Contempt (4 page)
In the meantime, while, absorbed in these thoughts, I sat looking about the room, Emilia was coming and going, carrying into the living-room, after the pillow, a pair of folded sheets that she took from the cupboard, a blanket, a dressing-gown. It was the beginning of October, and the weather was still mild, and she was going about the flat in a gauzy, transparent chemise. I have not yet described Emilia, but I should like to do so now, if only in order to explain my feelings that night. She was perhaps not really a tall woman, but to me, owing to the feeling that I had for her, she seemed taller and, above all, more majestic than any woman I had ever known. I could not say whether this look of majesty was innate in her or whether it was my own ravished glances that attributed it to her; I only remember that, on the first night after our wedding, when she had taken off her high-heeled shoes, I went up to her in the middle of the room and embraced her, and was vaguely surprised when I noticed that her forehead barely came up to the top of my chest and that I was taller than her by head and shoulders. But later, when she was lying beside me on the bed, there was a further surprise: her naked body now looked to me big, ample, powerful, although I knew that, in reality, she was not in the least massive. She had the most beautiful shoulders, the most beautiful arms, the most beautiful neck I had ever seen, full and rounded, shaped in form and languid in movement. Her complexion was dark her nose pronounced and in form severe; her mouth full and fresh and laughing, with two rows of teeth of a luminous whiteness which seemed always to be wet and gleaming with saliva; her eyes very large, of a fine golden brown sensual in expression, and sometimes, in moments of abandon, strangely relaxed and dazed-looking. She had not, as have already said, a really beautiful figure; and yet she appeared to have—for some reason that I cannot explain; perhaps because of the supple slenderness of her waist which emphasized the form of her hips and breast; perhaps because of her erect, dignified carriage; perhaps because of the youthful boldness and vigor of her long, straight, well-shaped legs. She had, in fact, an air of grace and of placid, unconscious, spontaneous majesty such as comes from nature alone and which, on that account, appears all the more mysterious and indefinable.
And so that evening, as she went backwards and forward between the bedroom and the living-room, and as I followed her with my eyes, not knowing what to say, and feeling at the same time both displeased and embarrassed, my glance traveled from her serene face to her body, which was more or less visible through the thin stuff of her chemise, its colors and contours being veiled and broken up by its folds and suddenly, the suspicion that she no longer loved me sprang into my mind again, in an abrupt, haunting sort of way, as a feeling of the impossibility of contact and communion between my body and hers. It was a sensation I had never felt before, and for a moment I was stunned and at the same time incredulous. Love is certainly, and before all else, a matter of feeling; but it is also, in an ineffable, almost spiritual manner, a communion of bodies—that communion, indeed, which up till then I had enjoyed without being conscious of it, as something obvious and completely natural. And now, as if my eyes had been at last opened to a fact which was clear and yet, till that moment, invisible, I was conscious that this communion might no longer exist between us, in fact, no longer did exist. And I, like a person who suddenly realizes he is hanging over an abyss, felt a kind of painful nausea at the thought that our intimacy had turned, for no reason at all, into estrangement, absence, separation.
I came to a pause at this staggering notion; meanwhile Emilia, who had gone into the bathroom, was washing, as I could tell from the sounds of water flowing from taps. I had an acute feeling of impotence and, at the same time, a violent desire to overcome it as quickly as possible. So far I had loved Emilia both easily and ignorantly; and my love had always manifested itself as if by enchantment, with a thoughtless, impetuous, inspired impulse which hitherto had seemed to me to spring from myself and from myself alone. Now, for the first time, I realized that this impulse depended upon, and nourished itself upon, a similar impulse in Emilia, and, seeing her so changed, I feared that I should no longer be capable of loving her with the same ease and spontaneity and naturalness. I feared, in fact, that that admirable communion, of which I had only now become aware, would be succeeded by, on my side, an act of cold imposition, and on hers...I did not know what her attitude would be, but I felt intuitively that if, on my side there was imposition, on hers there could only be a non-participating passivity, if not worse.
At that moment Emilia passed close to me as she came and went about the room. I leant forward with an almost involuntary lunge and seized her by the arm, saying: “Come here...I want to talk to you.”
Her immediate reaction was to draw away from me, then next moment, she yielded and came and sat down on the bed, though at some distance from me. “Talk to me? What do you want to talk to me about?”
For some reason or other, my throat now felt choked by sudden anxiety. Or perhaps it was shyness—a feeling which had hitherto been absent from our relationship and which more than anything else, seemed to confirm the change that had taken place in it. “Yes,” I said, “I want to talk to you I have an impression that something has changed between us.”
She threw me a rapid, sideways glance and answered with decision: “I don’t understand you...what do you mean, changed? Nothing’s changed.”
“I haven’t changed, but you have!”
“I haven’t changed in the least. I’m still just the same.”
“You used to love me more. You used to be sorry if I left you alone when I went out. You used not to mind sleeping with me then...on the contrary.”
“Ah, that’s what it’s all about,” she exclaimed, but I noticed that her tone was less assured; “I knew you would think something like that...But why don’t you stop tormenting yourself like this? I don’t want to sleep with you, merely because I want to sleep, and with you I can never manage to—that’s all.”
Now, strangely, I felt that arguments and ill-humor were melting quickly away and dissolving into nothingness, like wax at the fire: she was sitting beside me, in that vaporous, crumpled chemise through which it seemed that only the most intimate and secret colors and forms of her body were visible; and I desired her and felt it strange that she should not be aware of it and should not stop talking and embrace me, as had always happened in the past at the mere meeting of our disturbed glances. On the other hand, this feeling of desire made me hope not only that I should be drawn with the old, irresistible force towards her, but also that I should arouse in her a similar impulse towards me. I said, in a very low voice: “If nothing’s changed, prove it to me.”
“But I prove it to you every day, every hour!”
“No, now.”
As I said this, I leant forward and took hold of her almost violently by the hair and tried to bend her head back to kiss her. Obediently she allowed herself to be drawn towards me, but at the last moment she avoided my kiss by a slight movement of her head, so that my lips could only reach her neck. Letting her go, I said: “Don’t you want me to kiss you?”
“It’s not that,” she murmured, rearranging her hair with characteristically wayward indolence; “if it was just one kiss, I would willingly give it you. But then you go on...and it’s late already...”
I felt hurt by these prudent, discouraging words. “It’s never too late for such things,” I said.
Meanwhile I was trying to kiss her again, pulling her towards me by the arm. “Ow,” she cried out, “you’re hurting me!”
Now I had scarcely touched her, and I remembered how, at the time when we loved each other, I had sometimes clasped her violently in my arms without drawing so much as a sigh from her. Irritated, I said: “In the old days it didn’t hurt you!”
“You’ve got hands like iron,” she replied; “you don’t realize...You must have left marks on me now!” All this was said in an indolent sort of way, but without the slightest coquettishness.
“Come on,” I insisted sharply, “are you going to give me that kiss, or not?”
“Here you are”; and she leant forward and, in a motherly way, flicked me a light kiss on the brow. “And now let me go to bed; it’s late.”
I did not intend to put up with that; and I took hold of her again, with both hands, just below the waist. “Emilia,” I said, leaning towards her as she drew herself away, “that’s not the kiss I wanted from you.”
She thrust me away, saying once again, but now in a distinctly rough tone of voice: “Oh, let me alone...you hurt me!”
“It’s not true, it can’t be true,” I muttered between my clenched teeth, throwing myself upon her.
This time she disengaged herself with two or three energetic, simple movements; then rose to her feet and, as if suddenly making up her mind, said, without any show of modesty: “If you want to make love, all right then...But don’t hurt me; I can’t bear to feel myself squeezed like that!”
I was left breathless. Her tone was now utterly cold, I could not help noticing, and practical, without the faintest touch of feeling in it. For a moment I sat quite still on the bed, my hands clasped, my head bent. Then her voice reached me again: “Well then, if you really want to, let’s get on with it...shall we?”
Without raising my head, I said in a low voice: “Yes, I want to.” It was not true, for by this time I no longer desired her, but I wished to endure this new, curious sense of estrangement to the bitter end. I heard her say “all right,” and then I heard her walking about the room and moving around the bed behind me. All she had to do was to take off her chemise, I thought, and I recalled how in the past I had watched this simple act with enchanted eyes, like the brigand in the fairy-tale who, when the magic word had been uttered, saw the door of the cave slowly open, revealing the splendor of the marvelous treasures within. But this time I was unwilling to look, knowing that I should be looking with different eyes, eyes that were no longer childish and pure, even if desirous, but that had been, by her indifference, made cruel and unworthy both of her and of myself. I remained as I was, leaning forward, my hands in my lap, my head bowed. After a little I heard the springs of the bed creak gently; she had got on to the bed and was lying on top of the bed-clothes. There was again a slight rustling as though she were changing position, and then she said, still in that horrible new voice: “Well, come along then...what are you waiting for?”
I neither turned nor moved; but all of a sudden I wondered whether it had always been like that, in our relationship. Yes, I said to myself at once, it had always been like that, more or less; she had always undressed and lain down on the bed: how else could it have been? And yet, at the same time, everything had been different. Never until now had there been this mechanical docility, cold and detached, such as was apparent from the tone of her voice and even from the creaking of the bed-springs and the rustling of the pressed-down bed-covers. Formerly everything, on the contrary, had happened in a cloud of inspired haste, of intoxicated unconsciousness, of ravished complicity. It happens sometimes, when one’s mind is absorbed by some profound thought, that one puts down an object of some kind—a book, a brush, a shoe—somewhere or other, and then, when the fit of absorption is over, one looks for it in vain for hours and, in the end, finds it in some strange, almost unbelievable place, so that a physical effort is required to reach it—on top of a cupboard, in a hidden corner, inside a drawer. That is what had happened to me, hitherto, in relation to love-making. Everything had always run its course in a mood of swift, feverish, enchanted absorption, and I had always come to myself again in Emilia’s arms almost without being able to recollect how it had all happened and what I had done between the moment when we were sitting opposite each other, quiet and without desire, and that other moment in which we were joined together in the final embrace. This absorption was now entirely lacking in her and therefore in me also. Now, I could have observed her movements with a cold, even if excited, eye, just as she, no doubt, could have observed mine. All of a sudden, the feeling which was becoming clearer and clearer in my furious, disgusted mind took on the character of a precise image: I was no longer face to face with the wife I loved and who loved me, but with a rather impatient and inexpert prostitute who was preparing to submit passively to my embraces hoping only that they would be brief and not too tiring. I had this image right before my eyes for a moment, like an apparition, and then I felt that it went, so to speak, around behind my back and became one with Emilia lying behind me on the bed. At the same moment I rose to my feet, still without turning around, and said: “Never mind...I don’t want to, now...I’ll go and sleep in the other room; you stay here”; then, on tiptoe, I went to the door of the living-room.
The divan bed was ready, with the sheet turned down and Emilia’s nightdress laid out on top with the sleeves spread wide. I took this nightdress, the slippers she had placed on the floor, and the dressing-gown she had arranged on an armchair, went back into the bedroom and put them all down on one of the chairs there. But this time I could not help raising my eyes and looking at her. She was still in the attitude she had taken up when she lay down on the bed and called to me: “Come along then.” She was lying quite naked, with one arm behind her neck and her head turned towards me, her eyes wide open but indifferent and as it were unseeing, and the other arm lying across her body so that her sex was covered by her hand. But now, it seemed to me, she was no longer the prostitute; she had now become a semblance in a mirage, with a haze of impossibility, of nostalgia, about her, and infinitely remote, as though she were not only a few paces away from me but in some far-off region, outside reality and outside my personal feelings.
I CERTAINLY HAD a presentiment that evening that a period full of difficulties was beginning for me, but, strange to say I did not infer from Emilia’s behavior the results that might have been expected. There was no doubt that she had shown herself cold and indifferent, and it was perfectly true that I should rather have renounced love altogether than obtain it in that way. But I loved her, and love has a great capacity not only for illusion but also for forgetfulness. Next day—I don’t know how—the incident of the previous evening which later on was to appear so full of significance to me had already lost, in my eyes, much of its importance, losing its burden of hostility and reducing itself to an insignificant divergence of opinion. The truth is that one easily forget what one does not want to remember; and furthermore I think that Emilia herself contributed to my forgetfulness for a few days later, though she still insisted on sleeping alone, she did not refuse my love. It is true that on this occasion she again behaved in the cold, passive manner which had previously roused me to revolt; but, as often happens, what had seemed intolerable to me on that first evening seemed, a few days later, to be not only tolerable but even flattering. I was already, in fact, without being aware of it, in the slippery region where the coldness of the day before becomes, a day later—thanks to false arguments and the goodwill of a mind in need of illusion—warm-hearted love. I had thought that Emilia, that first evening, had behaved like a prostitute; but less than a week afterwards I consented to love her and be loved by her in exactly that way; and since, in the obscure depths of my mind, I had perhaps feared that she really did not want me any more, I was grateful to her for her cold, impatient passivity just as though it had been the normal attitude in our sexual relations.