Boredom - Alberto Moravia [12]
I raised my eyes and saw that the grapes all looked as if they had been nibbled or sucked, some more and some less.
“Lizards,” said my mother, in the curiously intimate, affectionate, and at the same time scientific tone of voice that she used when speaking of her flowers and plants. “Those nasty little creatures climb up the posts of the pergola and eat the grapes. They ruin my pergola; the black clusters among the green leaves and tendrils look so beautiful, but if the grapes are half nibbled away, the whole effect is spoiled.”
I said something or other about a ceiling by Zuccari in a palace in Rome, in which the subject of the painting was, in fact, a golden pergola with clusters of black grapes and vine leaves, and she went on: “The other day a hen belonging to the peasants close by somehow found its way into the garden. One of these lizards was on the pergola, and was, of course, sucking at my grapes. Then, for some odd reason, it lost its footing and came tumbling down. Just imagine—it didn’t even touch the ground: the hen caught it in its beak and positively drank it down. Yes, I really mean that—it drank it.”
“Then you must take to keeping hens,” I said. “They’ll eat up the lizards, and the lizards, of necessity, having been eaten, will stop eating the grapes.”
“For heaven’s sake, no! Hens, besides eating lizards, destroy everything, wherever they go. I’d rather keep the lizards.”
And so we went on around the garden, going down the long path underneath the pergola to the boundary wall and then walking through the greenhouses. My mother would stoop down and touch the corolla of a flower that had opened in the night, holding it between two fingers against the palm of her hand; or she would stand enraptured (there is no other word for it), glassy-eyed, in front of an earthenware flower pot from which a fleshy plant, like a green, hairy snake, curled right down to the ground, so that you almost expected it to hiss at you; or again, in a dry, didactic manner, she would provide me with a quantity of botanical information, culled from the detailed reading of horticultural manuals as well as from her long conversations with her two gardeners, very patient because very well paid, upon whom she inflicted her company the whole time they were working in the garden. As I have said, her love of flowers and plants was the only poetical thing in my mother’s otherwise completely prosaic life. It is true that, in her way, she loved me; and that she introduced an unbelievable passion into the management and the enlargement of our property. But, both in business matters and with me, the predominant influence was her own character, authoritative, unscrupulous, self-interested, mistrustful. Flowers and plants, on the other hand, she loved in an entirely disinterested way, with unrestrained enthusiasm and no ulterior motives. And my father, how had she loved him? As usual, the idea came back into my mind that my father and I resembled one another at least in this one point: that we did not want to live with my mother. I asked her abruptly:
“By the way, I should very much like to know why my father was always running away from you.”
I saw her wrinkle up her nose, as she always did when I spoke to her about my father. “Why by the way?” she said.
“Never mind, answer my question.”
“Your father wasn’t running away from me,” she answered after a moment, with icy dignity, “he liked traveling, that’s all. Look at these roses, aren’t they lovely?”
I said peremptorily: “I want you to tell me about my father. Why then, if it’s true that he wasn’t running away from you, didn’t you go traveling with him?”
“First and foremost, because somebody had to stay here in Rome to look after