Contempt (13 page)
“I didn’t say that. I only said that, if you have a clear conscience, all the rest ought not to matter to you.”
“It’s true that I have a clear conscience...but that doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes even one’s conscience deceives one.”
“But not yours, surely?” she said, with a faint irony that did not, however, escape me, and that seemed to me even more wounding than her indifference.
“Yes, even mine.”
“Well, well, I must go,” she said suddenly. “Have you anything else to say to me?”
“No, you shan’t go until you’ve told me the truth.”
“I’ve already told you the truth: I don’t love you.”
What an effect they had upon me, those four words! I turned pale, and implored her, miserably: “I asked you before not to say that again. It hurts too much!”
“It’s you who compel me to repeat it...It certainly doesn’t give me any pleasure to say it.”
“Why do you want to make me believe it’s because of that kiss that you’ve stopped loving me?” I pursued, following the train of my reflections. “A kiss is nothing at all. That girl was a perfectly ordinary little fool and I’ve never seen her since. You know and understand all that. No, the truth is that you’ve stopped loving me”—now I was not so much speaking as spelling out my words carefully in an attempt to express my own difficult and obscure intuition—“because something has happened...something that has changed your feelings towards me...something, in fact, that has perhaps changed, first and foremost, the idea you had of me, and consequently your feelings as well.”
“It must be admitted that you’re intelligent!” she said, in a tone of genuine surprise, almost of praise.
“It’s true, then?”
“I didn’t say it was true. I only said you were intelligent.”
I sought about in my mind, feeling that the truth was, so to speak, on the tip of my tongue. “To put it briefly,” I insisted, “before a certain thing happened, you thought well of me ...afterwards, you thought badly...and therefore ceased to love me.”
“It might possibly have happened like that.”
All of a sudden I had a horrible feeling: this reasonable tone of mine, I realized, was false. I was not reasonable, I was suffering, in fact, I was desperate, furious, I was shattered; and why in the world should I keep up a reasonable tone? I don’t know what happened to me at that moment. Before I knew what I was doing, I had jumped to my feet, shouting: “Don’t imagine I’m here just to keep up a bright conversation!” and had leaped on top of her and seized her by the throat and thrown her back on to the divan and was yelling into her face: “Tell me the truth...tell it once and for all. Come on!”
Beneath me the big, perfect body that I loved so much was struggling this way and that, and she had grown red and swollen in the face; I must have been squeezing her throat tightly, and I knew that, in my heart, I wanted to kill her. I kept on saying: “Tell me the truth, once and for all,” and at the same time I squeezed with redoubled force and thought: “I’m going to kill her...but better dead than my enemy!” Then I felt her trying to kick me in the belly with her knee, and indeed she succeeded in doing so, and with such violence that it took my breath away. This blow hurt me almost as much as the phrase: “I don’t love you”; and it was in truth the blow of an enemy, an enemy who seeks to harm his adversary as much as possible. At the same time my murderous hatred ebbed, I relaxed my grip somewhat, and she struggled free, giving me a push that almost threw me off the divan. Then, before I could recover myself, she cried out in a voice of exasperation: “I despise you...that’s the feeling I have for you and that’s the reason why I’ve stopped loving you. I despise you and you disgust me every time you touch me. There’s the truth for you...I despise you and you disgust me!”
I was standing up now. My eye, followed at once by my hand, moved towards a massive glass ashtray that stood on the table. She certainly thought I intended to kill her, for she uttered a groan of fear and covered her face with her arm. But my guardian angel stood by me. I do not know how I managed to control myself; I put the ashtray back on the table and went out of the room.
AS I HAVE already mentioned, Emilia had not had a good education: she had attended only the first elementary school and then, for a few years, the normal school; then she had broken off her studies and had learned to do typing and shorthand, and at sixteen was already employed in a lawyer’s office. She came, it is true, of what is called a good family—that is, of a family which in the past had been in easy circumstances, having owned property in the neighborhood of Rome. But her grandfather had dissipated his heritage in unsuccessful commercial speculations, and her father, up to the day of his death, had been merely a minor official in the Ministry of Finance. So she had grown up in poverty, and, as regards her education and manner of thinking, could almost be described as belonging to the working class; and, like many women of that class, she seemed to have nothing to fall back upon except her common sense, which was so solid as to appear sometimes like stupidity or, to say the least, narrowness of ideas. Yet by virtue solely of this common sense she sometimes succeeded, in a wholly unexpected and, to me, mysterious, manner, in formulating comments and appreciations that were extremely acute; just as, indeed, happens with people of the working class, who are closer to nature than others, and whose consciousness is not obscured by any convention or prejudice. Certain things she said merely because she had thought them over seriously, with sincerity and candor, and indeed her words had the unmistakable ring of truth. But, since she was not aware of her own candor, she felt no complacency about it; thus in a way confirming, by her very modesty, the genuineness of her judgment.
And so, that day, when she cried out: “I despise you,” I was immediately convinced that these words, which in the mouth of another woman might have meant nothing, when pronounced by her meant exactly what they said: she really did despise me and now there was nothing more to be done. Even if I had known nothing of Emilia’s character, the tone in which she had uttered the phrase would have left me in no doubt: it was the tone of the virgin word that springs directly from the thing itself and pronounced by someone who had perhaps never spoken that word before, and who, urged on by necessity, had fished it up from the ancestral depths of the language, without searching for it, almost involuntarily. So indeed may a peasant, among a number of mutilated, worn-out, dialect expressions, sometimes utter a remark that sparkles with crystal-clear moral wisdom—a remark which in a different mouth might not be surprising, but which, in his, is astonishing and appears almost unbelievable. “I despise you.” These three words, I noticed with bitterness, held the same absolutely genuine tone as those other words, so very different, which she had spoken to me the first time she had confessed her love: “I love you very much.”
I was so sure of the sincerity and truth of those three words that, once I was alone in my study, I started walking up and down without thinking of anything, my hands trembling, my eyes distraught, not knowing what to do. Emilia’s words seemed to be penetrating more deeply every minute into my sensibility, like three thorns, with sharp and increasing pain; but beyond this pain, of which I was acutely conscious, I was incapable of understanding anything. The thing that made me suffer most, of course, was the knowledge that I was not merely not loved but actually despised; and yet, utterly unable as I was to discover any reason at all, even the slightest, for this contempt, I had a violent feeling of injustice and, at the same time, a fear that, in reality, there was no injustice about it, and that the contempt had an objective foundation of which I was myself unaware, though to others it was quite obvious. I had a respectable opinion of myself, mixed with just a dash of pity, as of a man who is not too fortunate, a man upon whom Fate has not smiled as she ought to have done; but not in any way contemptible, quite the contrary. And now, behold, those words of Emilia’s were completely upsetting this idea, were making me suspect, for the first time, that I did not know myself or judge myself as I really was, and that I had always flattered myself beyond all truth.
Finally I went into the bathroom and put my head under the tap, and the jet of cold water did me good; my brain had seemed to be red hot, just as though Emilia’s words had set fire to it, discovering in it a combustible quality hitherto unknown. I combed my hair, washed my face, re-tied my tie, then went back into the living-room. But the sight of the table ready laid in the window embrasure aroused in me a feeling of rebellion: it was impossible that we should sit down as we did every day and eat together, in that room which still echoed with the words that had so deeply affected me. At that very moment Emilia opened the door and looked in, her face now recomposed into its usual serene, placid expression. Without looking at her I said: “I don’t want to dine at home this evening...Tell the maid we’re going out, and then get dressed at once...we’ll go and dine out somewhere...”
She answered, in some surprise: “Why, it’s all ready...the whole thing will have to be thrown away.”
A sudden rage swept over me, and I shouted: “That’s enough. Throw away anything you like, but go and get dressed because we’re going out.” Still I did not look at her, but I heard her murmur: “What a way to behave!” Then she closed the door again.
A few minutes later we left the house. In the narrow street, flanked on both sides by modern buildings like our own, with facades full of balconies and verandas, among all the big, expensive motor-cars, my own small, utilitarian car awaited us—a recent acquisition which, like the flat, had still, to a great extent, to be paid for out of the earnings of future film-scripts. I had only had it a few months, and I still had that feeling of slightly childish vanity which such a possession can at first inspire. But that evening, as we walked towards the car, side by side, not looking at each other, in silence and not touching each other, I could not help thinking: “This car, like the flat, represents the sacrifice of my ambitions...and that sacrifice has been in vain.” And in truth, just for a moment, I had a sharp sense of the contrast between the luxurious street in which everything looked new and expensive, our flat which looked down upon us from the third floor, the car that awaited us a few yards further on, and my own unhappiness, which made all these advantages appear useless and wearisome.
When I had got into the car, I waited until Emilia was seated and then stretched out my arm to shut the door. Usually, in making this movement, I brushed against her knees, or, turning a little, gave her a light, quick kiss on the cheek. This time, however, almost spontaneously I avoided touching her. The door closed with a bang and for a moment we sat motionless and silent. Then Emilia asked: “Where are we going?” I thought for a few seconds and replied at random: “Let’s go to the Via Appia.”
Slightly surprised, she said: “But it’s too early for the Via Appia...it’ll be cold and there won’t be anyone there.”
“Never mind...
we
shall be there.”
She was silent, and I drove off quickly towards the Appian Way. Coming down from our own quarter, we crossed the center of the city and went out by the Via dei Trionfi and the Passeggiata Archeologica. We passed the ancient mossy walls, the gardens and vegetable-plots, the villas hidden in trees along the first part of the Appian Way. Then we came to the entrance to the Catacombs, lit by two feeble lamps. Emilia was right; it was still too early in the year for the Via Appia. In the restaurant with the archaeological name, when we came into the big sham-rustic room adorned with amphoras and broken columns, we found nothing but tables and a quantity of waiters. We were the only customers, and I could not help thinking that, in that chilly deserted room, surrounded by the tiresome solicitude of too many attendants, we should have no hope of solving the problem of our relationship—on the contrary. I remembered that it was in that very restaurant, two years before, at the time of our deepest love, that we had constantly dined; and all at once I understood why, amongst so many, I had chosen it, so dismal at that season of the year, and so forlorn.
The waiter was standing, menu in hand, on one side, and on the other the wine-waiter was bowing, with the wine-list. I began ordering our dinner, making suggestions to Emilia, and bending forward slightly towards her like an attentive, gallant husband. She kept her eyes lowered and answered without looking up, in monosyllables: “Yes, no, all right.” I also ordered a bottle of the choicest wine, although Emilia protested that she did not want to drink anything. “I’ll drink it,” I said. The wine-waiter gave me an understanding smile, and the two waiters went off together.
I do not wish to give a description here of our dinner in all its details but merely to depict my own state of mind, a state of mind which was entirely new to me that evening but which was thenceforth to become normal in my relations with Emilia. They say that, if we manage to live without too great an effort, it is entirely owing to the automatism which makes us unconscious of a great part of our movements. In order to take one single step, it seems, we displace an infinite number of muscles, and yet, thanks to this automatism, we are unaware of it. The same thing happens in our relations with other people. As long as I believed myself to be loved by Emilia, a kind of happy automatism had presided over our relations; and only the final completion of any course of conduct on my part had been illuminated by the light of consciousness, all the rest remaining in the obscurity of affectionate and unnoticed habit. But now that the illusion of love had faded, I discovered myself to be conscious of every one of my actions, even the smallest. I offered her something to drink, I passed her the salt, I looked at her, I stopped looking at her: each gesture was accompanied by a painful, dull, impotent, exasperated consciousness. I felt myself completely shackled, completely numbed, completely paralyzed; at each act, I found myself wondering: am I doing right, am I doing wrong? I had, in fact, lost all confidence. With complete strangers one can always hope to regain it. But with Emilia, it was an experience of the past, a thing defunct: I could have no hope whatever.
