Contempt - Alberto Moravia [51]
I felt absurdly awkward as I said these words; rather like a cripple trying to demonstrate a dance-step. But Emilia did not speak, and I abandoned myself to this new humor of mine, which I imagined to be an inexhaustible stream but which very soon turned out to be no more than a thin and timid trickle. I was now driving along the Via Appia, of whose cypresses and brick ruins and white marble statues and Roman pavement, with its big, irregular paving-stones, I caught a glimpse now and then by the light of the headlamps on the road in front, through the thousand glistening threads of rain. I went straight on for a little and then said, in a tone of false elation: “Let’s forget, for once, who we are, and imagine we’re two young students looking for a quiet corner, far away from indiscreet eyes, where they can make love in peace.”
Still she said nothing, and I, encouraged by her silence, went a short distance farther along the road and then brought the car suddenly to a stop. It was pouring with rain now; the windshield-wipers, going backwards and forwards on the glass, did not move fast enough to sweep away the streams of water. “We’re two young students,” I said again in an uncertain voice; “I’m called Mario and you’re Maria...and we’ve at last found a quiet place though it’s rather wet. But inside the car we’re all right...Give me a kiss.” As I said this, with the decisiveness of a drunken man, I put my arm around her shoulders and tried to kiss her.
I don’t know what I was hoping for: what had occurred in the restaurant should have made me understand what I ought to expect. At first Emilia tried to withdraw herself, with quite a good grace and in silence, from my embrace; then, when I persisted and, taking her chin in my hand, tried to turn her face towards mine, she thrust me harshly away. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Or are you drunk?”
“No, I’m not drunk,” I murmured; “give me a kiss.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she answered with honest indignation, thrusting me away again. After a moment she went on: “And then you wonder that I tell you I despise you ...when you behave like this...after what has happened between us.”
“But I love you.”
“I don’t love you.”
I felt ridiculous, but in a distressed kind of way, like someone who realizes he has been forced into a position which has the double disadvantage of being both comic and irreparable. But I was not yet disposed to consider myself beaten. “You’re going to give me a kiss; if you won’t do it for love, I’ll make you do it,” I muttered in a voice that was meant to be brutal and masculine. And I threw myself upon her.
She said nothing this time, but she opened the door, and I fell forward on to the empty seat. She had jumped out of the car and run away down the road, despite the rain which was now falling very heavily.
I paused for a moment in astonishment, confronted by this empty seat. Then I said to myself: “I’m an idiot,” and I too got out of the car.
It was raining really hard, and when I put my foot to the ground I felt myself plunge up to the ankle in a puddle. Exasperated, I called out: “Emilia...come on, come back here and don’t worry. I won’t touch you.”
From some point that was indistinguishable in the darkness but not very far off, she answered: “Either you stop it, or I walk back into Rome.”
I said, in a voice that trembled: “Come along, I promise anything you wish.”
It was still raining heavily; the water was running down between the collar of my coat and my shirt-collar, wetting the back of my neck in a disagreeable fashion, and I felt it trickling over my forehead and the sides of my head. The headlamps of the car lit up only a small stretch of the road, together with a fragment of ruined Roman brickwork and a tall black cypress, truncated by the darkness; and, strain my eyes as I might, I was unable to see Emilia. Disheartened, I called again: “Emilia. Emilia...” and my voice ended on an almost tearful note.
At last she came forward out of the darkness into the beam of the headlamps, and said: “Do you promise you won’t touch me?”
“Yes, I promise.