Contempt - Alberto Moravia [95]
And so I started to think again, in a manner both determined and lucid. In what could it consist, this despicableness of mine? There returned to my mind now, inescapably, the words with which Rheingold, without realizing it, had described my position in relation to Emilia, thinking, instead, to describe that of Ulysses in relation to Penelope: “Ulysses is the civilized man, Penelope the primitive woman.” Rheingold, in short, after having, by his strained interpretation of the Odyssey, unintentionally precipitated the supreme crisis in my relations with Emilia, then consoled me—rather in the manner of Achilles’ spear which first wounded and then healed—by informing me, by means of the same interpretation, that I was not despicable but “civilized.” I was aware that this consolation was valid enough, if only I was willing to accept it. I was, in effect, the civilized man who, in a primitive situation—a crime in which honor is concerned—refuses to resort to the knife; the civilized man who prefers to use reason even in face of things that are sacred and considered as such. But no sooner had I shaped it in my own mind than I realized that such an explanation—an “historical” explanation, let us call it—could never satisfy me. Apart from the fact that I was not at all sure that the relationship between Emilia and me really resembled the one the film-director had imagined in the case of Ulysses and Penelope, this explanation, valid, no doubt, in the historical field, was not so in the highly intimate and individual realm of conscience, which is outside time and space. Here it is only our own interior spirit that can dictate laws. History could not justify or absolve me in the sphere proper to itself, which, in the situation in which I found myself, whatever the “historical” reasons for it may have been, was not really the spheres in which I desired to operate and to live.
Why, then, had Emilia ceased to love me? Why did she despise me? And, above all, why did she feel the need to despise me? Suddenly there came back to me the phrase she had used: “Because you’re not a man,” which had struck me because of its sweeping, commonplace character in contrast with the genuine, frank tone in which it had been pronounced; and it seemed to me that that phrase perhaps contained the key to Emilia’s attitude towards me. There was, in fact, in that phrase, a negative indication of Emilia’s own ideal image of a man who—to use her own words—was a man: that is to say, of what, according to her, I was not and never could be. Yet on the other hand the phrase itself, so sweeping, so slovenly in character, suggested that this ideal image had not arisen in Emilia’s mind from any conscious experience of human values, but rather from the conventions of the world in which she had found herself living. In that world, a man “who was a man” was, for instance, assuredly Battista, with his animal-like force and his gross successes. That this was true had been proved to me by the looks almost of admiration that she had directed towards him at table, the day before; and by her having finally surrendered to his desires, even if only out of desperation. In fact Emilia despised me and wished to despise me because, in spite of her genuineness and simplicity, or rather just because of them, she was completely ensnared in the commonplaces of Battista’s world; and among these commonplaces was the supposed inability of the poor man to be independent of the rich man, or in other words, to “be a man.” I did not know for certain whether Emilia really suspected me of having, out of self-interest, favored Battista’s aims; but, if this was true, she must clearly have thought along these lines: “Riccardo depends on Battista, he is paid by Battista, he hopes to get more work from Battista; Battista is