Boredom - Alberto Moravia [129]
We put our two glasses on the window sill and I took Cecilia by the arm again and steered her through the crowd toward a door at the far end of the room. I opened the door and led her into the passage. Immediately the din, the smoke, the crowd were replaced by the customary air of the house, clean, deserted and silent. I guided Cecilia to the staircase and started going up with her, one hand on the brass rail and the other on her shoulder. “Would you like to live here?” I asked her.
“Here or in some other place, it’s just the same to me.”
“But here there’s my mother.”
“She’s charming, your mother.”
I exclaimed, in astonishment: “Good Heavens, what do you find charming about my mother?”
“I don’t know, she’s charming.”
By this time we had reached the first floor. “Do you want to see my room?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I threw the door open and showed it to her. It had remained just as it was on the day when I ran away, leaving my trousers in the hands of Rita—with the shutters closed and the mattress rolled up on the bed. She gave it a cursory glance, with a complete absence of curiosity, and said: “Does no one use it now?”
“There are some empty rooms upstairs,” I said. “We could take them over, if we get married. Don’t you think you’d be better off here, in a room like this, than in the one where you’re living now?”
Her answer confirmed my conviction that she saw nothing, and that for her there was no difference between my mother’s splendid Empire furniture and the junk in her own home. “Why?” she said. “The two rooms are much the same. There’s a bed here as there is there, a wardrobe and chairs too, just as there are there.”
“At least you’ll admit that it’s larger?”
“Yes, it’s larger.”
I shut the door again and said: “Let’s go to my mother’s room. She’s busy with her cocktail party. We can talk there as much as we like.”
I led her to the bedroom, opened the door and pushed her forward into the darkness, as I might have pushed her into a prison to shut her up forever. Then I turned on the light. The big, comfortable room, in which there was not an inch of bare wall or uncarpeted floor and where everywhere there were curtains and hangings and rugs, seemed to me suffocating. I went to one of the windows, threw it open and looked out for a moment. The window overlooked the Italian garden, and beyond it the whole garden could be seen, with its avenues and trees, its fountain and pergola. Night had fallen now; the black, starless sky was dimly lit from time to time by flashes of lightning from some far-off thunderstorm, the air scarcely less hot and suffocating than inside the room. Lamps on the ground, concealed among the hedges, threw a false, quivering light upon the feet of the many guests who had gradually moved out from the ground floor rooms and were scattered about the garden. Thus they appeared illuminated up to their knees, in a ghostly sort of way; but from their knees up they melted into the darkness, so that it looked as though the whole garden were populated by male and female legs without any bodies. While I was watching this spectacle, Cecilia’s voice made me jump. “Where is the bathroom?” she asked.
“That door over there.”
Without a word she went over to the bathroom door. I left the window and went and sat in an armchair at the foot of the bed, and lit a cigarette.
I was struck by a large, old picture hanging to the left of the bed. It represented Danaë and the shower of gold, and was probably a recent acquisition of my mother who, as I knew, sometimes “invested” her money in works of art: I did not in fact remember having seen it before. Danaë was depicted lying on a bed very like my mother’s bed, low and wide, with a canopy decorated with bronze ornamentations. Leaning against a pile of pillows, her bosom drawn back and her belly thrust forward, one leg stretched out along the mattress and the other bent and dangling in the air, she was looking complacently at her lap into which, out of the shadow of the heavy curtains, fell the shower of coins, of a gold as bright and shining