José Saramago - Skylight

Then, propelled apart by a mutual feeling of repugnance, they separated and lay in silence on their respective sides of the bed. Caetano’s heavy breathing drowned out Justina’s, whose breathing now came in the form of a few final shudders.

A void opened up in Justina’s mind. Her limbs felt limp and painful. The stink of her husband’s body had impregnated her skin. Sweat dripped from her armpits, and a profound lassitude prevented her from moving. She seemed still to feel the weight of her husband on top of her. She tentatively reached out an arm and switched off the bedside lamp. Caetano’s breathing gradually grew more regular. Sated, he slipped into sleep. Justina was left alone. The shuddering stopped, her tiredness diminished. Only her mind remained empty of thoughts. Very slowly, small scraps of ideas began to appear. They followed one on the other, fragmentary, inconclusive, with no connecting thread. Justina tried to think about what had happened, tried to grab hold of one of those fleeting ideas, which appeared and disappeared like beans in a boiling pot of water that rise to the surface only to vanish at once. It was still too soon for coherent thought; instead, she was suddenly gripped by horror. What had happened only minutes before seemed to her so absurd she thought she must have dreamed it. However, her bruised body and a strange sense of indefinable plenitude in certain parts of her anatomy gave the lie to that. It was then, and only then, that she was struck, or allowed herself to be struck, by the full horror of it all.

She did not sleep for what remained of the night. She stared into the darkness, disoriented, unable to think. She had a vague sense that her relationship with her husband had undergone a change. It was as if she had passed from the shadows into the blinding glare of day, preventing her from seeing the surrounding objects except as blurred, indeterminate shapes. She heard the clock strike each and every hour. She observed the withdrawal of night and the approach of morning. Bluish reflections began to seep into the room. The door that opened onto the corridor glowed opalescent in the dim light. With the coming of morning the building filled with vague sounds. Caetano was sleeping, lying on his back, one leg uncovered as far as the groin, a soft, white leg, like the belly of a fish.

Rebelling against the torpor in her limbs, Justina sat up and remained sitting, back bent, head hanging. Her whole body hurt. She slid out of bed very cautiously so as not to wake her husband, put on her dressing gown and left the room. She still could not string two ideas together, but her involuntary thought processes, the ones that evolve and develop independent of the will, were nevertheless beginning to work.

It took only a matter of seconds for Justina to reach the bathroom and another moment for her to look at herself in the mirror. She looked and did not recognize her own image. The face before her either did not belong to her or had remained hidden until then. The dark shadows encircling her eyes made them seem still duller. Her cheeks were hollow. Her unruly hair was a reminder of the night’s agitation. None of this, however, was new to her: whenever her diabetes worsened, the mirror showed her just that face. What was different was the expression. She should be indignant and yet she was calm, she should feel offended and yet she felt as if she had pardoned an insult.

She sat down on a bench in the enclosed balcony. The sun was already slanting in through the topmost panes, striping the wall with a sliver of pink light that gradually grew longer and brighter. In the fresh morning air she could hear the twitter of passing swallows. On an impulse she went back into the bedroom. Her husband had not moved. He was sleeping, his mouth open, his teeth very white in his beard-blackened face. She crept slowly toward the bed and bent over him. Those inert features bore only a remote resemblance to the contorted face she had seen earlier. She remembered that she had spat in that face, and she felt afraid, a fear that made her draw back. Caetano stirred slightly. The sheet covering him slipped from his bent leg and left his penis exposed to view. A wave of nausea rose from Justina’s stomach. She fled the room. Only then did the last knot binding up her thoughts come undone. As if trying to make up for lost time, her brain whirred furiously into action until it fixed on one obsessive thought: “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

She felt neither scorn nor indifference now, only hatred. She hated her husband and she hated herself. She knew that she had given herself to him with the same uninhibited frenzy with which he had possessed her. She took a few indecisive steps about the kitchen, as if lost in a labyrinth. Wherever she turned she met with closed doors and dead ends. Had she been able to remain indifferent, she could have seen herself as the victim of brute force. She knew that, as a married woman, she had no right to refuse, but pure passivity would have been a way of refusing. She could have allowed herself to be possessed without surrendering herself, but she had surrendered herself, and her husband had seen that she had; he would consider this a victory and would behave like a victor. He would impose what laws he liked and laugh in her face when she tried to rebel. A moment’s madness, and the work of years had been destroyed. A moment’s blindness, and strength had become weakness.

She must think about what she should do, and think quickly before he woke up. Think before it was too late. Think while her hatred was still raw and bleeding. She had given in once and did not want to give in again. However, the memory of what she had felt that night began to trouble her. Until then, she had never scaled the highest peak of pleasure. Even when she used to have normal sexual relations with her husband, she had never experienced the kind of intensity of sensation that makes one both fear and desire madness. She had never been thrown, as then, into the maelstrom of pleasure, with all ties broken, all frontiers crossed. What for other women was an ascent into the heavens was, for her, a fall.

The sound of the doorbell interrupted her thoughts. She ran on tiptoe to the door. She paid the milkman and returned to the kitchen. Her husband had still not woken up.

The situation was clear to her now. It was a choice between pleasure and power. If she kept silent, she would be accepting defeat in exchange for other such moments, always assuming her husband was prepared to grant them to her. If she spoke, she ran the risk of having him throw her impassioned response back in her face. It was easy enough to set out those two alternatives, but rather harder to choose between them. Shortly before, she had felt nausea and disgust, but now those moments of sexual ecstasy roared inside her like the sea inside a shell. Speaking out would mean that last night’s experience would never be repeated. Saying nothing would mean subjecting herself to whatever conditions her husband chose to impose on her. Justina moved between those two poles — newly awoken desire and the desire to be in control. One excluded the other. Which to choose? And what scope did she have to make such a choice? If she chose control, how could she resist desire now that she had experienced it? If she chose submission, how could she bear submitting to a man she despised?

The Sunday-morning sun flooded in through the window like a river of light. From where she was sitting, Justina could see the small, raggedy white clouds chasing across the blue sky. Good weather. Bright skies. Spring.

From the bedroom came a mumbling sound. The bed creaked. Justina shuddered and felt her face flush scarlet. The line of thought she had been carefully drawing snapped. She sat paralyzed, waiting. The creaking continued. She went to the bedroom and peered around the door: her husband was sitting there, eyes open. He saw her. There was no going back. She entered in silence. Caetano looked at her in silence. Justina didn’t know what to say. All her powers of reasoning had abandoned her. Her husband smiled. She did not have time to find out what that smile meant. Almost without realizing she was speaking, she said: