Boredom - Alberto Moravia [70]
“What?”
“After he felt sick, and I’d helped him to get upstairs to the bedroom again and onto the bed, he lay there for a little, with his eyes shut, quite still. Then, gradually, he recovered and—just imagine—he wanted to make love yet again, for the third time. It was I who refused. He looked like death already, and I was frightened. He gave up the idea, but very unwillingly, and he was angry. Sometimes I think he died because he got so angry.”
So Balestrieri had really wished to kill himself, I thought. I seemed to see those two, separating at the critical moment of their intercourse; and the old painter clinging with both hands to the banister and climbing up painfully, step by step, to the gallery and then going and falling on the bed; and then the corpse-like figure sitting up suddenly and holding out its arms to Cecilia. Following the thread of my thoughts, I asked another question: “Did you use to deceive Balestrieri?”
She made that same grimace of irritation, as if troubled by an importunate gnat; and I realized that what I had really asked her was: “Are you deceiving me?” She too seemed to understand the true meaning of the question, for she merely murmured: “Now you’re beginning again.”
But I persisted. “Tell me, please, did you deceive him?”
Finally she replied: “Why d’you want to know? Yes, I did deceive him, now and then; he was so boring.”
This took my breath away. “Boring—how do you mean, boring?”
“Boring.”
“But what does that mean, to you—boring?”
“Boring means boring.”
“And that is?”
“Boring.”
So Cecilia was deceiving me, I thought again, and she was deceiving me because I was boring—in other words, as she was for me, non-existent. But between us there was this difference: I knew what boredom was, having suffered from it all my life, whereas for her boredom was simply an obscure urge to take the provoking, irresistible movement of her disdainful hips elsewhere. I looked at her again: she was lying flat on her back, her legs spread out, just as our last embrace had left her, with no sign of modesty, but apparently confident that I would consider her attitude of abandonment as a proof of naturalness and intimacy. As I looked at her I could not help succumbing to the masculine illusion which looks upon physical possession as the only true possession. Yes, I thought, Cecilia evaded me, she withdrew herself from me; but if I took her again—who knows?—possibly I might succeed this time in nullifying the feeling of not possessing her, I might succeed in possessing her truly and decisively. I pulled myself up, and bending over her lightly touched her lips with a kiss. Without opening her eyes she murmured: “I think I ought to be going soon.”
“Wait.”
And so I took her again without her opening her eyes, although with her body she candidly welcomed and facilitated my embrace in her usual hungry manner—a final proof, if there was need of it, of the fact that she was somewhere else and that what I took possession of had no value for her nor, therefore, for me either. But this time Cecilia opened her eyes wide immediately afterward, and said: “Now I really must be going.”
She rose, ran across to the bathroom door and disappeared. Left alone, I fell into a kind of empty reflection. I reflected in the literal sense of the word, that is, I contemplated, in the dark mirror of my consciousness, myself lying naked and inert on the divan, the easel with the blank canvas near the window, the studio and all the things it contained. Then a precise thought insinuated itself into this dead, objective world: namely, that after the second embrace Cecilia had remained more than ever elusive and therefore real, so that, if by some miracle of nature I had been capable of having her, not twice in succession but two hundred times, I should have found myself in the end just as unsatisfied as the first time. In short, the more I had her the less I possessed her, if only because in having her I wasted the energy I