Contempt - Alberto Moravia [39]
What happened then, I think it is hardly necessary to relate in detail. Emilia withdrew at once, and I, after saying very hurriedly to the girl, “Signorina, that’s enough for today, you can go home now,” almost ran out of the study and joined Emilia in the living-room. I expected a scene of jealousy, but all Emilia said was: “You might at least wipe the red off your lips.” I did so, and then sat down beside her and tried to justify myself, telling her the truth. She listened to me with an indefinable expression of suspicious, but fundamentally indulgent, mistrust, and at last remarked that, if I was truly in love with the typist, I had only to say so and she would agree to a separation forthwith. But she spoke these words without harshness and with a kind of melancholy gentleness, as though tacitly inviting me to contradict them. Finally, after many explanations and much desperation on my part (I was positively terrified at the thought of Emilia leaving me), she appeared to be convinced and, with some show of resistance and reluctance, consented to forgive me. That same afternoon, in the presence of Emilia, I telephoned to the typist to inform her that I should not need her again. The girl tried to wrest an appointment from me at some outside meeting-place; but I gave her an evasive answer, and have never seen her since.
This recapitulation, as I said, may seem lengthy, whereas in reality the scene flashed across my memory in the form of a lightning-like image: Emilia opening the door at the moment when I was kissing the typist. And I was at once surprised at not having thought of it before. There could be no doubt, I now felt, that things had taken the following course. Emilia, at the time, had shown that she paid no importance to the incident, whereas in reality, perhaps unconsciously, she had been profoundly disturbed by it. Afterwards she had thought about it again, weaving round that first memory an ever-thicker, ever-tighter cocoon of increasing disillusionment; so that that kiss, which for me had been nothing more than a passing weakness, had produced in her mind a trauma (to use a psychiatrist’s term), that is, a wound which time, instead of healing, had increasingly exacerbated. While I was pondering these things there must no doubt have been a very dreamy expression on my face, for all at once, through the kind of thick mist that enveloped me, I heard Rheingold’s voice asking in alarm: “But do you hear what I am saying, Signor Molteni?”
The mist dissolved in an instant, and I shook myself and saw the director’s smiling face stretching out towards me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “My mind was wandering. I was thinking of what Rheingold said: a man who loves his wife and is not loved in return...but...but...” Not knowing what to say, I made the objection that had come into my mind in the first place, “But Ulysses in the poem is loved in return by Penelope...in fact, in a sense, the whole of the Odyssey hinges on this love of Penelope’s for Ulysses.”
Rheingold, I saw, swept aside my objection with a smile. “Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know, people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is a form of vengeance, of blackmail, of recovering one’s self-respect. Loyalty, not love.”
I was struck once again, by what Rheingold said; and again I could not help thinking of Emilia, wondering whether, in place of loyalty and indifference, I would not perhaps have preferred betrayal and the consequent remorse. Yes, undoubtedly I should: if Emilia had betrayed me and had felt guilty towards me, it would have been possible for me to face her with assurance. But I had now demonstrated to myself that Emilia was not betraying me; that it had been I myself, in fact, who had betrayed her. As my mind was wandering in this new direction I was aroused by the voice of Battista saying: