The Empty Canvas (16 page)

'You've no secrets,' I said, 'because you know that I don't want your money. If I did, you'd have plenty.'

'What nonsense,' she replied; 'you're my son, aren't you?' And she went in front of me into the bathroom. This was a very large room, with the ostentatious, wasteful, useless spaciousness which, in the houses of the rich, is characteristic of places devoted to the care of the body. Between the bath and the wash-basin there were at least four yards of marble floor; and, between the basin and the water-closet, as many of tiled wall. I watched my mother as she went up to the wall, took hold of one of those hooks that are used for hanging towels on, turned it from left to right and then pulled it towards her. Four white tiles opened like a little door, uncovering the neat grey surface of a steel safe. 'Now let's see,' said my mother with schoolmistressy complacency, 'let's see: you try and open it, with the secret combination.'

My mother had taught me the combination of the safe, and I had learnt it almost against my own will, perhaps merely because I had a good memory; but I was most unwilling to make use of it, especially in her presence—rather as one is unwilling to take part in the rites of a religion in which one does not believe. 'Why?' I said. 'You open it; what's it got to do with me?'

'I wanted to see if you remembered it,' said my mother gaily. Rapidly, with her nervous white hand laden with massive rings, she turned some little wheels on the quadrant of the safe and then opened it. I had a glimpse of some rolls of share certificates and a number of white and yellow envelopes lying in confusion inside the deep recess. My mother, changing suddenly from gaiety to suspiciousness, threw me a mistrustful glance. I lowered my eyes in embarrassment. I saw, lying stranded on the porcelain surface of the lavatory pan, a wad of cotton wool; I put out my hand and pressed down the lever, and the water came gushing out. When I looked up again, my mother had already taken a bulging white envelope out of the safe and was now pushing the white tiles back into place. Then, turning back into the room, she said: 'I'll give you fifty thousand lire, for today. I've remembered that I need the other fifty thousand to pay a tradesman's bill.'

Thus the sum I had asked for was again reduced. I had counted on giving Cecilia a present to the value of two hundred thousand lire; I had resigned myself to accepting a hundred thousand; but fifty thousand seemed to me really a very small amount to alleviate the pain of our parting. I protested firmly. 'I need a hundred thousand lire today,' I said. 'You can pay the tradesman some other time.'

'No, I can't.' My mother went over to a tall, antique chest-of-drawers and, turning her back upon me, opened the envelope—as far as I could see—on the marble top. Without moving from the middle of the room, I said to her: 'In that envelope there are certainly more than fifty thousand lire, perhaps more than three hundred thousand, even. In that envelope you probably have at least half a million, so why do you tell me all these stories?'

She answered hastily, without turning round: 'No, there are only a hundred thousand lire in this envelope.'

'Let me see, then.'

She turned abruptly, with an unexpected movement, hiding the money with her shoulders and showing me a face which, beneath its usual withered dryness, had in it a trace of emotion. 'Dino,' she said, 'why don't you want to come and live with your mother again? if you were here, you'd have all the money you want.'

Such, then, was the bargain that my mother asked of me; and it mattered little that, instead of confronting me with a clear-cut dilemma, as she would have done with an insolvent debtor, she presented her proposal in the form of a pathetic appeal. I asked her, in my turn: 'What's that got to do with it, now?'

'I can't help noticing that you've come to see me simply in order to ask me for money, after I've not seen you for two months.'

'I've already told you that I've been busy.'

'If you came here, you could do just as you like. I wouldn't interfere in your life in any way at all.'

'Oh well, give me the money and don't let's speak of it any more.'

'You could come and go, stay out late at night, invite anyone you wanted, see all the women you wanted.'

'But I've no need to see anybody.'

'You ran away that day because you perhaps had the impression that I should have prevented you having a relationship with Rita. You're wrong: provided you had observed the decencies, I should not have prevented anything.'

This left me truly astonished. So my mother had noticed that there was something between me and Rita; but she had held her tongue, hoping, evidently, that an intrigue between the girl and myself would have strengthened my ties with the villa and therefore with her as well. And when had she noticed it? During luncheon? Or later? I had a sudden, unpleasant feeling of guilt, a familiar feeling, as though I were a little boy again and my mother had the right to put me in disgrace; but I managed to get the better of it by reflecting that, after all, my feeling of attraction towards Rita had its origin in the sense of despair which a visit to my mother never failed to arouse in me. Looking her straight in the face, I answered, in a tone of resentment: 'No, it wasn't because of Rita that I ran away, but because of you.'

'Because of me? Why, I even pretended not to notice how you were laying hands on her during luncheon.'

This remark and, even more, the tone in which it was spoken, made me furious. 'Exactly: and it was entirely because of you that I laid hands on her, as you call it.'

'Why, how do I come into it? So now it's my fault, is it, if you annoy the maids?'

'I laid hands on her because you put your feet on me.'

'Feet—whatever d'you mean?'

'By telling me not to talk about money affairs in front of servants. And also, let me tell you'—I had moved close to her now and was talking right into her face—'let me tell you, once and for all: all the stupid things I've ever done in my life, I've done because of you.'

'Because of
me?'

'I spent whole years of my youth,' I suddenly shouted, overcome by a terrible rage, 'dreaming of being a thief, a murderer, a criminal, just so as not to be what you wanted me to be. And you can thank heaven I didn't become one, for lack of opportunity. And all this because I lived with you, in this house.'

This time my tone of voice seemed really to frighten my mother, who, as long as it was a question of words, generally showed herself an intrepid adept in the game of give and take. But now, with a bewildered look on her face, she started shaking her head from side to side in a frightened way. 'Oh well,' she stammered, 'if it's like that, don't come and see me any more, don't come again to this house.'

Suddenly I grew calm again. 'No,' I said, 'I'll come to the house again, but don't ask me to love it.'

'What is it that's so odious about this house? Isn't it just like any other house?'

'On the contrary, it's a more beautiful and more comfortable house than a great many.'

'Well, then?'

I saw that she now appeared a little relieved at my not attacking her more directly. I answered her with a question: 'My father didn't like living in this house, either. Why was that?'

'Your father liked travelling.'

'Wouldn't it be more correct to say that he travelled because he didn't like living here?'

'Your father was your father, you are you.'

It was not the first time that arguments of this kind had taken place between me and my mother. I might shout and I might hurt her, but I always came to a stop in face of the real truth: that the house was repugnant to me because it was the house of a rich person. On the other hand my mother, by provoking and almost defying me, drove me, one might say, to the revelation of this truth; yet in reality she did not want me to reveal it and there always came a moment when she drew back and changed the course of the conversation. And so it was now. I was on the point of answering her when she went on, rather nervously: 'Say rather that you want to live on your own so as to have more freedom. You're making a mistake, but it doesn't matter. Here you are, then, here are your hundred thousand lire.'

She held out the money towards me, but only halfway; as I put out my hand, she drew it back again, as though she had realized that I was giving her nothing in exchange; and she added: 'By the way, do stay to lunch, anyhow.'

'I can't.'

'I've invited a few people to lunch. There's the Minister, Triolo, and his wife. A charming, intelligent, energetic man.'

'A Minister? How ghastly! Come on, give me this money.'

This time she gave me the money, but with a gesture that was at the same time both angry and hesitant, as if she wished to take it back at the very moment when she was handing it to me. 'Then come to lunch tomorrow,' she said. 'There'll be no one but you and me. Then I can give you the rest of the amount. If it's really true that you're going to Cortina . …'

'Why? D'you doubt it?'

'With you one never knows.'

My mother appeared now to be fairly well satisfied. I saw this from the way in which she walked downstairs in front of me, holding her head high and placing her hand on the brass rail. Perhaps she was satisfied, I thought, because she had succeeded once again in avoiding the great explanation between myself and her, the explanation that no one who is rich wants ever to happen, or else he could never again enjoy his wealth in peace. Her satisfaction was so great that, forgetting my recent refusal, she suggested to me, when we were in the hall: 'Why don't you stay until the Minister arrives? You could have a drink with him and then go away. He's an influential man, he might be useful.'

'Not to me, unfortunately,' I said with a sigh. 'Besides, I really must run away.'

My mother did not insist; she opened the front door and went out on to the doorstep and stood facing the drive, putting her hands under her armpits and shivering in the damp autumn air. 'If it goes on raining like this,' she said, looking up at the cloudy sky, 'it will be the end of my poor flowers.'

'Good-bye then, Mother,' I said; and stooping down, deposited the dry ritual kiss on the no less dry cheek. Then I ran off hastily to my car: I had seen another car appear suddenly at the far end of the drive and turn up towards the villa and I wanted, at all costs, to avoid an encounter with my mother's guests. I sat down at the wheel just at the moment when this other car came out on to the open space in front of the house and stopped. My mother was now standing at the front door in an attitude of readiness, so to speak, for the reception of her important guests. I started my engine and went off—just in time to see a chauffeur in a braided uniform get out and open the door of the car, at the same time taking off his cap and bowing, but not in time to see the owner of the black-shod masculine foot protruding from the doorway and feeling for the ground.

It was nearly one o'clock; I drove fast all the way along the Via Appia and reached the Piazza di Spagna shortly before the shops closed. I knew where to go to buy Cecilia's farewell present—to a shop in Via dei Condotti where they sold bags and umbrellas. It was full of smart women shoppers, who drew aside, with a faint look of surprise, at my appearance. Then, while I was hurriedly choosing a crocodile-leather bag, I caught sight of myself in a mirror and understood the reason for their glances. I looked like a tramp, and a rather alarming tramp at that: bald pate encircled with curly fair hair that badly needed cutting, a blur of reddish beard on the cheeks, charcoal-coloured sweater showing a shirt without a tie, shapeless, worn-out, olive green corduroy trousers. Tall, too, very tall in fact, in relation to the very low ceiling of the shop, with a forehead that looked like a vizor lowered over blue, bloodshot eyes, a short nose and a prominent mouth: a big ape, in fact. At the same time I realized, as I looked at myself, what a great proof of affection my mother had given me in inviting me to lunch, dressed as I was, in company with the Minister and her other guests. But then I reflected that my mother, with her sensitivity to what she called 'good form', must have felt that, after all, I was dressed like a painter, that is, I was wearing a kind of uniform which indicated my position, a by no means dishonourable position in a social circle such as hers, where a man had as much right to wear an artist's sweater as a Minister's double-breasted jacket. I was startled out of these thoughts by the voice of the shop assistant as she handed me the bag. I paid, took the parcel and went out.

It was one o'clock. The appointment was at five. Strange to say, whereas I had never been conscious of waiting for Cecilia on other days, when I knew that our relationship was going to continue, now that I had made up my mind to break with her I found that the waiting dismayed me. I therefore did all the things I could find to do until five o'clock with the greatest possible slowness, hoping in this way to make the time pass imperceptibly and painlessly; I had lunch in a near-by restaurant and pretended to enjoy the food and to meditate between one mouthful and the next; I went into a bar and, after drinking a cup of coffee, hung about listening to songs on the juke-box; I had a second cup of coffee in another bar and, perched on a stool, read a newspaper from beginning to end; I stood on the pavement for about twenty minutes conversing with a young painter whose name I did not know, pretending to be interested in his long diatribe on the subject of awards and exhibitions. But I succeeded, in this way, in whiling away only two of the four hours until the time of the appointment, In the end, with an aching heart, I went back to the studio.

There, filtering through the white curtain, came a mild, clean, clear light which was very familiar to me, that same light in which it seemed to me that my boredom, that is, the lack of contact between myself and external things, assumed an aspect of supreme normality, although it was none the less painful for that, in fact, perhaps precisely on that account, more painful than ever. And indeed, when I entered the studio and sat down in the armchair in front of the empty canvas which still glimmered white upon the easel, I at once said to myself: 'I am here and they are there.' By 'they' I meant the objects round me—the canvas on the easel, the round table in the middle, the screen in the corner to the left behind which the bed was concealed, the earthenware stove with its pipe going up into the ceding, the chairs with notebooks lying on them, the bookshelf and the books. They were there, I repeated to myself, and I was here; and between them and me there was nothing, truly nothing, just as, perhaps, in the interstellar spaces, there is nothing between the stars, milliards of light years distant from each other.