Boredom - Alberto Moravia [107]
I had a confirmation of this difference one day when I asked her for a much larger sum on a pretext which, as will be seen, was extremely unfortunate. It was after lunch; and my mother, as usual, had lain down on her bed in her own room, one arm over her face and her legs dangling. I was sitting in an armchair at the foot of the bed, and asking her questions, I believe, about my father—one of the few subjects which we had in common and which never ceased to interest me. My mother answered more and more briefly and vaguely and appeared on the point of falling asleep. Suddenly, without any preparation, I said to her: “By the way, I’m in need of three hundred thousand lire.”
I noticed that she drew her arm very slowly away from one of her eyes and looked at me for a moment with that eye only. Then, with a first sign of unpleasantness in the tone of her sleepy voice, she said: “I gave you fifty thousand on Saturday, and it’s only Tuesday now; what do you want all this money for?”
In accordance with the plan I had previously worked out, I replied: “It’s only the first installment of the sum I shall have to spend. I’ve decided that I must renovate the studio, which is in a shameful state.”
“And how much will the total expense amount to?”
“At least three times as much. Apart from plastering and whitewashing, I shall have to redo the bathroom entirely, put up new curtains, repair the floor, and so on.”
It had seemed to me a good plan. The studio was really in bad shape; I had good justification for touching my mother for a million or even a million and a half. Furthermore, I knew that my mother, owing to her aversion to my studio—a point of honor with her—would never make up her mind to come to Via Margutta in order to see how I was spending her money.
I awaited her answer, therefore, with confidence. She was lying still now; she appeared really to have dropped off to sleep. Finally, however, from beneath the arm which covered her face, came a perfectly wide-awake voice: “This time I shall not give you the money.”
“But why?”
“Because I don’t see any need for you to give the landlord a present of a million lire when you have the possibility of living in a villa on the Via Appia.”
I saw how she intended to parry the blow and realized, too late, that the pretext I had devised to extract the money from her was the very one I should have avoided. Pretending to be surprised, however, I exclaimed: “What has that to do with it?”
“You gave me to understand that you intended to come back and live here,” said my mother in a slow, hard, monotonous voice, “and I, as you may have noticed, had the tact to give you as long as you wished to decide. But now you are asking me for money to do up your studio. So I am forced to conclude that you have gone back on your promise.”
“I never made any promise,” I said, irritated. “On the contrary, in fact, I’ve never concealed my repugnance at the idea of living with you.”
“Well then, my dear Dino, you can hardly be surprised at my saying that this time I shall not give you the money.”
Two days before, I had given Cecilia the last thirty thousand lire that I possessed, and Cecilia was to come and visit me in the afternoon. It was possible for me not to give her anything, as so often in the past; but I was suddenly conscious that I would now no longer be capable of that. This was not so much because I felt that by giving her money I possessed her, as for the opposite reason: the money now endowed Cecilia’s elusiveness with a new aspect which confirmed and complicated it—that of her disinterestedness. And just because she did not allow herself to be possessed through the medium of money, I now felt myself irresistibly urged to give it to her; in the same way that,