Boredom - Alberto Moravia [65]
What most infuriated me was that, although I did not love Cecilia, circumstances were forcing me to have the feelings and to behave in the ways which are appropriate to love. I wanted to free myself from these circumstances as an ox wants to free itself from the yoke that weighs upon its neck, but I felt that with every movement they oppressed me more and constrained me to behave like the lover which I was now convinced I was not.
I said to myself, for instance: “Now Cecilia and her friend are in some retired corner of the Borghese Gardens and Cecilia is doing with him what she has done so many times with me: she is kissing him awkwardly and coldly, with her childish lips, and at the same time is giving him her customary hard, eager push in the belly with her groin.” And immediately afterward I thought: Why do I think all these things and why do I suffer? Obviously because I saw them together. And am I then forced, in spite of myself, by the sole fact of having seen them together, to be jealous on her account and to suffer?
I sat thinking with my head bent and my eyes on the floor. Finally I looked at the clock and discovered that there was only a short time left before Cecilia’s arrival. Rising from the divan and stretching my cramped limbs, I reflected that after all I was not altogether sure that she had betrayed me. What, in actual fact, had I seen? An innocent meeting in a place that was far from secret, the gallant but not highly significant gift of a bunch of violets, a walk to the Pincio. Such things happen every hour and every day, without the people who do them being, on that account, bound together by the ties of love. There was, it is true, the fact of the missed appointment of the previous day. But I had to beware of the kind of mental disposition that tends to establish arbitrary relations between separate and dissimilar things. Cecilia had not come to our appointment the day before: that was a fact. I had seen her that afternoon with a young man with peroxide hair: that was another fact. But that did not mean that the two facts were connected; above all, it did not mean that they were connected by a common factor of betrayal.
Strange to say, no sooner had I give shape to these reflections than the figure of Cecilia, which, as long as I had suspected her of betraying me, had been living and real to me, although mysterious (in fact, precisely because mysterious)—now that I was doubtful about her betrayal, became unreal and boring again as in the past. And, as in the days past, I felt I must get rid of her at all costs; and I was afraid lest I might not be capable of it; and I strengthened myself in my determination by recalling the cruelty which I had resorted to during one of our last meetings in order to avoid a relapse into boredom.
Cecilia was punctual. At five o’clock I heard the familiar ring at the bell that was so characteristic of her, so brief, so reticent, and at the same time so intimate. I went and opened the door, saying to myself: “The moment I see her I shall tell her I’m leaving for the mountains, and thus, even if I have cause to regret it later, I shall have created an established fact which it will be difficult for me to nullify afterward.” I foresaw that the moment she came in Cecilia would as usual throw her arms around my neck, with her customary, mechanically passionate gesture, but this time I would take hold of her hands and pull them down, disengaging myself from her embrace and saying: “First of all I’ve got to talk to you.”
What happened, however, was something I had not foreseen but which I really ought to have foreseen. When I threw the