Boredom - Alberto Moravia [78]
In the passage I said to Cecilia: “You introduced me to your father as your drawing teacher, and to your mother as Dino. Couldn’t you remember my surname?”
She replied, in an absent-minded sort of way: “You may not believe it, but I still don’t know it. I’ve known you as Dino, and I’ve never thought of asking you your other name. What is your other name, then?”
“Well,” I said, “if you still don’t know it, you might as well go on not knowing it. I’ll tell you another time.” Suddenly I felt myself to be unnamable, perhaps simply because Cecilia seemed to prefer me without a name.
“Just as you like.”
We went into the living room, and I said to Cecilia: “Your mother is very like you, physically. But what sort of character has she?”
“What d’you mean?”
“What is she like—good or bad, calm or nervous, generous or mean?”
“I really don’t know, I’ve never thought about it. She has an ordinary sort of character. To me, she’s my mother and that’s that.”
“And he?” I asked, indicating her father sitting in the armchair beside the radio; “what sort of character has he, in your opinion?”
This time she did not answer me at all; she merely shrugged her shoulders, in a strange way, as though I had asked an entirely senseless question. Seized by a sudden irritation, I took hold of her by the arm and, speaking right into her ear, asked her: “What’s that black hole up there in the ceiling?”
She looked up at the hole as though she were seeing it for the first time. “It’s a hole; it’s been there for some time.”
“Ah then, you can see the hole.”
“Why shouldn’t I be able to see it?”
“Then how is it that you can’t see your father’s and mother’s characters?”
“You can see a hole, you can’t see a character. My father and mother are people just like lots of other people, that’s all there is to it.”
We were now close to her father, who was listening, motionless, to the radio. I sat down on a chair opposite him and shouted: “How do you feel today?”
He jumped in his armchair and looked at me in dismay. Then he said something I did not understand. “He says there’s no need to shout, he’s not deaf,” explained Cecilia who, it appeared, understood her father’s whispering sounds perfectly.
She was right, and goodness knows why I had thought that, because he was almost dumb, he was also deaf. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I was asking you how you felt.” He pointed to the windows and said something which Cecilia interpreted: “There’s a scirocco blowing, and on scirocco days he never feels very well.”
“Why don’t you go to your shop?” I asked. “It would be a distraction for you, don’t you think?”
He made a gesture of humble denial and then answered in a more detailed way, pointing to his throat and face. Cecilia said: “He says he can’t go there because customers would be discouraged at seeing him so changed, and sales would suffer. He says he’ll go as soon as he’s better.”
“Are you having treatment?”
Again he spoke and again his daughter interpreted: “He’s having X-ray treatment. He hopes to be well again in a year’s time.” I looked at Cecilia now to see what was the effect upon her of these pathetic illusions on the part of her father; as usual, nothing was perceptible on her round face, in her expressionless eyes. I reflected that not merely did she not realize that her father was dying, but not even—contrary to what she had affirmed—that he was ill. Or rather, she did realize it, she was conscious of it, but in the same way that she was conscious of the black hole in the sitting-room ceiling: the hole was a hole, her father’s illness was an illness. Behind