Contempt - Alberto Moravia [103]
I realize, at this point, that I have almost nothing more to say. It is useless to describe how I left that same afternoon, how, when I reached Naples, I learned that in reality Emilia had been killed in a motor accident a short distance south of Terracina. Her death had been a strange one. Owing to fatigue and the great heat, she had apparently fallen asleep, with her head down and her chin resting on her chest. Battista, as usual, was driving extremely fast. Suddenly an ox-drawn cart had come out of a side road. Battista had jammed on the brakes; and, after an exchange of abuse with the driver of the cart, had driven on. But Emilia’s head was swaying from one side to another, and she had not spoken. Battista had spoken to her, but she had not answered; and, at a bend in the road, she had fallen on top of him. He had stopped the car, and had then discovered that she was dead. The sudden jamming on of the brakes to avoid the cart had caught her body in a moment of complete abandonment, with all the muscles relaxed, as indeed happens during sleep; and the jolt of the suddenly stopped car had caused an abrupt jerk of the neck, fracturing the spinal column out-right. She had died without knowing it.
It was extremely hot—a wearisome thing for sorrow, which demands, like joy, that there should be no rivalry in any other feeling. The funeral took place on a day of unrelieved sultriness, beneath a cloudy sky, the air damp and windless. After the funeral, in the evening, I closed the door behind me as I entered our apartment—for ever useless and empty, now—and I understood at last that Emilia, truly, was dead, and that I should never see her again. All the windows in the flat had been opened wide in the hope of increasing even the faintest breath of air, but I felt I was suffocating as I wandered from one room to another, over the polished floors, in the twilight gloom. Meanwhile the brightly lit windows of the adjoining houses, their inhabitants visible inside the rooms, drove me almost to frenzy, their quiet lights reminding me of a world in which people loved without misunderstandings and were loved in return and lived peaceful lives—a world from which it seemed to me that I was for ever shut out. The re-entry into such a world would have meant, for me, an explanation with Emilia, her conviction of my innocence, the creation once again of the miracle of love which, in order to exist, must be kindled not only in our own hearts but in those of others as well. But this was no longer possible, and I felt I should go mad when I thought that perhaps I ought to recognize, in Emilia’s death, a last, supreme act of hostility on her part against myself.
But I had to go on living. Next day I took up the suitcase which I had not yet opened, locked the door of the flat with the sensation of closing a grave, and handed the keys to the porter, explaining that I intended to get rid of the apartment as soon as I returned from my holiday. Then I started off again for Capri. Strange to say, I was driven to return there by the hope that, somehow or other, in the same place where she had appeared to me, or elsewhere, Emilia would again show herself to me. And then I would again explain to her why everything had happened, and I would again declare my love, and would again receive her assurance that she understood me and loved me. This hope had a quality of madness about it, and I was aware of this. Never, indeed, was I so near to a kind of reasoned insanity as I was at that time, balanced precariously between a loathing for reality and a longing for hallucination.
Emilia, fortunately, did not reappear to me, either when sleeping or waking. And when I compared the time at which she had appeared