Contempt - Alberto Moravia [55]
I was struck by this last phrase, so cruel in its sincerity; and I think I gave a violent start, as if I had been stabbed. I could not help exclaiming, in resentment: “Why do you talk to me like that? ‘Compelled’...What have I done to you? Why do you hate me so?”
Now it was she who was crying, as I perceived, although she was trying not to show it, by hiding part of her face with her hand. Then she shook her head and said: “You didn’t want me to go away. Well, I’m staying. You ought to be pleased, oughtn’t you?”
I got up from the armchair, sat down beside her on the divan and took her in my arms, although I was conscious, at the first contact, that she withdrew and resisted me. “Certainly I want you to stay,” I said, “but not in that way, not ‘compelled.’ What have I done to you, Emilia, that you speak to me like that?”
“If you like, I’ll go away,” she answered; “I’ll take a room somewhere...and you won’t have to help me except just for a short time. I’ll get a job as a typist again. And as soon as I find work, I shan’t ask anything more from you.”
“No, no,” I cried. “I want you to stay. But, Emilia, not ‘compelled’ to stay, not ‘compelled.’ ”
“It’s not you who compel me,” she replied, still weeping, “it’s life.”
Once again, as I clasped her in my arms, I felt a temptation to ask her why it was that she had ceased to love me, why, in fact, she despised me, and what had happened, what I had done to her. But now, perhaps as a counterpoise to her tears and bewilderment, I had regained, partly, my composure. I said to myself that this was not the moment to ask certain questions; that probably, by such questions, I should gain no ground at all; and that perhaps, in order to get at the truth, I ought to have recourse to different, and less brusque, stratagems. I waited a little, while she went on weeping in silence, her face turned away from me. “Look,” I proposed, “let’s not have any more discussions or explanations...they serve no purpose except to make us hurt each other. There’s nothing more I want to know from you, at any rate for the present. But just listen to me for a moment: I have agreed, after all, to do the Odyssey script. But Battista wants us to do it somewhere in the Bay of Naples, where most of the exteriors will be taken...so we’ve decided to go to Capri. I’ll leave you to yourself, there, I swear; in any case I won’t be able to help doing so, as I shall be working all day with the director, and I may or may not see you at meal-times...Capri is an extremely beautiful place, and soon it will be possible to go swimming. You can rest, and bathe, and go for walks; it’ll be good for your nerves, and you can think it all over and decide at your leisure what you want to do. Your mother is really right, after all: you ought to think it over. Then, in four or five months’ time, you can tell me what you’ve decided, and then—and not till then—we’ll talk about it again.”
She kept her head turned sideways all the time, as if to avoid seeing me. Then she asked, in a somewhat comforted tone of voice: “And when should we be going?”
“At once...that is, in about ten days...as soon as the director comes back from Paris.”
I was wondering now, as I held her against me and felt the roundness and softness of her breast against mine, whether I dared take the risk of kissing her. Actually, she was taking no sort of share in our embrace, but merely submitting to it. All the same, I deceived myself into thinking that this passivity was not entirely the result of indifference, and that it contained some element of interest. Then I heard her ask, still in the same comforted yet reluctant tone: “Where shall we