Contempt - Alberto Moravia [76]
Rheingold seemed extremely cheerful. He immediately asked me: “I say, Molteni—what d’you think of a morning like this?”
“I think it’s an exquisitely beautiful morning.”
“What would you say, Molteni,” he went on, taking me by the arm and turning with me towards the parapet, “what would you say to letting our work go hang, hiring a boat and rowing slowly all round the island? Don’t you think it would be better, infinitely better?”
I answered him without conviction, thinking in my heart that an excursion of that kind in the company of Rheingold would lose a good deal of its charm. “Yes,” I said, “in a sense it would be better.”
“You’ve said it, Molteni!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “In a sense...But in what sense? Not in the sense in which we understand life. For us life means duty—doesn’t it, Molteni? Duty, first and foremost...and so, Molteni, to work!” He left the parapet and sat down again at the table; then, leaning towards me and looking into my eyes, he said, with a certain solemnity: “Sit down here, opposite me...this morning we’ll just talk. I have a great many things to say to you.”
I sat down. Rheingold adjusted his cap over his eyes and resumed: “You will remember, Molteni, that I was explaining my interpretation of the Odyssey to you during our drive from Rome to Naples...but this explanation was interrupted by the appearance of Battista. Then, for the rest of the journey I was asleep, and so the explanation was postponed. You remember, Molteni?”
“Yes, certainly I do.”
“You will also remember that I gave you the key to the Odyssey—in this way: Ulysses takes ten years to return home because really, in his subconscious mind, he does not want to return.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“I will now reveal to you, then, the reason why, according to my idea, Ulysses does not want to return home,” said Rheingold. He paused a moment as if to mark the beginning of the revelation, and then, wrinkling his eyebrows and gazing at me with characteristic dictatorial seriousness, he went on: “Ulysses, in his subconscious mind, does not wish to return to Ithaca because in reality his relations with Penelope are unsatisfactory. That’s the reason, Molteni. And these relations had been unsatisfactory even before the departure of Ulysses to the war...in fact really Ulysses had gone off to the war because he was unhappy at home...and he was unhappy at home precisely because of his unsatisfactory relations with his wife!”
Rheingold was silent for a moment, but without ceasing to frown in that half-dictatorial, half-didactic manner; and I took advantage of the pause to turn my chair so that I did not have the sun in my eyes. Then he continued: “If his relations with Penelope had been good, Ulysses would not have gone off to the war. Ulysses was not a swaggerer or a warmonger. Ulysses was a prudent, wise, wary kind of man. If his relations with his wife had been good, Ulysses, simply in order to prove to Menelaus that he supported him, would perhaps just have sent an expeditionary force under the command of some man he trusted...instead of which he went off himself, taking advantage of the war to leave home and thus escape from his wife.”
“Very logical.”
“Very psychological, you mean, Molteni,” corrected Rheingold, having noticed, perhaps, a touch of irony in my tone, “very psychological. And remember that everything depends upon psychology; without psychology there is no character, without character there is no story. Now, what is the psychology of Ulysses and Penelope? This is