Boredom - Alberto Moravia [94]
Anyhow I do not remember ever having loved Cecilia with such violence as I did during the time when I was spying upon her and suspecting that she was being unfaithful to me. I would throw myself upon her as if she were an enemy whom I wished to tear to pieces, a beloved enemy, however, who in an ambiguous way incited me to do this, and I was hardly ever satisfied with only one embrace. Significantly, the feeling that I had not truly possessed her generally used to assail me at the moment when, fully dressed and after saying good-bye to me, she walked toward the door in order to leave; it was as though her departure suddenly revealed to me, in an entirely physical manner, her unchanging power to withdraw herself from me, to elude me. Then I would pursue her, seize her by the hair and hurl her on the divan, disregarding her protests which in any case were not very energetic, and have her again, just as she was, fully dressed, with her shoes on her feet and her bag on her arm, still with the illusory idea that by having her I could nullify her independence and her mystery. Immediately after the embrace I realized, of course, that I had not possessed her. But it was too late; Cecilia went away and I knew that the whole thing would begin again next day—the useless watching, the unattainable possession, the final disappointment.
After more than a month of fruitless spying and of even more fruitless sexual frenzy, I understood what I ought to have guessed from the very first day, that surveillance is not a thing that should be carried out by someone who is directly interested in the results of what he is doing. If I wanted to make any headway, I must have recourse to somebody who carried out such surveillance as a professional duty, that is, a private detective agency. It was Cecilia herself who gave me this idea. Continually, while I was spying upon her, I thought of nothing but Balestrieri. The old painter, whom I had never cared about while he was alive, had since his death become for me an object of horrified and incomprehensible attraction. In reality, I sometimes said to myself, Balestrieri, to me, was rather like a mirror to a sick man—an unanswerable witness to the progress of his disease. I thought especially of Balestrieri each time I suspected that I was doing something he had done before me. And so, during the time when I was spying upon Cecilia, I could not resist the temptation of asking her whether the old painter had also given way to the same weakness. We were in my car; I was taking Cecilia home, in the evening. When we reached the street in which she lived and where I recalled having so often waited in vain for her to come out, I stopped the car and asked her point blank: “Did Balestrieri ever spy on you?”
“What d’you mean?”
“Did he follow you, wait for you, watch you, in fact?”
“Yes.”
“You never told me about it.”
“You never asked me.”
“In what way did he watch you?”
“He stood in the courtyard and waited for me to come out.” So Balestrieri, I thought, had been more intelligent than I; he had quickly discovered that there were two doors. “And then what?” I asked.
“Then, as soon as I came out, he followed me.”
“Did he do this often?”
“During a certain period he did it ever day.”
“At what time did he take up his position in the courtyard?”
“That depended. Some days, when he knew I would be going out early, he was there by about eight o’clock.”
“How did you come to know about it?”
“I used to see him from my bedroom window.”
“And what did he do in the courtyard?”
“He used to walk about, or pretend to read the paper, or make drawings in a notebook.”
“But what did he do so that you shouldn’t see him, when you came out?”
“He went and stood under the doorway, in the shade, or behind a tree.”
“And then what?”
“Then he followed me.