Contempt - Alberto Moravia [68]
I happened to be standing at one corner of the terrace, in such a way that I could see, albeit slantwise, right into the living-room, without myself being seen. As I looked up, I saw that Battista and Emilia were both in the room. Emilia, who was wearing the same low-necked, black evening dress that she had worn on the occasion of our first meeting with Battista was standing close beside a little movable bar; and Battista, bending over the bar, was preparing some drink in a large crystal glass. I was suddenly struck by something unnatural in Emilia’s demeanor—a look of mingled perplexity and impudence, something between embarrassment and temptation: she stood waiting for Battista to hand her the glass and in the meantime was looking around her with an uneasy expression in which I recognized that look of disintegration that was caused in her, by doubt and bewilderment. Then Battista finished mixing the drinks, carefully filled two glasses, and held one out to Emilia as he rose; she started, as though awakening from a fit of deep abstraction, and slowly put out her hand to take the glass. My eyes were upon her at that moment as, standing in front of Battista, leaning slightly backwards, she raised one hand with the glass in it and supported herself with the other on the back of an armchair; and I could not help noticing that she seemed, as it were, to be offering her whole body as she thrust forward her bosom and her belly beneath the tight, glossy material of her dress. This gesture of offering herself, however, did not betray itself in any way in her face, which preserved its usual expression of uncertainty. Finally, as though to break an embarrassing silence, she said something, turning her head towards a group of armchairs at the far end of the room, round the fireplace; and then, cautiously, so as not to spill her brimming glass, she walked towards them. And then the thing happened which by now, in reality, I was expecting; Battista caught up with her in the middle of the room and put his arm around her waist, bringing his face close to hers, over her shoulder. She immediately protested, with no severity in her manner, but with a vivacity that was imploring and perhaps even playful, as, with her eyes, she indicated the glass which she was now holding tightly between her fingers, in mid-air. Battista laughed, shook his head and drew her more closely towards him, with a movement so abrupt that, as she had feared, the glass was upset. “Now he’s going to kiss her on the mouth,” I thought; but I failed to take into account Battista’s character, Battista’s brutality. He did not in fact kiss her, but, grasping the edge of her dress on her shoulder in his fist, with a strange, cruel violence, twisted and pulled it roughly downwards. One of Emilia’s shoulders was now completely bare, and Battista’s head was bending over it so that he might press his mouth against it; and she was standing upright and still, as though waiting patiently for him to have finished; but I had time to see that her face and her eyes, even during the kiss, remained perplexed and uneasy, as before. Then she looked in the direction of the window, and it seemed to me that our eyes met; I saw her make a gesture of disdain and then, holding up the torn shoulder-strap with one hand, leave the room hurriedly. I turned and walked back along the terrace.
My chief sensation at the moment was one of confusion and astonishment, because it seemed to me that what I had seen was in complete contradiction with what I knew and had hitherto thought. Emilia, who no longer loved me and who, in her own words, despised