Contempt - Alberto Moravia [41]
Listless, demoralized and perplexed, I went into my study and looked mechanically in the bookshelf for the translation of the Odyssey. Then I sat down at the desk, put a sheet of paper into my typewriter and, having lit a cigarette, prepared to write the summary. I thought that the work would soothe my anxiety or at least make me forget it: I had tried this remedy on other occasions. So I opened the book and read, slowly, the whole of the first canto. Then at the top of the page I typed the title: Synopsis of the Odyssey, and, underneath it, began: “The Trojan War has been over for some time. All the Greek heroes who took part in it have now gone home. All except Ulysses, who is still far from his own island and his dear ones.” At this point, however, a doubt as to whether or not it was suitable to introduce into my summary the Council of the Gods in the course of which this same return of Ulysses to Ithaca was discussed, caused me to interrupt my work. The council was important, it seemed to me, because it introduced into the poem the notion of Fate, and of the vanity and, at the same time, the nobility and heroism of human effort. Cutting out the council meant cutting out the whole supramundane aspect of the poem, eliminating all divine intervention, suppressing the figures of the various divinities, so charming and poetical in themselves. But there was no doubt that Battista would not want to have anything to do with the gods, who would seem to him nothing more than incompetent chatterboxes who made a great fuss about deciding things that could perfectly well be decided by the protagonists. As for Rheingold, the ambiguous hint he had given of a “psychological” film presaged no good towards the divinities: psychology obviously excludes Fate and divine intervention; at most, it discovers Fate in the depths of the human spirit, in the dark intricacies of the so-called subconscious. The gods, therefore, would be superfluous, because neither spectacular nor psychological...I thought about these things with ever-growing confusion and weariness; every now and then I looked at the typewriter and said to myself that I must get on with my work, but I could not bring myself to it and sat without moving a finger; and finally I fell into a profound but blank meditation, sitting there at the desk, my eyes staring into vacancy. In reality I was not so much meditating as stirring together in my mind the cold, acid flavors of the various feelings, all of them disagreeable, that agitated me; but, in my bewildered, weary, vaguely irritable state, I did not succeed in defining them to myself in any precise manner. Then, like an air-bubble that rises suddenly to the still surface of a pond after remaining for who knows how long under water, this reflection forced its way into my mind: “Now I shall have to submit the Odyssey to the usual massacre, to reduce it to a film, and once the script is finished, this book will go back into its shelf along with all the others that have served me for other screen-plays. And in a few years’ time, when I am looking for another book to cut to pieces for another film, I shall come upon it and say: ‘Ah, yes, of course, that was when I was doing the script of the Odyssey with Rheingold. And then nothing was done about it...nothing was done, after talking for months, morning and evening, day in and day out, about Ulysses and Penelope and the Cyclops and Circe and the Sirens. Nothing was done because...because there wasn