The Conformist by Alberto Moravia

Author:Alberto Moravia [Moravia, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58195-244-5
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2011-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

2

AS SOON AS HE THOUGHT Giulia was asleep, Marcello got up from the bed, put his feet on the floor, and began to get dressed. The room was immersed in a cool, transparent half-light that hinted at the beautiful June sun flooding both sky and sea. It was a real Riviera hotel room, high and white, decorated with blue stucco flowers, stems, and leaves. The furniture was all light wood in the same floral style as the stucco-work, and a large green palm stood in a corner. When he was dressed, he tiptoed to the shutters and pushed them aside to look out. Right away he saw the shining expanse of the sea, made even vaster by the perfect clarity of the horizon. It was a limpid, almost violent blue, and every wave seemed afire, beneath the gentle breeze, with a tiny sparkling flower of sunlight. Marcello lowered his eyes from the sea to the promenade. It was deserted: no one was sitting on the benches that faced out to sea in the shade of the palms; no one was walking on the clean gray asphalt.

He stared out at this vista for a long time, then closed the shutters again and turned to look at Giulia stretched out on the bed. She was naked and sleeping. She was lying on one side, and the position of her body thrust up a round, pale, full hip, from which her torso seemed to hang limp and lifeless, like the stem of a wilted flower in a vase. Her back and hips, as Marcello knew, were the only tight, solid parts of that body; on the other side, invisible but present to his memory, was the softness of her belly, falling into soft folds on the bed, and of her breasts, pulled down by their weight, one on top of the other. He could not see his wife’s head, since it was hidden by her shoulder; and remembering how he had possessed her only a few minutes before, he suddenly had the sensation of looking not at a person but at a machine made of flesh, lovely and lovable but brutal, made for love and love alone.

As if awakened by his merciless gaze, she suddenly moved and sighed deeply, then said in a clear voice, “Marcello.”

He went to her quickly and said with affection, “I’m here.”

He watched her turn over, heavily shifting her weight of feminine flesh from one side to the other; then she raised her arms blindly and wrapped them around his hips. Then, with her hair falling over her face, she nuzzled him slowly and persistently with her nose and mouth, searching out his sex. She kissed it with a kind of humble and passionate fetishism, remained motionless for a moment with her arms still around him, and then fell back onto the bed, conquered by sleep, her face wrapped in her hair. She had fallen asleep again in the same position as before, except that she had changed sides and now lay on her right side inside of her left.

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