Contempt Read Online Free PDF Page B

been a doubt in my mind. I did not admit it to myself, but the final question, in reality, was, “Has Emilia perhaps ceased to love me?”
    In the meantime, while, absorbed in these thoughts, I sat looking about the room, Emilia was coming and going, carrying into the living-room, after the pillow, a pair of folded sheets that she took from the cupboard, a blanket, a dressing-gown. It was the beginning of October, and the weather was still mild, and she was going about the flat in a gauzy, transparent chemise. I have not yet described Emilia, but I should like to do so now, if only in order to explain my feelings that night. She was perhaps not really a tall woman, but to me, owing to the feeling that I had for her, she seemed taller and, above all, more majestic than any woman I had ever known. I could not say whether this look of majesty was innate in her or whether it was my own ravished glances that attributed it to her; I only remember that, on the first night after our wedding, when she had taken off her high-heeled shoes, I went up to her in the middle of the room and embraced her, and was vaguely surprised when I noticed that her forehead barely came up to the top of my chest and that I was taller than her by head and shoulders. But later, when she was lying beside me on the bed, there was a further surprise: her naked body now looked to me big, ample, powerful, although I knew that, in reality, she was not in the least massive. She had the most beautiful shoulders, the most beautiful arms, the most beautiful neck I had ever seen, full and rounded, shaped in form and languid in movement. Her complexion was dark her nose pronounced and in form severe; her mouth full and fresh and laughing, with two rows of teeth of a luminous whiteness which seemed always to be wet and gleaming with saliva; her eyes very large, of a fine golden brown sensual in expression, and sometimes, in moments of abandon, strangely relaxed and dazed-looking. She had not, as have already said, a really beautiful figure; and yet she appeared to have—for some reason that I cannot explain; perhaps because of the supple slenderness of her waist which emphasized the form of her hips and breast; perhaps because of her erect, dignified carriage; perhaps because of the youthful boldness and vigor of her long, straight, well-shaped legs. She had, in fact, an air of grace and of placid, unconscious, spontaneous majesty such as comes from nature alone and which, on that account, appears all the more mysterious and indefinable.
    And so that evening, as she went backwards and forward between the bedroom and the living-room, and as I followed her with my eyes, not knowing what to say, and feeling at the same time both displeased and embarrassed, my glance traveled from her serene face to her body, which was more or less visible through the thin stuff of her chemise, its colors and contours being veiled and broken up by its folds and suddenly, the suspicion that she no longer loved me sprang into my mind again, in an abrupt, haunting sort of way, as a feeling of the impossibility of contact and communion between my body and hers. It was a sensation I had never felt before, and for a moment I was stunned and at the same time incredulous. Love is certainly, and before all else, a matter of feeling; but it is also, in an ineffable, almost spiritual manner, a communion of bodies—that communion, indeed, which up till then I had enjoyed without being conscious of it, as something obvious and completely natural. And now, as if my eyes had been at last opened to a fact which was clear and yet, till that moment, invisible, I was conscious that this communion might no longer exist between us, in fact, no longer did exist. And I, like a person who suddenly realizes he is hanging over an abyss, felt a kind of painful nausea at the thought that our intimacy had turned, for no reason at all, into estrangement, absence, separation.
    I came to a pause at this staggering