Boredom - Alberto Moravia [119]
At this point I ought to say that, apart from the prospect of freeing myself from my love for Cecilia, the matrimonial solution seemed to give me a gleam of hope that I might start painting again as soon as Cecilia, now installed in my mother’s house, ceased to darken my horizon. I imagined Cecilia much taken up with her children and with social life; meanwhile, in the studio at the bottom of the garden, I would devote myself deliciously to my beloved, chaste, highly intellectual painting. Quite a different thing from Balestrieri’s foul, hectic nudes. I felt I would paint the most abstract pictures that had ever been painted since abstract painting came into existence. In the end, having planted Cecilia with my mother and a whole nestful of urchins, I would come back and live by myself in Via Margutta.
It will be thought that all this was in contradiction to my previous character and behavior; and furthermore, that the terms of my problem were different. In point of fact, being in love with Cecilia and painting were not two facts depending on each other; rather they were equivalent and independent. It was not my love for Cecilia which prevented me from painting, but rather that I was powerless to paint just as I was powerless to possess Cecilia; and so a release from my love for her did not at all mean that I should be enabled to take up painting again. Moreover, I had always hated my mother’s house, my mother’s world, my mother’s money, and had gone to live in Via Margutta precisely because I had felt that it would be impossible for me to paint at the villa in Via Appia. And now I was thinking of going back to live with my mother, in that same house and that same world that I loathed. I can give no other explanation of all this except that contradiction is the fickle and unforeseeable basis of the human spirit. In reality I was desperate; and it seemed to me that even the kind of suicide that a return to my mother’s house meant to me was preferable to my present situation, provided that it served to rid me of Cecilia.
It was summer now, and one day, during our usual morning telephone call, I said to Cecilia that instead of meeting at my studio we might go out of Rome for a drive in my car. I knew that Cecilia liked being in the open air, but I was surprised by the extraordinary warmth with which she welcomed my proposal. “Yes indeed,” she added unexpectedly; “and today we can be together all day long, till late this evening. I’m quite free.”
“What’s happened?” I asked sarcastically, “will that terribly severe father of yours allow you to go out with me?”
She answered frankly, as though astonished at my remembering the lie she had made use of to conceal her relations with Luciani: “It’s not that. It’s because Luciani and I can’t meet this evening. So I thought you would like to spend the whole day with me.”
“Please thank Luciani very much from me for his generosity.”
“There, you see how it is with you. So it’s not true that one can always tell you the truth.”
“Very well, I’ll come and fetch you about eleven o’clock, and then we can have lunch together.”
“No, not at eleven, I can’t manage that; I’m lunching with Luciani.”
“I thought it was strange that you shouldn’t be seeing him for a whole day.”
“I’ll come to the studio about three.”
“All right, three o’clock.”
Cecilia appeared at the time arranged. She was wearing a new, green two-piece dress and I told her how well it suited her. She answered promptly, with a grateful eagerness that was vaguely surprising to me. “I bought it with your money, and these too,” she said, pointing to her shoes, “and these,” she added, stretching out her leg to show the stocking. “In fact,” she concluded, “I’m entirely dressed out