Conjugal Love Read Online Free PDF

. . and now you must keep your promise.' I said nothing, but I could not help thinking angrily of the many pages bristling with cancellations and superimposed lines piling up on my desk.
    I had noticed that in the morning, after passing the night, or part of the night, with my wife, when I sat down to work I felt an almost uncontrollable inclination to let my mind wander and do nothing; my head felt empty, I had an odd sensation of lightness at the back of my neck and a sort of lack of solidity in my limbs. Our moral relationship with ourselves is sometimes extremely obscure; not so the physical relationship, which, particularly at a mature age, if a man is well-balanced and healthy, reveals itself with perfect clarity. It did not take me much time or thought to conclude, rightly or wrongly, that this inability to work, this impossibility of keeping my mind on the subject, this temptation to idleness, must be attributed to the physical emptying of myself that occurred always after making love the previous night. Sometimes I would rise from my desk and look at myself in the mirror: in the tired, relaxed muscles of my face, in the shadows under my eyes and their lustreless expression, in the languid slackness of my whole attitude, I could recognize precisely the lack of that vigour of which, on the other hand, I was conscious in myself every night, at the moment when I lay down and took my wife in my arms. I realized that I did not attack my paper because, the evening before, I had exhausted all my aggressive force in my wife's embrace; I knew that what I was giving to my wife I was taking away, in equal measure, from my work. This was not a precise thought - not as precise, anyhow, as it now appears when I express it; rather it was a diffused sensation, a persistent suspicion, almost the beginning of an obsession. My creative force, I felt, was drained out of me every night from the middle of my body; and next day there was not enough left to rise upwards and fortify my brain. The obsession, as can be seen, took shape in images, in comparisons, in concrete metaphors which gave me a physical, almost a scientific, sense of my own importance.
    Obsessions either close up like abscesses which can find no outlet and slowly mature until their final, terrible outburst, or else, in more healthy persons, they find, sooner or later, some adequate means of elimination. I went on for several more days making love to my wife at night and spending the day thinking that it was just because I had made love to her that I could not work. At this point I ought to say that this obsession made no change whatever, not merely in my affection for my wife, but even in the actual physical transport: at the moment of love I forgot my scruples and almost deceived myself, in the temporary arrogance of desire, into thinking that I was strong enough to carry through both love making and work. But next day the obsession would return; and at night I found myself seeking love again if only to console myself for having been defeated in my work and in order, at the same time, to rediscover the fleeting illusion of inexhaustible vigour. At last, after spinning round for some time in this vicious circle, I decided, one evening, to speak. I was encouraged to do this also by the idea that it was she, after all, who urged me to work, and that if it was really of importance to her, as it seemed to be, that I should write the story, she would understand and accept my reasons. When we were lying side by side on the bed, I began: 'Listen, I must tell you a thing that I've never told you before.'
    It was hot, and we were both lying naked on top of the bedclothes, she on her back, with her hands clasped at the back of her neck and her head on the pillow, and I at her side. Scarcely moving her lips, and looking at me in her usual troubled, elusive way, she said: 'Tell me.'
    'It's this,' I went on. 'You want me to write this story?'
    'Certainly I do.'
    'This story which tells