Boredom - Alberto Moravia [95]
For a moment I was silent: I seemed to see the elderly painter, short and square, with his broad shoulders and big feet, his red face and silvery hair, turning up the collar of his raincoat and pulling the brim of his hat down over his eyes as he shadowed the sixteen-year-old girl from the courtyard to the street, and from that street to another; and I felt, recoiling upon me, the now habitual sense of shame at the thought that recently I had been doing exactly the same thing. Then I continued: “But did you notice that he was following you?”
“Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t.”
“And when you did notice, what did you do?”
“Nothing: I went on just as if I hadn’t noticed. But once I turned and went back to meet him, and then we went together into a café.”
“What did he say in the café?”
“He didn’t say anything; he started crying.”
I said nothing for a moment. Cecilia, who did not like being questioned, took advantage of this to start getting out of the car. But I stopped her. “Wait,” I said. “During the time when he was watching you, were you being unfaithful to him?”
As if amused at the coincidence, she replied: “No, no, at that time I wasn’t being unfaithful to him at all. It was only some months later that I had somebody.”
“So he was watching you for no reason, unjustly?”
“That’s right.”
“And by the time that you had somebody, he had given up following you?”
“Yes, because he had had proof that I was not being unfaithful.”
“In what way?”
“He had me followed.”
“By whom?”
She said somewhat vaguely: “Oh, by one of those agencies—you know—who make inquiries, by a detective. They told him I hadn’t anybody except him.”
“But how did you get to know that he’d employed an agency to follow you?”
“He told me himself. He made me read a long report—pages of it. It cost him I don’t know how much.”
“Was he pleased?”
“Delighted.”
After a brief silence, I asked: “And you were unfaithful to him immediately after the agency had proved to him that you weren’t?”
“Yes, a month later, but I didn’t do it on purpose—it just happened.”
“And he knew about it?”
She hesitated and then said: “I think he may have guessed something, but he was never really sure about it.”
“How do you mean?”
“He saw me two or three times, always with the same boy, and then he started following me again, on his own, without the agency. But he had got rather tired and he did it less often than before. Then he died.”
“Why didn’t he have you followed by the agency again?”
She said, with a reflective air: “If he had had me followed, he would have found out everything. But he no longer trusted the agency. He said I had always been faithful and the agency hadn’t been able to discover the truth.”
After this conversation, I began to think more and more often of using an agency, as Balestrieri had done. Strangely, whereas in the past I had refrained from doing certain things simply because I knew Balestrieri had done them, now, on the contrary, I felt inclined to employ an agency just because he had employed one. It was as though, having recognized the vanity of my efforts to stop myself on the slop down which Balestrieri had plunged, I had now decided to deliberately do the things he had done before me, as if doing them consciously and of my own free will had now become my only means of distinguishing myself from him, since he had done these things in spite of himself and in a state of unconsciousness bordering on madness.
One day, therefore, I started off to find the “Agenzia Falco,” in a gloomy building in Via Nazionale, very solemn-looking outside, ornate and covered with pillars and statues and Latin inscriptions, and dark and dreary inside. I went up to the third floor in a dilapidated, evil-smelling old elevator, stepped out on to a pitch-dark landing and walked toward a glimmer of light filtering through an opaque glass door, on which was the name of the agency and a small, symbolic bird which was, presumably, a falcon. The door rang a bell as I opened it, and I went into an anteroom which was almost entirely bare except for a few wicker