The Woman of Rome by Alberto Moravia Page A

my own condition and partly in order to persuade myself that I, too, was free and capable of doing what I liked, despite the sense of slavery that was weighing me down. I could not wear beautiful clothes or have a house like that, but at least I could make love as the rich did, and perhaps better than they.
    “Why show me all these clothes?” I asked Gino. “What do they matter to me?”
    “I thought you’d be curious to see what they’re like,” he replied, rather disconcerted.
    “I’m not at all interested in them,” I said. “They’re lovely, but I didn’t come here to look at clothes.”
    I saw his eyes light up as I spoke.
    “I’d rather see your room,” I added carelessly.
    “It’s in the basement,” he replied eagerly, “Shall we go down?”
    I looked at him in silence for a moment and then asked him with a newly found forthright kind of manner I disliked in myself, “Why are you playing the fool with me?”
    “But I —” he began uneasily, in surprise.
    “You know better than I do that we didn’t come here to look over the house or admire your mistress’s dresses, but to go to your room and make love — well, then, let’s just go do it then, right now, and stop talking about it.”
    In this way, all in a moment, through having seen the house, I changed from the shy, ingenuous girl I had been when I entered it. I was amazed at the change and hardly recognized myself. We left the room and began to go downstairs. Gino put his arm around my waist and kissed me on every step — I do not think anyone ever went down a stairway more slowly. When we reached the ground floor Gino opened a doorway concealed in the wall and, still kissing me and holding me by the waist, led me down the back stairs into the basement. It was evening, and the basement was dark. We reached Gino’s room at the end of a long passage, without putting on any lights, our arms still around one another, his mouth on mine. He opened the door, we entered, I heard him close it behind us. We stood there in the dark for some time, kissing one another. It was an endless kiss, every time I wanted to stop he started again; and every time he wanted to stop, it was I who went on. Then Gino pushed me toward the bed and I let myself fall on to it.
    Gino kept on whispering in my ear, most provocatively, words of endearment and persuasion, with the obvious purpose of bewildering me and preventing me from noticing that, meanwhile, he was trying to undress me. But this was quite unnecessary, first of all because I had made up my mind to give myself to him, and then because I hated all those clothes I had liked so much before,and I was dying to be rid of them. Naked, I thought, I would be as beautiful, if not more beautiful, than Gino’s mistress and all the other rich women in the world. In any case, my body had been waiting for this moment for months now, and I felt that despite myself, it was quivering with impatience and repressed desire like a chained and starving animal, which finally, after a long fast, is set free and given food.
    For this reason, the act of love seemed entirely natural to me, and my physical pleasure was not accompanied by any feeling that I was doing something unusual. On the contrary, I seemed to be doing things I had already done, I did not know where or when, maybe in another life, just as sometimes certain landscapes seem familiar whereas you are really seeing them for the first time in your life. This did not prevent me from loving Gino passionately, fiercely, kissing him, biting him, crushing him in my arms almost to the point of suffocation. He, too, seemed to be swept away by the same rage of possession. And so we embraced one another violently in that dark little room, buried beneath two floors of the empty, silent house, goading our bodies in innumerable ways like two enemies struggling for life and trying to hurt each other as much as possible.
    But as soon as our desire was satisfied and we lay beside one