Boredom - Alberto Moravia [130]
She had undressed and had wrapped herself in a short towel which just covered her hips and bosom and looked like one of those abbreviated pieces of material which women in the tropics wind round their bodies. Approaching me on tiptoe, she said: “Do you know, my trouble is all over? So we can make love, if you like.”
“Here?”
“Why not? It’s so comfortable here.”
I had a sudden feeling that this was a treacherous, self-interested piece of generosity, as though Cecilia were intending, by offering herself in this unexpected way when I had already given up the idea, to compensate me in some way, in advance, for a loss of which I was still ignorant. I said brusquely: “Very well, but first you must give me your answer.”
“What answer?”
“Whether you’ll agree to become my wife.”
She said nothing, but wandered about the room for a little and then, with sudden decision, came and sat on my knee. She began to untie my tie and unbutton my collar, and said slowly: “Dino, you’re the only man I could marry because with you I can be natural and sincere and not hide anything.”
“Really?” I exclaimed, somewhat astonished by this preamble. “I always have the impression that with me you hide everything, or nearly everything. If it’s like that with me, whatever happens with other people?”
Bending her head as she pulled off my tie and then, one by one, undid the buttons of my shirt, she went on as if she had not heard what I said. “And this is a lovely house. I should like to live in it with you.”
“Well, then?”
“Besides,” she continued, trying to pull my arm out of the sleeve of my coat, “You’ve promised me so many nice things—traveling, clothes, parties.”
“Well?”
“But I must tell you I can’t marry you. I ought to have told you at once, when you spoke to me about it, but I hadn’t the courage, I saw you were so set on it.” By this time she had succeeded in taking off my jacket and my shirt too; she folded them and threw them aside, to the bottom of the bed.
I now had a feeling of immense astonishment; it was just as though I had really believed Cecilia would be flattered at the idea of becoming my wife. The fact of the matter, as I at last realized, was that just as in the past I had hoped to possess her by means of money, so this time I had imagined I could achieve the same end by offering her something that women almost always place before money—marriage. I asked angrily: “Why don’t you want to?”
“I don’t want to because I don’t want to.”
“But why?”
“Because of Luciani,” she said. “I don’t want to leave him.”
“Do you want to marry him?”
“Oh no, I’m not thinking of that. Besides, he has a wife already.”
“Luciani has a wife?”
“Yes, and he has to support her, too.”
Exasperated, I cried: “What does Luciani matter to me? I’d let you see him as much as you liked.”
“No, I said no, and no it is.”
“But why?”
Speaking in the same tone with which she had answered me when I had offered to pay her a fixed monthly sum, a tone which suggested that she was attached to a convenient and cherished habit, she said: “No, no, Dino, why should we get married? Let’s stay as we are; it all works so well as it is.”
With almost unbelievable tenacity, I now clung more and more to the idea of marriage, possibly because Cecilia would have nothing to do with it. “But if I let you see Luciani, or anyone else you like,” I said, “if nothing changes except for the better, if instead of living in a wretched flat with your family you come and live in this villa with me, why on earth should you refuse? What is it that makes you refuse?”
“I don’t want to get