Contempt - Alberto Moravia [46]
“It might possibly have happened like that.”
All of a sudden I had a horrible feeling: this reasonable tone of mine, I realized, was false. I was not reasonable, I was suffering, in fact, I was desperate, furious, I was shattered; and why in the world should I keep up a reasonable tone? I don’t know what happened to me at that moment. Before I knew what I was doing, I had jumped to my feet, shouting: “Don’t imagine I’m here just to keep up a bright conversation!” and had leaped on top of her and seized her by the throat and thrown her back on to the divan and was yelling into her face: “Tell me the truth...tell it once and for all. Come on!”
Beneath me the big, perfect body that I loved so much was struggling this way and that, and she had grown red and swollen in the face; I must have been squeezing her throat tightly, and I knew that, in my heart, I wanted to kill her. I kept on saying: “Tell me the truth, once and for all,” and at the same time I squeezed with redoubled force and thought: “I’m going to kill her...but better dead than my enemy!” Then I felt her trying to kick me in the belly with her knee, and indeed she succeeded in doing so, and with such violence that it took my breath away. This blow hurt me almost as much as the phrase: “I don’t love you”; and it was in truth the blow of an enemy, an enemy who seeks to harm his adversary as much as possible. At the same time my murderous hatred ebbed, I relaxed my grip somewhat, and she struggled free, giving me a push that almost threw me off the divan. Then, before I could recover myself, she cried out in a voice of exasperation: “I despise you...that’s the feeling I have for you and that’s the reason why I’ve stopped loving you. I despise you and you disgust me every time you touch me. There’s the truth for you...I despise you and you disgust me!”
I was standing up now. My eye, followed at once by my hand, moved towards a massive glass ashtray that stood on the table. She certainly thought I intended to kill her, for she uttered a groan of fear and covered her face with her arm. But my guardian angel stood by me. I do not know how I managed to control myself; I put the ashtray back on the table and went out of the room.
10
AS I HAVE already mentioned, Emilia had not had a good education: she had attended only the first elementary school and then, for a few years, the normal school; then she had broken off her studies and had learned to do typing and shorthand, and at sixteen was already employed in a lawyer’s office. She came, it is true, of what is called a good family—that is, of a family which in the past had been in easy circumstances, having owned property in the neighborhood of Rome. But her grandfather had dissipated his heritage in unsuccessful commercial speculations, and her father, up to the day of his death, had been merely a minor official in the Ministry of Finance. So she had grown up in poverty, and, as regards her education and manner of thinking, could almost be described as belonging to the working class; and, like many women of that class, she seemed to have nothing to fall back upon except her common sense, which was so solid as to appear sometimes like stupidity or, to say the least, narrowness of ideas. Yet by virtue solely of this common sense she sometimes succeeded, in a wholly unexpected and, to me, mysterious, manner, in formulating comments and appreciations that were extremely acute; just as, indeed, happens with people of the working class, who are closer to nature than others, and whose consciousness is not obscured by any convention or prejudice. Certain things she said merely because she had thought them over seriously, with sincerity and candor, and indeed her words had the unmistakable ring of truth. But, since she was not aware of her own candor, she felt no complacency about it; thus in a way confirming, by her very modesty, the genuineness of her judgment.