Boredom - Alberto Moravia [69]
At the same time I saw her afresh, more real than ever and therefore desirable, with her full, brown, womanly breasts hanging forward from her thin, white adolescent body; with her slim waist; with her compact, powerful hips; and it seemed to me that she appeared real and desirable precisely because she was evading me through her lying and treachery. This thought filled me with anxious, vindictive rage; I seized her by the hair with such force that I heard her groan, threw her off me and hurled myself upon her. Physical possession, usually, was no more than the repetition of a preceding mental possession, that is, it merely confirmed the boredom which made Cecilia unreal and absurd to me. But this time I felt that possession appeared to confirm my inability truly to possess her. However roughly I treated her, however much I squeezed her and bit her and penetrated her, I failed to possess Cecilia and she was elsewhere, God knows where. Finally I fell back exhausted but still angry, withdrawing from her sex as from a useless wound; and it seemed to me that Cecilia, who was now lying beside me with closed eyes, had an expression of irony on her face even in the midst of the composed serenity that follows the satisfaction of carnal appetite. The expression, I said to myself, of reality itself, the reality that evaded me and receded at the very moment when I imagined I had seized hold of it.
I looked at her intently. She must have felt my eyes upon her, for she opened hers and gazed back at me. Then she said: “Do you know, it was wonderful today?”
“Isn’t it always wonderful in the same way?”
“Oh no, it’s always different. There are days when it’s not so good, but today it was very good.”
“Why was it so good?”
“It’s a thing one can’t explain. A woman feels it, you know, when it’s good and when it isn’t so good. D’you know how many times, today?”
“How many?”
She lifted her hand with three fingers pointing up and said: “Three,” then she closed her eyes again, pressing herself lightly against me, and as she made this movement the ironical expression I had already noticed appeared again on her face with its lowered eyelids. And so, I thought, it might even be that I had really possessed her, possessed her totally, possessed her with no margin of independence or mystery. But I was unable to have full consciousness of it, or, therefore, to enjoy it; it seemed that only the one who was possessed could be conscious of possession, not the possessor. Again, and more strongly than ever, I experienced the feeling that I was incapable of achieving true possession, in spite of the fullness of the physical relation. I should have liked to ask: “Was it better with me or with Luciani?”, but once again I felt myself unable to utter the actor’s name. I asked her instead, for some inexplicable reason: “Is it true that Balestrieri died in your arms, while you were making love?”
I noticed that she wrinkled up her face for an instant, without opening her eyes, as though a gnat had brushed against it in flight. Then she murmured: “Why d’you want to know that?”
“Tell me if it’s true.”
She was still lying with her eyes closed, and I seemed to be questioning a sleepwalker. “Not exactly,” she replied. “He felt sick while we were making love, but he died later, after we had stopped.”
“You’re not telling the truth.”
“Why shouldn’t I be telling the truth? I was so frightened. I thought he was really dead; but luckily he managed to get to the bed.”
“Then you weren’t on the bed?”
“No.”
“Where were you, then?”
“What a lot of things you want to know.”
“Where were you?”
“On the stairs.”
“On the stairs?”
“Yes, he used to want to make love at any moment, so to speak. We’d already done it once in the little room upstairs, and we were going down to the studio because he wanted to paint. I was in front