Contempt - Alberto Moravia [8]
Between our visit to the empty flat and the day of our entry into it a couple of months went by, during which the necessary contracts were drawn up, all in Emilia’s name, because I knew that this gave her pleasure; while we also collected together the small amount of furniture that, with my very limited means, I could afford to buy. Meanwhile, when the first feeling of satisfaction was over, I felt, as I have mentioned, extremely anxious about the future, and, at moments, positively desperate. I was earning enough by now, it is true, for us to live in a modest manner and even put aside a few pennies; but these savings were certainly not sufficient to pay the next installment on the flat. My desperation was all the more acute inasmuch as I could not even have the relief of talking about it to Emilia: I did not wish to spoil her pleasure. But I recall that time as a period of great anxiety and, in a way, of diminished love for Emilia. Indeed I could not help realizing that she was not in the least worried to know how I had managed to come by so much money, although she knew our real position perfectly well. This thought was vaguely surprising to me, and there were moments when it inspired me almost with irritation against her—she who now, all busy and cheerful, thought of nothing but going round the shops looking for things to furnish the flat, and who every day, in her most placid tone of voice, announced some new acquisition. I wondered how it came about that she, who loved me so much, failed to guess at the cruel anxieties that oppressed me; but I realized that, probably, she thought that if I had bought the lease of the flat I had no doubt also taken steps to procure the necessary money. Nevertheless her serenity and satisfaction seemed to me, in contrast to my own wretched worries, to be a sign of selfishness, or, at the least, of insensibility.
I was so troubled at that period that even the image I had hitherto made of myself in my own mind had changed. Up till then I had looked upon myself as an intellectual, a man of culture, a writer for the theater—the “art” theater, I mean—for which I had always had a great passion and to which I felt I was drawn by a natural vocation. This moral image, as I may call it, also had an influence on the physical image; I saw myself as a young man whose thinness, short sight, nervousness, pallor and carelessness in dress all bore witness, in anticipation, of the literary glory for which I was destined. But at that time, under the pressure of my cruel anxieties, this very promising and flattering picture had given place to an entirely different one, that of a poor devil who had been caught in a shabby, pathetic trap, who had not been able to resist his love for his wife and had over-reached himself and would be forced to struggle, for goodness knows how much longer, in the mortifying toils of poverty. I saw myself changed in my physical aspect as well: I was no longer the young and still unknown theatrical genius, I was the starving journalist, the contributor to cheap reviews and second-rate newspapers; or perhaps—even worse—the scraggy employee of some private company or government office. This man hid his anxieties from his wife, so as not to worry her; he ran about the town all day long, looking for work and often not finding any; he would wake up in the night with a start, thinking of the debts that had to be paid; in fact, he no longer thought of, or saw, anything but money. It was a touching picture, perhaps, but lacking in luster and dignity, the picture of a wretched, conventional literary figure, and I hated it because I thought that, slowly and insensibly, with the years, I should end by resembling it in spite of myself. But there it was: I had not married a woman who could understand and share my