Boredom - Alberto Moravia [30]
Balestrieri’s death, moreover, had not been so simple a matter as might appear at first sight. That same day, partly through the shocked allusions of the caretaker, partly through the more explicit comments of a group of friends whom I met at the café, I was able to reconstruct the old painter’s end. It seemed that Balestrieri had died at a very special moment, that is, while he was in the act of making love with the girl who had so often smiled at me. Furthermore, this lovemaking had not been of a normal kind—meaning by “normal” the act which leads to procreation—but rather a distortion of it, an erotic speciality, so that Balesterieri had been killed not by lovemaking but by the manner in which he had done it. The caretaker refused to be explicit, she merely alluded to the matter with indignation; my friends at the café, on the other hand, had been cheerfully liberal with details, as though they had been present in Balestrieri’s studio at the moment of his death; but, as I finally managed to establish, this was all a question of supposition. In reality Balestrieri had felt sick and had died under the frightened eyes of the girl; that was all that was known for certain. The fact that the girl was his mistress, that he had been found half-naked on the bed, and that the girl herself had run out and called the caretaker, wearing a dressing gown with nothing underneath—all this seemed to confirm the gossip about a sudden death which had taken place at the moment of pleasure. But those who were unwilling to believe this pointed out that the girl was in a dressing gown because she was a model and was sitting to Balestrieri, and that the latter, in the summer, always used to work in a sleeveless vest and a pair of swimming trunks. On the other hand, in support of the “love-death” gossip, there was the reported statement of the doctor who had been summoned to the death bed: “If this man had realized that there are certain things that cannot be done at his age, he would still be alive.” Others, however, maintained that, after examining Balestrieri, all the doctor had said to the girl was: “Signorina, you killed him,” adding immediately afterwards: “Or rather, you helped him to kill himself.” But no one knew who this doctor was nor where he was to be found; he might have been called in through one of the numerous drugstores in the neighborhood; nor did I trouble to track him down.
That same day, after having lunch in a little restaurant in Via Margutta, I went back to my studio and found a parcel with a note from my mother. In her note, my mother gave me a lesson in good manners: “Another time, instead of running away like that, do at least come and say good-bye to me.” In the parcel were my dinner jacket and the light trousers which the good Rita had cleaned and ironed. I threw the whole lot onto the floor, lay down on the divan and lit a cigarette. I was suffering as usual from a cruel sense of boredom, and it seemed odd to me that other people did not notice my boredom—they did not realize that, for me, they and the whole world did not really exist. It seemed odd that, like my mother, they should continue to behave toward me as though I were not bored. As I lay there smoking, I gradually began to reflect upon my situation, which was obviously going from bad to worse every day; and finally I asked myself what there was left for me to do, now that I had given up painting and had nevertheless not had the courage to accept my mother’s money. I realized that there was little to be done, in the sense of any action that would introduce some really substantial change; but that I could always do what many people do when they find themselves in an unendurable situation: accept it and adapt myself to it. Fundamentally, I thought, I was like some scion of a noble but decayed family who obstinately tries to go on living on the same sumptuous scale as his ancestors. The day he accepts a situation which hitherto has seemed to him unendurable, and which,