Boredom - Alberto Moravia [136]
“Cecilia has gone away, and her father is dying. She’s left me alone in this empty house. My husband was taken off yesterday to the clinic, and there’s no hope now.”
“There’s no hope?”
“No, the doctors give him only two or three days to live.”
“But isn’t Cecilia fond of her father?”
“Ah, Cecilia’s not fond of anyone, Professor.”
All at once I remembered how Cecilia had come to look for me on the very day on which Balestrieri died. “I’m sorry,” I said abruptly, “I’m truly sorry,” and after listening impatiently with a set face to a few further laments, I went away.
As I walked back to the car, I realized that I could not endure the idea that Cecilia was with the actor at that very moment. I was faced with the usual impossibility of doing anything at all except what I felt I ought not to do; and this was confirmed and made even more hopeless by my recent disappointment. I jumped into the car and very soon became aware that I was driving in the direction of Via Archimede, where Luciani lived. I say I became aware because I was acting in an automatic manner, with the type of automatism which goes with extreme rage. When I reached Via Archimede, I drove at headlong speed down the narrow, winding street as far as the bar, where I stopped and looked across at Luciani’s windows. They were in darkness, and at once I was sure that the two lovers were not there. Nevertheless I got out of the car, entered the building, and rang the bell of the actor’s flat on the ground floor. I do not know what came into my mind as I listened to the prolonged ringing of the bell inside the empty flat; I only know that two minutes later I was in the bar dialing the telephone number of a procuress through whom, in the past, I had made contact with girls of easy virtue. When the woman came to the other end of the line, she told me there was a girl available at the usual place, a villa on the Via Cassia.
Back in the car, I reflected that the girl whom I was now preparing to visit was the exact opposite of Cecilia: she was at my entire disposal for a sum of money and I should possess her completely, with no margins of independence or mystery, thanks to that same sum of money. What I had not succeeded in doing in the villa on the Via Appia, with a proposal of marriage and half a million lire, I should now achieve, at small expense, in the maison de rendez-vous on the Via Cassia. But the girl was not Cecilia; why, then, was I going to visit her?
I realized to my astonishment, when I tried to answer this question, that at the back of my absurd telephone call to the procuress there was a strange, almost unbelievable hope. In the midst of my fury I hoped, I truly hoped that in the villa on the Via Cassia I should find Cecilia herself waiting for me, ready to give herself to me and to allow me, at last, full possession. I really do not know where this hope came from; partly, perhaps from the alluring words of the procuress who, like all her kind, had made marvelous promises of the very thing she could not possibly provide—that is, love; but partly also from the fact that all rational means of possessing Cecilia having proved vain, my only hope now lay in a miracle.
With these thoughts in my head, or rather, in this raging, almost mystical state of mind, I drove out of the city and started along the Via Cassia. The villa was in the open country; I went on for about twenty minutes or so and then arrived at a rustic iron gate, wide open, with a rough lane leading up from it to the top of a hill upon which could be seen a white building. I drove quickly through the gate and up the road between little stunted trees that appeared to have been recently planted. Leaning forward on the steering wheel, I could see that all the windows in the villa were dark; then one of these windows was lit up. The car came out on to an open, graveled space; I stopped and got out.
The villa was a plain building, with two stories and three windows on each floor, and with an outside staircase going up to the first floor. The staircase led to a little