The Empty Canvas (21 page)

'I don't know whether I like it. In any case, I'm not there very much.'

I could go on, in this way,
ad infinitum.
But I think I have given a good example of what I have called Cecilia's abstractness. It may perhaps be thought, at this point, that Cecilia was stupid, and, anyhow, devoid of personality. But this was not so: the fact that I never heard her say stupid things was a proof, if nothing else, that she was not stupid; and as for personality, this, as I have already said, lay elsewhere than in her conversation, so that to report the latter without at the same time accompanying it with a description of her face and figure would be rather like reading an operatic libretto without music or a film script without the pictures on the screen. But I wished to transcribe an example of conversation mainly in order to convey the idea that Cecilia's way of speaking was thus formal and bloodless for the good reason that she herself was ignorant of the things about which I questioned her, just as much as I was and perhaps more so. In other words, she lived with her father and mother in a flat in Prati and had been Balestrieri's mistress; but she had never paused to look at the people and things in her life and therefore had never truly seen them, still less observed them. She was, in fact, a stranger to herself and to the world she lived in; just as much as those who knew neither her nor her world.

In any case, my suspicion of Cecilia's unfaithfulness, by making her mysterious and elusive and therefore real, finally aroused in me a desire to verify her vague scraps of information, if only in order to abolish at least that portion of mystery which lay outside our sexual relationship. And so, one day, I asked her to let me make the acquaintance of her family. I noticed, with some surprise, that my request did not embarrass her at all, in spite of the 'grumblings' that she had put forward as an excuse to justify her intention of reducing the number of our meetings. 'I had thought of that too,' she said; 'my mother is always asking me about you.'

'Did you introduce Balestrieri to your family, at that time?'

'Yes.'

'Did your parents ever get to know that you were Balestrieri's mistress?'

'No.'

'If they had known, what would they have done?'

'Who knows?'

'Did Balestrieri often come to your home?'

'Yes.'

'What did he do there?'

'Nothing. He used to come to lunch or for coffee and then we'd go off together to his studio.'

'Did you ever make love, you and Balestrieri, at your home?'

'He always wanted to, but
I
didn't, because I was afraid my parents would discover.'

'But why did he want to do it there, in your home?'

'I don't know, he liked the idea.'

'But did you do it, or not?'

'Yes, we did it sometimes.'

'Where?'

'I don't remember now.'

'Try and remember.'

'Ah yes, we did it once in the kitchen.'

'In the kitchen?'

'Yes, Mother had gone out to buy something, and I had to mind the oven.'

'But couldn't you have gone into your room, seeing that you were alone in the house?'

'If Balestrieri had a mind to make love, he did it wherever he was: he liked doing it in odd places.'

'Why?'

'I don't know.'

'But how did you manage to do it, like that, in the kitchen?'

'Standing up.'

And so, one day, Cecilia brought me an invitation to lunch from her parents. That morning I changed my sweater and corduroy trousers for a dark suit, a white shirt and a sober tie, so as to look like the professor I was supposed to be, and went off towards one o'clock to Cecilia's address, a street in Prati. To tell the truth, I felt intensely curious and almost excited at going to visit her at her home; this was because every discovery I made, or thought I made, about Cecilia now immediately assumed a sensual quality, as if, in discovering aspects of her life that I did not know, I had discovered her herself, in a material sense, or had stripped her naked.

I did not have much difficulty in finding the street, a quiet, bleak, straight street flanked by plane-trees now leafless, and with rows of shops on the ground floors of the big grey and yellow buildings. The entrance door of Cecilia's block of flats led into a large courtyard in which a few palm-trees planted in the middle of barren flower-beds raised yellowed crests like plucked feathers to the garlands of washing hung out to dry from the top floors. There were various staircases marked with the letters A to F; the one leading to Cecilia's flat was staircase E. An 'Out of Order' notice hung on the grating of the ancient lift; so I walked up many flights of stairs, in a wan, cold light, from one landing to another, scrutinizing, at each floor, the labels on the doors. Flats One, Two, and Three; Flats Four, Five, and Six; Flats Seven, Eight, and Nine; Flats Ten, Eleven, and Twelve: this, then, was the staircase, I could not help thinking, as I arrived at last at Flat Thirteen, on the fourth floor, and pressed the bell, this was the staircase up and down which Cecilia went every day when she came to see me or returned home again. What would I have found out about this staircase if I had asked Cecilia? Nothing, less than nothing. She would have answered me, with characteristic tautology, that 'the staircase was a staircase', and that would have been the end of it. And yet upon this staircase she had left a part of her life; and this grey light, these white marble steps, these red tiles on the landings, this dark wood of which the doors were made, all these must have remained in her memory—just as others, more fortunate, retain a memory of the smiling landscapes amongst which they have passed their years of childhood and youth. As I was thinking these things I heard, on the far side of the door, a step which, though light, made a loud sound on the loose bricks of an old floor. The door opened and Cecilia appeared on the threshold. She was wearing the usual green, hairy sweater that came down below her waist, with the deep, triangular neckline allowing a glimpse of the beginning of her breasts; her short, tight black skirt was stretched in deep, concentric folds over her belly. As I greeted her, she leant forward in the doorway and I was a little surprised because I thought she was intending to kiss me, and this was not like her, in such a place and at such a moment. Instead, she whispered: 'Remember it's a lesson day today and that after lunch we go off together to your studio.' For some reason or other, this unusual urgency made me almost suspicious; and it crossed my mind that Cecilia intended to make use of me and of our appointment in order to conceal some other engagement.

The hall was furnished like a room of the same kind in an old-fashioned family boarding-house at a watering-place: chairs and table of wickerwork, a plant in one corner and a plaster statue of a nude woman in another. But the chairs and the table looked old and decrepit, the statue, wherever there was a curve or a hollow, was grey with dust and lacked a hand into the bargain, and the plant, of the species called
ficus,
was reduced to a couple of leaves at the end of a long stalk. I noticed that the walls were white, but with à suspicion of dust everywhere, a kind of old, sticky dust which seemed thicker in the corners of the ceiling, where there were little dark, dense cobwebs. It suddenly occurred to me that this was a house of which, rightly or wrongly, any ordinary girl would be ashamed, at a moment when she was bringing in her lover; any ordinary girl, but not Cecilia. Meanwhile she was leading me down a long, empty passage; then she opened a door and beckoned to me to follow her.

I saw a big, rectangular room with four windows, veiled by yellow curtains, in a row along one wall. The room appeared to be divided into two parts by a couple of steps and an arch; the larger part was the sitting-room, and in it was the furniture which Cecilia had once described as being without colour, that is, gilded. This furniture, actually, was in the Louis XV style, imitated from the antique, as had been the fashion forty years before, and it was arranged in ghostly groups round little circular tables and meagre lamps with shades adorned with beads. With my first glance I noticed white patches where the gilded plaster had peeled off, dirty marks on the flower-patterned arms of the chairs, damp stains on the small pieces of tapestry depicting episodes of gallantry. But the shabbiness of the place was evident not so much in the worn look of its furnishings as in certain almost unbelievable details which seemed to indicate a long-standing, unjustifiable neglect: a long, narrow strip of wallpaper with a pattern of little bunches of flowers and baskets, for instance, hanging down in the middle of the wall and showing the raw plaster behind it; a wide, uneven, rough-edged tear in one of the yellow curtains at the windows; and actually a large, black, gaping hole in one corner of the ceiling. Why had Cecilia's parents not taken the trouble at least to paste back the strip of wallpaper, to mend the curtain, to have the ceiling repaired as far as possible? And as for Cecilia—was this, then, the house which was a house, the sitting-room which was a sitting-room, the furniture which was furniture? Was it possible that she lived in a flat which, in its own squalid way, was so peculiar, and had never become conscious of it? With these thoughts in my mind I followed her into the smaller part of the room, beyond the arch, which was arranged as a dining-room, with furniture in the same dark, massive, Renaissance style as I had already noted in Balestrieri's studio. From near one of the windows, breaking the silence, came the jerky sound of light music on the radio. Possibly because of a certain icy quality in this silence, when I heard these sounds I realized suddenly that, although it was already the beginning of December, the flat was not heated. Cecilia, who was in front of me, said: 'Dad, let me introduce my drawing-master.'

Cecilia's father rose with an effort from the armchair in which he was sitting listening to the radio and held out his hand to me without speaking, at the same time pointing to his throat as if to warn me that, owing to his disease, he was unable to talk. I recalled the strange whispering, breathing sound that I had heard on the telephone some days before and realized that it had been he who had answered me, or rather had tried, in vain, to answer me. I looked at him as he let himself fall back into his old leather armchair, all blackened and worn, and then as he bent forward and turned down the volume of the radio. He must have been what is generally called a handsome man, with that slightly vulgar kind of handsomeness that is to be found in some over-symmetrical faces. Of that handsomeness there was now nothing left. Disease had ravaged his face, causing it to swell in some places and contract in others, reddening it here and whitening it there. And there was death already, it seemed to me, in his black hair, which lay flat and lifeless and glued down, as it were, by an unhealthy sweat upon his brow and temples; in the purplish colour of his lips; and, above all, in his round eyes, with their expression of intense dismay. These eyes seemed to say things which his mouth, even if it had not been speechless, would have passed over in silence; and they brought to mind, not merely the dumbness produced by his disease, but, even more, the kind of forced helplessness of one who has been bound and gagged and left, alone and defenceless, to face a deadly peril.

Cecilia told her father to sit down, and she invited me to do the same and to keep her father company, as she had to go to the kitchen: she spoke in a loud voice, mentioning her father as if he were some inanimate object to be disposed of as one liked. I sat down, therefore, opposite the invalid, and, not knowing what to say, began talking in a flattering way about Cecilia's artistic talent. Her father listened to me, rolling his terrified eyes as if, instead of talking to him about his daughter, I were hurling grave threats at him. From time to time he also talked, or rather tried to talk, as he had done on the telephone that day when he answered me; but the sounds that issued from his mouth, blown forth rather than articulated, were to me incomprehensible. All of a sudden, without much ceremony and with the involuntary bad manners of the healthy when confronted with the sick, I said I must wash my hands; and I rose and left the room.

I was urged to do this by the same curiosity that had made me ask Cecilia to introduce me to her parents. When I was in the passage I went, at random, to the first of the four doors leading from it, and opened it. A little bedroom, of a chilling poverty, met my eyes: the cold, subdued light came from the courtyard through the panes of curtainless windows. A black-painted iron bedstead with a consecrated olive-branch tied to its bars and a red coverlet well tucked in under a thin mattress, two so-called kitchen chairs with yellow straw seats, and a small wardrobe of rough wood, constituted the whole of the furniture. I was at once sure that this almost empty little room must be Cecilia's; I knew it from the smell that hung in the air, a rather sharp, unsophisticated feminine smell that I remembered having encountered in her hair and on her skin. I opened the cupboard to make more sure, and there indeed I saw on their hangers the few clothes, so well known to me, of which Cecilia's wardrobe consisted—the little ballet-skirt she had worn during the summer, when I first met her; a two-piece suit of grey wool which she put on in cold weather; a black coat which she wore in the evening; a black dress of the kind known, I believe, as semi-evening dress. On a shelf lay something wrapped in white tissue-paper—the bag I had given her on the day that should have been the day of our parting. I closed the cupboard again and looked round, trying to define to myself the feeling which the room inspired in me; and finally I understood: the room was bare and squalid, but its bareness and its squalor were natural and as it were untamed, like those of a place—of some hollow or cave—lived in by wild beasts. It was the bareness, in a word, not so much of a poverty-stricken house as of a lair.

I tiptoed out and opened the next door. Here the darkness was almost complete, but from the vague outline of a big double bed and from a stuffy smell very different from that in Cecilia's room, heavier and less healthy, I concluded it was her parents' bedroom. I closed this door too, and opened the third.