Boredom - Alberto Moravia [2]
In recent years, too, a silence has surrounded the work of Moravia and his finest contemporaries—at least in the English-speaking world—but there are signs (and this reprint of La noia is one) of a rekindled interest. And new readers will now be able to discover that, whether in the original or in Davidson’s translations, Moravia scrive benissimo!
—WILLIAM WEAVER
BOREDOM
Prologue
I REMEMBER PERFECTLY well how it was that I stopped painting. One evening, after I had been in my studio for eight hours, painting for five or ten minutes at a time and then throwing myself down on the divan and lying there flat, staring up at the ceiling for an hour or two—all of a sudden, as though at last after so many feeble attempts I had had a genuine inspiration, I stubbed out my last cigarette in an ashtray already full of dead cigarette butts, leaped cat-like from the armchair into which I had sunk, seized hold of a small palette knife which I sometimes used for scraping off colors and slashed repeatedly at the canvas on which I had been painting, not content until I had reduced it to ribbons. Then from a corner of the room I took a blank canvas of the same size, threw away the torn canvas and placed the new one on the easel. Immediately afterward, however, I realized that the whole of my—shall I say creative?—energy had been vented completely in my furious and fundamentally rational gesture of destruction. I had been working on that canvas for the last two months, doggedly and without pause; slashing it to ribbons with a knife was equivalent, fundamentally, to finishing it—in a negative manner, perhaps, as regards external results, which in any case had little interest for me, but positively, in relation to my own inspiration. In fact my destruction of the canvas meant that I had reached the conclusion of a long discourse which I had been holding with myself for an interminable time. It meant that I had at last planted my foot on solid ground. And so the empty canvas that now stood on the easel was not just an ordinary canvas which had not yet been used; it was a particular canvas that I had placed on the easel at the termination of a long job of work. In effect, I thought, seeking to console myself against the sense of catastrophe that was throttling me, this canvas, similar in appearance to so many other canvases but for me fraught with meaning and consequence, could be the starting point from which I could now begin all over again in complete freedom, just as if those ten years of painting had not gone by and I myself were still twenty-five, as I was when I had left my mother’s house and had gone to live in the studio in Via Margutta in order to devote myself in complete leisure to painting. On the other hand, it might well be—in fact it was highly probable—that the empty canvas now flaunting itself on the easel was the outward sign of a development no less intimate and no less necessary but entirely negative, a development which might lead me, by imperceptible stages, to complete impotence. That this second hypothesis might well be the true one appeared to be borne out by the fact that slowly but surely boredom had come to be the companion of my work during the last six months, until finally it had brought it to a full stop on that afternoon when I slashed my canvas to tatters; it was rather like a deposit of lime in a spring which, in the end, blocks the passages and brings the flow of water to a complete