Contempt - Alberto Moravia [83]
Intense feelings have in them the virtue of making us pass from feeling to action in a wholly spontaneous fashion, without the concurrence of the will, almost unconsciously. Without my knowing how it had happened, I found myself no longer sitting apart by myself, with my back against a rock, but kneeling beside Emilia, bending over her with my face held close to hers, while she lay motionless and asleep. I don’t know how, but I had already removed the hat that hid her face, and, as I prepared to kiss her, I was looking at her mouth as one sometimes looks at a fruit before putting one’s teeth into it. It was a large, very full mouth, and the redness of the lipstick upon it looked parched and cracked as though it had been dried up, not by the sun, but by some interior heat. I said to myself that that mouth had not kissed me for a very long time, and that the savor of the kiss, if it were returned by her as she lay thus between waking and sleeping, would be as intoxicating as that of some old, potent liquor. I think I must have gazed at her mouth for at least a minute; then, gradually, I lowered my lips to hers. But I did not immediately kiss her: I paused for a moment with my lips very close to hers. I felt the light, quiet breath that came from her nostrils; and also, it seemed to me, the warmth of her burning lips. I knew that behind those lips, inside her mouth—like frozen snow preserved in a fold of sun-scorched earth—lay the coolness of her saliva, as surprising, as refreshing as such snow would be. While I was relishing this foretaste, my lips came truly into contact with Emilia’s. The touch did not appear to awaken her, nor to surprise her. I pressed my lips against hers, first softly, then more and more strongly; then, seeing that she remained perfectly still, I ventured upon a profounder kiss. This time I felt her mouth slowly opening, as I had hoped—like a shellfish whose valves open at the pulsating movement of some living creature wet with cool sea-water. Slowly, slowly it opened, the lips drawing back over the gums; and at the same time I felt an arm encircling my neck...
With a violent jolt, I started and awoke from what must evidently have been a kind of trance induced by the silence and the heat of the sun. In front of me, Emilia was lying on the beach as before; and her face was still hidden by the straw hat. I realized that I had dreamed the kiss, or rather, had actually experienced it in that state of delirious hankering which constantly replaces dreary reality with some more attractive illusion. I had kissed her and she had returned my kiss; but the one who had kissed and the one who had returned the kiss were merely a couple of phantoms evoked by desire and entirely dissociated from our two persons as we lay motionless and apart. I looked at Emilia and wondered suddenly: “Suppose I now tried really to kiss her?” And I answered myself: “No, you won’t try...you’re paralyzed by timidity and by the consciousness of her contempt for you.” All at once I said, in a loud voice: “Emilia!”
“What is it?”
“I fell asleep and dreamed I was kissing you.”
She said nothing. Frightened by her silence, I was anxious to change the subject, so I went on, at random: “Where’s Battista?”
She answered in a quiet voice, from underneath the hat: “I don’t know where he is...By the way, he won’t be at lunch with us today...he’s lunching with Rheingold at the beach.”
Before I knew what I was saying, I blurted out: “Emilia, I saw you yesterday evening, when Battista kissed you in the living-room!”
“I knew you’d seen me. I saw you too.” Her voice was quite normal, though slightly muffled by the brim of the hat.
I was disconcerted by the manner in which she received my disclosure; and also, to some extent, by the way in which I myself had made it. The truth of the matter, I thought, was that the stupefying sunshine and the silence of the sea reduced and neutralized our quarrel in a general feeling of vanity and indifference. However, with a great effort, I went on: “Emilia, you