Boredom - Alberto Moravia [62]
Back in my studio I looked at the clock and, since I knew I was no longer expecting anybody, I realized that I was looking at it to see how long it was before Cecilia telephoned me in the morning, as she always did. I reflected that it was the first time I had had such a thought; and I knew that henceforward such thoughts would visit my mind more and more frequently.
5
NEXT MORNING, THINKING over Cecilia’s failure to arrive, I was convinced, or rather I tried to convince myself, that her absence was due to causes which had nothing to do with our relationship. I still wanted to break with Cecilia, but the Cecilia I wanted to break with was the Cecilia who was in love with me, or whom I imagined to be in love with me, not the Cecilia who no longer loved me and who missed her appointments. This was not a case of that special, perverse kind of love which makes us love someone who does not love us and dislike anyone who does love us; it was because the Cecilia who loved me had proved boring, and therefore unreal, whereas the Cecilia who did not love me seemed, on the contrary, by the very fact of not loving me, to acquire a steadily increasing semblance of reality in my eyes. Nevertheless I preferred to think that Cecilia loved me and that consequently I did not have to alter my decision to get rid of her, because, as I have already hinted, the idea that she had ceased to bore me, in other words that she was becoming real, filled me, fundamentally, with a kind of fear, as though I were confronting a trial that I did not feel able to face.
In the meantime, however, there was a problem, a small but painful problem: should I be the first to telephone, or should I wait for her to telephone me? Cecilia was in the habit of telephoning me every day, always at the same time, about ten o’clock in the morning, to greet me and confirm our appointment for the afternoon. I could therefore certainly expect her to telephone that day as usual, but at the same time I was afraid lest she might not do so and might go out, in which case, by the time I made up my mind to telephone myself, she would not be there and I should have to spend the whole day in uncertainty as to whether she was coming—an uncertainty which without any doubt had by now become extremely painful. And furthermore I realized that in this affair of the telephone the terms of my greater problem were being repeated in an identical way: I wanted Cecilia to telephone me first so that I could continue to consider her dispensable and therefore non-existent; whereas, if it were I who telephoned, I should have to think of her as of something problematical and elusive and therefore real. At three in the afternoon I was still immersed in these reflections when I heard the telephone ringing repeatedly over at the far end of the studio—gently, querulously, ironically, as if to tell me that the thing that mattered was not my thoughts, however lucid, but its own ringing. I went over and took up the receiver and at once heard Cecilia’s voice saying: “At last! Where were you?”
I answered in a very low voice: “I was in the studio, but I hadn’t heard you.”
There was a moment’s silence and then she said: “I didn’t ring you this morning because the telephone was out of order. See you today at the usual time, then.”
I could not help exclaiming somewhat sharply: “But why didn’t you come yesterday?”
I expected her reply, whether sincere or untruthful, to be anyhow precise. Instead, these disconcerting words reached my ears: “Because I couldn’t.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
“Because I had things to do.”
“Very well,” I said angrily, recognizing, in these answers, Cecilia’s characteristic capacity at the same time to avoid both telling the truth and telling a lie. “Very well then. See you soon.”
“Yes, soon. Good-bye.”
I realized immediately