When the book opens, G.H., a well-to-do resident of a Rio de Janeiro penthouse, reminisces on what happened to her the previous day, when she decided to clean out the room occupied by the black maid, who had just quit. She forgets the maid's name, and struggles to recall her face.
"Before I entered the room, what was I?" G.H. asks. "I was what others had always seen me be, and that was the way I knew myself."[5]
Though G.H. expects the maid's room to be a mess, she is instead surprised to find "an entirely clean and vibrating room as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed".[6]
The room was the opposite of what I had created in my house, the opposite of the soft beauty that came from my talent for arrangement, my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, of my sweet and exempt irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, of the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself. The room was the portrait of an empty stomach.[7]
On the white wall of the maid's room are black scratches outlining the forms of a man, a woman, and a dog. G.H. regards the drawing and realizes that the maid had hated her. Furious, she opens the wardrobe and is frightened by a cockroach crawling from inside it. She slams the door shut onto the cockroach, and sees the insect's innards ooze out of its still-living body.
G.H. is appalled by the sight, but she is trapped in the room by the irresistible fascination for the dying insect. She wants to scream, but she knows it is already too late: "If I raised the alarm at being alive, voiceless and hard they would drag me away since they drag away those who depart the possible world, the exceptional being is dragged away, the screaming being [sic]."[8]
Staring at the insect, her human personality begins to break down; finally, at the height of her mystic crisis, she famously takes the matter oozing from the cockroach — the fundamental, anonymous matter of the universe which she shares with the roach — and puts it in her mouth.
