Boredom - Alberto Moravia [64]
When she reached the Piazza di Spagna, Cecilia walked with decision toward the great flight of steps. I stopped for a moment and, my eye leaping from her to the place that she appeared to be making for, I caught sight of the figure of a man who seemed to be waiting for somebody, standing beside a flower seller’s big umbrella. He was a young man, tall and vigorous-looking, with two features that I noticed at once: very broad shoulders which seemed to indicate an athletic build, and hair of a false-looking, golden blond that appeared to be bleached with peroxide. Cecilia, meanwhile, had crossed the whole space of the Piazza di Spagna, her head bent, and was now approaching the young man, without quickening her step but with a movement of the hips that was full of irresistible, provoking urgency. She reached him and stopped, and it looked to me as if they shook hands; and then, hastily, I also moved. They were talking now and Cecilia had climbed onto the first step of the stairs, and even so looked shorter than he.
Soon I was quite close to them. I realized that Cecilia had not seen me, so I went almost up to her, at a distance of a pace or so, and even then I was sure that she continued not to see me. I moved up onto the step and walked around her, almost touching her this time: she was talking and laughing gaily with the man with the peroxide hair, and all of a sudden her big dark eyes rested upon me, but even now, although it seemed to me impossible, I had to admit that she had not seen me. I was aware that I was registering these things without thinking at all, and I knew I was not thinking because I was suffering. In the end I went and hid behind the flower seller’s umbrella, a few steps farther on.
Now the young man with the peroxide hair had taken Cecilia by the arm, with an eloquent tenderness, and was gently pushing her toward the umbrella behind which I was hiding. They stopped, and then the young man, without letting go of Cecilia’s arm, selected a bunch of violets from a jar and handed them to her. Cecilia raised the flowers to her nostrils; the young man paid the flower seller, and then, still holding Cecilia by the arm, went off with her up the steps toward Trinità dei Monti. For the first time I noticed that the young man was wearing a short green overcoat; until then I had not seen it.
For a short time after they had disappeared I remained where I was, looking up the flight of steps. I felt an acute pain which gave me no peace and at the same time an impotent rage at the fact that I felt this pain. I understood, indeed, that until I had suffered I should not be able to part from Cecilia, as I still wished to do. And I also understood that with Cecilia I could only be bored, or suffer: hitherto I had been bored and consequently had wished to leave her; now I was suffering and I felt I would not be able to leave her until I was bored once again.
These reflections and others of a similar kind must have been very intense and very absorbing, for I suddenly found myself, to my surprise, back again in my studio. Wrapped in a cloud of thought I had gone back, without being conscious of it, to Via Margutta, had gone in and thrown myself