Agostino by Alberto Moravia

Author:Alberto Moravia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-737-2
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2014-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

* G.L. Bickersteth, Carducci: A Selection of His Poems, with Verse Translations, Notes, and Three Introductory Essays (London, New York, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913).

3

AFTER that day a dark and tormented period began for Agostino. On that day his eyes had been forced open, but what he learned was far more than he could bear. What oppressed and embittered him was not so much the novelty as the quality of the things he had come to know, their massive and undigested importance. He had thought, for example, that after those revelations, his relations with his mother would have been settled, and the unease, irritation, and repulsion that her caresses provoked in him, especially in recent days, would be almost magically resolved and appeased by a new and serene awareness. But this did not happen. His irritation, unease, and repulsion persisted. While before they were signs of a son’s affection, tainted and troubled by the dark awareness of his mother’s womanhood, now, after the morning spent under Saro’s tarp, they stemmed from an acrid, impure curiosity that his continued respect for family made intolerable. While before he had struggled in the dark to free that affection from an unjustified repulsion, now he felt almost obliged to separate his rational new knowledge from the promiscuous, visceral sense that he was born of a person he wanted to see only as a woman. He felt as if all his unhappiness would vanish on the day he could see in his mother the same beautiful creature perceived by Saro and the boys. And he searched doggedly for occasions that would confirm this conviction, only to find that he had replaced his former reverence with cruelty and his affection with sensuality.

At home his mother, as in the past, did not conceal herself from his gaze, nor did she notice any change in it. Agostino felt as if she were provoking and pursuing him with her maternal immodesty. Sometimes he would hear her calling him and find her at her vanity, in dishabille, her breasts half naked. Or he would wake up and see her leaning over him for a morning kiss, allowing her dressing gown to fall open and her body’s outlines to appear through the transparency of her light, wrinkled negligee. She walked back and forth in front of him as if he weren’t there. She would pull her stockings on and off, slip into her clothes, dab on some perfume, apply her makeup. All of these gestures, which had once seemed so natural to Agostino, now seemed to take on meaning and become an almost visible part of a larger, more dangerous reality, dividing his spirit between curiosity and pain. He repeated to himself “She’s only a woman” with the objective indifference of a connoisseur. But one moment later, unable to bear his mother’s un-awareness or his own attentions, he wanted to shout, “Cover yourself, stop showing yourself to me, I’m not who I used to be.” Anyway, his hopes to see his mother only as a woman failed almost immediately.

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