Free Boredom by Alberto Moravia Page A

her head aside, perhaps to hide a smile. “Go upstairs then, to your own room,” said my mother. “Take off your trousers and give them to Rita. Then put on the dressing gown which is in the cupboard and come down again. In the meantime I’ll be getting ready some papers that I want to show you.”
    So we went out, Rita and I, she almost running in front of me and saying: “I’ll go on ahead because that room has been shut up for a long time and at any rate I can open the windows,” and I following her and reflecting, with some degree of astonishment, that everything was working out according to the unwritten but inflexible rules for situations of this particular type: the mother who herself provides the son with a pretext for retiring with the maid; the maid and the son going off to the bed upon which they will lie together, each pretending to the other to take seriously the pretext provided by the mother; the maid excited and obsequiously eager; the son also excited but at the same time humiliated by stooping so low. With these thoughts in my mind I reached the first floor and went to my room, whither Rita had preceded me. I found her leaning out of the window, opening the shutters; when she turned around, rather red in the face from the effort, and from running, and also, perhaps, from excitement, I said to her abruptly: “Wait outside a moment and I’ll call you.”
    As soon as she had left the room I went slowly to the window and for a moment stood there, my back against the windowframe, gazing dreamily at the Italian garden which lay below. I am not given to remembering the past nor becoming emotional over places connected with the past, but that day I had decided to come back and live with my mother after an absence of ten years, and I could not help comparing my present state of mind with that of ten years earlier. And then, looking first at the fine Empire furniture in the room and then at the geometrical design of the Italian garden, all of which had remained exactly the same, I realized that I felt a sort of dismal relief at the idea that, fundamentally, I too was unchanged. No, I had not changed, and now I was coming back to live with my mother and I should resume the old habits of ten years ago; perhaps, gradually, I might even begin painting again, down there in the studio at the bottom of the garden, which had also remained unaltered. In fact it might even come about that, just as at one time going to live in Via Margutta had served, for a little, to renew my confidence in my work, so now, coming back to my mother’s villa would inspire in me once again—even if only for a short time—the illusion offered me by painting: life, in essence, consisted merely in this continual change of position; it was like being in an uncomfortable bed in which it was impossible to sleep for long on one side. But when my eyes came to rest on the bed inside the room and I saw that it had neither blankets nor sheets and that the mattress was rolled up, as is always done in uninhabited rooms, I became suddenly aware that the unchanging quality in things and in myself was not after all so positive as, for a moment, it had appeared to me. It was true that nothing had changed, but I was again going to find myself face to face with despair, with the same despair, also unchanged, that had formerly made me run away. Nothing was changed, but since time does not pass to no purpose, everything had become a little worse, even though remaining substantially unaffected. And so, while my mother was waiting for me downstairs in the study in order to explain to me, her papers ready in her hand, what it means to be rich, Rita was waiting outside the door for me to call her in and jump on her: two things apparently very remote from one another but in reality connected by a secret, rigorous mechanism. This mechanism was not unknown to me, indeed I had always suspected its existence; but I had never seen it with such clarity as I did