Boredom - Alberto Moravia [44]
After taking off her sweater, Cecilia would turn slightly on her hip and, bringing her hands together at her waist, unhook and lower the zipper fastening. The skirt fell to the floor and, with an impatient gesture like the movement with which she had snatched her sweater from over her head, she would stamp her feet on it a couple of times before picking it up and placing it on the armchair. Now she was quite naked, or rather she was only wearing what I may call her most intimate trappings: the garter belt around her hips, the triangular veil of the slip over her belly, the stockings on her legs. These trappings, however, were by this time all crooked and in confusion, as though Cecilia in undressing had deprived them of all functional purpose; the slip appeared to be crumpled and rolled up, the garter belt had two of its four garters undone and was hanging slantwise to one side, one stocking was up and the other was dangling below her knee. The disorder was feminine and warlike, and it was curiously out of harmony with the childish, expressionless innocence of her face. In truth, Cecilia always seemed to have a two-fold character, to be a woman and a child at the same time; and not only in her body but in her expression and her movements.
This twofold character found particular expression in the contrast between the upper and the lower parts of her body. There are differences of weight which are apparent to the eye even before they are verified by the hands. An object made of lead, for instance, appears to the eye of an observer to be without any doubt heavier than some other object of equal dimensions, made of a lighter material. Cecilia’s body, from the waist down, did indeed appear to have the consistency of something made of a very dense, very heavy material. How solid, for example, was the attachment of the legs to the groin compared with that of the arms to the armpits; how different from the delicate thinness of the torso was the vigorous curve of the lower back, the superabundant muscularity of the loins, the massive compactness of the thighs. Adolescent from the waist up, grown woman from the waist down, Cecilia gave rather the idea of one of those decorative monsters which are depicted in ancient frescoes: a kind of sphinx or harpy, a boyish torso grafted with grotesque effect onto a powerful belly and legs.
The manner in which Cecilia conducted herself during lovemaking also reflected the contrast between the two sides of her nature, the childish and the womanly. I have often thought about this; and I have come to the conclusion that Cecilia had no feeling, and possibly, even, no real sensuality, but merely a sexual appetite of which she herself was not entirely conscious although she submitted passively to its urgency. In my arms she would adopt the position of a child obediently opening its mouth to the spoon held out by its mother: only in her case the mouth was her sex and it was her lover who fed her. The poetical, childish fragility of her round, pale face was in continual contrast with the hardness, the exigence, the avidity with which she worked upon herself and upon me, with the object, so it seemed, of bringing me to the point of orgasm and deriving her own pleasure from it to the very last spasm. The movements of her belly which, as the embrace acquired rhythm and force, became more and more frequent, had the strength and regularity of some unharnessed mechanism which neither she nor I had the power to arrest. Languid at first, scarcely perceptible, indolent as it were, in the end these movements seemed truly like those of a piston rising and falling