Boredom - Alberto Moravia [37]
“I don’t know.” She hesitated again, then, as though she had succeeded in finally overcoming her last remnant of waywardness, she broke into a kind of loquacity which, though still precise and economical, had in it less reserve than her former manner. “I suppose I didn’t attract him, and that was all there was to it. We went on in that way for two or three months, and by then he was positively avoiding me and it made me unhappy. At that time I was really in love with him. In the end I resorted to a trick.”
“A trick?”
“Yes. One day when Elisa was due to go to his studio and I knew about it, I asked Elisa to lunch and told her he had telephoned to tell her not to come after all because he was busy, and I went myself instead.”
“How did Balestrieri take your trick?”
“At first he wanted to send me away. Later on he became kinder.”
“You and he made love that day, did you?”
Again she blushed, in the same gradual, uneven way, and nodded her head in assent, without speaking.
“How about Elisa?”
“Elisa never knew that I had gone in her place. But she and Balestrieri parted shortly afterward.”
“Are you still friends with Elisa?”
“No, we never see each other now.”
Silence followed. I realized that I was cross-examining her almost like a policeman, and that she seemed to submit to my examination quite willingly; I asked myself what it was that I really wanted to know. Clearly it was not so much the facts that interested me as something that lay beyond them and constituted their background and their justification. But what was this something? I asked bluntly: “Why did you fall in love with Balestrieri?”
“What d’you mean?”
“What I mean is—why with Balestrieri, a man old enough to have been your father’s father?”
“There’s no reason for falling in love with someone. You just fall in love and that’s that.”
“There are always reasons, for everything.”
She looked at me and she seemed now to be closer to me on the divan. Or was this possibly an optical illusion due to the cross-examination which was making her gradually better known and more recognizable to me? At last, leaning slightly forward and gazing straight at me, she said faintly: “I felt very strongly attracted to him.”
“What kind of attraction was it?”
She said nothing, but merely looked at me. “Well?” I insisted.
“Oh well; I’ll tell you. Balestrieri was a little like my father, and when I was younger I had a real passion for my father.”
“A passion?”
“Yes, I used to dream about him at night.”
“So you fell in love with Balestrieri because he was a little like your father?”
“Yes, that was part of the reason.”
There was silence again, and then I went on: “Why do you think Balestrieri refused to have anything to do with you at the beginning?”
“I’ve already told you: I didn’t attract him.”
“To say that you didn’t attract him doesn’t explain anything. There are so many reasons why a person may not be attractive.”
“That may be so. But I don’t know what they are.”
“But you might guess them. Do you think Balestrieri refused to have anything to do with you because you were too young?”
“No, not that.”
“Or because he had the same feeling about you that you had about him—I mean that he looked upon you rather like a daughter?”
“I don’t think so. Otherwise he would have told me.”
I paused a moment, engrossed in thought. It had now become clear to me that I was questioning the girl about Balestrieri in order to find out something about myself: I too, in fact, had so far repelled her advances, and with me too she appeared to have fallen in love. “Or don’t you think, perhaps,” I said, “that Balestrieri was afraid of getting to know you?”
“Afraid, why afraid?”
“Afraid because he foresaw what did in fact happen afterwards: that he would fall in love with you. Love does sometimes frighten people.”
“It doesn’t frighten me,” she said mysteriously.
“You haven’t answered my question,” I insisted. “Did Balestrieri avoid you because he was afraid?”
“No, he wasn’t afraid. In fact I remember now that he once said to me: ‘If you hadn’t played that