Boredom - Alberto Moravia [39]
“In what sense was he always in need of you?”
“In every sense.”
“In the sense of lovemaking?”
She looked at me and said nothing. I repeated my question. Then she appeared to make up her mind and answered precisely: “Yes, in that sense.”
“Did you do it very often?”
“At first only once or twice a week, then every other day, then every day, then twice a day. In the end I gave up counting.”
“Why?”
“He was doing it continually”—she seemed more at ease now—“he would make me pose, then he would stop painting and want to make love: and so it went on all day long.”
“Wasn’t he ever satisfied?”
“He used to get tired. Sometimes he felt sick, too. But it was never enough for him.”
“And you, did you like all that?”
She hesitated, and then remarked: “A woman never minds a man showing that he loves her.”
“But did he really love you? Wasn’t it rather that he needed you as a habit, as a vice, just as, in fact, a person needs a drug?”
With a touch of warmth she replied: “No, he really loved me.”
“How, for instance, did he show that he loved you?”
“How can one explain? These are things that one feels.”
“Nothing more than that?”
“Well, just as an example, he wanted to marry me.”
“But he was already married, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, but he said he would manage to get a divorce.”
“And would you have accepted him?”
“No.”
“Why wouldn’t you have accepted him?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t feel like marrying him.”
“Then you didn’t love him?”
“I never loved him.” She stopped, as if prevented by some scruple, and then added: “Or rather, perhaps I loved him at the beginning, just after I first met him.”
There was a long silence. She was very close to me now, almost hanging over me, with her bust inclined forward and her eyes fixed upon me, giving me a feeling of unsteadiness which made me think of her again as a vessel, a beautiful two-handled vase, slim and big-breasted and brimming with desire, on the point of overflowing and submerging me. Finally I said: “I have put you through a full-scale cross-examination and perhaps you’re a bit tired?”
“Oh no, you haven’t tired me at all,” she hastened to reply. “On the contrary.”
“On the contrary what?”
“On the contrary you gave me pleasure. You’ve made me think of so many things that I never think about.”
“Don’t you ever think about Balestrieri?”
“No.”
“Not even today, when they took him away?”
“No, today less than other days.”
“Why less than other days?”
She looked at me and said nothing. I repeated: “Why less than other days?”
She answered at last, quite sharply: “Because today I’ve only thought of you. I followed the funeral for a little, from some way off, then I couldn’t resist any longer and ran back to the studio. I was afraid they might have changed the lock.”
“What then?”
“Then I shouldn’t have had any excuse for seeing you.”
I pretended not to attach any importance to this declaration, and asked her: “All the same, Balestrieri did mean something to you?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“What?”
She thought for a moment and then replied: “I don’t know. Certainly he meant something to me, but as I’ve never thought about it I don’t know what it was.”
“Think about it now.”
“I can’t think about it. You can’t think on purpose about somebody or something. Either you just think about them naturally or you don’t think at all.”
“At this moment what would you be thinking about, as you say, naturally?”
“About you.”
I remained silent for a moment. I lit a cigarette and then said, deliberately: “Now, you can rest assured, I’ve finished cross-examining you and I’ll come to the point. While Balestrieri did not mean anything much to you, or possibly nothing, you to Balestrieri were something very real, very concrete. Something he could not do without, according to his own words, in short—something like a drug. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“In other words, you, to Balestrieri, were not merely something very real, but actually the only reality that mattered. In fact, when you told him you