The Empty Canvas Read Free

indisputable, between boredom and money. I do not wish to linger too long over this exceedingly disagreeable period of my life. Since I was bored, and when bored could not paint, I began to hate, with all my soul, both my mother's villa and the comforts I enjoyed there; it was to the villa I attributed my boredom and the consequent impossibility of painting, and I longed to leave it. But since, as I said, it was a question of a mere suspicion, I could not bring myself to say clearly the one thing I ought to have said to my mother: I don't want to live with you because you are rich, and being rich bores me and boredom prevents me from painting. Instead, I sought instinctively to make myself intolerable, in such a way as to hint at, and to some extent to force, my departure from the villa. I recall those days as days of unending ill-humour, of obstinate hostility, of determined non-compliance, of almost morbid antipathy. I have never treated my mother worse than I did during that period; and thus, to the boredom that oppressed me, there was added, on top of everything else, a feeling of pity for her, incapable, as she was, of finding any explanation for my rudeness. Worse than anything, I suffered from a kind of paralysis of all my faculties, which made me mute and apathetic and dull, so that I felt as if I were buried alive inside myself, in a hermetically sealed and stifling prison.
    My sojourn at the villa and my consequent state of mind would have probably been far more prolonged if, luckily, my mother had not come to believe that she recognized, in my boredom, a feeling analogous to that which had ruined her relations with my father. The moment has now come to make a brief mention of him too, if for no other reason than that he preceded me along the path of boredom.
    My father, then, was a born vagabond—from what I have been able to make out, putting two and two together; in other words, one of those men who, when at home, fall gradually silent, lose their appetite and in fact refuse to go on living, rather like certain birds which cannot endure to be shut up in a cage; but who, on the other hand, once they find themselves on the deck of a ship or in a railway carriage, recover all their vitality. He was tall, athletic, fair-haired and blue-eyed, like me; but I am not good-looking because I have gone prematurely bald, and my face, generally, is grey and gloomy; he, however, was a handsome man—at least, if one can believe the boasts of my mother, who insisted on marrying him willy-nilly, in spite of the fact that he kept telling her all the time that he did not love her and that he would leave her as soon as he could. I saw him only a few times, because he was always travelling, and the last time I saw him his fair hair was almost grey and his boyish face was all furrowed with fine, deep wrinkles; but he was still wearing the care free butterfly bow-ties and check suits of his youth. He came and went: that is, he ran away from my mother with whom he was bored and then came back again, probably in order to get a new supply of money so as to run off again, for he himself had not a penny, although, in theory, he was in the 'import and export' business. Finally he came back no more. A violent gust of wind, in the sea off Japan, overturned a ferry-boat with a hundred passengers on board, and my father was drowned with the rest of them. What he was doing in Japan, whether he was there in connexion with 'imports and exports' or for some other purpose, I have never known. According to my mother, who loved scientific or seemingly scientific definitions, my father suffered from 'dromomania', in other words the passion for movement. It was perhaps this mania, she used to remark thoughtfully, that explained his passion for stamps—those small, brightly-coloured evidences of the vastness and variety of the world—of which he had gathered together a fine collection, still preserved by her, as well as his talent for geography, the