José Saramago - Skylight

Nothing was said about the night when Justina had revealed herself naked to her husband for the first time. Caetano kept quiet out of cowardice, and Justina out of pride. All that remained was a still-greater coldness between them. After leaving work, Caetano spent the rest of the night and the following morning in someone else’s bed. He returned home only at lunchtime, after which he slept all afternoon. They kept the bare essentials of communication as brief and monosyllabic as possible. Their mutual dislike of each other had never been so complete. Caetano avoided all contact with his wife, as if he feared she might suddenly appear before him again stark naked. Justina, on the other hand, eyed him with scorn, almost insolence. He felt the weight of that look and seethed with impotent rage. He knew that many men beat their wives, and that some husbands and wives found this natural. He knew that, for many men, this was considered a proof of their virility, just as some believed that catching a venereal disease was a sign of manliness. However, although he could boast of having been afflicted by various forms of the French disease, he could not pride himself on ever having beaten his wife, not as a matter of principle, as he would like to have claimed, but, again, out of cowardice. He was intimidated by Justina’s serenity, whose calm surface he had seen crack only on that one occasion and in a way that filled him with shame. The vision returned to him over and over of that scrawny, naked figure and that strange sobbing laughter. The sheer unexpectedness of his wife’s reaction had only increased his feeling of inferiority in relation to her, which is why he avoided her, spent as little time as possible at home and shrank from lying beside her in bed. There was another reason too. He knew that if he lay down with her in the same bed, he would feel impelled to have sex with her. When he first became aware of this impulse, he felt frightened. He tried to suppress it, called himself an idiot, listed all the reasons that should make such a feeling impossible: her graceless body, the many times she had rejected him, her scorn. But however many reasons he added to the list, his desire only grew in intensity. He tried to quench that desire elsewhere, but never succeeded. He would arrive home drained, unsteady and hollow-eyed, but he just had to smell the peculiar smell of Justina’s body for a wave of desire to wash over his innermost being. It was as if he had emerged from a long period of sexual abstinence only to find a woman lying within arm’s reach. When he went to bed after lunch, even the warmth of the sheets was a torment to him. His eyes would be drawn to some item of clothing his wife had left draped over a chair. In his mind’s eye, he endowed that empty dress, that folded stocking, with the shape and motion of a living body, of a tense, vibrant leg. His imagination constructed perfect forms that bore no relation to reality. And if, at that moment, Justina came into the room, he had to draw on every ounce of willpower not to leap out of bed and drag her onto it. He was filled with a base sensuality. He had the kind of erotic dreams that had besieged him as an adolescent. He exhausted his various temporary lovers and heaped insults on them because they could not assuage his longings. Desire, like a bothersome fly, constantly buzzed about him. Just as a moth, with one side of its body paralyzed by the light, flies in ever-diminishing circles until it’s burned by the flame, so he circled about his wife, attracted by her smell, by her gaunt, unlovely shape.

Justina had no clue as to the effect her presence had on her husband. She noticed that he was unusually nervous and excitable, but attributed this to her redoubled scorn. Like someone toying with a dangerous animal and perfectly aware of the risks she is running, but too consumed with curiosity to flee, Justina wanted to see just how much her husband could take. She wanted to gauge the depth and breadth of his cowardice. She shifted from silent disdain to becoming almost talkative, so that she might have more opportunities to reveal her disdain. In every word, in every inflection of her voice, she was showing her husband how unworthy she considered him. Caetano reacted in a way she could not have foreseen. He had become a masochist. All her insults, all her blows to his pride as a man and a husband, provoked in him new paroxysms of desire. Justina, all unwitting, was playing with fire.

One night, unable to resist any longer, Caetano raced home after leaving work. He completely forgot that he had arranged to meet someone else, not that the woman expecting him could possibly have satisfied him. Like a madman who could still remember the place where reason would be restored to him, he hurried home. He hailed a passing taxi and promised the driver a fat tip if he got him to his destination quickly. The taxi bounded along the deserted streets and covered the short distance in no time at all. The tip was generous, even extravagant. As he entered the apartment, Caetano suddenly remembered the humiliation he had suffered the last time he had come home at that hour. In a brief moment of lucidity, he understood what he was going to do and feared the consequences. Then he heard Justina’s regular breathing, felt the warmth of the room, touched the body lying stretched out on the bed, and a sexual frenzy rose in him like a wave out of the depths of the sea.

The room lay in darkness. Justina recognized her husband instantly. Still half immersed in sleep, she tried frantically to defend herself, but he was stronger than she and held her pinned to the mattress. She lay there motionless, detached, unable to react, as if caught up in one of those nightmares in which some monstrous Thing, strange and horrible, falls upon us. She finally managed to free one arm and groped in the darkness for the bedside lamp. When she turned it on, she saw her husband. His face terrified her: the bulging eyes, the more than usually pendulous lower lip, the red, perspiring face, the animal grimace. The only reason Justina did not cry out was that her throat was so tight with terror she could not utter a single sound. Suddenly Caetano’s mask-like visage contracted in such a way as to become unrecognizable. It was the face of an utterly alien creature, that of a man plucked from a prehistoric animality, a wild beast in human form.

Then, eyes glinting coldly, Justina spat in his face. Stunned and still trembling, Caetano looked at her. He could not quite understand what had happened. He ran his hand over his face and looked at the still-warm saliva stuck to his fingers. He spread his fingers wide and saw how the saliva formed shining threads between them, threads that grew thinner and thinner until they broke. Then Caetano understood, finally understood. It was like the whiplash too far that causes the tame tiger to rise up on its back legs, claws extended, teeth bared. Justina closed her eyes and waited. Her husband still did not move. Fearfully, she half opened her eyes and immediately felt him begin thrusting away at her again. She tried to slide out from under him, but his body had hers in its grip. She tried to remain cold, as she had the first time, but that coldness had been quite natural, not an act of will. Now willpower alone could maintain that coldness, but her will had begun to weaken. Powerful forces that had lain dormant until then were stirring inside her, breaking over her like fast-running waves. A kind of bright light flickered on and off inside her head. She gave an inarticulate groan. Her will was drowning in the deep well of instinct. For a moment it managed to keep its head above water, before flailing helplessly about and vanishing. Like a thing possessed, Justina responded to her husband’s embrace. Her thin body was barely visible beneath his. She trembled and writhed, as mad with desire as he, subject to the same blind instinct. A simultaneous loud moan emerged from both and their bodies rolled about on the bed, entwined, pulsating.