Free Boredom by Alberto Moravia Page B

now—just as you can look at the window display of an airline company and see a section of an airplane engine, with all its numerous and complicated parts. It was, in fact, the mechanism of despair, which, if I returned to live with my mother, would cause me to recoil from money into a state of impotence, from impotence to boredom and from boredom to Rita or to some other degradation of a similar or parallel kind. Better to go back to the studio in Via Margutta, where despair expressed itself, at least, in the empty canvas upon which I would never paint.
    At this point in my thoughts I heard a discreet, but obviously impatient and confidential scratching at the door; and before I realized what I was doing I had undone my belt, slipped off my trousers, then thrown down the mattress and laid myself flat on the bed. Then I called to Rita to come in.
    She came in immediately, assured herself by a quick glance that I was on the bed, and then turned to close the door. I lay with my whole body quite still, except in that place to which desire sent a surge of excited blood: I stared fixedly at my belly, my chin glued to my chest, just as a corpse lying on a catafalque seems to be staring at its own body after it is laid out and ready to be carried to the cemetery. Rita, meanwhile, had come forward and was standing close against the bed; she appeared to be contemplating me, through her hypocritical glasses, as one contemplates an object which one has never seen before and which is worth studying. Then I put out my hand and took hold of her hand which was hanging at her side and pulled it forward in the way one pulls at the bridle of an animal that is not so much recalcitrant as timid; and I felt her whole body following the direction of her hand. I guided her hand toward the center of my body, and as soon as I was sure that her hand had closed, I let go of it. She was now standing quite still, bending slightly forward, her arm stretched out over me, a lively red in her cheeks below the two dark circles of her glasses. Then she said in a slow, contented voice: “How disgusting!” and I was surprised because those were the words I would have used myself to express the mingled feeling of repugnance and excitement that I had at that moment.
    I heaved a deep sigh and asked, finally, in a low voice and without looking at her: “Why did you come here?”
    She said nothing; she seemed incapable of speaking.
    “To take the stain out of my trousers? Well then, go and do it. What are you waiting for?”
    I saw her give a start, as though I had hit her in the face. Reluctantly, she opened her fingers, one after the other, then she went out of my field of vision. I realized she had gone out of the room too, for I heard the sound of the door opening and shutting. As soon as I was sure she had gone, I jumped off the bed and went and opened the wardrobe. As I was hoping, beside the silk dressing gown which, according to my mother’s advice, I ought to be putting on, there was hanging in a cellophane bag the only suit I had not taken away with me when I had gone to live in the studio—my dinner jacket and trousers. I took out the trousers and put them on. They fitted me pretty well, though perhaps a bit large in the waist; I had been fatter ten years ago, for my mother’s food was richer and more nourishing than that of the modest restaurants I had been frequenting recently. I looked at myself in the glass; with my brown linen jacket and black trousers I had the appearance of an unemployed waiter. Very slowly I opened the door and, seeing that there was no one there, ran hurriedly downstairs and, avoiding the reception rooms, went along the passage into the hall and so out of the front door.
    The two cars, the old and the new, were standing there side by side in front of the house. The cloudy sky, the trees, the villa were vaguely reflected in the clear glossiness of the new car; the old car, on the other hand, looked dull and dim—with the