Boredom - Alberto Moravia [50]
And now, when I saw Cecilia walking away docilely on tiptoe toward the window, it occurred to me to play the same cruel game with her as I had played with the cat. In her case too, it was to satisfy her appetite that she had come over to the divan; and she too, like the cat, had at that moment expressed her appetite—her perfectly natural and legitimate appetite—with her whole body, from her head to her feet. Now I was going to play with her as I had played with the cat; but this time I should be completely conscious of the true motive of the game, which was to re-establish through cruelty my relationship with external things that had been broken off by boredom.
Cecilia, in the meantime, had gone to the window and drawn the curtains and was now coming back to the divan again. Upon her face, which for a moment had worn the diligent expression of a young maidservant (even though she was naked) carrying out an order from her master, there was now, again, that primitive, ritual look, the apologetic, expectant prelude to love. Still walking on tiptoe, she circled around the easel, crossed the room, reached the divan and was on the point of climbing onto it. But I stopped her, saying: “I’m sorry, but I can’t bear to make love in front of an open door. Please go and shut the bathroom door.”
“How difficult you are!” she murmured. Nevertheless, docile as ever, off she went again across the studio. I saw her disappear into the shadow, a graceful ghost with her spreading, curly brown hair, her slender, bony back, and below her slim waist the two pale, oblong mounds of her buttocks. She closed the door carefully and turned back, ghostly again in the half-darkness which made her eyes look larger and darker, her breasts heavier and browner, her groin deeper and blacker. This time I did not stop her when she placed her knee on the divan, but at the moment when she was laying herself down, a little out of breath, beside me. “Forgive me once more,” I said, “but do be kind enough to take the receiver off the telephone. Yesterday it rang just at the best moment. It’s true I didn’t answer it, but all the same ringing got on my nerves.”
She looked at me for an instant, saying: “That’s the third time,” in a quiet but not reproachful voice, then she got up and went to the table in the middle of the room to take off the receiver, standing there for a moment in profile against the light. Then she came back again toward the divan, her face assuming, for the third time, its apologetic, expectant expression. I waited until she was close to me and exclaimed with pretended innocence: “How absent-minded I am! Cecilia, my love, do me one more favor: go and fetch my cigarette case from the window sill.... You know I like to smoke afterwards. Please!”
She said nothing, but threw me a long, astonished glance. She obeyed, however, for the fourth time; she went again to the window, fetched the cigarettes and came back to me, still ready and willing to give herself to me.
“There are your cigarettes,” she said in a cheerfully impatient manner, throwing them in my face and at the same time making a movement to hurl herself upon me. But I stopped her in the act. “What about the matches?” I asked.
“Ugh!” Another walk across the studio, still on tiptoe; as she came back, however, her ritual expression seemed slightly falsified by a shadow of doubt and mortification. She threw the matches in my face as she had done with the cigarettes, but, instead of climbing on to the divan, she stopped at a little distance from it and asked: “Tell me quickly whether