Boredom - Alberto Moravia [90]
“Yes, that one.”
He bent forward, cautiously took the bottle from the window and appeared to be making a move to replace it with another standing near it. I said hastily, in a commanding voice: “Let me see it.”
Slightly surprised, he handed me the bottle and I pretended to examine it at leisure, in the hope that he would forget the empty place in the window. Fortunately, at that moment a customer came in; the barman left me and went back behind the counter. After an interval he brought me my coffee, but he did not put any other bottle in place of the one he had given me. I breathed freely again and set myself to the task of watching the door which was now entirely visible.
I calculated that Cecilia would have taken the bus because I knew she had no money and that she was never in too much of a hurry to get to her appointments. It took at least twenty minutes to go by bus from Cecilia’s home to the Parioli district. All this, of course, depended upon whether Cecilia had really gone out a minute before my telephone call and whether she had really gone to see Luciani. I decided—provisionally, at least—that these two suppositions were correct, and therefore spent about twenty minutes in tolerable ease, though without for one instant taking my eyes off the door.
When these first twenty minutes were over, I waited patiently for a further ten, and then found myself confronted with this dilemma: either Cecilia had arrived before me by taxi (this was not improbable: I had had to stop at three sets of traffic lights), or she had not arrived at all. What ought I to do? Wait for her to come out or go away? I was so sure that Cecilia had gone to see Luciani that day that in the end I decided to wait. Furthermore, I said to myself, if Cecilia had arrived, say, five minutes before me, I should anyhow have thirty-five minutes less to wait.
But, as though to deny me even this modest consolation, suddenly, right in front of my eyes, was the figure of a man in a green overcoat. It seemed to me that there was something familiar about his back, and when he moved to cross the street, I recognized him beyond doubt by his broad shoulders and above all by his artificial-looking, too-bright fair hair; it was the actor. I saw him go in the door and vanish.
So my vigil was only just beginning. Either Cecilia had arrived before Luciani and had gone up to his flat to wait for him, or she had not come at all; but I, in order to make certain, would now have to wait for goodness knows how long. And the thirty minutes I had already spent in spying had been spent in vain.
I realized that if my wait in front of Cecilia’s house had been painful, that in front of the actor’s house was a hundred times more so. When I waited outside Cecilia’s house, I had been waiting for her to finish eating or dressing or talking to her mother—all of them innocent things; but as I waited outside Luciani’s house I was actually waiting for her to finish making love. Thus, whereas I had suffered an hour earlier from having to endure a shapeless, empty period of expectation which my imagination had not been able to fill, now, when I knew perfectly well why Cecilia was in Luciani’s flat, I had to endure a period of waiting which contained the whole shape and rhythm of the sexual act. Now, in contrast to what had happened earlier, if I looked at my watch I could calculate to the minute what was going on in the actor’s flat. At this moment Cecilia is pulling off her sweater over her head. At this moment, naked, she is going over to the bed, is getting on to it, is lying down. At this moment she is having her first orgasm, and after two or three violent jerks of her belly, she throws back her head and lies back exhausted. All these imaginings, naturally, renewed the feeling I had of not possessing, of never having possessed her, since hitherto I had deceived myself into thinking I possessed her simply because I had possessed her body, and that body was now in the arms of Luciani.
Apart from all this, the feeling of