The telephone went on ringing for a long time; then at last came Cecilia’s voice, neutral, colorless: “Is that you? What is it?”
“I’ve been thinking it over; I’d like to see you today.”
“Today’s impossible.”
“Why is it impossible?”
“Because I can’t.”
“Do you have to go and see that film producer again today?”
This time she was silent, as though she were waiting for me to ring off. I waited too, hoping that she would be hypocritical enough to give me a word of affection, as any other woman would have done, seeing herself to be, quite rightly, suspected. But Cecilia had no imagination and never said a word more than was necessary. After a long silence, she concluded: “Till tomorrow, then; good-bye.”
I left the bar, got into my car and parked two blocks farther on, in front of Cecilia’s door. It was the first time in my life that I had spied upon anyone, and, as I have said, I was under the illusion that it was an easy thing to do. Apart from people who made a business of it, such as detectives and the like, was it not done by silly women through the bars of shutters, by urchins through keyholes, and by idlers in general in order to kill time? But when I began spying, I discovered a simple fact: it is one thing to spy as a profession, like a policeman, or out of idle curiosity, like silly women or street urchins, but quite another to spy for a precise and directly personal reason. Not ten minutes had passed, in fact, before I realized that I was suffering far more than if I had stayed in my studio mentally analyzing my suspicions, without seeking otherwise to verify the basis of them. I continued now to be suspicious of Cecilia in just the same way; but to the misery of suspicion was added that of espionage. If at least I had known the exact moment at which she would come out; then I could have felt easy until, let us say, one minute before she appeared in the doorway. But since I was ignorant of when that moment would arrive, each instant that passed had, for me, the exaggeratedly painful quality of that one single instant when I would see her actually appear. And, instead of being subdivided into a number of easily justifiable periods of delay (the usual delays one concedes to all women, due to the exigencies of the toilet, to a telephone call, a visit, and so forth) sufficiently prolonged to allow of some measure of repose, the period of waiting, and of facing disappointment at every second, increased steadily in intensity, strained and vacant, like a single shrill note rising up and up, or a monotonous pain growing more and more severe.
I waited calmly for the first ten minutes, for I was certain that Cecilia would not come out during that time, since I had mounted guard at ten minutes to three and knew that she never went out before three. These first ten minutes went by without Cecilia appearing, and then I allowed her another ten. These minutes went by, and yet a further ten, and then I decided to wait ten minutes more, though I was quite unable, this time, to imagine what could be keeping her indoors. These empty, but still endurable, ten minutes passed more slowly than the first thirty, seeing that I did not intend to go on waiting and indeed hoped that Cecilia would appear at the third or fourth minute; but she did not come and I found myself faced for the fifth time with an empty period which was as repugnant to me as a huge, deserted square must be to a man suffering from agoraphobia. I waited, nevertheless, telling myself with a kind of mystical hopefulness that this time Cecilia was bound to come. But she did not come, and I resigned myself to waiting a further ten minutes, comforting myself, for lack of anything better, by reflecting that this would make a complete hour, and an hour is the longest time that anyone can wait in any possible circumstances. But naturally (I say naturally, because I now felt that Cecilia’s appearance would be a fact against nature, a miracle)—naturally she did not come this time either, and I prepared for the seventh time to wait another ten minutes, justifying my decision with the subtle, arbitrary reflection that, an hour being the longest time one could wait, I must give Cecilia ten minutes over the hour, if only out of politeness. At this point, however, I became aware that my mind was no longer working, and was thus refusing to keep me company while I waited. I was alone with myself, that is, with the misery which at that moment was my only mode of existence, and the only two things that meant anything to me now were the watch on my wrist and the door upon which my eyes were fixed. My plan was to glance at my watch at intervals of three minutes; the rest of the time I kept my eyes on the door as much as possible, as though I were afraid that Cecilia might come out with the speed of lightning and vanish during that one moment when I looked down at my watch. But invariably my impatience caused me to think the three minutes had gone by after only one minute had passed, and that the effort with which I forced myself to stare at the door became suddenly unendurable, as is any muscular tension that is continued for too long. And so I looked too often at my watch and was astonished to see that the minutes of this time of waiting appeared to be infinitely slower than any other minutes I had ever waited in my life; and on the other hand I felt an almost unconquerable longing to take my eyes off the door, the threshold of which seemed deserted only because I was looking at it, as though its stones and bricks and plaster knew of my waiting and maliciously withheld Cecilia’s appearance just because I desired it so much.
I waited thus for ten minutes beyond the hour, and then for another ten, because at twenty minutes past four, as I knew, Cecilia’s mother went off to the shop which was not far away and which opened at half past four, and Cecilia sometimes waited to go out until her mother had gone. But at a quarter past four, quite suddenly, as though my muscles had given an involuntary jerk, without thinking I started the car and moved away. I did not go far, however. At the bar at the corner I stopped, got out, went in and telephoned. “She must have gone out,” replied Cecilia’s mother in an uncertain tone. “I’ve been in the kitchen and I haven’t seen her. She may have gone out five minutes ago, or maybe half an hour ago.” I rushed out of the bar, jumped into the car and went very fast up and down that street and the adjacent streets, pressing on as far as the bus stop where I knew Cecilia used to wait for her bus, but I found nothing. Evidently her mother had been wrong and Cecilia had not gone out five minutes or half an hour before, but only a minute or so, and thus had come out of the building at the very moment when I was looking for her in the neighboring streets; unless possibly she had come halfway downstairs and then gone back again, for some reason of her own that I could not imagine, and so was now back again in the flat. But I had no desire to make any more telephone experiments; so I decided to go and lie in wait in front of the house in which Luciani lived. This was in the Parioli district, in Via Archimede, a narrow, winding street which circles around the hill between two rows of modern houses. I had already explored this street some days previously, not so much with the purpose of spying as to see the place where I knew Cecilia so often went nowadays; and I seemed to remember that opposite the actor’s house there was a bar from which it would be easy to watch it. And indeed, when I got out of the car and looked into the bar, I found I was not mistaken: in the window there were two or three little tables from which, looking through between bottles and boxes of sweets, I could easily watch the door of the house opposite without being observed.
I sat down, ordered coffee and began my spying—an occupation which by this time I hated with my whole heart. The door of the house in which the actor lived was framed in black marble and stood out against the white façade like an obituary notice on the page of a newspaper, but I immediately discovered that a bottle of whisky displayed in the window concealed at least half of it. It was quite possible that Cecilia might slip in or out of the house without my being aware of it, through the half of the door that I could not see. I tried moving my chair, but then I could not see the door at all because it was completely hidden by a large box of English biscuits. I wondered whether I could possibly put out my hand and remove the bottle; but I saw I could not do so without making the barman suspicious. In the end I decided to get rid of the embarrassing object by acquiring it. It was true that the barman might well have a similar bottle in reserve and would therefore not give me the one from the window, but I had no other means of achieving my aim. I called out: “I want that bottle there.”
He came over at once, a young, tough-looking man, thin and very pale, with one noticeable feature—a harelip which was ill concealed beneath a drooping black mustache. He asked, in a deep, confidential tone of voice: “The bottle of Canadian whisky?”
“Yes, that one.”
He bent forward, cautiously took the bottle from the window and appeared to be making a move to replace it with another standing near it. I said hastily, in a commanding voice: “Let me see it.”
Slightly surprised, he handed me the bottle and I pretended to examine it at leisure, in the hope that he would forget the empty place in the window. Fortunately, at that moment a customer came in; the barman left me and went back behind the counter. After an interval he brought me my coffee, but he did not put any other bottle in place of the one he had given me. I breathed freely again and set myself to the task of watching the door which was now entirely visible.
I calculated that Cecilia would have taken the bus because I knew she had no money and that she was never in too much of a hurry to get to her appointments. It took at least twenty minutes to go by bus from Cecilia’s home to the Parioli district. All this, of course, depended upon whether Cecilia had really gone out a minute before my telephone call and whether she had really gone to see Luciani. I decided—provisionally, at least—that these two suppositions were correct, and therefore spent about twenty minutes in tolerable ease, though without for one instant taking my eyes off the door.
When these first twenty minutes were over, I waited patiently for a further ten, and then found myself confronted with this dilemma: either Cecilia had arrived before me by taxi (this was not improbable: I had had to stop at three sets of traffic lights), or she had not arrived at all. What ought I to do? Wait for her to come out or go away? I was so sure that Cecilia had gone to see Luciani that day that in the end I decided to wait. Furthermore, I said to myself, if Cecilia had arrived, say, five minutes before me, I should anyhow have thirty-five minutes less to wait.
But, as though to deny me even this modest consolation, suddenly, right in front of my eyes, was the figure of a man in a green overcoat. It seemed to me that there was something familiar about his back, and when he moved to cross the street, I recognized him beyond doubt by his broad shoulders and above all by his artificial-looking, too-bright fair hair; it was the actor. I saw him go in the door and vanish.
So my vigil was only just beginning. Either Cecilia had arrived before Luciani and had gone up to his flat to wait for him, or she had not come at all; but I, in order to make certain, would now have to wait for goodness knows how long. And the thirty minutes I had already spent in spying had been spent in vain.
I realized that if my wait in front of Cecilia’s house had been painful, that in front of the actor’s house was a hundred times more so. When I waited outside Cecilia’s house, I had been waiting for her to finish eating or dressing or talking to her mother—all of them innocent things; but as I waited outside Luciani’s house I was actually waiting for her to finish making love. Thus, whereas I had suffered an hour earlier from having to endure a shapeless, empty period of expectation which my imagination had not been able to fill, now, when I knew perfectly well why Cecilia was in Luciani’s flat, I had to endure a period of waiting which contained the whole shape and rhythm of the sexual act. Now, in contrast to what had happened earlier, if I looked at my watch I could calculate to the minute what was going on in the actor’s flat. At this moment Cecilia is pulling off her sweater over her head. At this moment, naked, she is going over to the bed, is getting on to it, is lying down. At this moment she is having her first orgasm, and after two or three violent jerks of her belly, she throws back her head and lies back exhausted. All these imaginings, naturally, renewed the feeling I had of not possessing, of never having possessed her, since hitherto I had deceived myself into thinking I possessed her simply because I had possessed her body, and that body was now in the arms of Luciani.
Apart from all this, the feeling of Cecilia’s elusiveness was further increased by my uncertainty as to whether she was in fact with Luciani in his flat. After all, there was a possibility that they might not be seeing each other that day. In that case my imaginings became truly those of the most ordinary kind of jealous lover, who builds up a whole castle of hypotheses upon the foundation of a small and fallacious clue. Nevertheless, this did not in any way imply that Cecilia was not unfaithful to me; it merely meant that she was not being unfaithful on that particular day.
Finally I thought I would telephone to Luciani; I might possibly be able, by means of some sound or other, to detect Cecilia’s presence in the flat. Luckily the telephone in the bar was near the door, so that I would be able to make the call without interfering with my watch on the street door opposite. I went over and dialed the number, and heard the actor’s voice. My calculations were not entirely wrong; while the actor was repeating, “Hello, hello,” I could distinctly hear the sound of a dance tune, and this made my heart sink, for I knew that Cecilia liked to make love to the sound of music. The actor, after repeating “Hello” once again, added the single word “Idiot!” and hung up the receiver. If the dance music had given me some vague idea of the size and arrangement and look of the room in which it was being played, this insulting word, in which I seemed to detect not only irritation at being disturbed but also male vanity aroused by the nature of the thing which had been disturbed, gave me a glimpse of Cecilia and the actor as they were at that moment—he standing naked beside the little table with the telephone on it, fully visible with his big chest and broad, hairy shoulders, with his muscular belly, and his sexual organ still, perhaps, in a state of erection, with his athletic, over-developed loins and legs; she, naked too, lying languidly on the bed, her eyes turned to gaze with delight at the limbs of her lover. I hung up the receiver and sat in the window again.