Boredom - Alberto Moravia [49]
I remember perfectly well how this cruelty showed itself for the first time. One afternoon Cecilia, after she had undressed, was coming over to the divan where I was awaiting her, lying down and also undressed, my eyes turned toward her. She was walking on tiptoe with her chest thrown forward and her shoulders and hips held slightly back, and on her face was the expectant, troubled, solemn expression of one who prepares to perform a familiar act which has been performed many times before and is yet, perhaps for that very reason, always new. I watched her as she came toward me and reflected that not merely did I not desire her (though I also knew that, if only in an automatic way, I should attain a sufficient degree of excitement to have intercourse with her) but that I could not even manage to look upon her as a thing that was in any kind of contact with me. While I was thinking of these things and she had come up to the divan and placed one knee upon it so as to lie down beside me, I suddenly noticed that the curtains were only half drawn across the big window. The white light of the sultry day worried me; besides, there were windows on the other side of the courtyard from which people could look into the studio if they wanted to. So I said, in a casual way: “Look, do you mind drawing the curtains?”
“Oh, the curtains,” she said; and as usual she obediently turned away from me and, still walking on tiptoe, went to the window. Then, as I watched her going across the studio, with her strange, significantly shaped figure, half adolescent and half grown woman, I was suddenly seized, for the first time since I had met her, with an impulse of cruelty. It was an impulse which took me back in time to the years of my childhood, to the only occasion in my life when I had been consciously cruel. At that time I owned a large tabby cat I was very fond of but with whom, quite often, I grew bored, especially when I had gone through the few games and tests of intelligence of which the creature was capable. Boredom gave me a feeling of cruelty which led in turn to the following game. I put on a plate a small quantity of raw fish I knew the cat liked and put the plate in a corner of the room. Then I went and fetched the cat and, after allowing it to smell the fish, carried it to the opposite corner and let it go. The cat rushed to the plate, expressing its delight and greed with its whole body, from the tip of its tail to the tip of its nose; but I was ready, the moment it reached the middle of the room, to seize it like lightning by its neck and carry it back to its point of departure. I repeated this game over and over again, and each time the cat became slightly more aware that it was the victim of a mysterious misfortune and in consequence changed its behavior. In its first bounds it had been violent, greedy, sure of itself; then it became more wary, as though it hoped, by pressing its body against the floor and moving its paws with caution, that it might escape my vigilance and perhaps make itself invisible; in the end, all the poor cat did was to make a slight, tentative forward movement in the direction of the plate, an experiment, at the same time both cunning and melancholy, to assure itself without too much effort that I still persisted in my cruel