Boredom - Alberto Moravia [80]
Her husband shot a furious glance at her and then started speaking to me again. In a sad, resigned voice, his wife said: “He says he didn’t like Balestrieri.” She shook her head in genuine pity and distress, and then added: “Goodness knows what poor Balestrieri did to him!”
Her husband again said something, in a forcible manner. His wife interpreted: “He says that Balestrieri bossed him in his own house.”
Her husband was now staring at her with a positively anguished look in his eyes. Then, in the desperately emphatic way of a dumb man who cannot make himself understood, he opened his mouth wide and once more blew his incomprehensible noises into my face. Cecilia had now come into the room again, and I saw her raise her eyes and look at me. Her mother went on: “My husband says ridiculous things. Did you understand what he was saying?”
“No,” I said.
I had the impression that she hesitated for a moment; then she explained: “He says Balestrieri tried to make love to me.” She uttered these words with an air of anxiety, looking not at me but at her husband, eyeing him with an intensity in which sadness, entreaty and reproof appeared to be mingled. I turned toward him and saw that, in a way, his wife’s glance had had its effect. He now appeared crushed and mortified like a dog that has been kicked. Looking already more relieved, his wife said: “Balestrieri liked to pay me compliments—oh yes, indeed, and to have a joke with me too, to flirt a little, in fact. But that was all. That was really all. No, Professor,” she went on, speaking of her husband as if he had not been present or had been an inanimate object, rather as Cecilia had done a little earlier, “my husband is a very good, fine man, but his brain goes on working and working all the time—you’ve only to look at his eyes. It’s the thoughts that he turns round and round in his head all day. His brain goes on working and working and working, and then he comes out with something ridiculous.”
I glanced at her husband, who was sitting quietly now, hurt and crestfallen, rolling his frightened eyes hither and thither and gathering breadcrumbs together with his fingers; and suddenly a plausible interpretation of his quickly cooled anger flashed across my mind. This was that he had got wind of there being something between Balestrieri and Cecilia; or at any rate that Balestrieri’s feelings toward Cecilia were not quite as fatherly as he had wished her parents to believe. This was the accusation which he had shouted in his wife’s face; she, however, had hastily substituted herself for her daughter, explaining that her husband was jealous because he had imagined that Balestrieri was trying to make love to her.
What I still wished to know was why Cecilia’s mother had wanted to conceal the true significance of her husband’s words from me. In order not to pass on an accusation which seemed to her false and unseemly? Or because she had always suspected something, and had taken full advantage of Balestrieri’s self-interested generosity, even perhaps without realizing that he and Cecilia were lovers? Or, finally, because she had known all the time of the relationship between her daughter and the old painter and had accepted presents and favors in full consciousness of it? These three hypotheses were all equally plausible, although quite different and of varying importance. As I turned these thoughts over in my mind I looked at Cecilia and realized once more that, fundamentally, nothing that I was discovering during my visit concerned her; in other words, even in the worst case—that is, even if her mother had known of the relationship and had derived material advantages from it in agreement with her daughter, I would not be able to say I had learned anything