Contempt - Alberto Moravia [42]
I do not know how long I remained like that, hunched up motionless in my chair in front of the typewriter, with my eyes turned towards the window. At last I heard the front door bang, at the other end of the flat, and then the sound of footsteps in the living-room, and I knew that Emilia had returned. I did not move, but remained where I was. Finally I heard the door of the study open behind me and Emilia’s voice asking: “Are you in here? What are you doing? Are you working?” Then I turned around.
She was standing in the doorway with her hat still on her head and a parcel in her hand. I said at once, with a spontaneity which astonished me after so many doubts and apprehensions: “No, I’m not working...I was just wondering whether I ought or ought not to accept this new script of Battista’s.”
She closed the door and came and stood beside me, near the desk. “Have you been to see Battista?”
“Yes.”
“But you haven’t come to an agreement...Doesn’t he offer you enough?”
“Yes, he offers enough...and we have come to an agreement.”
“Well, then...But perhaps you don’t like the subject?”
“No, it’s a good subject.”
“What is the subject?”
I looked at her for a moment before replying: as usual she appeared absent-minded and indifferent, and one could see she was only speaking from duty. “It’s the Odyssey,” I answered briefly.
She put down the parcel on the desk, lifted her hand to her head and slowly took off her hat, shaking out her pressed-down hair. But her face was blank and inattentive: either she had not understood that I was speaking of the famous poem, or—which was more probable—the title, though not entirely unknown, conveyed nothing to her. “Well,” she remarked at last, almost impatiently, “don’t you like it?”
“Yes, I told you I did!”
“Isn’t the Odyssey the thing one learns at school? Why don’t you want to do it?”
“Because I don’t feel like doing it, now.”
“But surely, only this morning, you had decided to accept the job?”
All of a sudden I realized that the moment had come for another, and this time really decisive, explanation. I jumped to my feet, took hold of her by the arm and said: “Let’s go in there, into the living-room; I must talk to you.”
She was frightened, more, perhaps, by the almost frenzied force with which I gripped her arm than by the tone of my voice. “What’s the matter with you? are you mad?”
“No, I’m not mad...Let’s go in there and talk.”
Meanwhile I was dragging her, forcibly, across the study. I opened the door and thrust her into the other room, in the direction of an armchair. “Sit down there!” I myself sat down facing her, and said: “Now let’s talk.”
She looked at me dubiously, and still a little frightened. “Well, talk then, I’m listening.”
I began in a cold and colorless voice. “Yesterday—do you remember?—I told you that I had no desire to do this script because I was not sure that you loved me...and you answered that you did love me and that I ought to do it. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“Well,” I declared resolutely, “I believe you were telling me a lie...I don’t know why—perhaps because you were sorry for me, perhaps in order to serve your own interests—”
“But what interests?” she interrupted me harshly.
“The interest you may have,” I explained, “in remaining in this flat which you like so much.”
Her reaction was such that I was struck by its violence. She sat up straight in her chair and said, in a louder voice than usual: “Who told you that? This flat doesn’t matter to me in the least, not in the very least. I’m perfectly ready to go back and live in a furnished room...It’s quite obvious you don’t know me...It means nothing to me.”
These words gave me a feeling of acute pain, pain such as a man might