), probably faced with the impossibility of finding excuses, leaned toward me with both hands on his stick, completely overwhelmed by shame, and moved from one foot to the other while anxiously striving in his meager Serbo-Hungarian vocabulary to justify for himself. He had heard, he said, from the lawyer Golovan that méltóságos úr Arsen, esteemed Mr. Arsen, had been taken ill from too much worry, and that he hadn’t left his room at Venac since the war. But he, Tomaž, becsulet szavamra, honest to God, went several times to visit méltóságos úr Arsen to give an account of his house on Paris Street, but, becsulet szavamra, when he got to Venac esteemed Mrs. Katarin told him that esteemed Mr. Arsen couldn’t receive him. But Tomaž, becsulet szavamra, was sorry, but understood and went back to Paris Street. Two months later he again went to Venac, but esteemed Mrs. Katarin again told him that it was strictly forbidden that méltóságos úr Arsen see Tomaž and worry. Then later lawyer Golovan, at night in October, told him: “Maestro Tomaž, we’re very sorry but you can’t take care of esteemed Mr. Arsen’s house any more, though you can still live upstairs, padláson, in attic.”
I was on the point of asking him if he meant to complain of the manner in which the lawyer had given him notice. But I realized that, in the heat of my desire to renew my professional authority, I would have acknowledged that he had worked here for years without my approval and knowledge. So instead I confirmed that certain instructions of that nature had indeed been given, but that they seemed to have been taken too literally.