Boredom - Alberto Moravia [138]
IN FRONT OF the window of my room at the hospital to which I had been taken after the collision there was a great tree in the garden, a cedar of Lebanon, with long drooping branches of an almost blue green. I took to gazing at it for hours, my head turned sideways on the pillow as I lay on my back in bed—during all those hours, in fact, that were not occupied in sleeping or eating; for I was almost always alone, having let my mother and my few friends know the first day that I did not want to be visited. I gazed at the tree and experienced a feeling of absolute but calm and stabilized despair, such as one might well feel after passing through a crisis which, though not decisive, may yet be supposed to be the greatest that one can face. What for lack of a more appropriate term I must call my suicide had resolved nothing, but the fact of having attempted it had made me feel I had done all that was in my power; more than that I could not do. In other words, the fact that I had tried to kill myself confirmed the seriousness of my involvement. I was not dead, but at least I had proved to myself that, rather than go on living as I had lived previously, I should have preferred, and seriously preferred death. All this did not mitigate the feeling of despair that occupied my mind; but it introduced a certain kind of mournful, resigned serenity. I had indeed visited the dim purlieus of death, but I had returned; and now, although without hope, all that was left for me was to go on living.
As I have said, I spent hours gazing at the tree, to the great surprise of the nuns and the servants in the hospital, who said they had never seen a quieter patient than me. In reality I was not quiet, merely I was closely occupied with the only thing that truly interested me at that moment, the contemplation of the tree. I had no thoughts, I simply wondered when and how I had recognized the reality of the tree, had recognized, in other words, its existence as an object which was different from myself, had no relationship with me, and yet was there and could not be ignored. Evidently something had occurred just at the moment when I hurled myself off the road in my car; something which, to put it plainly, might be described as the collapse of an insupportable ambition. I now contemplated the tree with infinite complacency, as though to feel it different from myself and independent of me were the only thing that gave me pleasure. But I knew that chance alone had willed that the tree would be the object of my contemplation; the plaster casing compelled me to lie on my back and forced me to look through the window of my room. Any other object, I realized, would have provided me with the same kind of contemplation, the same feeling of infinite complacency.
And indeed, as soon as I began to think about Cecilia again, I was aware of the same thing happening to me as when I gazed at the tree through the window. Ten days had passed since my collision and Cecilia was certainly still at Ponza with Luciani; I took to thinking about her, therefore, at first cautiously and at rare intervals, then more often and with greater confidence. I realized then that I was able to imagine perfectly well, just as if I had been present, all the things she was doing while I was lying there in bed at the hospital. To say “imagine” is to say too little, for I could see her. As through the wrong end of a telescope, I saw the tiny, remote but brightly clear figures of Cecilia and the actor moving, running, embracing, walking, lying together, disappearing and reappearing in a hundred different attitudes against a background of blue sea and calm, luminous sky. I knew from experience that happiness is to be found with the person whom one loves and who loves one, in a lovely, peaceful place; I was sure that Cecilia, in her own economical, inexpressive way, was happy, and I was astonished to find that I was pleased. Yes indeed, I was pleased that she should be happy, but above all I was pleased that she should exist, away there in the island of Ponza, in a manner which was her own