Boredom - Alberto Moravia [112]
“In the restaurant I gave it to him under the table. In the night club he took it out of my bag.”
“And then he took you home in a taxi?”
“Yes.”
“Did he go into the courtyard with you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go upstairs together?”
“Yes.”
“Did you make love on the stairs?”
“We did, a little, on my landing.”
“What does ‘a little’ mean?”
“Without going right to the end.”
“Did you like it?”
“Better than I did in the theater because I wasn’t so frightened.”
“And then?”
“Then we parted.”
“And you went to bed?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think about him before you went to sleep?”
“No, I thought about you.”
“About me?”
“Yes, about you; I thought about you until I went to sleep.”
“What did you think?”
“I don’t remember. I just thought about you, that’s all.”
One day, as if to confirm the feeling of elusiveness that Cecilia inspired in me, there occurred an incident which I wish to relate. Quite often, especially when I knew that Cecilia would not be coming to visit me, I used to go into Balestrieri’s studio, which was still in the state as on the day the old painter died. His widow had not troubled to let it again, or—which was more probable—had not yet found a tenant. I was able to get into the studio thanks to the key which Balestrieri had given to Cecilia and which I had taken from her, and I took to wandering about among the dust-covered furniture in that room which smelled of fustiness and squalor, seeking I knew not what. As I lingered in the big, gloomy studio full of black furniture and dull red hangings that had witnessed the amours of Cecilia and Balestrieri, I had a mournful feeling, as though I were not in Balestrieri’s studio but my own, and I myself were dead, and had come back in the form of a ghost to visit, as ghosts do, the place of my own amours. This mournful feeling came to me not only from the sickening resemblance between my relationship with Cecilia and that of Cecilia and Balestrieri, but also from the conviction that I, in a way, was dead too, and in a manner perhaps more decisive than the old painter, who at least had never had doubts about his own art and had gone on painting, so to speak, until his last breath. I, on the other hand, as I thought when I looked at the enormous, agitated nudes of Cecilia covering the walls from floor to ceiling, I was dead to painting even before I met Cecilia; and if, like Balestrieri, I had died because of Cecilia, I had merely confirmed in life what had already happened to me in art. And so, as always, I felt that there was a link between the crisis in my painting and my relationship with Cecilia; between my inability to paint on the canvas that stood on the easel and my inability to possess Cecilia upon the cushions of the divan; just as there had been a link between the execrable quality of Balestrieri’s painting and the character of his relationship with Cecilia. It was an obscure, sinister link; there is a similar significance, for a traveler lost in the middle of a desert, in the white bones scattered on the sand.
One afternoon, while I was contemplating Balestrieri’s hideous nudes as one contemplates the mysterious signs of an un-deciphered language, the door, which I had left ajar, opened slightly and in the opening appeared the head of a woman. The woman, after making sure that I was there, then entered and came over to me. I recognized her almost at once; it was Balestrieri’s widow who, on the day of his funeral, had her face completely hidden by a thick black veil of the kind that you see in village funeral processions, but whom I had happened to encounter on one or two subsequent occasions. She was a tall, well-built woman who had been beautiful and who at fifty still retained her youthful coloring, though it was now diluted and diffused over the slackened flesh of her face—a gleaming whiteness of skin, a clear blackness in her rather cow-like eyes, a vivid red, like that of a ripe cherry, in her full lips. In her youth she had been a model, and was perhaps the only woman, before Cecilia, whom Balestrieri had loved or imagined he loved: indeed he had