Boredom - Alberto Moravia [45]
This dissociation of Cecilia’s mind during love-making was especially noticeable at those moments when she suddenly, and apparently without reason, bestirred herself from the avid, mechanical passivity which I have just described and started to return my caresses. Procreative love, as we may call it, is always chaste; hardly ever chaste, on the other hand, are the amatory techniques by means of which lovers endeavor to excite one another. But the way in which Cecilia applied herself to my body was absolutely chaste just because it was so curiously automatic and unconscious. All of a sudden, in the middle of an embrace, she would sit up and bend forward, with her mouth on my belly as though she were browsing; but this sudden impulse had something somnambulistic about it; it was almost as if she had abandoned herself to it in a dream, that is, in a state of complete unconsciousness. Then, when she had satisfied herself, or rather, after she had scrupulously exhausted all the possibilities of her caress, she would throw herself once more into my arms, her eyes closed, her mouth half-open; and once again I would have the strange sensation of having seen a person asleep perform gestures devoid of sense, and then, still without waking, lie down again.
After the orgasm, which shook her body several times like a minor epileptic fit but did not disturb the apathetic stillness of her face, Cecilia would lie exhausted beneath me, one arm behind her head and the other lying limp on the divan, her face turned toward her shoulder and her legs apart, as they had remained after the embrace. For a second, almost immediately after I had withdrawn myself from her, she would smile at me, and that, perhaps, was the best moment of our lovemaking. The smile, a very sweet smile, in which the sweetness of appeased desire seemed to ebb and die away, did not however belie the childish ambiguity I have already noted: even while she was smiling, Cecilia did not look at me, or rather she did not appear to see me, so that she seemed to be smiling not so much at me as at herself, as though she were grateful to herself for having experienced pleasure, rather than to me for having caused her to experience it. This smile, although impersonal and solitary, was nevertheless the last phase of our embrace, that is, of the communication, the almost fusion, of our two bodies. Immediately afterward there were two of us on the divan, separate from each other, and it became necessary to speak.
At this point I would realize that her sexual appetite—which, even if it did not seem to concern me directly, yet made use of me for its gratification—was succeeded by indifference. When I say indifference I do not by that mean an attitude of coldness or detachment. No, Cecilia’s indifference toward me immediately after we had made love was simply a complete lack of contact very similar to the thing which caused me to suffer so much and which I called boredom; only that Cecilia, unlike me, not only did not suffer at all but did not even appear to be conscious of it. It was as though she had been born with the detachment from external things which to me seemed an intolerable change from a very different original state; as though what to me seemed a sort of sickness was, in her, a sane and normal fact.
And yet, as I said, it became necessary to speak. The recent intimacy of physical love inspired in me a desire for another and truer intimacy of the affections which could be achieved only through the spoken word. So I tried to start a conversation with her; or rather, since Cecilia never carried on a conversation but confined herself to answering questions, I interrogated her about herself and her life. In