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By Root 743 0

elsewhere than in her conversation, so that to report the latter without at the same time accompanying it with a description of her face and figure would be rather like reading an operatic libretto without music or a film script without the pictures on the screen. But I wished to give an example of conversation mainly in order to convey the idea that Cecilia’s way of speaking was thus formal and bloodless for the good reason that she herself was ignorant of the things about which I questioned her, just as much as I was and perhaps more so. In other words, she lived with her father and mother in a flat in Prati and had been Balestrieri’s mistress; but she had never paused to look at the people and things in her life and therefore had never truly seen them, still less observed them. She was, in fact, a stranger to herself and to the world she lived in; just as much as those who knew neither her nor her world.

In any case, my suspicion of Cecilia’s unfaithfulness, by making her mysterious and elusive and therefore real, finally aroused in me a desire to verify her vague scraps of information, if only in order to abolish at least that portion of mystery which lay outside our sexual relationship. One day I asked her to let me make the acquaintance of her family. I noticed with some surprise that my request did not embarrass her at all, in spite of the “grumblings” that she had put forward as an excuse to justify her intention of reducing the number of our meetings. “I had thought of that too,” she said. “My mother is always asking me about you.”

“Did you introduce Balestrieri to your family?”

“Yes.”

“Did your parents ever get to know that you were Balestrieri’s mistress?”

“No.”

“If they had known, what would they have done?”

“Who knows?”

“Did Balestrieri often come to your home?”

“Yes.”

“What did he do there?”

“Nothing. He used to come to lunch or for coffee and then we’d go off together to his studio.”

“Did you ever make love, you and Balestrieri, at your home?”

“He always wanted to, but I didn’t, because I was afraid my parents would discover.”

“But why did he want to do it there, in your home?”

“I don’t know, he liked the idea.”

“But did you do it, or not?”

“Yes, we did sometimes.”

“Where?”

“I don’t remember now.”

“Try and remember.”

“Ah yes, we did it once in the kitchen.”

“In the kitchen?”

“Yes, Mother had gone out to buy something, and I had to mind the oven.”

“But couldn’t you have gone into your room, seeing that you were alone in the house?”

“If Balestrieri had a mind to make love, he did it wherever he was: he liked doing it in odd places.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“But how did you manage to do it, like that, in the kitchen?”

“Standing up.”

And so, one day, Cecilia brought me an invitation to lunch from her parents. That morning I changed my sweater and corduroy trousers for a dark suit, a white shirt and a sober tie, so as to look like the professor I was supposed to be, and went off shortly before one o’clock to Cecilia’s address, a street in Prati. To tell the truth, I felt intensely curious and almost excited at going to visit her at her home; this was because every discovery I made, or thought I made, about Cecilia now immediately assumed a sensual quality, as if in discovering aspects of her life that I did not know I had discovered her herself, in a material sense, or had stripped her naked.

I did not have much difficulty in finding the street, a quiet, bleak, straight street flanked by plane trees now leafless, and with rows of shops on the ground floors of the big gray and yellow buildings. The entrance door of Cecilia’s block of apartments led into a large courtyard in which a few palm trees planted in the middle of barren flower beds raised yellowed crests like plucked feathers to the garlands of washing hung out to dry from the top floors. There were various staircases marked with the letters A to F; the one leading to Cecilia’s flat was staircase E. An “Out of Order” notice hung on the grating of the ancient elevator, so I walked up many flights of stairs, in a wan, cold light,