The Empty Canvas (8 page)

2

In the same building in Via Margutta in which I lived, an elderly painter called Balestrieri had a studio three doors beyond mine along the ground floor corridor. I used often to meet him and had exchanged a few words with him, but was not in the habit of visiting him; like all men who think of nothing but women, Balestrieri behaved with extreme, almost insulting coldness towards persons of his own sex, whatever might be their condition or age, evidently seeing in them so many potential rivals. Balestrieri was a small man with very broad shoulders and very large feet—two disproportions which he took no trouble to conceal; in fact, he drew attention to them by wearing enormous check sports jackets and old-fashioned pointed, patent-leather shoes. Balestrieri's face had in it a strong look of the carnival mask or the Pompeian satyr: the hair silvery white, the skin a hectic red, eyebrows black as coal, a prominent nose, a large mouth, a pointed chin. The expression of his face was slightly doll-like, and yet, underneath, there was a look of uneasiness. I had heard from one or two elderly painters who knew Balestrieri well that he was a sex maniac, and that he had begun painting in his youth simply and solely in order to attract women to his studio, under the pretext of painting them. Afterwards, however, the habit of painting, so to speak, had remained with him—which for him meant, above all things, painting the female nude. Balestrieri, who was comfortably off, did not depend on his work for a living; he never exhibited and, in a way, painted for himself only; his friends told me that, so great was his affection for his pictures, on the rare occasions when he decided to give one of them away he used to make a copy and give it in place of the original. As for their quality, all his friends were agreed that he was an extremely bad painter.

Once or twice, seized with curiosity, I tried to get a glimpse of Balestrieri's pictures from the courtyard, through his big window; and I caught sight of a few large, dark canvases upon which could be distinguished, with some difficulty, enormous female nudes with exaggerated forms, in attitudes far from natural.

Balestrieri's studio was continually visited by a large number of women. I could see them through my own big window as they crossed the courtyard and then disappeared into the door leading to the ground floor corridor. I knew it was Balestrieri they were going to see, because the other two studios were inhabited by two painters who lived in them with their families and who, in any case, did not make use of models because they painted abstract pictures. Balestrieri's women bore witness to a great variety of tastes: they were young and middle-aged, of the working and the upper class, young girls and married women, fair and dark, thin and fat, short and tall; and it became clear that Balestrieri, like all Don Juans of a not very refined type, did not go in for subtleties but was a collector of adventures concerned more with quantity than quality. It was very rarely that Balestrieri had what is called a relationship, that is, a lasting love affair with any one woman; and even when he had, it did not interfere with other less important adventures. Especially during the first years that I lived in Via Margutta, Balestrieri's appearance, and the life he led, filled me with so much curiosity that I even went so far as to spy upon him to some extent. I actually drew up statistics of the women who visited him: as many as five different women in a month, that is, One new woman every six days, and on an average two visits a day. When I saw Balestrieri for the first time, he was fifty-five; at the time during which the events of which I am writing took place, he was sixty-five; yet, during those ten years, I never observed any change in his habits: I saw always the same number of women, more or less, as though time, for him, stood still.

Or rather, to be more precise, a change there was, but it showed itself, not in a diminution of feminine visits as one might have expected, but in an increase. Balestrieri's eroticism, which I compared often to a volcano in continuous but quiet activity, in fact went through a phase, when he was about sixty-three, which I can only describe as a paroxysm. The women who filed through the courtyard and went and knocked at the old painter's door appeared to be more numerous; furthermore, I noticed that they were now almost always very young girls: like all vicious men, Balestrieri, with the years, inclined towards adolescents. I spoke of a phase of 'paroxysm' in his love life; it would be more correct to say that it was a question, if anything, of a fixation, probably unconscious, upon one single type of woman to the exclusion of all others. Balestrieri, in fact, without realizing it, was at that time ceasing to be the Don Juan, the collector of adventures, that he had always been, and was for the first time devoting himself, or wishing to devote himself, to one woman only. The numerous girls, all more or less of the same age, were therefore nothing more than progressive experiments in a type which, little by little, was becoming precisely defined, tentative approaches towards an ideal figure which, some day, would become flesh and blood. And indeed, all of a sudden the flow of adolescent girls to Balestrieri's studio ceased, giving place to a single feminine visitor for whom, evidently, they had prepared the way and who, in herself, summarized them all.

I was enabled to observe her with some attention, if only because I became aware, almost at once, that she was observing me. Dressed always like a little ballet-dancer according to the fashion of the moment, in a light puffy blouse and a very short, wide skirt that appeared to be supported by a crinoline, she looked rather like an inverted flower with a crooked, oscillating corolla, walking about on its pistils. She had a round face, like a child; but it was a child that had grown too hastily and had been initiated too soon into the experiences of womanhood. She was pale, with a slight shadow underneath her cheekbones which made her cheeks look hollow, and a mass of thick, brown, curly hair all round her face. Her small mouth, childish both in shape and expression, reminded one of a bud that had withered prematurely on the bough, without opening; and its corners were marked by two thin furrows, which struck me particularly because of the feeling of intense aridity which they suggested. Finally her eyes, her best feature, were large and dark, and they too were childish in shape beneath a rather prominent forehead; and their glance, indefinably remote, indirect, unsteady, was lacking in innocence.

Unlike Balestrieri's other women, who walked straight and with bent heads towards the old painter's studio, this one crossed the courtyard with what appeared to be a studied slowness, letting herself be drawn along, so it seemed, by the indolent, meditative movement of her hips. She looked not so much as though she were going unwillingly to see Balestrieri, as that on her way she were searching, at the same time, for something else that she herself could not have defined. And almost always, as she crossed the courtyard, she would look up towards my studio, and if—as often happened, since I had my easel close to the window—I were visible behind the glass, she would never fail to accompany her look with a smile. For some time I was uncertain about this smile, which was so slight as to make me doubt whether it was intentional. But later, when I happened to meet her at closer quarters in the corridor, I was forced to the conviction that the smile was for me and that a very precise meaning was attached to it.

This mute invitation on her part inspired in me an obscure feeling of aversion which I will try to explain. In the first place, I am not given to such adventures, especially if, as was the case here, the adventure is, so to speak, suggested and almost imposed upon me by the woman; in fact, the very persistence of the smile aroused in me an almost spiteful impulse not to return it and to pretend not to have noticed it. In the second place, the girl did not attract me: I had never made love to any but fully grown-up women, and this girl, who could not have been more than seventeen, looked less than fifteen, owing to the slenderness of her figure and the childishness of her face. Finally, there was a third reason, a more valid one if less clear and easy to define, and that was the feeling of nausea that assailed me every time I imagined myself approaching her, speaking to her, and—inevitable consequence—making love to her. This feeling of nausea was not inspired by a direct physical repugnance: the girl did not attract me, it is true, but she was not actually repugnant to me; rather it came from my imaginative picture of the experience in which I should be involved by accepting her invitation. It was, I reflected, the same feeling of nausea that probably everyone experiences when on the threshold of some unknown, vague reality; or perhaps, more simply, of reality unadulterated, if they have become accustomed, over a long period, to not facing it. It was a feeling, as I say, of disgust mingled with apprehension; and it astonished me because the girl, childish and insignificant as she was, did not seem to justify it in any way.

But it is not easy, when one is bored, to give continuous thought to anything. Boredom, for me, was like a kind of fog in which my thought was constantly losing its way, catching glimpses only at intervals of some detail of reality; like a person in a thick mist who catches a glimpse now of the corner of a house, now of the figure of a passer-by, now of some other object, but only for an instant, and an instant later they have vanished. In the fog of boredom I had caught a glimpse of the girl and of Balestrieri; but without attaching any importance to them, and with my attention being constantly drawn away from them. And so it happened that for weeks I forgot the existence of these two, who nevertheless were living and making love only a few steps away from me. Every now and then I would remember them, almost with astonishment, and say to myself: 'Why, they're still there, they're still making love together!' I forgot Balestrieri to such an extent that, the morning after my flight from my mother's villa, coming back to my studio after having a cup of coffee nearby, and noticing in Via Margutta, right in front of my door, a black and gilt hearse with the usual gilt angels at the four corners and the usual black horses in the shafts, but still empty and without any flowers, I never imagined that it might be waiting there for someone I knew. I went round the hearse, which was blocking the way, and into the entrance-hall, and since I was walking as I habitually do, with my eyes on the ground, I ran straight into the coffin, which four men were at that moment carrying out on their shoulders, bumping my forehead against its lower edge. I immediately jumped back, while the four bearers threw glances of astonished reproof at me; then the coffin went past very close to me, followed by only two persons: a brutal-faced, pock-marked young man in a blue cloth suit, and a woman with her arm in his, of whom I could see nothing as she was smothered in black veils from head to foot. The young man made me think of Balestrieri, possibly because he too had a rather red face and very black eyebrows; at the same moment I heard the caretaker of the building murmuring some comment or other on how sudden some deaths can be, coupled with the name of the old painter. And so I learned that Balestrieri had died, probably the previous day, that this was his funeral and that the woman in mourning was the wife from whom he had been separated for many years and the young man in the blue suit the son whom he had had by her.

As I have already said, my mind, at that time, had been distracted by boredom to such a degree that I had forgotten the existence not only of Balestrieri but also of the girl about whom I had a certain curiosity. Therefore it was without surprise that I realized I had been in my studio during the last two days without knowing that, three doors farther on, Balestrieri had been taken ill, had died, had been watched over through the night, had been placed in his coffin, had been carried away. Heaven knows, I thought, possibly someone had spoken to me of Balestrieri's illness, and I, while hearing of it, had not listened, lost in boredom as I was; just as it sometimes happened that I read carefully the headlines in the newspapers and discovered a moment later that I had no idea of what they said. It had required the coffin, or rather the painful blow from the coffin on my forehead, to make me remember the painter's existence, at the same moment when I became aware of his death.

Balestrieri's death, moreover, had not been so simple a matter as might appear at first sight. That same day, partly through the shocked allusions of the caretaker, partly through the more explicit comments of a group of friends whom I met at the café, I was able to reconstruct the old painter's end. It appeared, then, that Balestrieri had died at a very special moment, that is, while he was in the act of making love with the girl who had so often smiled at me. Furthermore, this love-making had not been of a normal kind—meaning by 'normal' the act which leads to procreation—but rather a distortion of it, an erotic speciality, so that Balestrieri had been killed not by love-making but, so to speak, by the manner in which he had done it. The caretaker refused to be explicit, she merely alluded to the matter with indignation; my friends at the café, on the other hand, had been cheerfully liberal with details, just as though they had been present in Balestrieri's studio at the moment of his death; but, as I finally managed to establish, this was all a question of supposition. In reality Balestrieri had felt ill and had died under the frightened eyes of the girl: that was all that was known for certain. The fact that the girl was his mistress, that he had been found half-naked on the bed, and finally that the girl herself had run out and called the caretaker in a dressing-gown with nothing underneath—all this seemed to confirm the gossip about a sudden death which had taken place at the moment of pleasure. But those who were unwilling to believe in a death of this kind pointed out that the girl was in a dressing-gown because she was a model and was sitting to Balestrieri, and that the latter, in the summer, always used to work in a sleeveless vest and a pair of bathing-pants. On the other hand, in support of the 'love-death' gossip, there was the reported statement of the doctor who had been summoned to the death-bed: 'If this man had realized that there are certain things that cannot be done at his age, he would still be alive.' Others, however, maintained that, after examining Balestrieri, all the doctor had said to the girl was: 'Signorina, you killed him,' adding, nevertheless, immediately afterwards: 'Or rather, you helped him to kill himself.' But no one knew who this doctor was nor where he was to be found; he might have been called in through one of the numerous chemist's shops in the neighbourhood; nor did I trouble to track him down.