Boredom - Alberto Moravia [85]
The actor’s number was not in the telephone directory; but it was easy for me to obtain it from a film company for whom he had worked in the past. Having found out the number, I ascertained the truth of what I had supposed in the following way: I would first telephone Cecilia at about a quarter to twelve and invariably find that the number was busy; immediately afterward I would telephone the actor and discover that he too was on the line. I would wait five or ten minutes and then repeat the maneuver: both the lines would be free. A moment later, with a punctuality that filled me with sadness, my own telephone would ring and Cecilia, at the other end, calm and precise as a trained secretary, would tell me, according to the situation, whether we could see each other that day or not.
I also made use of the telephone to keep watch over Cecilia’s comings and goings. I telephoned methodically (if one can speak of method in relation to the frantic stratagems of jealousy) at various times of day, and either I found no one or I found Cecilia’s mother, who often stayed at home, leaving the shop to her sister. Then I would enter into conversation with her. She, on her side, asked nothing better than a few minutes’ chatter, and by way of this chatter I would get to know more or less what I wanted. The mother’s pieces of information, of course, came almost entirely from Cecilia, who lied to her just as she did to me, and told her only what best suited her; but I had now reached a point when I could decipher these pieces of information fairly well, all the more so because Cecilia, not knowing that she was being spied upon, did not take the trouble to bring them into line with the equally false but different information with which she provided me. Thus I came to know that Cecilia, a creature of habit like all persons who lack imagination, had, to her parents, justified her relations with the actor in the same way as those with Balestrieri and myself: she said she went to see the actor because he had promised to find her work in the films, just as she had said in the past that she visited Balestrieri and me because we gave her drawing lessons. But lessons last only an hour or two, whereas an association with a place of regular work may take up the entire day; and thus I discovered that under the pretext of her film job Cecilia was seeing the actor every day, twice or even three times a day. She saw him sometimes in the morning, especially if the weather was fine, for a walk in the town and an apéritif; she saw him in the afternoon, probably in order to make love; she saw him in the evening, to have dinner and go to the pictures. Her mother was slightly alarmed at this pretended film activity on her daughter’s part, and at the same time rather flattered. Taking me into her confidence, she would ask me anxiously if there was not a danger that the motion-picture world, so notoriously free and easy, not to say licentious, might have a corrupting influence upon Cecilia; and then again she would ask, with equal anxiety, whether I thought that her daughter had the right qualities for becoming a star. She spoke with complete ingenuousness; but to me, at the other end of the line, she often gave the impression of knowing everything, both about myself and about the actor, and of amusing herself by tormenting me with refined and conscious cruelty. In reality, as I knew perfectly well, the cruelty lay in the circumstances and in them only.
And so, what with Cecilia’s lies on the one hand and her mother