many rooms, 4

January 2017

 

where I fell in love with books

“My Father’s house has many rooms”

- John, 14:2

 

Even before entering the flat, one could have a glimpse of the room where I fell in love with books form the hallway, where two old blue Schindler elevators and the stairs of the building landed. Facing this hallway, and the narrow patio it overlooked, was the room’s window, with its gorgeous glass louvers, in the style of the 1950s.

When open, the apartment’s entrance door hid the threshold to the room, towards the north, from a spacious distribution hall.

Under a shiny white, hollow wooden door, a partially loose brass transition strip marked the division between the room’s grey synthetic rug, and the hall’s fine grain, mostly white, terrazzo floor, with brass inlays. Above the door, a yellowish translucent glass, with a rough texture, framed in white steel, completed the threshold all the way up to the ceiling.

Below, the dun carpet met the walls under an uneven white wooden skirting, also loose at some points, and poorly fixed to the wall with tiny steel nails. Above this skirting, the walls were painted in a creamy hue, darkened further by dust. The ceiling was supposedly white, but was also greyed by dust. A single, incandescent light bulb illuminated the whole room, at the very center of this ceiling.

A small, walk in closet was concealed behind another white wooden door, alike the first, towards the west. The floor of this smaller room was clad with green linoleum tiles, with stone-like patterns. Inside, cabinets and drawers were built with sheets of raw triplex wood.

Lying on the worn-out carpet, was a brown, two seat couch, against the blank southern wall. Next to it, a small set of LP records rested on a low, white wooden table with a brown leather top. Between the couch and this table, standing on a black aluminum pedestal, was the oddly shaped Weltron 2000 gleaming white plastic stereo system.

A light wooden single bed lay under the aforementioned window, facing the hallway east. The window spanned the whole width of the room, and rose slightly from over a meter, above the bed, all the way up to the ceiling, some two and a half meters high. Next to the bed, north, stood a small, mustard colored wooden night table, with three white drawers with mustard colored knobs, and a low, long wooden shelf, with two glass sliding doors, containing a hardcover copy of Romulo Gallegos’s novel Cantaclaro.

 

Jorge Mejia Hernandez