Contempt - Alberto Moravia [44]
“I haven’t anything at all...and now let me go!”
I clasped her legs more tightly with my two arms, pressing my face into her lap. Generally, when I made this gesture, I would feel, after a moment or two, the big hand that I loved so much being laid on my head in a slow, tentative caress. This would be the signal of her emotional response and of her willingness to do my pleasure. But this time her hand remained dangling and inert. This attitude on her part, so different from her former one, smote deep into my heart. I released her, and taking her by the wrist again, cried: “No, you shan’t go... You’ve got to tell me the truth...this very minute...You shan’t leave the room until you’ve told me the truth.”
She went on looking down at me from above: I could not see her but I seemed to feel her hesitating gaze on my bowed head. At last she said: “Well, you’ve asked for it. All I wanted was to go on as we are. It’s you who’ve asked for it: it’s true, I don’t love you now. There’s the truth for you!”
It is possible to picture the most disagreeable things and to picture them with the certainty that they are true. But the confirmation of such fancies, or rather, of such certainties. always comes unexpectedly and painfully, just as though one had not pictured anything beforehand. Really and truly I had known all the time that Emilia no longer loved me. But to hear her say it had, nevertheless, a chilling effect upon me. She did not love me now: those words, so often imagined, assumed, when pronounced by her lips, an entirely new significance. They were fact, not fancy, however mixed the latter might have been with certainty. They had a weight, a size, which they had never before had in my mind. I do not remember clearly how I received this declaration. Probably I gave a start, like someone who goes under an icy shower-bath knowing that it is icy, and yet, when he feels it, gives a start just the same, as if he had never known at all. Then I tried to recover myself, to show myself, somehow, reasonable and objective. I said, as gently as I could: “Come here...sit down and explain to me why you don’t love me.”
She obeyed and sat down again, this time on the divan. Then she said, rather irritably: “There’s nothing to explain. I don’t love you now and that is absolutely all I have to say.”
I realized that, the more I sought to show myself reasonable, the more deeply did the thorn of my unspeakable pain sink into my flesh. My face was twisted into a forced smile as I answered: “You must at least admit that you owe me an explanation. Even when one sacks a servant, one explains the reason.”
“I don’t love you any more: that’s all I have to say.”
“But why? You did love me, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I loved you...very much...but now I don’t any more.”
“You loved me very much?”
“Yes, very much; but it’s all over now.”
“But why? There must be a reason.”
“Perhaps there may be...but I don’t know what it is; I only know that I don’t love you.”
“Don’t repeat it so often,” I exclaimed almost in spite of myself, and raising my voice a little.
“It’s you who make me repeat it. You refuse to be convinced and so I have to go on repeating it.”
“I’m convinced now.”
There was silence. Emilia had lit a cigarette and was smoking it with downcast eyes. I was bending forward with my head between my hands. Finally I said: “If I tell you the reason—will you recognize it?”
“But I don’t know it, myself.”
“But if I tell it to you, perhaps you’ll recognize it.”
“All right then, come on...tell me.”
“Don’t speak to me like that!” I wanted to cry to her, wounded by her curt, indifferent tone. But I restrained myself and, trying to maintain my reasonable air, began: “Do you remember that girl who came here some months ago to type out