just like me, and he began to feel more self-confident, and he looked at the Christ some more, but he didn’t see anything, he was not observing the picture but what the person next to him was doing; but he wasn’t doing anything, only going from one picture to the next, he’s really not a guard, he thought, finally relaxing, and he looked again at the Christ, above Him there was something like a very faint cross-hatching, but impossible to decipher, and so he tried to read what was written below the picture which might as well have been in Catalan, as he didn’t understand a word, then he took one step farther to the next picture; the background of that one was also completely gold, and it could have been made a very long time ago, because the wood on which it had been painted was already thoroughly chewed up by woodworms and the paints were peeling off to a considerable degree, but what he saw was very beautiful again, the Virgin Mother sat there in a picture within the picture, the Infant on her arm; the Infant particularly pleased him, as he pressed his little face as close as he could to the Virgin Mary’s, who however was not looking at the Infant but somehow in front of herself, outside of the picture, at him, who was looking at it, and her gaze was very sad, as if she knew what would happen later to her little son, such that he stopped looking at her and stared at the gold background until it dazzled him, and the third picture and the fourth picture and the fifth picture were all very similar, they were all painted onto wood, they all had gold backgrounds, in all of them the Virgin or Christ, or some Saint, were childishly painted, for there was some kind of Saint in each picture, frequently there were several, but the essential thing, he determined, was that these Marys and Jesuses and Saints, painted in vivid colors with gold backgrounds, were — well, as if children had created them, at least that’s what came to his mind — of course then he tossed it away as nonsense, for what could be expected of him anyway, he didn’t understand, he had, it was true, once worked for a few months in an art restorer’s workshop, but still! — anything here, well no, what he saw was certainly not childish, rather just only. . probably very old, he concurred with himself, so old that people didn’t know the rules of painting, or that painting could have had a different set of rules; he went from one to the other, here leaning his head to the left and there leaning it to the right, and if the strained readiness to jump out of there at the first ominous sign had not ceased in him, he now lingered in front of each picture in a more orderly way, because not including the Christ here at the end of the room, whose stern gaze he had encountered at the very beginning, the rest of the Saints, the Infants, and the Kings looked at him with complete tenderness, so that he really did calm down a little, and still no one came to put him in his place or to ask for an entrance ticket, if it was an exhibit, it remained so, indeed, he didn’t go back into the first room he had blindly hurried across when he first came in, he continued on into the next one, where it was just as dark and where only little lamps also illuminated each one of the pictures from above, here too were the Saints with the Virgin Mary or with Christ, here too was no end of gold and illumination, which practically radiated out from them, as if they didn’t need a single lamp above them, because the light came from within them; he walked up and down with complete self-confidence now, given his circumstances, he went from one room to the next, he looked at the Saints and the Kings and the other Beatified Ones, and instead of feeling gratitude to the heavens for being able to be here undisturbed, he was overcome — exactly in that place where the eternal hatred was — by a kind of sadness, and he felt alone — ever since he had arrived here, he hadn’t felt anything like that; he stared at the illumination, he stared at the gold leaf, and something began to hurt violently within him, and he didn’t know what it was: if it was really being alone that hurt so much, the pain coming upon him suddenly; or that he had wandered into this happenstance so dispossessed, while everyone outside was wandering around so happily; or if it was that immeasurable distance that hurt so much, making him realize how unbearably far away were these Saints, these Kings, these Beatified Ones, Marys and Christs — and that illumination.