Boredom - Alberto Moravia [34]
“He hasn’t drawn in my head because he always did that last. So how d’you know it isn’t like me?”
“What I mean is that the figure drawn by Balestrieri doesn’t look like yours.”
“You don’t think so? And yet it is mine.”
I was aware of the utter futility and falseness of this pseudo-artistic discussion, over a picture of such a kind and on a question of resemblance, into the bargain. But even though I felt ashamed, just as if there had been a tacit collusion which I ought to reject, I could not refrain from answering in a lively fashion: “It’s not possible, I can’t believe it!”
“You don’t think so?” she said again. “And yet my figure is like that.” She put down her bundle on the table, went to the easel, contemplated the canvas for a moment, and then turned and went on: “Perhaps there’s a little exaggeration, but on the whole I’m just like that.”
For some reason, as I saw her standing beside the picture, I recalled my dream of that afternoon. I asked casually: “Is that the only picture Balestrieri did of you, or did he do others as well?”
“Oh, he painted me over and over again.” She looked up at the walls and began counting, pointing as she went: “That’s me, and that too, and that one up there, and that one there too.” She added conclusively: “He was always painting me. He kept me posing for hours.”
I was conscious of an obscure impulse to say something nasty about Balestrieri, perhaps in order to force her into a more personal, a more confidential key. I said unkindly: “A great deal of effort for a very poor result.”
“Why?”
“Because Balestrieri was an extremely bad painter, in fact he wasn’t a painter at all.”
She did not react in any way; she merely said: “I don’t know anything about painting.”
I persisted. “Actually Balestrieri was simply a man who liked women very much.”
She agreed, with conviction. “Oh yes, there you’re right.”
She had now taken up her bundle again and was looking at me with a questioning air, as much as to say: “Am I to go now—why don’t you do something to stop me?” With a sudden gentleness of tone, which surprised me because I had neither intended it nor foreseen it, I suggested: “Won’t you come to my studio for a moment?”
Her face lit up with a prompt, naïve hopefulness. “D’you want me to sit for you?” she asked.
I felt embarrassed. I had had no intention of lying to her, and now here she was suggesting an artifice which was doubly humiliating to me, partly because it was an artifice, partly because it was the last artifice I should have had recourse to—that of the painter who invites a pretty girl to his studio under the pretext of wanting to paint her; in a word, an artifice worthy of Balestrieri. I asked, rather scornfully: “Did Balestrieri invite you to his studio the first time under the pretext of painting you?”
“No,” she replied seriously. “No, I went to him to take drawing lessons. Then he wanted to paint me, but that was later.”
For her, then, the painting artifice was not an artifice at all but a serious thing. She went on: “I’ve nothing to do now. If you like, I could sit for you until dinner time.”
I wondered whether I ought to explain to her that I was a painter who had given up painting; and that furthermore, during the time when I was painting, I had never painted figure studies. But in that case, I reflected, I should perhaps have to look for another excuse for inviting her to my studio, since it appeared that she required an excuse of some kind. One might as well accept the excuse of wanting to paint her. So I said, in a light, vague sort of manner: “Very well, let’s go to my studio.”
“I used always to sit for Balestrieri at this time of day,” she told me, relieved and contented, taking up her bundle from the table. “He painted every day from four till seven.”
“And in the morning too?”
“Yes, in the morning too, from ten till one.”
Meanwhile we had moved toward the door. I was aware that she was seeing, for the last time, the studio in which she had spent so large a part of her life, and I was expecting that, if only