Boredom - Alberto Moravia [32]
It was a cloudy day and the studio was filled with a subdued, gray, melancholy light. I jumped off the divan and, acting as though I knew what I was doing, rushed to the door, opened it and went out into the corridor. It was empty and the four doors were closed, but as I looked more carefully I noticed that the door of Balestrieri’s studio was ajar. Without thinking, and still acting in an almost mechanical way, I went to this door, pushed it and walked in.
I had never before penetrated into the old painter’s studio; so I was now able to imagine that it was merely curiosity which brought me there. The curtains were drawn and the studio was almost in darkness; a lamp with a red shade, on a carved and gilded wooden stand—a piece of church furniture, probably—stood burning on a table covered with purple damask. In the blood-red light from this lamp I was able to see that Balestrieri’s studio was very different from mine. In the first place it was larger, with a staircase leading to a wooden gallery on to which two small doors opened. Furthermore, my studio had the look of a real painter’s studio, sparsely furnished and very untidy, but Balestrieri’s, I noticed with a vague feeling of repugnance, was furnished and decorated like an old-fashioned middle-class drawing room of forty or fifty years ago; nobody could have imagined that a painter had lived there, had it not been for the famous nudes hanging close together on the walls from floor to ceiling, and for a monumental easel placed in a good light near the big window, with an unfinished canvas upon it. I was struck particularly by the gloominess of the furniture, most of it antique or sham antique, in the Renaissance style. The walls behind the pictures were hung with red damask; on the floor, in confusion and one on top of another, were Persian carpets of dark, close design. I closed the door behind me and then, looking about me and sniffing in the curious smell that hung in the air, a mingled smell of death chamber and domestic interior, I walked slowly across to the easel. The unfinished picture could only be the one that Balestrieri, just before his death, had been painting of his youthful mistress; and I was seized with curiosity to see what her figure was like. But when I stood in front of the canvas I had a feeling of incredulity and disappointment. Balestrieri had made a charcoal sketch of a figure which I found very difficult to connect with the slender body and childish face of the young girl who had so often smiled at me. It was one of his usual exaggerated nudes, portrayed, into the bargain, in a strained attitude, squatting down on folded legs but with hands clasped behind the back of the neck in such a way as to give the greatest prominence to the breast and hips, two parts of the female body for which Balestrieri seemed to have a special partiality. I was particularly struck by the amplitude of the loins and the heaviness of the breast which I did not remember having noticed in the model. The slim waist, on the other hand, and the slender shoulders and arms might well have been hers. It was significant that Balestrieri had forgotten, or not troubled, to draw the face, so that any identification, for me at any rate, was impossible.
I looked for a long time at the canvas, reflecting that Balestrieri was really an extremely bad painter, even according to the remote naturalistic tradition to which, in a vague way, he was related; then I turned back into the studio and started to examine the pictures hanging on the walls. They were all nudes, all female nudes, most of them posed in unnatural, strained attitudes; and the first thought that occurred to me was that Balestrieri, although he was an extremely bad painter, was nevertheless a very careful painter, accurate, in fact, to the point of pedantry. It was obvious that he did not rely on inspiration and worked rather in the manner of the old masters, by means of successive glazes, coming back