The Empty Canvas by Alberto Moravia

Author:Alberto Moravia [Moravia, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

6

Cecilia, as I think I have made clear, was not talkative, in fact it might be said that her natural inclination was to keep silence; but even when she spoke she contrived, as it were, to be silent at the same time, thanks to the disconcertingly brief, impersonal quality of her manner. Words, in her mouth, seemed to lose all real significance, and were reduced to abstract sounds as though they were words in a foreign language that I did not know. The lack of any kind of accent or dialect and of any inflection of social class, the complete absence of revealing commonplaces, the reduction of conversation to pure and simple declarations of incontrovertible facts such as 'It's hot today'—all these confirmed this impression of abstractness. I would ask her, for example, what she had done on the evening of the day before; and she would answer: 'I had dinner at home and then I went out with Mother and we went to the cinema together.' Now these words, as I immediately noticed—'home', 'dinner', 'mother', 'cinema'—which in another mouth would have meant what they usually mean, and consequently, according to how they were uttered, would have made me see whether she was lying or telling the truth, these same words, in Cecilia's mouth, seemed to be nothing more than abstract sounds, behind which it was impossible to imagine the reality either of truth or of falsehood. How it was that Cecilia contrived to speak and at the same time give the impression of being silent, I have often wondered. And I came to the conclusion that she had only one means of expression, the sexual one, which however was obviously impossible to interpret even though original and powerful; and that with her mouth she said nothing, not even things concerned with sex, because her mouth was, so to speak, a false orifice, without depth or resonance, that did not communicate with anything inside her. So much so that often, looking at her as she lay beside me on the divan after our intercourse, flat on her back with her legs open, I could not help comparing the horizontal cleft of her mouth with the vertical cleft of her sex and remarking, with surprise, how much more expressive the latter was than the former—and with the same purely psychological quality as those features of the face by which a person's nature is revealed.

I had, furthermore, to discover what was concealed behind a remark such as: 'I had dinner at home and then I went out with Mother and we went to the cinema together'; whether, in fact, a dinner and a home, a mother and a cinema were really concealed behind the words, or possibly an appointment with the peroxide-haired actor; and thus, all at once, I was seized with a furious desire to know Cecilia better, for hitherto I had not taken the trouble to find out anything about her because, being under the illusion that I possessed her through our sexual relationship, I was under the illusion that I knew everything.

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