Boredom - Alberto Moravia [29]
But when one is bored it is not easy to give continuous thought to anything. Boredom, for me, was like a kind of fog in which my thought was constantly losing its way, catching glimpses only at intervals of some detail of reality: like a person in a thick mist who catches a glimpse now of the corner of a house, now of the figure of a passer-by, now of some other object, but only for an instant, before they vanish. In the fog of boredom I had caught a glimpse of the girl and of Balestrieri, but without attaching any importance to them and with my attention being constantly drawn away from them. And so it happened that for weeks I forgot the existence of these two, who were living and making love only a few steps away from me. Now and then I would remember them, almost with astonishment, and say to myself: “Why, they’re still there, they’re still making love together!” I forgot Balestrieri to such an extent that, the morning after my flight from my mother’s villa, coming back to my studio after having a cup of coffee near by, and noticing in Via Margutta, right in front of my door, a black and gilt hearse with the usual gilt angels at the four corners and the usual black horses in the shafts, but still empty and without any flowers, I never imagined that it might be waiting there for someone I knew. I went around the hearse, which was blocking the way, and into the entrance hall, and since I was walking, as I habitually do, with my eyes on the ground, I ran straight into the coffin, which four men were at that moment carrying out on their shoulders, bumping my forehead against its lower edge. I immediately jumped back, while the four bearers glared at me reprovingly, then the coffin passed close to me, followed by only two persons; a brutal-faced, pock-marked young man in a blue cloth suit and a woman with her arm in his, of whom I could see nothing as she was smothered in black veils from head to foot. The young man made me think of Balestrieri, possibly because he too had a rather red face and very black eyebrows; at the same moment I heard the caretaker of the building murmuring some comment on how sudden some deaths can be, coupled with the name of the old painter. And so I learned that Balestrieri had died, probably the previous day, that this was his funeral and that the woman in mourning was the wife from whom he had been separated for many years and the young man in the blue suit the son whom he had had by her.
As I have already said, my mind at that time had been distracted by boredom to such a degree that I had forgotten the existence not only of Balestrieri but also of the girl. Therefore it was without surprise that I realized I had been in my studio during the last two days without knowing that, three doors further on, Balestrieri had been taken ill, had died, had been watched over through the night, had been placed in his coffin, had been carried away. Heaven knows, I thought, someone may have spoken to me of Balestrieri’s illness, and I, while hearing, had not listened, lost in boredom as I was; just as it sometimes happened that I read carefully the headlines in the newspapers and discovered a moment later that I had no idea of what they said. It had required the coffin, or rather the painful blow from the coffin on my forehead, to make