Contempt - Alberto Moravia [13]
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