The Empty Canvas (34 page)

But I was suffering. And gradually, through this suffering, there came to me at last an extravagant idea which I was astonished not to have had before: possibly the only way in which I could set myself free from Cecilia—that is, possess her truly and consequently become bored with her—was to marry her. I had not succeeded in becoming bored with Cecilia by having her as a mistress; but I was almost sure that I would be bored with her once she had become my wife. Thus the idea of marriage began to attract me more and more, but with a prospect, completely different from the one that generally smiles upon a man preparing to get married; the latter cherishes the dream of an endless love; but it was the opposite kind of dream, a dream of the end of love, that smiled upon me. I took pleasure in imagining that, once she was married, Cecilia would turn into an ordinary wife, full of domestic and social occupations, satisfied, without mystery; that in fact she would become, as they say, 'settled'. It was possible that her present elusiveness was nothing more than an expression of matrimonial ambitions; perhaps she was searching instinctively amongst her lovers for a husband with whom she might pause and be quiet. I planned to marry her with every sort of religious and social ceremony, and after marriage to make her have a large number of children, who would also play a part in ordering her life and confining her to the far from enigmatic role of motherhood.

It may be thought that this idea of employing matrimony where a physical relationship and money had both failed was absurd, and anyhow inadequate. Like burning down one's house to light a cigarette. But I had severed all bonds, as I think I have made clear, with any kind of society, especially with the world in which my mother moved. In this lack of all roots and responsibilities, in this utter void created by boredom, marriage, for me, was something dead and meaningless; and in this way it would at least serve some purpose.

Naturally I counted upon going to live, as soon as I was married, in the villa on the Via Appia, with my wife and my mother. Matrimony, the villa, my mother, my mother's world—all these were parts of the diabolical machine into which Cecilia would enter as a charming, enigmatic demon and from which she would issue as an ordinary, middle-class married woman.

Moreover the idea of marriage had come to me spontaneously as the surest means of severing relations between Cecilia and Luciani. I thought, in fact, that she would willingly leave Luciani once she had agreed to marry me. But it was also true that, if Cecilia became my wife, I felt it would not much matter to me whether she went on having Luciani as a lover, or some other man, or no one at all.

At this point I ought to say that, apart from the prospect of freeing myself from my love for Cecilia, the matrimonial solution seemed to give me a gleam of hope that I might start painting again as soon as Cecilia, now installed in my mother's house, ceased to darken my horizon. I imagined Cecilia much taken up with her children and with social life; and I, meanwhile, in the studio at the bottom of the garden, would devote myself deliciously to my beloved, chaste, highly intellectual painting. Quite a different thing from Balestrieri's foul, hectic nudes. I felt I would paint the most abstract pictures that had ever been painted since abstract painting came into existence. In the end, having planted Cecilia with my mother and a whole nestful of urchins, I would come back and live by myself in Via Margutta.

It will be thought that all this was in contradiction to my previous character and behaviour; and furthermore, that the terms of my problem were different. In point of fact, being in love with Cecilia, and painting, were not two facts depending on each other; rather they were equivalent and independent. In other words, it was not my love for Cecilia which prevented me from painting, but rather that I was powerless to paint just as I was powerless to possess Cecilia; and so a release from my love for her did not at all mean that I should be enabled to take up painting again. Moreover, I had always hated my mother's house, my mother's world, my mother's money, and had gone to live in Via Margutta precisely because I had felt that it would be impossible for me to paint at the villa in Via Appia.

And now I was thinking of going back to live with my mother, in that same house and that same world that I loathed. I can give no other explanation of all this, except that contradiction is the fickle and unforeseeable basis of the human spirit. In reality I was desperate; and it seemed to me that even the kind of suicide that a return to my mother's house meant to me was preferable to my present situation, provided that it served to rid me of Cecilia.

It was summer now, and one day, during our usual morning telephone call, I said to Cecilia that instead of meeting at my studio we might go out of Rome for a drive in my car. I knew that Cecilia liked being in the open air; nevertheless I was surprised by the extraordinary warmth with which she welcomed my proposal. 'Yes indeed,' she added unexpectedly; 'and today we can be together all day long, till late this evening. I'm quite free.'

'What's happened?' I asked sarcastically; 'will that terribly severe father of yours allow you to go out with me?'

She answered frankly, as though astonished at my remembering the lie she had made use of to conceal her relations with Luciani. 'It's not that,' she said. 'It's because Luciani and I can't meet this evening. So I thought you would like to spend the whole day with me.'

'Please thank Luciani very much from me for his generosity.'

'There, you see how it is with you. So it's not true that one can always tell you the truth.'

'Very well, I'll come and fetch you about eleven o'clock, and then we can have lunch together.'

'No, not at eleven, I can't manage that; I'm lunching with Luciani.'

'I thought it was strange that you shouldn't be seeing him for a whole day.'

'I'll come to the studio, about three.'

'All right, three o'clock.'

Cecilia appeared, with her usual punctuality, at the time arranged. She was wearing a new, green, two-piece dress and I told her how well it suited her. She answered promptly, with a grateful eagerness that was vaguely surprising to me. 'I bought it with your money, and these too,' she said, pointing to her shoes, 'and these,' she added, stretching out her leg to show the stocking. 'In fact,' she concluded, 'I'm entirely dressed out of your money, underneath and on top.'

As I drove the car out of the courtyard, I asked: 'Why d'you tell me this?'

'Because you once told me that you liked me to tell you these things.'

'Yes, that's true. But I would far rather know that you belonged to me, not only underneath and on top, but inside as well.'

'Inside where?'

'Inside.'

She laughed, with her rather childish laugh that lifted her lips above her eye-teeth. 'Inside, I don't belong to anybody,' she said. 'Inside are one's lungs and heart and liver and intestines. What would you do with them?'

She was gay, and I pointed this out to her. She said lightly: 'I'm gay because I'm with you.'

'Thank you, that's very nice of you.'

We crossed the Piazza del Popolo and the Tiber, went the whole length of Via Cola di Rienzo and, after circling the sloping walls of the Vatican, started off along the Via Aurelia, in the direction of Fregene. Cecilia sat quite still at my side, her head erect, the mass of her thick, curly hair falling about her round face, her hands in her lap. From time to time, as I drove, I cast a sideways glance at her and recognized yet again the characteristics which, in their enigmatic way, made her so desirable to me and at the same time so elusive; the childishness of her face, contradicted nevertheless by the dry, fine lines that cut into the skin at the corners of her small mouth; the sharp slimness of her shoulders, which seemed belied by the full, heavy prominence of her bosom; the supple slenderness of her waist which did not match the rotundity of her hips and the solidity of her thighs. And, lying in her lap, her big, ugly hands, doubtfully white, yet attractive and even, perhaps, beautiful—if it is permissible to say that an ugly thing is beautiful. Never had I found her so pleasing; and that in a manner so very like herself, both irritating and evasive. As soon as we were outside Rome I began to think I should not be able to wait until six, at which time we should be returning to the studio. I had ten hours at my disposal; therefore I could make love twice: now, immediately, and then again at night, after dinner. Now, in any convenient meadow; after dinner, at the studio.

The road went up and down amongst treeless hills covered with thick, luxuriant grass of an almost blue green, grass which had sprouted from the water-soaked earth after the abundant rain of the last two months. But the sky was still not clear: black clouds, which looked as if they were unable to rise for the burden of rain they carried, hung in motionless layers above this spring-like green. I kept looking about for a suitable place, although I was driving fast, but failed to find one: either it was too near the road, or too exposed, or too close to a farm, or on too steep a slope. So I went on for some miles, still without speaking, and in the silence I became overburdened with the full force, the anger, almost, of my desire. At last, at the first side road, I turned off. 'But aren't we going to the sea?' Cecilia demanded.

'We're going now to a quiet place to make love,' I answered, 'and afterwards we'll go to the sea.'

She said nothing; and I drove on as fast as I could along the white, stony country road. After we had bumped along over crackling loose rubble for about half a mile, the landscape, as I had hoped, began to change. No longer were there grassy, treeless hills, but wooded slopes rising behind small fields in which horses and sheep were grazing. It was just what I was looking for. I came to a sudden stop beside a fence and said to Cecilia: 'Let's get out.'

She obeyed, and stood aside to let me go ahead. I said, for no particular reason: 'I'd rather you went in front.' She made no objection; and, after pushing open a rustic gate, started off down a path, or rather a track where the tall, thick grass had been trodden down; and then I saw why I had asked her to walk in front of me: I wanted to watch the powerful, indolent movement of her hips. I knew that this movement did not concern me, personally, any more than the sexual appeal of a woman of any kind concerns any particular man. Now if I had been walking in front of her, I might even, perhaps, have had the illusion that I was acting as her guide. But in this way, by making her walk ahead of me, I should be able to persuade myself that this movement was directed not so much at me as at the pleasure that awaited her at some spot in the wood, a pleasure which I should be providing for her, it is true, but of which I should be merely the instrument.

We walked on in silence through the tangled, sticky grass. Above our heads the mass of cloud, low and swollen like a pregnant belly, seemed to be unravelling itself into shreds of mist. The air was damp and warm and humming with insects. I watched Cecilia's hips which, as we gradually drew nearer to the wood, appeared to assert the strength and monotony of their movement like a machine that has found its normal rhythm, and I reflected that there was no difference between this movement which she made as she walked and those she would soon be making as she lay on her back: Cecilia was always ready, so to speak, for the sexual act, just as a machine, nourished with the proper fuel, is always ready to function. She must have become aware of my gaze, for suddenly she turned and asked: 'What's the matter, why don't you speak?'

'I want you too much to speak.'

'D'you want me always?'

'Do you mind?'

'No, I was just asking.'

We walked on for some distance; then the thick grass of the meadow began to be replaced by scantier, taller undergrowth and trees rose here and there from the uneven ground, thinly scattered at first but growing steadily thicker. After a few more steps we found ourselves in a little ravine between two hills, with trees everywhere, and bushes and thickets up and down the humps and hollows of the broken ground. I started looking round for a suitable place, where we could lie down; and finally I thought I had found what I wanted—a flat, mossy open space surrounded with tall ferns and big broom bushes. I was about to point it out to Cecilia, when she turned round and said lightly: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, it's not possible for us to make love today.'

I felt as though I had put my foot into a trap. 'Why?' I asked.

'I'm not well.'

'You're not telling me the truth.'

She did not reply, but walked on amongst the ferns and the broom bushes with her usual slow, firm step and climbed up on to a small, round hillock; then she turned towards me, stooped down and, taking hold of the hem of her dress with both hands, pulled it right up to her belly. I could see her straight thighs pressed close together, sheathed in their silk stockings, and, at the lowest point of her belly, where usually the transparent stuff of her slip allowed a glimpse of the dark groin, the pale, opaque patch of a wad of cotton-wool. 'Now d'you believe me?' she asked.

I answered angrily: 'Yes, it's true, with you it's always true.'

She pulled down her dress in silence, and then asked: 'Why do you say that? On other occasions I've never refused you.'

I felt now that I was going almost mad; frustrated desire joined forces with my usual obsession of being unable to possess her, as though this day's discomfiture were only one of the many impossibilities of a never-changing situation. 'I wanted you so much,' I said, 'and by coming with me and letting me think you were willing, you made my desire twice as great. Why didn't you tell me at once that you weren't well?'

She looked at me with indifference, like a shopkeeper who, instead of an article which is out of stock, offers another which is quite different and of inferior value. 'But we're going to be together all day,' she answered.

'But I wanted to make love.'

'We'll do that some other time, perhaps even tomorrow.'

'But I wanted to do it today—now.'

'You're like a child.'

Silence followed. Cecilia was walking amongst the bushes with bent head and appeared to be looking for something. Then she stooped, picked a blade of grass and put it between her teeth. I said furiously: 'That's why you suggested that we should spend the day together. Just because you knew you couldn't make love with Luciani.'