Boredom - Alberto Moravia [86]
Furthermore, the telephone seemed perfectly designed to confirm the elusiveness of Cecilia’s character. Obviously it was not the fault of the little black instrument if Cecilia was late in telephoning me or did not telephone me at all; if she lied to me or disappointed me. But since all this took place on the telephone, I had reached the point when I was obsessed with hatred for that innocent object. I never telephoned now without extreme repugnance; I never heard its ringing without a feeling of anguish. In the first case I feared not to find Cecilia—as indeed almost always happened; in the second, that I should hear her, as usual, lying to me—which was also a manner of not finding her. But the telephone, above all, confirmed Cecilia’s elusiveness, for by its means her physical presence was replaced by one single part of her, and the most abstract at that—her voice. Even when this voice was not lying to me it remained, to me, ambiguous and evasive, simply because it was only a voice. And all the more so because it was Cecilia’s voice, which was always so stubbornly expressionless.
But the thing that drove me on to spy directly upon Cecilia was, more than anything else, my own fatigue. I now spent almost the whole day looking at the telephone, waiting either for the time when Cecilia should telephone me, or for the time at which I knew I could telephone to her with the hope of finding her. Besides this, there were the calls when I found no one, or only the whisperings of her father; and there were the calls to her mother, exhausting and irritating, to reconstruct Cecilia’s daily activities. All these telephonic stratagems, growing, as they did, more and more complicated and harassing, in the end canceled out any possible relief that I might derive from the telephone calls themselves. Like a starving man, whose hunger seems unsatisfied even after he has eaten, so I, after I had finally succeeded in speaking to Cecilia, continued to feel just as harassed and angry as before. Moreover the result of all this was a kind of sexual frenzy: after deciding beforehand to question Cecilia calmly and at length and to oblige her to confess her unfaithfulness, the moment she appeared in the doorway of the studio I would forget my cool intentions, throw her on the divan and have her there and then, without waiting for her to undress, without even—as she herself used to say with a touch of childish complacency—giving her time to breathe. It was the usual masculine illusion that possession can be achieved all in a moment and without a word, by the mere physical act, which drove me to this frenzy. But immediately afterward, when I saw Cecilia to be even more elusive than before, I realized my mistake and said to myself that, if I wished to possess her truly, I ought not to expend my energy in an act which had merely the semblance of possession.
An insignificant incident was the immediate cause of my decision to spy upon Cecilia. It is worth recounting if only to give an indication of my state of mind at that time. One morning, after I had carried out my usual investigation of Cecilia’s and the actor’s telephones and had found them both to be busy, I asked Cecilia point blank, as soon as she rang me: “Who were you telephoning to? Your number’s been busy for at least twenty minutes.”
She replied at once, in a perfectly natural way: “I was telephoning to Gianna.”
Gianna was a friend of Cecilia’s, and by chance I knew her surname and address. I hastily said good-bye