Contempt - Alberto Moravia [71]
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, pouring himself out some wine, “you look gloomy...not to say ill-humored.”
This was his method of attack: perhaps because he knew that the best way to be on the defensive is to be offensive. I answered with a promptness that surprised me: “I started feeling ill-humored while I was out on the terrace looking at the sea.”
He raised his eyebrows and looked at me questioningly but with no sign of agitation. “Oh, really...why?”
I looked at Emilia: she did not appear to be worried, either. They were both of them incredibly sure of themselves. Yet Emilia had certainly seen me, and in all probability had told Battista. Suddenly these unpremeditated words issued from my mouth: “Battista, may I talk to you frankly?”
Again I wondered at his imperturbability. “Frankly?” he asked. “But of course! I always like people to talk to me frankly.”
“You see,” I went on, “when I was looking at the sea, I imagined for a moment that I was here working on my own account. My ambition, as you know, is to write for the theater. And so I thought how this would be the ideal spot, as they say, to devote myself to my work: beauty, silence, peace, my wife with me, nothing to worry about. Then I remembered that I was here, in this place which is so lovely and so favorable in every way, not for that purpose, but—I’m sorry, but you wanted me to be frank—in order to spend my time writing a film-script which will certainly be good but which, in fact, really and truly doesn’t concern me. I shall give of my very best to Rheingold, and Rheingold will make whatever use of it he likes, and in the end I shall be given a check. And I shall have wasted three or four months of the best and most creative time of my life. I know I shouldn’t say such things to you, nor to any other producer...but you wanted me to be frank. Now you know why I’m in a bad temper.”
Why had I said these things instead of the others that were on the tip of my tongue and that concerned the conduct of Battista towards my wife? I did not know; perhaps owing to a sudden weariness of overstrained nerves; perhaps because in this way I expressed, indirectly, my desperation at Emilia’s unfaithfulness which I felt to be somehow connected with the commercial and subordinate character of my work. But, just as Battista and Emilia had remained untroubled by my ominous preamble, so now they failed to show any relief at all at the wretched confession of weakness that had followed it. Battista said seriously: “But I’m sure, Molteni, you’ll write a very fine script.”
Having started out on the wrong track, I was now committed to it to the bitter end. I answered in a tone of exasperation: “I am afraid I didn’t make myself clear. I am a writer for the theater, Battista, not one of the large number of professional writers of film-scripts...and this script, however fine, however perfect it is, will be, for me, merely a script...a thing— allow me to say frankly—that I do simply in order to earn money...Now at the age of twenty-seven one has what are commonly called ideals—and my ideal is to write for the theater!...Why am I unable to do so? Because the world to-day is so constructed that no one can do what he would like to do, and he is forced, instead, to do what others wish him to do. Because the question of money always intrudes—into what we do, into what we are, into what we wish to become, into our work, into