During the period when he held the chair of Aesthetics at the Catholic University of Vienna, Oskar Serti perceived the final examinations as providing an unexspected opportunity of seeing his favourite female students alone.
Before their entering his office one by one, he pinned a small piece of paper on the window frame upon which he had written the following in red ink : “Please refrain from looking at the ceiling.”
In the course of the discussion the young girls could not avoid looking at this note. And, completely intimidated by the perverse effects of this strange recommendation, none of the girls could resist the temptation to look up, despite the indifference they feigned. Worn out from having to exercise such e restraint, they all defied the order for a second by taking a quick look at the ceiling as if they had suddenly been seized by a mysterious power.
Those few moments in which they lost control so naively enabled Serti to undress them with his eyes, without fear of punishment.
During his last year of teaching, Oskar Serti wanted to keep a souvenir of these precious moments and skillfully hid a camera between two books in his library.
Later, when he watched his secret films, he was always struck by the extraordinary expression of delight on his students’ face when they looked up at the ceiling. He realized with bitterness that he had never shared this powerful emotion with them; he had always been too much a slave to his base instincts.
In a split second Serti wanted to return to his former office in order to experience for himself the unexspected powers of this ceiling which he had been stupid enough to ignore for so many years; but he resisted this urge as he was suddenly overcome by the suspicion that his students had been playing games with him; that, one after another, they had feigned a profound sense of rapture in the hope of bringing him to raise his head too, just for a joke.