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By Root 708 0

was ready to give herself to me. That day she behaved during our lovemaking in the same way as on the days when I paid her; and she went away without alluding in any way to the fact that I had not paid her. I did the same thing two or three times, but Cecilia, childishly impenetrable, again gave no sign of having noticed anything. So I found myself faced with three possibilities: either Cecilia was venal, but was sufficiently superior and elegant in her astuteness not to show it; or she was absent-minded, but with a highly mysterious kind of absent-mindedness—that is, she was as elusive as before and as always, in spite of the money; or again, she was completely disinterested, and in this case too she eluded me and withdrew herself from my possession. I turned over this problem in my mind for some time, and in the end decided to get her with her back to the wall. One day I again slipped two ten thousand lire notes into her hand and said to her: “Look, I’ve given you twenty thousand lire.”

“Yes, I noticed you had.”

“It’s the first time I’ve done it, after giving you nothing for a week. Did you notice that too?”

“Of course.”

“You weren’t annoyed?”

“I imagined you hadn’t the money.”

Cecilia, completely devoid of curiosity as she was, had never questioned me about my family and did not know that I was rich. She took me for what I appeared—a painter in a sweater and a pair of corduroy trousers, with a very untidy studio and a decrepit car. And so her reply was, as usual, the only one she could give. “It’s true,” I went on, “I didn’t have the money, but I thought you might be annoyed that I stopped giving you any.”

“To be left without money is a thing that can happen to anyone,” she answered ambiguously.

“Supposing that from now on I couldn’t give you any more—what would you do?”

“You gave me some today; why think of the future?”

This was one of Cecilia’s fundamental responses: past and future, for her, did not exist; only the most immediate present, in fact only the actual fleeting moment, seemed to her worthy of consideration. I went on insisting, however: “But suppose I didn’t give you anything more; would you go on seeing me?”

She looked at me, and then finally replied: “Didn’t we see each other before you started giving me anything?” It was, I thought, the perfect answer. But her uncertain, dubious, questioning tone, as if she were not entirely sure of what she was saying, seemed to allow room for the supposition that if I did really stop paying her she would perhaps reconsider the whole question of our relationship. And yet even this was not certain. Cecilia, as I perceived, did not really know what she would do if I ceased to give her money; and this for the good reason that, being attached to the present and quite devoid of imagination, she could not foresee what feeling my financial shortcomings would arouse in her, and above all to what extent, once I had stopped paying her, she would feel the desire to make love with me, whether less or more or in the same way or in a different way or not at all. “Now listen,” I said, “I want to make a suggestion. Instead of my giving you sometimes five, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty thousand lire, as I do at present, we might agree on a fixed amount which I would give you once a month. What do you say to that?”

She immediately protested, as though she were being asked to replace a cherished habit, slightly absurd but nevertheless poetical, with something more rational but prosaic. “No, no,” she said, “let’s go on like this, as we’ve done so far. You can give me what you like and when you like, from time to time, without any rules; anyhow, like that it’s a surprise every time.”

Thus once again I failed to catch Cecilia in the trap of venality, and also failed to transform her from a creature of mystery and elusiveness into an ordinary, boring, mercenary woman. I came finally to the conclusion that the money one gives to a prostitute has, in reality, a possessive character because not only the one who gives it but also the one who receives it considers