Contempt - Alberto Moravia [20]
This director was called Pasetti and was a fairish young man, angular, thin, precise and clean-looking, with the appearance of a meticulous geometrician or accountant rather than of an artist. He was about the same age as myself; but, as always happens with script-writing, the relations between him and me were those of superior and inferior, for the director always has greater authority than any other of the collaborators. After a moment he resumed, with his characteristically cold, awkward pleasantness: “I must say, Riccardo, I must say, you’re just like a horse that smells its own stable. I was certain we’d have to work for at least four more days...and now we’ve polished it off in two hours. It was the prospect of the cash, was it?—that inspired you!”
I did not dislike Pasetti, in spite of his mediocrity and his almost unbelievable psychological obtuseness; and there had grown up between us a relationship that was in a way well-balanced, he being a man without imagination and without nerves, but conscious of his limitations and fundamentally modest, while I was all nerves and imagination, morbidly sensitive and complex. Adopting his facetious tone and joining in the joke, I answered: “Of course, what you say is quite true—it was the prospect of the cash.”
Lighting a cigarette, he went on: “But don’t imagine the game is finished. All we’ve done is the main part of the job; we’ve got to revise the whole of the dialogue...You can’t rest on your laurels yet.”
I could not help noticing, yet again, how he expressed himself almost entirely in commonplaces and ready-made phrases; and I looked discreetly at the clock. It was almost one. “Don’t worry,” I said; “I shall be at your service for any touching-up that’s needed.”
Shaking his head, he replied: “I know my own chickens. I shall tell Battista to hold up the last installment of your pay until you can’t hold out any longer.”
He had his own way, facetious yet authoritative, and surprising in one so young, of spurring on his collaborators by alternating praise with blame, flattery with reserve, entreaty with command; and in this sense he might even have been called a good director, since directing—two thirds of it, anyhow—consists in having a shrewd knowledge of how to get others to do one’s bidding. I answered, drawing him out, as usual: “No, you get him to pay me the whole installment and I promise you I’ll be at your service for any touching-up that’s needed.”
“But what do you do with all this money?” he asked, awkwardly jocose; “it’s never enough for you...and yet you haven’t any mistresses, you don’t gamble, you haven’t any children...”
“I have to pay the installments on the flat,” I replied seriously, lowering my eyes, slightly annoyed at his indiscreetness.
“Have you much to pay still?”
“Almost the whole amount.”
“I bet it’s your wife who bullies you until you get yourself paid what’s owing to you. I can hear her saying, ‘Now, Riccardo, remember to make them pay you that last installment!’”
“Yes, it’s my wife,” I lied, “but you know what women are. Their homes are immensely important to them.”
“You’re telling me!” He started talking about his wife, who very much resembled him and whom he, nevertheless—or so I gathered—considered to be a bizarre creature, full of caprices and all sorts of unexpected things—in fact, a woman. I listened with an attentive expression, though in point of fact I was thinking about something else. He concluded in an unforeseen manner: “That’s all very well...but I know what you script-writers are: you’re all the same, the whole lot of you. After you once get your money, one’s lucky to see you again. No, no, I shall tell Battista to keep back the last installment!”
“Come on, Pasetti, do what I ask!”
“Well, well, I’ll see. But don’t count on it.”
I glanced stealthily at the clock again. Now I had given him the chance to flaunt his authority and he had taken it: so I could go away. I began: “Well, well, I’m pleased to have finished the job—or rather, as you say, the main part of it. But now I think it