Boredom - Alberto Moravia [135]
I do not think I spoke more than two or three times, and then more and more briefly, during our drive from my mother’s villa to Cecilia’s home. Once I asked her, stupidly, to write to me, although I was very well aware that Cecilia, so reticent in speech, must be utterly dumb in correspondence and so would not write anything, even a picture post card. We reached the street in which she lived. I stopped and she got out and I said good-bye to her, after kissing her lightly on the mouth. I watched her as she crossed the street and thought: “Let’s hope that at least she’ll turn around in the doorway and smile and wave to me.” But I was disappointed in my expectation. Cecilia crossed the threshold and disappeared without turning around.
As soon as she was gone I realized that I had no desire to go to my studio or anywhere else. The only place I wished to go was Cecilia’s home: it seemed to me that I had not finished with her yet. I wanted to go up to the flat, ring the doorbell, go with her to her bedroom and go to bed with her for the third time that day. I knew that this was madness, that by having her again I should not be possessing her any more than I possessed her now—which meant not at all—and that the thing which eluded me was not indeed her almost too complaisant body, but something which had nothing to do with her body. And yet I felt that this was the only thing I wanted to do.
I do not know how long I debated this problem, sitting in my car in the deserted street in front of Cecilia’s door. Finally I said to myself that Cecilia, after all, had almost insisted on our being together until midnight, and that therefore there would be nothing strange about it if I, regretting that I had left her so early, telephoned and suggested taking her out to dinner. Cecilia, as I knew, had almost unlimited patience, and when she refused to do something she never refused because she did not want to do it but merely because she could not do otherwise. Suddenly making up my mind, I quickly backed the car to the corner, got out and went into the bar.
But the telephone was occupied by the type of person one could not expect to finish quickly—a modest-appearing girl, a servant girl, perhaps, who was speaking and answering in an extremely low voice and with the long, reflective pauses of one who is engaged in a sentimental conversation. I did not hesitate a moment, but went straight out again and walked resolutely back to Cecilia’s door. Why should I telephone? I would go up to the flat, find her there and hurry her into her bedroom.
I ran all the way up the stairs, ran across to ring the bell, then stopped panting on the landing, waiting for the door to open so that I could rush into the flat. But it was not Cecilia who came to open the door; it was her mother, with a troubled expression on her worn, painted face. “Cecilia?” I inquired.
She replied in a voice of distress: “Cecilia’s not here, Professor.”
“What, she’s not here?”
“She went out just two minutes ago.”
“But where has she gone?”
“She’s gone out to dinner.”
“What time will she be back?”
“She’s not coming back, Professor. She took her suitcase with her. She’s going with a girl friend to Ponza. She’s sleeping at her friend’s house tonight and she’ll be back in a fortnight.”
Thus, while I had been debating whether it was advisable to telephone her, Cecilia had run up to the flat, fetched her already packed suitcase, gone out by the usual door which opened on to the other street and made her way to Luciani’s. I looked up at her mother’s face and saw that she was biting her handkerchief and that her eyes were filled with tears. “But what has happened?