Contempt - Alberto Moravia [50]
She said nothing; all she did was to gaze at me, with apprehension almost; and indeed, my face must have been distorted with rage. At last she replied: “You asked for it and I told you.”
“But it’s up to you to explain.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’ve got to explain why...why you despise me.”
“That I shall never tell you...not even if I were on the point of death.”
I was struck by her unusually resolute tone. But my surprise did not last long. I was filled with a fury which now permitted no time for reflection. “Tell me,” I insisted, and again I seized her hand, but this time in a far from caressing manner, “tell me...why do you despise me?”
“I’ve already said I shall never tell you.”
“Tell me...if not, I shall hurt you.” Beside myself with rage, I twisted her fingers. She looked at me in surprise for a moment, then screwed up her mouth in pain; and, immediately afterwards, the contempt of which hitherto she had merely spoken, showed itself clearly in her expression. “Stop it,” she said roughly; “so you want to hurt me now, as well.” I noticed this “as well,” in which there appeared to be an allusion to other severities that I wished to inflict upon her, and was left breathless. “Stop it...aren’t you ashamed of yourself? The waiters are watching us.”
“Tell me why you despise me.”
“Don’t be a fool; leave me alone.”
“Tell me why you despise me.”
“Ow!” She wrenched her fingers away with a violent jerk that knocked a tumbler off the table. There was a sound of broken glass, and she jumped up and walked away towards the door, saying loudly: “I’m going to wait for you in the car... while you pay the bill.”
She went out, and I was left sitting motionless where I was, humiliated, not so much from shame (it was true, as she had said, that all those idle waiters had been watching us the whole time and had not missed a single word or gesture of our quarrel) as by the strangeness of her behavior towards me. Never before had she spoken to me in that tone, never before had she abused me. The words “as well” continued, moreover, to echo in my ears like a new and unpleasant enigma that had to be solved, amongst so many others: how and when had I inflicted those things upon her of which, with her “as well” she was now complaining? At last I summoned the waiter, paid the bill, and followed her out.
Outside the restaurant, I found that the weather, which all day had been cloudy and uncertain, had turned to a thick drizzle. A little farther on, in the darkness of the open space, I could just see the figure of Emilia standing beside the car: I had locked the doors, and she was waiting there, patiently, in the rain. I said, in a shaky voice: “I’m sorry, I’d forgotten I had locked the car”; and heard her voice, quite quietly, answer: “Never mind...it’s not raining much.” Once again, at those forgiving words, hope of a reconciliation reawakened, crazily, in my heart: how was it possible to be filled with contempt, if one spoke in a voice so quiet, so kindly? I opened the door, got into the car, and she got in beside me. I started the engine, and said to her, in a voice that seemed to me, all of a sudden, strangely hilarious, almost jovial: “Well, Emilia, where would you like to go?”
She answered without turning, looking straight ahead: “I don’t know...wherever you like.”
Without waiting, I drove off. As I said, I now had a kind of jovial, carefree, hilarious feeling; it seemed almost as though, by turning the whole affair into a joke, by substituting lightness for seriousness and, frivolity for passion, I might succeed in solving the problem of my relations with Emilia. I do not know what it was that possessed me at that moment: perhaps desperation, like an over-potent wine, had gone to my head. I said, in an amused, deliberate playful tone: “Let’s go wherever luck takes us...we’ll just see what happens.