Boredom - Alberto Moravia [59]
In the midst of these reflections I began to feel sleepy; I got up from the armchair and threw myself on the divan. I fell asleep almost at once and with such a rush that I had, in my sleep, a sensation of hurtling downward, fists and teeth clenched and all huddled up, into an infinity of space, and the longer my fall continued the more did the weight of my body increase. Then suddenly I awoke, with a taste of iron in my mouth as though I had been gripping a metal bar between my teeth. The studio was almost in darkness, and the objects in it had turned black in the gray half-light. I jumped up from the divan and turned on the light. Immediately it was night at the window. Then I looked at the clock on the table and saw that it was past six: Cecilia was to have come at five.
It did not require a great effort of imagination to realize that her lateness was not a matter of chance and that it was indeed now very probable that she would not come that day. But this was not a normal fact that could be accepted with tranquillity. By one of the many contradictions in her character, even though she seemed incapable of the feelings which prompt us not to cause suffering to the people who love us, Cecilia was always extremely punctual, just as if she had really loved me; and when, for some reason, she could not help being late, she always found means of letting me know in time. Her lateness therefore was abnormal and could only be explained in one way—by some event more important than our appointment, so important that it not merely prevented her from coming but also from letting me know that she would not come.
Nevertheless, the first thought that came into my mind was: “Well, aren’t you pleased? You wanted to get rid of her and she hasn’t come. So much the better, surely?” But this thought was an ironical one; for I realized to my astonishment that Cecilia’s lateness not only gave me no pleasure but seriously troubled me.
I went back and sat down on the divan and started thinking. Why did Cecilia’s lateness upset me? I saw that, whereas she had hitherto been nothing to me, as I have already said, her lateness caused her to become something. Furthermore this “something,” at the very moment when it was acquiring substance, eluded me in a painful fashion, for after all Cecilia had not come. And so it seemed to me that when she was in the studio and clinging to me, Cecilia was absent; now, when she was not there and when I knew she would not come, I felt her to be poignantly, obscurely present.
I tried to think with greater clearness, although I found it difficult to do so because I was suffering. Cecilia had not come, she had not even taken the trouble to justify herself, therefore she no longer loved me, or anyhow not enough to be punctual or to let me know she was not coming—in other words, she loved me very little. Then suddenly I remembered, with some astonishment, that during the two months that our relationship had lasted Cecilia had never told me that she loved me and I had never asked her. Certainly the fact that she had given herself to me and had shown that she found pleasure with me might be equivalent to a declaration of love. But it was also possible, as I at once realized, that it meant nothing at all.
In any case, the very slight importance that Cecilia gave to this surrendering of her body seemed to prove that it had no meaning. Some things are simply a matter of feeling: Cecilia had given me her body with the same barbaric, naïve indifference with which a savage presents a rapacious explorer with the amulet of precious stones that he wears around his neck. It was, in fact, as though she had never had any wooers to make her understand how desirable a woman’s body can be. Balestrieri, it is true, had adored