Free The Empty Canvas by Alberto Moravia Page A

persons of his own sex, whatever might be their condition or age, evidently seeing in them so many potential rivals. Balestrieri was a small man with very broad shoulders and very large feet—two disproportions which he took no trouble to conceal; in fact, he drew attention to them by wearing enormous check sports jackets and old-fashioned pointed, patent-leather shoes. Balestrieri's face had in it a strong look of the carnival mask or the Pompeian satyr: the hair silvery white, the skin a hectic red, eyebrows black as coal, a prominent nose, a large mouth, a pointed chin. The expression of his face was slightly doll-like, and yet, underneath, there was a look of uneasiness. I had heard from one or two elderly painters who knew Balestrieri well that he was a sex maniac, and that he had begun painting in his youth simply and solely in order to attract women to his studio, under the pretext of painting them. Afterwards, however, the habit of painting, so to speak, had remained with him—which for him meant, above all things, painting the female nude. Balestrieri, who was comfortably off, did not depend on his work for a living; he never exhibited and, in a way, painted for himself only; his friends told me that, so great was his affection for his pictures, on the rare occasions when he decided to give one of them away he used to make a copy and give it in place of the original. As for their quality, all his friends were agreed that he was an extremely bad painter.
    Once or twice, seized with curiosity, I tried to get a glimpse of Balestrieri's pictures from the courtyard, through his big window; and I caught sight of a few large, dark canvases upon which could be distinguished, with some difficulty, enormous female nudes with exaggerated forms, in attitudes far from natural.
    Balestrieri's studio was continually visited by a large number of women. I could see them through my own big window as they crossed the courtyard and then disappeared into the door leading to the ground floor corridor. I knew it was Balestrieri they were going to see, because the other two studios were inhabited by two painters who lived in them with their families and who, in any case, did not make use of models because they painted abstract pictures. Balestrieri's women bore witness to a great variety of tastes: they were young and middle-aged, of the working and the upper class, young girls and married women, fair and dark, thin and fat, short and tall; and it became clear that Balestrieri, like all Don Juans of a not very refined type, did not go in for subtleties but was a collector of adventures concerned more with quantity than quality. It was very rarely that Balestrieri had what is called a relationship, that is, a lasting love affair with any one woman; and even when he had, it did not interfere with other less important adventures. Especially during the first years that I lived in Via Margutta, Balestrieri's appearance, and the life he led, filled me with so much curiosity that I even went so far as to spy upon him to some extent. I actually drew up statistics of the women who visited him: as many as five different women in a month, that is, One new woman every six days, and on an average two visits a day. When I saw Balestrieri for the first time, he was fifty-five; at the time during which the events of which I am writing took place, he was sixty-five; yet, during those ten years, I never observed any change in his habits: I saw always the same number of women, more or less, as though time, for him, stood still.
    Or rather, to be more precise, a change there was, but it showed itself, not in a diminution of feminine visits as one might have expected, but in an increase. Balestrieri's eroticism, which I compared often to a volcano in continuous but quiet activity, in fact went through a phase, when he was about sixty-three, which I can only describe as a paroxysm. The women who filed through the courtyard and went and knocked at the old