Boredom - Alberto Moravia [122]
“Luciani didn’t have me yesterday, he had me three days ago, like you.”
She walked on in front of me through the bushes, wandering about, the blade of grass between her teeth. I asked angrily: “Where are you going, what do you want to do?”
“Whatever you want to do.”
“You know what I wanted.”
“But I’ve told you it’s impossible.”
“Well, if we can’t do that, I really don’t know what we can do.”
“D’you want to go back to town and see a picture?”
“No.”
“D’you want to go to the sea?”
“No.”
“D’you want to go over toward the Castelli?”
“No.”
“D’you want to stay here?”
“No.”
“D’you want to go away?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I’ve already told you: I want you.”
“And I’ve already told you—not today.”
“Then let’s go back to the car.”
“And where shall we go?”
“I don’t know; let’s go, anyhow.”
So we went back to the car and this time I walked in front of Cecilia, although, unlike her—for she always seemed to be conscious of her objective, with her body at least, if not with her mind—I was entirely ignorant of where I was going.
When we were in the car I did not even wait for Cecilia to close the door properly before I started off at full speed. I felt an increasing fury which nothing could quench nor satiate, like a fire to whose flames fresh fuel is constantly being added. And this fury filled my mind with continuous, haunting illusions, so that, having failed to make love to Cecilia, I sought her everywhere, in a stupid, stubborn fashion, if even the most remote resemblance permitted it. Thus brief stretches of country, partly mown and partly grassy, made me think of her belly, rounded hillocks of her breasts, irregularities in the ground, of her profile and her hair. Or again I saw the road creeping in between two long, curving hills, and it seemed to me that they were the open legs of Cecilia as she lay on her back, and that between the two hills was the cleft of her sex and that the car was moving swiftly toward this cleft. Then, when I thought I was about to plunge, car and all, into this gigantic Cecilia made of earth, the whole prospect changed, and instead of two hills there were four, and there were no longer any legs or sex or anything but merely an ordinary landscape. Moreover, as I have said, I did not know where I was going; I seemed to be rushing in search of something which, rush as I might, remained unattainable. This something was in front of me all the time—down there in that group of trees, on that hill, in that wide valley, upon that bridge; but when I reached the group of trees, the hill, the valley, the bridge, there was nothing there and I had to rush on breathlessly toward new fictitious goals. And meanwhile, in the midst of this delirium of dull, impotent rage, I still had the feeling that Cecilia was there, at my side, close to me yet at the same time inaccessible.
I do not know how far I went in this haphazard way—along one road after another, branching off at crossroads without any exact sense of direction, turning back, driving for miles and miles along the sea or through woods—for more than an hour, perhaps. Suddenly, on one of these roads, facing a wide stretch of fields bounded by poplar trees, I stopped the car abruptly and turned to Cecilia. “I have a proposal to make to you,” I said.
“What is that?”
The idea had never entered my head while I was driving. But I had thought about it during the preceding days and that same morning before seeing Cecilia. And so it seemed to me that I was saying something quite natural. “I want you to become my wife.”
She looked at me with quiet diffidence, but without surprise. “You want us to get married?”
“Yes.”
“But why d’you say this to me now?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for some time and now the moment has come.”
She was gazing at me, and I, meanwhile, had a giddy, voluptuous feeling, like a man who, after many hesitations, hurls himself headlong into the void. I seized her hands and said hurriedly: “You’ll be my wife and we’ll go and live at my mother’s house. Perhaps you don