Boredom - Alberto Moravia [18]
We were now sitting facing one another at a small round table in a room which was not large but which had a very high ceiling. On the Florentine lace tablecloth were plates of German porcelain flanked by spoons and forks of English silver and glasses of French crystal. Behind my mother’s chair the golden inlay of a Dutch dresser gleamed in the half-light; behind me, as I knew, stood a Venetian sideboard. The French window giving on to the garden was wide open but the curtains were half drawn because my mother did not wish, in her own words, that some gardener or other should count the mouthfuls as she was eating. My mother herself helped me to wine from a crystal and silver carafe, then told Rita that she could serve the lunch. The girl took from the sideboard a porcelain dish standing on a salver and went across to my mother. The latter said sharply: “Serve Signor Dino first.”
“Why? You first,” I said.
“No, I...”
“Rita, serve the Signora first.”
“But I eat practically nothing,” said my mother, and she served herself a tiny portion of food with the point of the spoon. Rita came over to me and then I understood the good smell of cooking I had noticed when we were in the garden—a macaroni pie. “I knew you liked it,” said my mother, “I had it made specially for you.”
“Good, good, good,” I said with masochistic satisfaction, and I deposited an enormous helping of it on my plate. As a rule I ate little, and this type of food, particularly, I did not eat at all. I could not help thinking that this was a continuation of the comedy of the prodigal son, and I burst out laughing. My mother asked in alarm: “Why are you laughing?”
“I remember having read somewhere,” I replied, “an amusing parody of the parable of the prodigal son—you know, the one in the Gospels.”
“What was that?”
“In the parable, the prodigal son returns home and his father welcomes him with all sorts of attentions and kills the fatted calf for him. In the parody, on the other hand, the fatted calf runs away in terror as soon as the prodigal son comes back, knowing well what his fate is to be. So they wait for him to return. The fatted calf keeps them waiting quite a long time and then decides to come back. In the intensity of his joy the father, in order to celebrate the return of the fatted calf, kills the prodigal son and makes a feast of him for the calf.”
My mother believed in nothing—except money. She did rely, as I have already said, upon what she called “good form,” and this required, among other things, that she should be a practicing Catholic, or anyhow that she should respect things connected with religion. So I saw her assume a wooden expression, and then she said in her most disagreeable voice: “You know I don’t like you to make jokes about sacred things.”
“On the contrary, I’m not joking. What, in fact, does my return signify, if not the sacrifice of the prodigal son—that is to say, myself—for the advantage of the fatted calf, which is all this?”—and I gave a wave of my hand to indicate the expensive furniture all around me in the room.
“I don’t understand you.” My mother was not lacking in a curious, rather gloomy, mechanical sense of humor; without smiling, she added: “Anyhow I think that after the macaroni there happens to be some veal coming—whether from a fatted calf or not, I don’t know.”
I said nothing, but started devouring my helping of pie with a mixed feeling of joy and remorse, because I was really hungry and the pie was good and yet at the same time I felt angry at liking it. Then I looked up at my mother and saw that she was watching me with disapproval. “You ought to chew your food more thoroughly,” she said. “The first stage of digestion takes place in your mouth.”
“How very disgusting! Who told you that?”
“All doctors say so.”
Her blue, glassy, utterly expressionless eyes brooded over me in an indefinable manner above the two crossed, ring-laden hands upon which she supported her chin. I finished clearing my plate in a mad hurry; then my mother,