Contempt - Alberto Moravia [61]
We got out of the car, and I immediately started off down a path that led through the vineyard to the beach. I explained to Rheingold: “I’ve been shut up indoors for eight months...I haven’t seen the sea since last summer. Let’s go down to the beach for a moment.”
He followed me in silence; perhaps he was still offended, and still cross with me. The path wound through the vineyard for not much more than fifty yards and then petered out in the sand of the beach. The dull, mechanical sound of the engine had now been replaced by the irregular, echoing roar—to me a delicious sound—of waves piled upon each other and breaking in disorder. I walked a short distance, now going down on to the shimmering wet sand and now withdrawing again, according as the waves advanced or retired; finally I stopped and stood still for a long time on top of a sand-dune, my eyes turned towards the horizon. I felt I had offended Rheingold, that I ought to resume the conversation again in some more courteous manner, and that he was expecting me to do so. So, although it irritated me very much to be forced to interrupt my rapt contemplation of the far-off spaces of the sea, I finally made up my mind. “I’m sorry, Rheingold,” I said all at once, “perhaps I didn’t express myself very well just now. But, to tell you the truth, your interpretation didn’t entirely convince me...if you like, I’ll tell you why.”
He answered at once, solicitously: “Tell me...tell me... discussion is part of our work, isn’t it?”
“Well,” I resumed, without looking at him, “I am not entirely convinced, though I’m not saying that the Odyssey may not have that significance too. But the distinctive quality of the Homeric poems and, in general, of classical art is to conceal such a significance and a thousand other meanings too, that may occur to us moderns, in a conclusive, and what I may call a profound, form. What I mean is,” I added, with sudden, inexplicable irritation, “the beauty of the Odyssey consists precisely in this belief in reality as it is and as it presents itself objectively...in this same form, in fact, which allows of no analysis or dissection and which is exactly what it is: take it or leave it. In other words,” I concluded, still looking not at Rheingold but at the sea, “the world of Homer is a real world. Homer belonged to a civilization which had developed in accordance with, not in antagonism to, nature...That is why Homer believed in the reality of the perceptible world and saw it in a direct way, as he represented it, and that is why we too should accept it as it is, believing in it as Homer believed in it, literally, without going out of our way to look for hidden meanings.”
I paused, but my attempt at clarification, far from calming me, had strangely exasperated me, as though it had been an effort that I knew perfectly well to be useless. And almost immediately came Rheingold’s reply, accompanied by a burst of laughter, this time triumphant: “Extrovert, extrovert...You, Molteni, like all Mediterranean people, are an extrovert, and you don’t understand anyone who is an introvert. But of course there’s no harm in that. I am an introvert and you are an extrovert...it was precisely for that that I chose you. You, with your extrovert character, will counterbalance my introvert character. Our collaboration will work marvelously well, as you’ll see.”
I was on the point of answering him; and I think my answer would have been such as to offend him again, for I again felt violently irritated at his pig-headed obtuseness; when a well-known voice suddenly reached me from behind: “Rheingold, Molteni...what