Boredom - Alberto Moravia [104]
And so I acquired the habit, at the first moment of our meetings, of thrusting into Cecilia’s hand—without a word, as I had done the first time—a sum of money which varied, according to the day, from five to thirty thousand lire. In this way, I thought, the elusive, mysterious Cecilia, from whom I could not succeed in detaching myself would be replaced in a short time by a Cecilia who was not in the least elusive and who was entirely devoid of mystery. But this transformation did not take place. If anything, it was the opposite that happened: it was not the money that changed Cecilia’s character; on the contrary it was Cecilia, evidently the stronger of the two, who changed the character of the money.
Cecilia, when I thrust the folded banknotes into her palm, would immediately clench her fist, but without giving any other sign that she had received and accepted them. It was truly as if this money and the hand that gave it and the hand that received it belonged to a different world from the world in which Cecilia and I existed. Then, while I was embracing her, she would drop the notes on the floor beside the divan, and there they would remain, folded and crumpled, where I could see them easily while we were making love—the symbol, it seemed to me, of a method of possession which I fondly imagined to be more complete and satisfying than the one to which I was applying myself at the same moment. Afterward Cecilia, ready to tiptoe naked to the bathroom, would stoop swiftly and, with the graceful gesture of a runner bending to pick up a handkerchief dropped by his companion, would snatch up the notes with the tips of her fingers and throw them beside her bag on the table. When she was dressed she would go to the table, take up the notes, put them safely in her purse and shut the purse in her bag. Cecilia liked to do things always in the same way, as a kind of ritual. And so this detail of the money came to be included in the customary love ritual with perfect naturalness and even with a sort of grace, without, in fact, any of the meretricious significance which I had thought to be inevitable—indeed, like everything Cecilia did, without any significance at all.
At first, as I have said, I gave her from five to thirty thousand lire, wishing to see whether she would react in any way to these varying sums. I felt that if she said to me: “Last time you gave me twenty thousand lire, today you’ve given me only five—why is that?” I should have more than sufficient reason to consider that she was venal. But she never showed that she noticed whether the notes I put in her hand were single or double, green or red, as though the gesture of paying her had no particular significance but was simply one of the many gestures I made when I was with her, which I might have made in a different way or not at all, without our relationship being altered on that account. Then I decided to see what would happen if I stopped giving her money. Strange to say, I set about this experiment with a beating of the heart. I did not openly admit it to myself, but since I was almost convinced that these banknotes which I slipped furtively into Cecilia’s hand now constituted the chief grounds for our relationship, I was afraid of losing her at the very moment when I hoped to prove to myself that, in losing her, I had nothing to lose.
One day, therefore, I did not put anything into her hand. To my astonishment Cecilia, far from showing disappointment, did not even appear to have noticed the change that had occurred in the customary love ritual. In the clasp of the fingers that received my empty hand there was no feeling of surprise or dissatisfaction; it was exactly the same handclasp with which, on the previous days, she had announced to me after receiving the money that she