an excerpt from:
Hebdomeros & other writings
by Giorgio de Chirico

…And then began the visit to that strange building located in an austerely respectable but by no means dismal street. Seen from outside, the building looked like a German consulate in Melbourne. Large shops took up the whole ground floor. Though it was neither a Sunday nor a holiday the shops were closed at the time, which gave to this portion of the street a weary, melancholy air, that particular dreary atmosphere one associates with Anglo-Saxon towns on Sundays. A faint smell of docks hung in the air, the indefinable and highly suggestive odor given off by warehouses adjoining the wharves in a port. The idea that the building resembled a German consulate in Melbourne was a purely personal one of Hebdomeros’, and when he spoke about it to his friends they smiled and said they found the comparison odd, but they immediately dropped the subject and went on to talk about something else. Hebdomeros concluded from this that perhaps they had not really understood what he meant, and he reflected on the difficulty of making oneself understood when one’s thoughts reached a certain height or depth. "It’s strange," Hebdomeros was thinking, "as for me, the very idea that something had escaped my understanding would keep me awake at nights, whereas people in general are not in the least perturbed when they see or read or hear things they find completely obscure." They began to climb the stairs, which were very wide and made throughout of varnished wood; running up the middle was a carpet; at the foot of the stairs on a little Doric column carved out of oak and joined to the end of the banister stood a polychrome statue, also carved in wood, representing a Californian Negro with his hands stretched above his head, holding aloft a gas lamp whose burner had an asbestos mantle over it. Hebdomeros felt as though he were going upstairs to visit a dentist, or a doctor specializing in venereal diseases; this perturbed him a little, and he felt the onset of something like the colic; he tried to fight down this uneasiness by reminding himself he was not alone, that two of his friends were with him — strong, athletic fellows carrying automatics with spare magazines in the pockets of their trousers. When they saw they were coming to the floor which they had been told had a history of being haunted by strange apparitions, they slowed down and began to climb on tiptoe, looking more warily around them. They stayed abreast of one another but moved apart a little so they could get downstairs quickly and freely, should they encounter a particularly strange kind of apparition. At that moment Hebdomeros thought of his childhood dreams; in a state of anguish he would be climbing a staircase bathed in a dim light, a staircase made of varnished wood with a thick carpet in the middle which muffled his foatsteps — (in any case even outside his dreams his shoes rarely squeaked for he had them made to measure by a shoemaker named Perpignani, known throughout the town for the high quality of his leather; Hebdomeros’ father, on the other hand, was hopeless when it came to buying shoes; his shoes made a horrible noise, as if he were crushing bags of nuts at every step). Then came the apparition of the bear, the frightening, relentless bear that follows you on the stairs and along the corridors, its head lowered, and looking as if its thoughts were elsewhere; the headlong flight through rooms with complicated exits, the leap through the window into empty space (suicide in a dream) and the gliding descent, like those condor-men Leonardo drew for amusement among his catapults and anatomical fragments. It was a dream which always foretold trouble, especially sickness.