Boredom - Alberto Moravia [102]
She looked at me, but said nothing. I shook her again. “So you allow yourself to be called a whore and you don’t protest.”
She rose to her feet. “Dino, I’m going away.”
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