Contempt - Alberto Moravia [90]
She at once objected, coldly: “Yesterday evening you were of a different opinion...and you’d already seen.”
“Yesterday evening I allowed myself to be persuaded by your arguments...but afterwards I saw that I ought not to take them into account. I don’t know for what reason you advise me to do the script, nor do I wish to know. I only know that it’s better for me, and for you too, that I shouldn’t do it!”
“Does Battista know?” she asked unexpectedly.
“No, he doesn’t,” I replied, “but Rheingold does. I’ve just told him.”
“You’ve made a very great mistake.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she said, in an uncertain, discontented tone of voice, “we need this money to pay the installments on the flat. Besides, you yourself have said, over and over again, that to break a contract means cutting yourself off from other jobs. You’ve made a bad mistake: you shouldn’t have done it.”
I, in turn, became irritated. “But don’t you understand,” I cried, “don’t you understand that my situation has become intolerable...that I cannot go on taking money from the man...from the man who is in the process of seducing my wife?”
She said nothing. I went on: “I am refusing the job because it would not be decent for me to accept it, in the present circumstances...but I am refusing it also for your sake, on account of you, in order that you may change your opinion about me. You—I don’t know why—at present consider me a man capable of accepting a job under such conditions. Well, you’re wrong. I’m not that sort of man!”
I saw a hostile, malicious light come into her eyes. “If you’re doing it for your own sake, well, I don’t know...but if you’re doing it because of me, you still have time to change your mind. You would be doing a useless thing, I assure you. It would serve no purpose except to damage yourself—that would be all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean just what I say—that it would serve no purpose.”
I felt cold about the temples and knew I was turning pale. “And so—?”
“You tell me first what effect this sacrifice of yours is supposed to have on me.”
I realized that the moment of final explanation had arrived. It was she herself who was offering it to me. And all of a sudden I had a feeling of fear. I began, nevertheless: “You said, some time ago, that...that you despised me...that was what you said. I don’t know why you despise me. I only know that people get themselves despised when they do despicable things. Accepting this job, at the present moment, would in fact be a despicable thing...and so my decision will prove to you, more than anything, that I am not what you believe me to be—that’s all.”
She answered promptly in a tone of triumph, pleased, one would have thought, at having at last made me fall into a trap: “On the contrary, your decision won’t prove anything to me...and that’s why I advise you to go back on it.”
“What do you mean, it won’t prove anything?” I had sat down again and, with an almost automatic gesture, in which my distress was visibly expressed, I put out my hand and took hers as it lay on the arm of the chair. “Emilia, tell me that.”
She pulled her hand away awkwardly. “Please leave all that alone...in fact...please don’t touch me, don’t try to touch me again. I don’t love you and it will never be possible for me to love you again.”
I withdrew my hand and said in a resentful voice: “Don’t let’s talk about our love, never mind that...let’s talk instead about your...your contempt. Even if I refuse the job you’ll go on despising me?”
Suddenly she jumped to her feet, as though seized by a violent impatience. “Yes, certainly I’ll go on. And now let me alone.”
“But why do you despise me?”
“Because I do,” she cried all at once; “because you’re made like that, and however hard you try, you can’t change yourself.”
“But how am I made?”
“I don’t know how you’re made—you ought to know. I only know you’re not a man, you don’t behave like a man.”
I was struck by the contrast between the genuineness, the sincerity of feeling that sounded in her voice and the commonplace, sweeping nature of