Contempt - Alberto Moravia [81]
This was, in truth, the whole matter: I had examined my situation from beginning to end, ruthlessly and with complete sincerity. It seemed to me clear that there was now no further need to “think it over,” as Rheingold had advised; I could go straight back to him and announce what was now my immovable decision. But the next moment I said to myself that, just because there was now no necessity to “think it over,” I must not do things in a hurry, and so give a wrong impression of rashness and obstinacy. I would go during the afternoon, quite calmly, to Rheingold and tell him what I had decided. When I returned home I would, in the same calm manner, ask Emilia to pack her bags. As for Battista, I decided to say nothing to him; in the morning, when we left, I would leave him a short note, attributing my decision to the fact that my ideas and those of Rheingold were incompatible—which was, indeed, true. Battista was a shrewd man: he would understand, and I should not see him again.
With these thoughts in my mind, and almost without realizing where I was going, I turned into the lane, went along it until I was below the villa, and then started running down a steep, crumbling path towards the little lonely cove of which I had had a glimpse when I came out that morning. I was out of breath when I reached it, and, to recover myself, I stood still for a moment on a rock, looking round. The brief stretch of stony beach was all surrounded by great irregular masses of rock which looked as if they had that very moment come rolling down from the heights above; two rocky promontories closed it in, rising sheer from the green, transparent water which was penetrated by rays of sunlight that showed up the white, pebbly bottom. Then I noticed a black rock, all crannied and corroded and half submerged in sand and water, and thought I would go and lie down behind it to be sheltered from the sun which was already very strong. But no sooner had I walked round it than I caught sight of Emilia lying, quite naked, on the beach.
To tell the truth, I did not at once recognize her, for her face was hidden by a big straw hat; in fact my first impulse was to retreat, as I thought I had come upon some unknown sun-bather. Then my eye fell on the arm which was stretched out on the pebbles, and, following the arm down to the hand, I recognized, on the forefinger, a ring in the shape of two little hardstone acorns set in golden husks which I had given Emilia some time before as a birthday present.
I was right behind Emilia and saw her foreshortened. She was naked, as I said, and her clothes were lying beside her on the sand, a little pile of colored garments; it seemed impossible that they could have covered that large body. The thing that struck me most, indeed, about Emilia’s nudity, from the very first glance, was not this or that detail, but, in general, the size and powerfulness of her body. I knew, of course, that Emilia was no larger than a great many other women; but at that moment her nudity seemed to me immense, as though the sea and sky had lent her some of their vastness. As she was lying flat on her back, her breasts were only vaguely defined by the slight swelling of the stretched-out muscle, but to my eyes they seemed very large, both in outline and in volume and in the rosy circles of the nipples; so did also her hips, spread out over the sand in strong, comfortable amplitude; so also her belly, that seemed to gather all the light of the sun into its circle of flesh; and so her legs, which, lower than the rest of her body on account of the slope, looked as though they were being pulled downwards by their weight and by length. All of a sudden I wondered what could be the source of this feeling in