The Empty Canvas (38 page)

As she lay down she looked at me with curiosity and amusement and also, I thought, with a touch of agitation. The bundle of notes that I had taken from the envelope was a thick one; I calculated there must be fifty notes of ten thousand lire each. I started from the bottom, symbolically, by spreading a single, carefully smoothed note over her dark, curly groin. Then, moving upwards, I covered the white, childish belly, the slim waist, and the beautiful brown bosom, placing one banknote on each breast. I wrapped another note across her neck; four I put on her shoulders and four on her arms. Then I went down again below her belly, and covered her legs with notes right down to her small feet. Cecilia at first followed this operation with childish, attentive curiosity, just as though it were a game; then all of a sudden she began to laugh, with nervous uncontrollable laughter. I could not help thinking hopefully that this was the laughter of a woman who finally yields to her lover, after repulsing him for a long time. In such a way, I reflected, must Danaë have laughed when she felt the divine shower of gold flooding her with amorous voluptuousness. Still laughing, Cecilia continued to take part in the game, pointing to the places that still remained to be covered: 'There's still room here, put one here, and here.' Finally she lay still, looking like some strange bedizened animal, flat on her back with her face turned towards me and her eyes wide open. I said curtly: 'There are twenty-four ten thousand-lire notes. If you don't go to Ponza, I'll give you the lot.'

She started laughing again and exclaimed: 'I thought there'd be more than that.'

I thought it might not be enough for her, so I went on: 'I'll give you twice the amount, the number that's needed to cover you back and front. That's fair, because after all you have a back and a front.'

Lying now beneath the banknotes, motionless and as though afraid of disarranging them and so spoiling the game, she looked at me with an expression of regretful perplexity. At last she said: 'I'm sorry, Dino, but it's not possible.' She was silent a moment, still looking at me, then she went on with an unusual gentleness that could not have been feigned: 'Let's make love now. Then, when I come back from Ponza, I promise you we'll do it more often than in the past and I promise you we'll see more of each other.'

I saw that the gentleness in her voice was due to the excitement that the game with the banknotes had aroused in her. This excitement, according to my intention, should have allowed me to take possession of her through the medium of money; now, on the contrary, after her refusal, it made her once more elusive and unattainable. 'You really won't do as I ask?' I demanded.

'No, it's not possible.'

She lay still, taking care not to move beneath her garment of banknotes, as though the game were going on and she were awaiting its final phase. Then suddenly I felt myself assailed by the usual blind male impulse, which urged me to take her because I could not succeed in possessing her, as if by taking her I could in fact possess her. I threw myself upon her and covered her body, and the banknotes that covered it, with my own body. Cecilia showed at once that she had expected the game to end in this way, clinging closely to me with her arms and legs, while the banknotes, horribly dirty and incongruous, crackled and slithered between our two ardent, sweating bodies. Other notes, meanwhile, had become scattered round us on the bed-covers; and yet others on the pillow, amongst Cecilia's hair.

Afterwards, Cecilia lay supine, her legs apart, motionless and sated like a great snake that has swallowed an animal bigger than itself. I lay on top of her, no less motionless; and when I reflected upon our two separate stillnesses, I realized that mine was the stillness that can follow a futile, exhausting effort, while hers had the quality of full, rich satisfaction. Suddenly I recalled the time when I was still painting, when, after working the whole day, I would feel tired, not with an exhausted tiredness such as I felt now but with a satisfied tiredness like Cecilia's; and I said to myself that in our relationship it was she, in reality, who possessed me and I who was possessed, although nature, for her own ends, deceived both Cecilia and me into thinking the opposite. And so, I thought, as a man I was finished: not only would I never paint again, but I should also destroy myself in the pursuit of that species of mirage which seemed to rise up from Cecilia's womb as from the sands of the desert; and in the end, like Balestrieri, I should sink into the darkness of mania.

I was drawn out of these reflections by Cecilia's voice, saying: 'At least you must admit that I'm not mercenary.'

I asked, in surprise: 'Why d'you say that?'

'Any other woman, in my place, would have taken the money and then gone away just the same.'

'And what then?'

'Well, you must admit that, in a way, I've saved you a lot of money.'

'It's not I who have saved it,' I said, hoping, almost, that Cecilia had thought better of it and was going to accept my proposal; 'it's you who have lost it.'

'Just as you like. Now I want to ask you a favour.'

'What is that?'

'You were ready to give me nearly half a million lire if I didn't go away. Instead, lend me a small part of that amount, forty thousand.'

'But what d'you want it for?' I inquired stupidly.

'Luciani, as you know, is out of a job, and we have very little money. It would be useful for our trip to Ponza.'

Before I realized what was happening, I had leapt forward and fastened my hands round Cecilia's neck, shouting the first words of abuse that came into my head. They say that at certain moments of great intensity a man can think and act in contrary ways. In that second when I clasped Cecilia's neck, my thought was that perhaps the only way of possessing her was by killing her. By killing her I should snatch her away from all the things that rendered her elusive, and should shut her up, once and for all, in the prison of death. And so, for one instant, I thought of strangling her, there on my mother's bed, amongst the banknotes she had refused, in the house in which we should have lived together if we had got married. And I should certainly have done it if I had not realized, in that same lucid, lightning-like moment, that this crime, at least as far as my intended purpose was concerned, would be useless. Instead of achieving full possession of Cecilia and liberating myself from her, I should, in reality, merely succeed in establishing her complete and final independence; wrapped in a mystery doubly sealed by death, she would have then eluded me for ever, irreparably. I relaxed my grip and said in a low voice: 'Forgive me, for a moment you made me lose my head.'

She did not appear to have understood the danger in which she had been. 'You hurt me,' she said. 'Whatever put it into your head to get angry like that?'

'I don't know. Again, please forgive me.'

'Never mind. It doesn't matter.'

I raised myself slightly on my elbow, quickly collected some of the notes and handed them to her, saying: 'Here's seventy thousand lire: is that enough?'

'That's too much, forty thousand would be enough.'

'Take them, they'll come in useful.'

'Thank you.'

She kissed me with ingenuous, disarming gratitude, and again I felt desire for her, still from the same old reason that she was there in my arms and at the same time not there, and that possibly, possibly, if I took her once again, possibly she
might
be there and might stay there. And so, with no fury this time, but gently, tenderly, despairingly, I passed my arm under her back, being careful not to hurt her with my wrist-watch, and when my hand, encircling her slender waist, almost met my other arm, I insinuated my legs between hers, passed my other arm under her neck, and when I held her closely enveloped and confined, penetrated slowly into her, as though I were hoping, by this slowness, to achieve the full possession which on all other occasions had eluded me. At the end, I asked her: 'That was good, wasn't it?'

'Yes, it was good.'

'Very good or rather good?'

'Very good.'

'Better than usual?'

'Yes, perhaps better than usual.'

'Are you happy?'

'Yes, I'm happy.'

'D'you love me?'

'Yes, you know I love you.'

These were words I had used countless times, but never with a feeling so utterly desperate. As I said them, I was thinking that Cecilia would now go away to Ponza and that her departure, the concrete symbol of her elusiveness, would inevitably give new strength to my love and to my consequent longing to free myself from her by possessing her. So, when she came back, everything would begin all over again, just as it had been before she went away, but worse than before. I felt a sudden desire not to stay with her any longer, to get away from her. I said, as gently as I could: 'It's time we went away. Otherwise my mother might come and find us here, and that would be tiresome.'

'I'll get dressed at once.'

'Don't be in too much of a hurry. I said it would be tiresome, but not more than tiresome. It isn't really important. At most, my mother would protest not so much at the thing itself as at the way it was done.'

'How d'you mean?'

'My mother attaches great importance to what she calls good form. That's what we've failed to observe, by making love in her bedroom instead of in my studio.'

'What is good form?'

'I don't know. Probably it's the result of thinking a great deal about money.'

We finished dressing in silence. Then I collected the banknotes that were lying scattered over the bed, went into the bathroom and wrote in pencil on the envelope: 'Have taken 70,000 lire. Thank you. Dino'; and I put the envelope back in the safe. Cecilia was rearranging the bed-covers. Then she asked: 'Where are we going now?'

A sudden impulse of rage swept over me. 'We're not going anywhere,' I said; 'it wouldn't be any use now, anyhow. I'll take you home.'

I almost hoped she might show displeasure or regret in face of this abrupt change in our programme. Instead of which she answered, with indifference: 'Just as you like.'

'Just as
I
like?' I insisted. 'No, it's just as
you
like; it's you who are going away tomorrow. It's up to you to say whether you want us to stay together until midnight or not.'

'It's all the same to me.'

'Why is it all the same?'

'Because I know I shall see you again in two weeks' time.'

'Are you sure of that?'

'Yes.'

'Oh well, I'll take you home.'

During this little discussion we had left the bedroom and gone down to the ground floor. We walked along the passage; an intense hubbub, like the clamour of a disturbed beehive, could be heard on the other side of the closed doors; the party was still going on. We followed the passage into the hall and went out in front of the house.

The unexpected freshness of the summer night made me look up instinctively at the sky as I opened the door of the car: the storm which had been hanging over the city all day long had burst elsewhere; the sky had now cleared and stars were shining brightly, and here and there a few light clouds mingled their whiteness with the luminous whiteness of the Milky Way. Cecilia, I thought, would have fine weather for her trip to Ponza; and again I was conscious of jealousy gnawing at my anxious heart. Yes, I would be counting the days, the hours, the minutes and the seconds as I waited for her to come back, knowing all the time that during those same days and hours and minutes and seconds she would be joking, laughing, strolling about, going in a boat on the sea, and making love with Luciani—eluding me, in fact. And when she came back, I should not be able to restrain myself from starting to run after her again, like Balestrieri, in whose footsteps, it seemed, I was condemned to follow.

I do not think I spoke more than two or three times, and then more and more briefly, during our drive from my mother's villa to Cecilia's home. Once I asked her, stupidly, to write to me, although I was very well aware that Cecilia, so reticent in speech, must be utterly dumb in correspondence and so would not write anything, even a picture post-card. We reached the street in which she lived. I stopped and she got out and I said good-bye to her, after kissing her lightly on the mouth. I watched her as she crossed the street and thought: 'Let's hope that at least she'll turn round in the doorway and smile and wave to me.' But I was disappointed in my expectation. Cecilia crossed the threshold and disappeared without turning round.

As soon as she disappeared I realized that I had no desire to go to my studio or anywhere else. The only place where I wished to go was Cecilia's home: it seemed to me that I had not finished with her yet; I wanted to go up to the flat, ring the doorbell, go with her to her bedroom and there go to bed with her for the third time that day. I knew that this was madness, that by having her again I should not be possessing her any more than I possessed her now—which meant not at all—and that the thing which eluded me was not indeed her almost too complaisant body, but something which had nothing to do with her body. And yet I felt that this was the only thing I wanted to do.

I do not know how long I debated this problem, sitting in my car in the deserted street in front of Cecilia's door. Finally I said to myself that Cecilia, after all, had almost insisted on our being together until midnight, and that therefore there would be nothing strange about it if I, regretting that I had left her so early, telephoned and suggested taking her out to dinner. Cecilia, as I knew, had an almost unlimited patience, and when she refused to do something she never refused because she did not want to do it but merely because she could not do otherwise. Suddenly making up my mind, I quickly backed the car to the corner, got out and went into the bar.

But the telephone was occupied by precisely the type of person whom one could not possibly expect to finish quickly—a girl of modest appearance, a servant-girl, perhaps, who was speaking and answering in an extremely low voice and with the long reflective pauses of one who is engaged in a sentimental conversation. I did not hesitate a moment, but went straight out again and walked back resolutely back to Cecilia's door. Why should I telephone? I would go up to the flat, find her there and hurry her into her bedroom.