The Empty Canvas (17 page)

I repeated to myself: 'I am here and they are there'; and then I remembered Cecilia lying, the day before, on the divan with her eyes closed and her head thrown back on the cushion, her belly thrust forward and offered in the most explicit, literal manner, like an object with no will of any sort beyond that of being possessed; and I remembered also that, as I went towards her, I had thought, as I was thinking today: 'She is there and I am here'; and I had felt that between her and me there was nothing, and that I had to penetrate, to cross, in fact to fill, that void with the movement of my body throwing itself upon hers. And as I recalled the effort, like the breaking of a barrier, that I had made in order to embrace and possess her, I suddenly realized that my decision to leave her was in reality nothing else than the official confirmation, so to speak, of a situation that already existed. Yes, I would break with Cecilia that day; but I had in effect left her a long time before—if indeed I had ever had any contact with her.

In the midst of these reflections I began to feel sleepy; finally I got up from the armchair and went and threw myself on the divan. I fell asleep almost at once and with such a rush that I had, in my sleep, a sensation of hurtling downwards, fists and teeth clenched and all huddled up, into an infinity of space, and the longer my fall continued the more did the weight of my body increase. Then suddenly I awoke, with a taste of iron in my mouth as though I had been gripping a metal bar between my teeth. The studio was almost in darkness, and the objects in it had turned black in the grey half-light. I jumped up from the divan and went and turned on the light. Immediately it was night at the window. Then I looked at the clock on the table and saw that it was past six: Cecilia was to have come at five.

It did not require a great effort of imagination to realize that her lateness was not a matter of chance and that it was indeed now very probable that she would not come that day. But this was not a normal fact that could be accepted with tranquillity. By one of the many contradictions in her character, even though she seemed incapable of the feelings which prompt us not to cause suffering to the people who love us, Cecilia was always extremely punctual, just as if she had really loved me; and when, for some reason, she could not help being late, she always found means of letting me know in time. Her lateness that day, therefore, was abnormal and could only be explained in one way—by some event more important than our appointment, so important that it not merely prevented her from coming but also from letting me know that she would not come.

Nevertheless, the first thought that came into my mind was: 'Well, aren't you pleased? You wanted to get rid of her and she hasn't come. So much the better, surely?' But this thought was an ironical one; for I realized to my astonishment that Cecilia's lateness not only gave me no pleasure but seriously troubled me.

I went back and sat down on the divan and started thinking.

Why did Cecilia's lateness upset me? I saw that, whereas she had hitherto been nothing to me, as I have already said, her lateness caused her to become something. Furthermore this 'something', at the very moment when it was acquiring substance, eluded me in a painful fashion, for after all Cecilia had not come. And so it seemed to me that, when she was in the studio and clinging to me, Cecilia was absent; now, on the contrary, when she was not there and when I knew she would not come, I felt her to be poignantly, obscurely present.

I tried to think with greater clearness, although I found it difficult to do so because I was suffering. Cecilia had not come; she had not even taken the trouble to justify herself; therefore she no longer loved me, or anyhow not enough to be punctual or to let me know she was not coming—in other words, she loved me very little. Then suddenly I remembered, with some astonishment, that, during the two months that our relationship had lasted, Cecilia had never told me that she loved me and I had never asked her. Certainly the fact that she had given herself to me and had shown that she found pleasure with me might be equivalent to a declaration of love. But it was also possible, as I at once realized, that it meant nothing at all.

In any case, the very slight importance that Cecilia gave to this surrendering of her body seemed to prove that it had no meaning. Some things are simply a matter of feeling: Cecilia had given me her body with the same barbaric, naïve indifference with which a savage presents a rapacious explorer with the amulet of precious stones that he wears round his neck. It was, in fact, as though she had never had any wooers to make her understand how desirable a woman's body can be. Balestrieri, it is true, had adored her and had died of his adoration; but Cecilia appeared still to be surprised at it, as at something that seemed to her utterly unjustified.

Suddenly I felt a pang at my heart, and I started violently so that my whole body shook. The thought that had pierced my heart was this: 'I can think whatever I like, but in the meantime she hasn't come!' and it aroused in me an almost physical feeling of the vanity of any sort of reflection in face of the reality of her absence. I looked at the clock and saw that more than half an hour had passed since I had woken up: certainly Cecilia would not be coming now. And I no longer had any desire to prove to myself that her absence left me indifferent.

I thought she might not be feeling well—the only reason that could explain her conduct without causing me to be suspicious of her; and I got up from the divan to go to the telephone. And then I recollected, with the feeling that I was making a discovery, that I had never, not even once, telephoned to Cecilia. It was she who had telephoned me, every day; I had never telephoned her because I had never felt the need of it. This lack of curiosity on my part seemed to me significant. I had never bothered to telephone Cecilia, in the same way that I had never sought to establish any real contact with her. And so our relationship had been nothing, and boredom had easily corroded it, and I, in the end, had made up my mind to break it.

After I had dialled the number, Cecilia's telephone went on ringing for a long time in a mysterious silence. Or, to be more precise, I felt that the silence was mysterious inasmuch as Cecilia, who was in the background of this silence, had, from the moment when she failed to arrive, become mysterious to me, like an animal which had taken refuge in the depths of its lair. However, although it was mysterious, this silence was not entirely negative. In an insecure sort of way, like a gambler who, after many losses, still deceives himself into thinking he is going to win, I hoped that Cecilia's voice would become audible. Instead of that, a strange thing happened: the ringing stopped, someone took off the receiver but no one spoke; or rather, I seemed to hear heavy breathing, or a kind of whispering, at the other end of the line. I called out: 'Hullo, hullo!' several times I asked: 'Who is speaking?' and finally I became aware that the receiver at the other end had been replaced. In a rage I dialled the number again, was again answered with silence and with that mysterious sound of breathing, and again, finally, the receiver was replaced. The third time, the telephone rang for a long time but nobody replied.

I left the telephone and went back and sat on the divan. For some time, in astonishment, I thought of nothing. The only thing that was clear to me was that, on the very day when I had decided to announce the ending of our relationship, Cecilia, for some reason I still did not know, had for the first time missed an appointment, had in fact—even if only in a provisional way—provoked the separation which I had had it in mind to suggest to her. Thus I had the disagreeable sensation of someone who, going down a steep staircase in the dark, expects another step and encounters instead the flat surface of a landing and then loses his balance just because the step that might have caused him to lose it is not there.

Deep in thought, I rose and went mechanically to the door, opened it and looked out into the corridor, towards the corner, almost hoping to see Cecilia appear there. I looked also in the opposite direction; and my glance, travelling along the wall, came to a stop at the last door, which was that of Balestrieri's studio. I could not help thinking that Balestrieri himself must have put his head out into the corridor countless times to see if Cecilia, when she was late, might appear at the corner. I knew that his studio had not yet been let again; in fact it was said that his widow had the intention of going to live there herself. Now Cecilia had left the key of the old painter's studio on my table, the day of our first meeting. She had never asked me for this key, and I had thrown it into the bottom of a drawer, with a presentiment, as it were, that I might make use of it in the future. I felt a sudden desire to have a look at the place in which Balestrieri had tormented himself through the same uncertainty from which I myself was suffering at that moment.

I took the key, left the door ajar so that Cecilia, if she came, could get in, and went to Balestrieri's studio. When the imitation candles of the central chandelier were lit, the studio looked to me gloomier than ever, with its sham-antique furniture and red damask. I went up to the table, walking across the thick carpet and inhaling with distaste the stuffy, dusty, slightly malodorous air. It was a massive table, in Renaissance style, its polished top now veiled with the dust of two months' abandonment; the telephone was standing upon it, together with the directories and a green receipted bill. I reflected that the widow was perhaps really intending to come and live in the studio, since she was continuing to pay for the telephone; then my eye fell on a bound address book with a marbled cover: I took it up and turned over the pages. Balestrieri's handwriting, big and coarse and thick, made me think, for some reason, of his too-wide shoulders and his too-large feet. I was struck by the great number of women's names without any surnames, on almost every page—Paola, Maria, Milly, Ines, Daniela, Laura, Sofia, Giovanna, etc., etc. Knowing Balestrieri's habits, I had no doubt that they were the names of the accommodating girls who in the past, before his great love for Cecilia, had so often visited him. I went on turning the pages and looked at the letter C. There was Cecilia's name, followed by the same telephone number that I had just been vainly ringing. I stood for a moment with my eyes fixed on this name and number, thinking of the very different feelings Balestrieri must have had on the day he wrote it down and then, successively, on each of the occasions when he went and looked at it before telephoning to Cecilia. Probably, in the end, he would not have had to refer to the address book, as he would have known the number by heart; but all the same he would have taken a look, now and then, at the page with the letter C, to revive the memory of that first, fatal occasion when he had written down Cecilia's name and number. All of a sudden the telephone on the table started ringing.

I hesitated, then took up the receiver. I had a strange feeling of being not myself but Balestrieri; and that I should hear Cecilia's voice on the telephone. This feeling had an unexpected confirmation; I did, in fact, hear the well-known voice asking: 'Is that you, Mauro?' (Balestrieri's name was Mauro.) In a rush of anguish and nausea, my heart failed. So it really was Cecilia, and she was telephoning not to me but to Balestrieri, to a man who was dead and whom she knew to be dead.

All this did not last more than an instant. In a scarcely audible voice I said: 'No, it's Dino'; and immediately the other voice, losing all resemblance to Cecilia's and showing itself, in fact, to be very different—as though the resemblance had been created there and then simply by my anxiety—exclaimed in a tone of confusion: 'Oh, I'm sorry, am I not speaking to Signor Balestrieri's number?'

'Yes.'

'Is Signor Balestrieri not there? You see, I've been away from Rome for four months and I wanted to have a word with him. Are you a friend of his?'

'Yes, I'm a friend of his. And you—who are you?'

'I'm Milly,' answered the girl, in a pathetic, hopeful tone of voice which somehow suggested her intimacy with the old painter.

'Signorina Milly, Signor Balestrieri has ... has gone away.'

'He's gone away? And you don't know when he's coming back?'

'No.'

'Oh well, tell him, when you see him, that Milly telephoned.'

I put down the receiver again and stayed quite still for a time, brooding over the vague, unpleasant feeling that this telephone call had aroused in me. Then I became conscious that it was cold in the studio and that the cold was getting right into my bones. It was a special sort of cold, at the same time both unclean and sepulchral, the cold of a tomb which was also an alcove, or an alcove which was also a tomb. I had sat down to answer the telephone, overcome, it may be, by my agitation when I thought I heard Cecilia's voice. I rose and went out into the corridor.

Back in my studio I looked at the clock and, since I knew I was no longer expecting anybody, I realized that I was looking at it to see how long it was before Cecilia telephoned me in the morning, as she always did. Next moment I reflected that it was the first time I had had such a thought; and I knew that henceforward such thoughts would visit my mind more and more frequently.

5

Next morning, thinking over Cecilia's failure to arrive, I was convinced, or rather I tried to convince myself, that her absence was due to causes which had nothing to do with our relationship. For I still wanted to break with Cecilia, but the Cecilia I wanted to break with was the Cecilia who was in love with me, or whom I imagined to be in love with me, not the Cecilia who no longer loved me and who missed her appointments. And this was not a case of that special, perverse kind of love which makes us love someone who does not love us and dislike anyone who does love us; it was because the Cecilia who loved me had proved boring, and therefore unreal, whereas the Cecilia who did not love me seemed, on the contrary, by the very fact of not loving me, to acquire a steadily increasing resemblance of reality in my eyes. Nevertheless I preferred to think that Cecilia loved me and that consequently I did not have to alter my decision to get rid of her, because, as I have already hinted, the idea that she had ceased to bore me, in other words that she was becoming real, filled me, fundamentally, with a kind of fear, as though I were confronting a trial that I did not feel able to face.