Boredom by Alberto Moravia

enormous helping of it on my plate. As a rule I ate little, and this type of food, particularly, I did not eat at all. I could not help thinking that this was a continuation of the comedy of the prodigal son, and I burst out laughing. My mother asked in alarm: “Why are you laughing?”
    “I remember having read somewhere,” I replied, “an amusing parody of the parable of the prodigal son—you know, the one in the Gospels.”
    “What was that?”
    “In the parable, the prodigal son returns home and his father welcomes him with all sorts of attentions and kills the fatted calf for him. In the parody, on the other hand, the fatted calf runs away in terror as soon as the prodigal son comes back, knowing well what his fate is to be. So they wait for him to return. The fatted calf keeps them waiting quite a long time and then decides to come back. In the intensity of his joy the father, in order to celebrate the return of the fatted calf, kills the prodigal son and makes a feast of him for the calf.”
    My mother believed in nothing—except money. She did rely, as I have already said, upon what she called “good form,” and this required, among other things, that she should be a practicing Catholic, or anyhow that she should respect things connected with religion. So I saw her assume a wooden expression, and then she said in her most disagreeable voice: “You know I don’t like you to make jokes about sacred things.”
    “On the contrary, I’m not joking. What, in fact, does my return signify, if not the sacrifice of the prodigal son—that is to say, myself—for the advantage of the fatted calf, which is all this?”—and I gave a wave of my hand to indicate the expensive furniture all around me in the room.
    “I don’t understand you.” My mother was not lacking in a curious, rather gloomy, mechanical sense of humor; without smiling, she added: “Anyhow I think that after the macaroni there happens to be some veal coming—whether from a fatted calf or not, I don’t know.”
    I said nothing, but started devouring my helping of pie with a mixed feeling of joy and remorse, because I was really hungry and the pie was good and yet at the same time I felt angry at liking it. Then I looked up at my mother and saw that she was watching me with disapproval. “You ought to chew your food more thoroughly,” she said. “The first stage of digestion takes place in your mouth.”
    “How very disgusting! Who told you that?”
    “All doctors say so.”
    Her blue, glassy, utterly expressionless eyes brooded over me in an indefinable manner above the two crossed, ring-laden hands upon which she supported her chin. I finished clearing my plate in a mad hurry; then my mother, in her cold, toneless voice, said: “Offer Signor Dino some more,” and Rita, who all this time had remained standing with her back to the dresser behind my mother, took up the dish and came over and handed it to me. I helped myself with one hand only, leaving my mother hand where it was, resting on the edge of the table. Then I felt the hand with which Rita was supporting the dish press lightly upon mine, in a way that might or might not have been intentional. I did not stop more than an instant to consider this possibility, but resumed eating. Finally I asked my mother, in a tone of slight amusement: “What do you do all the time?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean exactly what I say: what do you do all the time?”
    “Oh, my life is the same as ever, you know.”
    “Yes, but in all these years that I’ve been away from home I’ve never asked you what you did. Now, perhaps because I’m on the point of coming back, I’m curious to know about it. Why, it’s quite possible that everything’s changed.”
    “I don’t like changing anything. I like to think that I live now as I lived ten years ago, and as I shall be living in ten years’ time.”
    “But, all the same, I don’t know how you live; let’s see now, what time do you wake