Boredom - Alberto Moravia [61]
I took the key, left the door ajar so that Cecilia, if she came, could get in, and went to Balestrieri’s studio. When the imitation candles of the central chandelier were lit, the studio looked to me gloomier than ever, with its sham antique furniture and red damask. I went up to the table, walking across the thick carpet and inhaling with distaste the stuffy, dusty, slightly malodorous air. It was a massive, Renaissance style table, its polished top now veiled with the dust of two months’ abandonment; the telephone was standing upon it, together with the directories and a green receipted bill. I reflected that the widow was perhaps really intending to come and live in the studio, since she was continuing to pay for the telephone; then my eye fell on a bound address book with a marbled cover: I picked it up and turned over the pages. Balestrieri’s handwriting, big and coarse and thick, made me think for some reason of his too-wide shoulders and his too-large feet. I was struck by the great number of women’s names without any surnames, on almost every page—Paola, Maria, Milly, Ines, Daniela, Laura, Sofia, Giovanna, etc. etc. Knowing Balestrieri’s habits, I had no doubt that they were the names of the accommodating girls who in the past, before his great love for Cecilia, had so often visited him. I went on turning the pages and looked at the letter C. There was Cecilia’s name, followed by the same telephone number that I had just been vainly ringing. I stood for a moment with my eyes fixed on this name and number, thinking of the very different feelings Balestrieri must have had on the day he wrote it down and then, successively, on each of the occasions when he went and looked at it before telephoning to Cecilia. No doubt in the end he would not have had to refer to the address book, as he would have known the number by heart, but all the same he would have taken a look, now and then, at the page with the letter C, to revive the memory of that first, fatal occasion when he had written down Cecilia’s name and number. All of a sudden the telephone on the table started ringing.
I hesitated, then took up the receiver. I had a strange feeling of being not myself but Balestrieri; and that I should hear Cecilia’s voice on the telephone. This feeling had an unexpected confirmation; I did, in fact, hear the well-known voice asking: “Is that you, Mauro?” (Balestrieri’s name was Mauro.) In a rush of anguish and nausea, my heart failed. So it really was Cecilia, and she was telephoning not to me but to Balestrieri, to a man who was dead and whom she knew to be dead.
All this did not last more than an instant. In a scarcely audible voice I said: “No, it’s Dino,” and immediately the other voice, losing all resemblance to Cecilia’s and showing itself, in fact, to be very different—as though the resemblance had been created there and then simply by my anxiety—exclaimed in a tone of confusion: “Oh, I’m sorry, am I not speaking to Signor Balestrieri’s number?”
“Yes.”
“Is Signor Balestrieri not there? You see, I’ve been away from Rome for four months and I wanted to have a word with him. Are you a friend of his?”
“Yes, I’m a friend of his. And you—who are you?”
“I’m Milly,” answered the girl, in a pathetic, hopeful tone of voice which somehow suggested her intimacy with the old painter.
“Signorina Milly, Signor Balestrieri has...has gone away.”
“He’s gone away? And you don’t know when he’s coming back?”
“No.”
“Oh well, tell him, when you see him, that Milly telephoned.”
I put down the receiver again and stayed quite still for a time, brooding over the vague, unpleasant feeling that this telephone call had aroused in me. Then I became conscious that it was cold in the studio and that the cold was getting right into my bones. It was a special sort of cold, at the same time both