Among all the many things I had failed to foresee, there was this—the possibility of her going away. Seized with a sudden anxiety, I asked: “Where are you going?”
“I’m going away. It’s better for us not to go on seeing each other.”
“But why? Wait. Wait a moment. We must talk.”
“What’s the use of talking? We don’t agree, anyhow. Our characters are too different.”
Thus Cecilia was again eluding me, and in two ways—first, by reducing the value of her own confession: between herself and me, according to her, there was merely a difference of character, as though unfaithfulness were a question of individual temperament and not of moral standards; secondly, by leaving me before I could leave her. Passing suddenly from the moral to the physical, I was seized with desire for her; it was as though I should be able to pretend to myself, if I took her at that moment, that I was possessing her through the physical act after psychological possession had failed. I caught her round the waist as she was already moving toward the door and whispered in her ear: “We must make love, for the last time.”
“No, no, no,” she replied, trying to pull herself away, “that’s all finished.”
“Come here.”
“No, let me go.”
She struggled determinedly, but without any hostility, as though she were withholding herself simply because I was incapable of offering her my love in a more efficacious manner. In her enigmatic, unmoving eyes there was an ambiguous hint of allurement; and in her body below the waist, a submissiveness which I did not perceive in its childish, slender upper part. Nevertheless she struggled, and when I succeeded in making her sit on the divan she drew back a little out of reach of my lips. Then an idea came to me, or rather an impulse. That morning I had taken twenty thousand lire, in two notes of ten thousand, out of my drawer and put them in my pocket. I pulled Cecilia violently toward me; and at the same time, as she turned her face away from me and my kiss landed on her neck, I slipped the two notes into her hand. She lowered her eyes to take a quick glance at the unaccustomed object in the palm of her hand; then her hand closed, I felt her body abandon its resistance, and I saw that she had lowered her eyelids as if ready to fall asleep—which was her way of showing me that she accepted my love and was prepared to enjoy it.
And so I took her, without her undressing; with a fury and a violence greater than usual, for it seemed to me that her body had become a kind of arena where I had to compete with the actor in vigor and tenacity. I took her in silence; but at the moment of the orgasm I blew the word “Bitch!” right into her face. I may have been wrong, but it seemed to me that a very faint smile hovered on her lips; I could not tell if she smiled for the pleasure she was feeling or at my insult.
Later, when she was half asleep and I was lying beside her, I reflected as usual that physical possession had in no way satisfied me. The fleeting, ambiguous, possibly ironical smile with which she had answered my insulting word confirmed, if anything, the futility of the carnal relationship. But I had seen her grasp the banknotes in her fist, and during our lovemaking she had put her hand up to her forehead so that the notes had been in front of my eyes all the time. I said to myself that considering the failure of my previous attempts at possession, money might possibly be the trap in which I could catch her. She had refused herself to me until the moment when I put the money in her hand; so that, contrary to what I had thought hitherto, she was venal. It was now a matter of proving that she really was so, that is, of reducing the mystery of her independence to a question of profit.
Cecilia slept beside me for a little, for her usual length of time and in her usual way; then she woke up, planted a kiss on my cheek with her usual mechanical tenderness, and finally rose to her feet, smoothing down her crumpled dress with both hands. The two banknotes, folded in four, were now lying on the floor where she had dropped them after we finished making love. She picked them up, opened her bag and slipped them, very carefully, into her purse. “Then you still want us to part company?” I asked.
She did not appear to grasp the allusion contained in the word “still”; she answered indifferently: “Just as you like. If you want us to go on, I don’t mind. If you want us to part company, let’s do so.”
And so, I reflected, not without astonishment, the money she had received and accepted had sufficed for one single time only; and it had failed to suggest to her listless imagination the alluring prospect of her being able to earn more in the future, in the same manner. “But,” I asked, “if you go on seeing me, why would you do so?”
“Because I’m fond of you.”
“If I asked you to give up Luciani, would you do it?”
“Oh no, not that.”
I was hurt, in spite of myself, at the firmness of her refusal. “You might answer me with a little less eagerness,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“So from now on I’ve got to go halves with Luciani?”
She seemed to become more animated, as though I had at last touched a sensitive spot. “But what does it matter to you?” she said. “Why are you so worried about it? I’ll come and see you as usual; nothing will be changed.”
I repeated to myself: “Nothing will be changed,” saying to myself that for her it was the truth. She was gazing at me now with a curious, almost regretful expression. At last she said: “You know, I should be sorry to leave you.”
I was struck by the undoubted sincerity of these words. “Would you really be sorry?” I asked.
“Yes, I’ve grown accustomed to you.”
“But you would be equally sorry to leave Luciani, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“You’ve grown accustomed to him too?”
“You’re two different things.”
I remained silent for a moment. How could we be two different things, seeing that Cecilia asked the same thing from both of us, which was in fact the mere physical relationship? “So you want to have us both?” I asked.
She nodded her head in a mysterious silence, full of impudent, childish covetousness. Then she said: “What fault is it of mine if I like being with both of you? You each of you give me something different.”
I felt tempted to ask her: “I give you money and Luciani gives you love—isn’t that so?” But I restrained myself, realizing that it was still too early for a question of that sort. Before I asked it, I would have to get to the bottom of her newly discovered venality. The fact that she had accepted money just this once might not have any significance. With a mingled feeling of anger and weariness, I said: “Very well then, you shall have both of us. We’ll have a try at it. But you’ll see yourself that it’s impossible to love two men at the same time.”
“Not at all; I tell you it’s perfectly possible.” She appeared to be extremely glad at having solved the problem of our relationship; stooping, she lightly touched my cheek with her lips and went off, telling me that she would telephone me next morning, as she did every day.
I turned to the wall and closed my eyes.
I HAD NOW to prove to myself that Cecilia was venal. I recalled all the times I had given money to prostitutes and told myself that if Cecilia was really venal I would have the same feeling for her that I had for these women after I had paid them—a feeling of possession, but of a possession depreciated and superfluous, a feeling that the person who had received the money was reduced to the status of an inanimate object, a feeling that, owing to this commercial valuation, she had forfeited all true value. It was only a step from this feeling to the sense of boredom which would liberate me from Cecilia and from my love for her. Certainly it was a degrading kind of possession, for the one who was possessed as well as for the one who possessed; and without doubt I should have preferred a different kind, which would have permitted of my parting from Cecilia as from somebody whom I now knew too well but did not despise; but I had at all costs to relieve my own misery. Indeed, I preferred to know that Cecilia was mercenary rather than mysterious; the knowledge that she was mercenary would give me a sense of possession that mystery denied me.
And so I acquired the habit, at the first moment of our meetings, of thrusting into Cecilia’s hand—without a word, as I had done the first time—a sum of money which varied, according to the day, from five to thirty thousand lire. In this way, I thought, the elusive, mysterious Cecilia, from whom I could not succeed in detaching myself would be replaced in a short time by a Cecilia who was not in the least elusive and who was entirely devoid of mystery. But this transformation did not take place. If anything, it was the opposite that happened: it was not the money that changed Cecilia’s character; on the contrary it was Cecilia, evidently the stronger of the two, who changed the character of the money.
Cecilia, when I thrust the folded banknotes into her palm, would immediately clench her fist, but without giving any other sign that she had received and accepted them. It was truly as if this money and the hand that gave it and the hand that received it belonged to a different world from the world in which Cecilia and I existed. Then, while I was embracing her, she would drop the notes on the floor beside the divan, and there they would remain, folded and crumpled, where I could see them easily while we were making love—the symbol, it seemed to me, of a method of possession which I fondly imagined to be more complete and satisfying than the one to which I was applying myself at the same moment. Afterward Cecilia, ready to tiptoe naked to the bathroom, would stoop swiftly and, with the graceful gesture of a runner bending to pick up a handkerchief dropped by his companion, would snatch up the notes with the tips of her fingers and throw them beside her bag on the table. When she was dressed she would go to the table, take up the notes, put them safely in her purse and shut the purse in her bag. Cecilia liked to do things always in the same way, as a kind of ritual. And so this detail of the money came to be included in the customary love ritual with perfect naturalness and even with a sort of grace, without, in fact, any of the meretricious significance which I had thought to be inevitable—indeed, like everything Cecilia did, without any significance at all.
At first, as I have said, I gave her from five to thirty thousand lire, wishing to see whether she would react in any way to these varying sums. I felt that if she said to me: “Last time you gave me twenty thousand lire, today you’ve given me only five—why is that?” I should have more than sufficient reason to consider that she was venal. But she never showed that she noticed whether the notes I put in her hand were single or double, green or red, as though the gesture of paying her had no particular significance but was simply one of the many gestures I made when I was with her, which I might have made in a different way or not at all, without our relationship being altered on that account. Then I decided to see what would happen if I stopped giving her money. Strange to say, I set about this experiment with a beating of the heart. I did not openly admit it to myself, but since I was almost convinced that these banknotes which I slipped furtively into Cecilia’s hand now constituted the chief grounds for our relationship, I was afraid of losing her at the very moment when I hoped to prove to myself that, in losing her, I had nothing to lose.
One day, therefore, I did not put anything into her hand. To my astonishment Cecilia, far from showing disappointment, did not even appear to have noticed the change that had occurred in the customary love ritual. In the clasp of the fingers that received my empty hand there was no feeling of surprise or dissatisfaction; it was exactly the same handclasp with which, on the previous days, she had announced to me after receiving the money that she was ready to give herself to me. That day she behaved during our lovemaking in the same way as on the days when I paid her; and she went away without alluding in any way to the fact that I had not paid her. I did the same thing two or three times, but Cecilia, childishly impenetrable, again gave no sign of having noticed anything. So I found myself faced with three possibilities: either Cecilia was venal, but was sufficiently superior and elegant in her astuteness not to show it; or she was absent-minded, but with a highly mysterious kind of absent-mindedness—that is, she was as elusive as before and as always, in spite of the money; or again, she was completely disinterested, and in this case too she eluded me and withdrew herself from my possession. I turned over this problem in my mind for some time, and in the end decided to get her with her back to the wall. One day I again slipped two ten thousand lire notes into her hand and said to her: “Look, I’ve given you twenty thousand lire.”
“Yes, I noticed you had.”
“It’s the first time I’ve done it, after giving you nothing for a week. Did you notice that too?”
“Of course.”
“You weren’t annoyed?”
“I imagined you hadn’t the money.”
Cecilia, completely devoid of curiosity as she was, had never questioned me about my family and did not know that I was rich. She took me for what I appeared—a painter in a sweater and a pair of corduroy trousers, with a very untidy studio and a decrepit car. And so her reply was, as usual, the only one she could give. “It’s true,” I went on, “I didn’t have the money, but I thought you might be annoyed that I stopped giving you any.”
“To be left without money is a thing that can happen to anyone,” she answered ambiguously.
“Supposing that from now on I couldn’t give you any more—what would you do?”
“You gave me some today; why think of the future?”
This was one of Cecilia’s fundamental responses: past and future, for her, did not exist; only the most immediate present, in fact only the actual fleeting moment, seemed to her worthy of consideration. I went on insisting, however: “But suppose I didn’t give you anything more; would you go on seeing me?”
She looked at me, and then finally replied: “Didn’t we see each other before you started giving me anything?” It was, I thought, the perfect answer. But her uncertain, dubious, questioning tone, as if she were not entirely sure of what she was saying, seemed to allow room for the supposition that if I did really stop paying her she would perhaps reconsider the whole question of our relationship. And yet even this was not certain. Cecilia, as I perceived, did not really know what she would do if I ceased to give her money; and this for the good reason that, being attached to the present and quite devoid of imagination, she could not foresee what feeling my financial shortcomings would arouse in her, and above all to what extent, once I had stopped paying her, she would feel the desire to make love with me, whether less or more or in the same way or in a different way or not at all. “Now listen,” I said, “I want to make a suggestion. Instead of my giving you sometimes five, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty thousand lire, as I do at present, we might agree on a fixed amount which I would give you once a month. What do you say to that?”