Boredom - Alberto Moravia [38]
I saw I should make no further headway in that direction, so I abruptly changed my line of approach. “But afterwards,” I said, “afterwards he fell in love with you, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Very much so?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Why?”
She bent forward and looked at me. She was quite close to me now. It was no longer a question of an optical illusion; her knees were touching mine.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“But didn’t he talk about his love for you?”
“Yes, he talked about it.”
“And what did he say?”
She seemed to be reflecting, and I noticed her drooping over toward me, as if she were going to fall on top of me. Or rather, owing perhaps to the kind of sheath-like wrapping formed by the towel around her body, she seemed like a vessel full of some liquid or other tilting further and further toward me, as though to make it possible for me to drink from it. Finally she answered: “I don’t remember what he said. I remember what he did.”
“What did he do?”
“He used to cry, for instance.”
“To cry?”
“Yes, all of a sudden he would take his head between his hands and start crying.”
I thought of Balestrieri as I had always seen him: old, certainly, but robust, broad-shouldered, firm on his legs, his red face full of vitality beneath his white hair; and I could not help feeling disconcerted. “Why did he cry?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t he tell you why he cried?”
“No, he only said he cried because of me.”
“Perhaps he was jealous?”
“No, he wasn’t jealous.”
“But did you give him reason to be jealous?”
She looked at me for a moment in silence, as though she had not understood, then she replied briefly: “No.”
“Did he cry like that in silence, without speaking?”
“No, he always said something.”
“Well then, you see, he did speak. And what did he say?”
“He used to say, for instance, that he couldn’t do without me.”
“Ah, then, there was a reason for his crying. He would have liked to do without you and he couldn’t.”
She corrected me pedantically. “No, he simply said that he couldn’t do without me. He never said that he wanted to do without me; on the contrary, in fact, once when I wanted to leave him he tried to kill himself.”
I was surprised at the complete absence of any change in the tone of her voice, whether she was saying something unimportant or whether she was revealing to me that Balestrieri had tried to kill himself on her account. “So he tried to kill himself? How?” I asked.
“With those pills that people take when they can’t sleep. I don’t remember what they’re called.”
“Barbiturates?”
“That’s it, barbiturates.”
“Was he sick after that?”
“He was sick for a couple of days, then he got better.”
“Did Balestrieri suffer from sleeplessness?”
“Yes, he took barbiturates for it. There were nights when he slept for only an hour or two.”
“Why?”
“Why didn’t he sleep? I don’t know.”
“Was it because of you?”
“He used to say that everything that happened to him was because of me.”
“Didn’t he say anything more? Didn’t he explain why you were the cause of everything?”
“Yes, now that I think of it, he used to say I was his drug.”
“A commonplace, don’t you think?”
“What does a commonplace mean?”
“Something not at all original, that anybody might say.”
There was silence again. Finally I went on: “But why were you a drug for Balestrieri?”
She in turn asked me, slowly: “Tell me, why are you asking me all these questions?”
I answered, with sincerity: “Because in all this story about you and Balestrieri there is something that makes me curious.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I ask you these questions. In order to find out why I ask you.”
She did not smile, but again gazed at me intently though in an expressionless way, leaning toward me so that it almost seemed to me that the warm, simple smell of her body came faintly to my nostrils. Finally she explained: “I suppose I was like a drug for Balestrieri because he had more