Boredom - Alberto Moravia [137]
I thought: “It’s Cecilia!” and rushed up the staircase while the dark figure, leaning placidly with her elbows on the balustrade, watched me. When I reached the top, she straightened up and came forward to meet me, saying: “Good evening.”
She was against the light and I could not see her face, but her voice seemed to me to be Cecilia’s and I took her in my arms. I saw, then, the pretty, plump face of a very young girl, a face covered with the fashionable livid, corpse-like powder, with lilac-painted lips, eyes encircled with black, and fair, straw-colored hair. She had Cecilia’s prominent bosom; her waist, around which I had put my arms, was as slim as Cecilia’s. But it was not Cecilia.
But, in my stupefaction, I exclaimed: “Cecilia!”
The girl smiled and replied: “My name isn’t Cecilia, my name’s Gianna.”
“But I wanted Cecilia.”
“I don’t know who Cecilia is, there’s no Cecilia here. Well, shall we go in?”
I said: “Cecilia, I came for Cecilia,” then I tore myself away from the girl, ran down the stairs, crossed the open space and got back into my car. A moment later I was driving along the Via Cassia, not in the direction of Rome but out into the country.
For some time now I had been conscious, when driving, of a frequent temptation to go off the road and rush at full speed into the first obstacle I encountered. This temptation, singularly hard to resist, was enticing and at the same time reassuring—like the temptation a child feels when he plays with his father’s revolver and from time to time raises it to his forehead. And yet I did not think of killing myself, the idea of suicide was never in my mind. The desire for death was, on the contrary, in my body, which was worn out with anguish, so that I often felt that my arm would very easily give the steering wheel the half-turn which was all that would be required to hurl the car against a boundary wall or a white-banded plane tree. It was an almost irresistible temptation, sweet and reassuring, and it made me think of the temptation to fall asleep which sometimes gets the better of us in spite of ourselves, causing us to dream that we are resisting sleep and are awake, when in reality we are already fast asleep. I knew in advance that if I killed myself in my car I would do it without realizing it and without intending it, just as though I had really followed an imaginary road different from the one along which I was driving, a road which took no account of boundary walls or trees or houses, and at the end of which was death.
That evening, as I was driving in a haphazard way along the Via Cassia, out into the country, there flashed into my mind a remark I had once heard: “Humanity is divided into two main categories; those who, when faced with an insurmountable difficulty, feel an impulse to kill, and those who, on the contrary, feel an impulse to kill themselves.” I said to myself that I had tried the first horn of the dilemma and had failed in the attempt: I had been incapable of killing Cecilia, shortly before, on my mother’s bed. Now there was nothing left but to kill myself. It occurred to me that if I killed myself I should be behaving exactly like any other lover since the world began: Cecilia was going off to Ponza with Luciani and so I killed myself. But it was precisely this reflection upon the banality and normality of my position that inspired in me a destructive fury more intense than ever. At that moment I came on to a straight stretch of road bordered with trees; there was a slow-moving truck in front of me. I shifted gears in order to overtake it, and it was possibly this gear shifting, with its momentary slowing down, that saved my life. Immediately after shifting, just as though I had really seen another road on my left into which I wanted to turn, I drove the car into a plane tree.
Epilogue