The Empty Canvas (24 page)

'Very well, I'll leave you at once.'

'Wait a little; and now come with me.'

She walked in front of me down the passage towards her room. She went in first; as soon as I had come in, she carefully closed the door. 'Would you like to make love now—here?' she asked. 'But we must be quick about it, because I really haven't time.'

Faced with this very charming, very cynical proposal, I felt once again that desire for her which seemed never to be satisfied, for the simple reason that it was not her body—always so ready and so docile—which I desired, but the whole of her. I said, however: 'No, don't think of that now. I don't like doing things in a hurry.'

'But we needn't be in a hurry. Only that I shall have to run away immediately afterwards.'

'No, I'm not like Balestrieri, it's of no consequence to me to make love in your home.'

'How does Balestrieri come into it?'

'Talking about Balestrieri—there's one thing I want you to tell me.'

'What's that?'

'That time you made love in the kitchen, had there been an argument, a quarrel, a disagreement between you shortly before?'

'How can you expect me to remember? It happened such a long time ago.'

'Try and remember.'

'Well, yes, I think there had been a bit of an argument. Balestrieri was so tiresome, he always wanted to know everything.'

'Everything?'

'Yes, everything: whom I saw, where I went, what I did.'

'And had you had an argument of this kind on that occasion?'

'Yes, I believe we had.'

'How did it finish?'

'It finished in the usual way.'

'What d'you mean by that?'

'There came a point when I stopped answering him, and then he wanted to make love.'

'Just like me!' I could not help exclaiming.

'No, you're exactly the opposite, you
don't
want to make love. Come on, then, why shouldn't we?'

She gave me a tempting look, as though she felt herself to be in debt to me and wished to pay me back at all costs, so as not to have to think about it any more. I should have liked to reply: 'I don't want to make love because I don't want to do the same things as Balestrieri.' But instead, kissing her on the neck, I said: 'We'll do it tomorrow at my studio, calmly.' She shook her head in sign of slight disappointment, then went and opened the wardrobe, took out the parcel containing the bag and removed the tissue paper. 'D'you see?' she said, smiling at me, 'I'm using your bag.'

We left the room and went out of the flat. Cecilia walked downstairs in front of me, and as I followed her I thought over what had happened. I told myself that, although the effort had been almost superhuman, I had avoided making love to her in the passage in spite of a furious desire to do so; that is, I had avoided, this time at least, doing precisely the same thing that Balestrieri had done before me; and yet this was only a tiny episode in a passion which, in its more general development tended increasingly to resemble the passion which the old painter had felt for Cecilia. I was able, in fact, thanks to a clearer consciousness of the situation, to prevent myself from acting like Balestrieri on particular occasions; but it looked as though I was not capable of halting my progress along the road that he had followed before me to the bitter end. When we reached the entrance hall, I said brusquely to Cecilia; 'Good-bye, then.'

She seemed astonished both by my words and my tone of voice. 'Why?' she said, 'aren't you going with me?'

'Where to?'

'I've told you already, to that film producer's.'

'Very well, then: come along.'

I did not speak during the whole journey. Fundamentally, what most exasperated me was not so much that Cecilia should make me drive her to an appointment with her lover, as that she should do so without malice and without cruel intent, in a vague sort of way, simply, it might be, because she was tired of taking the usual crowded bus, and there was I, ready and on the spot, with my car. I realized that this detached, childish lack of sensitiveness caused me far more pain than any self-indulgent perversity.

Finally I stopped the car in front of the film company's door and watched Cecilia as she disappeared into the darkness of the entrance hall, walking with her usual tired-looking, swaying step. Evidently the appointment with the film producer was genuine; but either the actor was waiting for Cecilia in the office, or Cecilia was intending to join him at his own home after she had spoken with the producer. In both cases it would have been easy for me to ascertain the truth, either by following her immediately into the building, or by waiting until she came out. But I gave up the idea: I was still at the stage of jealousy when a surviving sense of dignity prevents one from spying upon the person of whom one is jealous. Nevertheless, as I went away I knew I had merely postponed the moment when I would start watching her. Next time, I thought, I should no longer be able to stand firm against circumstances which encouraged me, which indeed almost obliged me, to spy upon her.

7

The events which I am now going to relate may possibly create the impression of a crisis of very ordinary jealousy; and indeed, if my behaviour during that time had been observed by a spectator of little perspicacity, it might well have appeared to be that of the stock victim of jealousy. But it was not like that. The jealous man suffers from an excessive sense of possessiveness; he suspects continually that some other man wishes to get possession of his woman; and this haunting suspicion gives rise to extravagant imaginings and may even lead him to crime. I myself, on the other hand, suffered because I loved Cecilia (for it had now become a question of love); and my aim in spying upon her was to make certain that she was deceiving me, not indeed to punish her or in any way prevent her from continuing in her unfaithfulness, but in order to set myself free both from my love and from her. The jealous man tends, in fact, even in spite of himself, to shackle himself in his own servitude; I, on the contrary, wished to release myself from this same servitude, and I saw no other means of attaining my object than by destroying Cecilia's independence and mystery, thus reducing her, through a more exact knowledge of her treacherous conduct, to something well-known and ordinary and insignificant.

My first thought was to make use of the telephone. As I have already mentioned, Cecilia used to telephone me every morning about ten o'clock. She had done this, at the beginning, merely in order to greet me. But now that her visits had become rarer (her promise to go on coming to see me every day, as before, had soon been proved unreliable), the telephone had become an essential element in our relationship. It was in fact by telephone that Cecilia now fixed the day and hour of our appointments each time, in an unaccountable, irregular manner. I noticed that the time of these telephone calls had changed recently from ten to twelve o'clock. Cecilia had justified this change by the fact that her telephone was a party line and that the subscriber who shared it had taken to making a great many calls in the early morning. But I was convinced that the reason was a different one and that she no longer telephoned me at ten o'clock because by that time she had not yet spoken to the actor who, like all actors, slept very late into the morning. And, not having spoken to him, she did not yet know what she would be doing during the day, and therefore could not tell me if and when she could see me.

The actor's number was not in the telephone directory; but it was easy for me to obtain it from a film company for whom he had worked in the past. Having found out the number, I ascertained the truth of what I had supposed in the following way: I first telephoned to Cecilia at about a quarter to twelve and invariably found that the number was engaged; immediately afterwards I telephoned the actor and discovered that he too was on the line. I waited five or ten minutes and then repeated the manoeuvre: both the lines were free. And indeed, a moment later, with a punctuality that filled me with sadness, my own telephone would ring and Cecilia, at the other end, calm and precise as a trained secretary, would tell me, according to the situation, whether we could see each other that day or not.

I also made use of the telephone to keep watch over Cecilia's comings and goings. I telephoned methodically (if one can speak of method in relation to the frantic stratagems of jealousy) at various times of day, and either I found no one, or I found Cecilia's mother, who often stayed at home, leaving the shop to her sister. Then I would enter into conversation with her, and she, on her side, asked nothing better than a few minutes' chatter; and thus, by way of this chatter, I would get to know more or less what I wanted. The mother's pieces of information, of course, came almost entirely from Cecilia, who lied to her just as she did to me, and anyhow told her only what best suited her; but I had now reached a point when I could decipher these pieces of information fairly well, all the more so because Cecilia, not knowing that she was being spied upon, did not take the trouble to bring them into line with the equally false but different information with which she provided me. Thus I came to know that Cecilia, a creature of habit like all persons who lack imagination, had, to her parents, justified her relations with the actor in the same way as those with Balestrieri and myself: she said she went to see the actor because he had promised to find her work on the films, just as she had said, in the past, that she visited Balestrieri and me because we gave her drawing lessons. But lessons last only an hour or two, whereas an association with a place of regular work may take up the entire day; and thus I discovered that Cecilia, under the pretext of her film job, was seeing the actor every day, twice or even three times a day. She saw him sometimes in the morning, especially if the weather was fine, for a walk in the town and an aperitif; she saw him in the afternoon, probably in order to make love; she saw him in the evening, to have dinner and go to the cinema. Her mother was slightly alarmed at this pretended film activity on her daughter's part, and at the same time rather flattered. Taking me into her confidence, she would ask me anxiously, at one moment, if there was not a danger that the film world, so notoriously free and easy, not to say licentious, might have a corrupting influence upon Cecilia; and then again she would ask, with equal anxiety, whether I thought that her daughter had the right qualities for becoming a star. She spoke with complete ingenuousness; but to me, at the other end of the line, she often gave the impression of knowing everything, both about myself and about the actor, and of amusing herself by tormenting me with refined and conscious cruelty. In reality, as I knew perfectly well, the cruelty lay in the circumstances and in them only.

And so, what with Cecilia's lies on the one hand and her mother's illusions on the other, the telephone neither gave me complete reassurance nor did it furnish me with the indubitable proofs that I needed in order to free myself of my little mistress and of my love for her. Indirect and abstract by its very nature, the telephone now seemed to me, in fact, to be the positive symbol of my own situation: a means of communication which prevented me from communicating; an instrument of inspection which permitted of no precise information; an automatic machine, extremely easy to use, which nevertheless showed itself to be almost always capricious and untrustworthy.

Furthermore, the telephone seemed perfectly designed to confirm the elusiveness of Cecilia's character. Obviously it was not the fault of the little black instrument if Cecilia was late in telephoning me or did not telephone me at all; if she lied to me or disappointed me. But since all this took place on the telephone, I had reached the point when I was obsessed with hatred for that innocent object. I never telephoned now without extreme repugnance; I never heard its ringing without a feeling of anguish. In the first case I feared not to find Cecilia—as indeed almost always happened; in the second, that I should hear her, as usual, lying to me—which was also a manner of not finding her. But the telephone, above all, confirmed Cecilia's elusiveness, for by its means her physical presence was replaced by one single part of her, and the most abstract, at that—her voice. Even when this voice was not lying to me it remained, to me, ambiguous and evasive, simply because it was only a voice. And all the more so because it was Cecilia's voice, which was always so stubbornly expressionless.

But the thing that drove me on to spy directly upon Cecilia was, more than anything else, my own fatigue. I now spent almost the whole day looking at the telephone, waiting either for the time at which Cecilia telephoned me, or for the time at which I knew I could telephone to her with the hope of finding her. Besides this, there were the calls when I found no one, or only the whisperings of her father; and there were the calls to her mother, exhausting and irritating, to reconstruct Cecilia's daily activities. All these telephonic stratagems, growing, as they did, more and more complicated and harassing, in the end cancelled out, I noticed, any possible relief that I might derive from the telephone calls themselves. Like a starving man, whose hunger seems unsatisfied even after he has eaten, so I, after I had finally succeeded in speaking to Cecilia, continued to feel just as harassed and angry as before. Moreover the result of all this was a kind of sexual frenzy; after deciding beforehand to question Cecilia calmly and at length and to oblige her to confess her unfaithfulness, the moment she appeared in the doorway of the studio I would forget my cool intentions, throw her on the divan and have there and then, without waiting for her to undress, without even—as she herself used to say with a touch of childish complacency—giving her time to breathe. It was the usual masculine illusion that possession can be achieved all in a moment and without a word, by the mere physical act, which drove me to this frenzy. But immediately afterwards, when I saw Cecilia to be even more elusive than before, I realized my mistake and said to myself that, if I wished to possess her truly, I ought not to expend my energy in an act which had merely the semblance of possession.