Contempt - Alberto Moravia [96]
I was astonished at not having thought of this before. It was indeed strange that I myself, who had so clearly recognized, in Rheingold’s and Battista’s interpretations of the Odyssey, their two different ways of looking at life, should not have realized that Emilia, in constructing an image of me so different from the truth, had done, fundamentally, the same thing as the producer and the director. The only difference was that Rheingold and Battista had set out to interpret the two imaginary figures of Ulysses and Penelope; whereas Emilia had applied the despicable conventions by which she was dominated to two living creatures, herself and me. Thus, from a mixture of moral straightforwardness and unconscious vulgarity there had sprung, perhaps, the idea—not accepted by Emilia, it is true, but not contradicted by her either—that I had wished to push her into the arms of Battista.
In proof of all this, I said to myself, let us imagine for a moment that Emilia has to choose between the three different interpretations of the Odyssey—Rheingold’s, Battista’s, and mine. She is certainly capable of understanding the commercial motives for which Battista insists upon a spectacular Odyssey; she can even approve Rheingold’s debasing psychological conception; but, with all her naturalness and straightforwardness, she is certainly quite incapable of achieving the level of my own interpretation, or rather, that of Homer and Dante. She cannot do this, not only because she is ignorant but also because she does not live in an ideal world but rather in the perfectly real world of people like Battista and Rheingold. Thus the circle closed in. Emilia was at the same time the woman of my dreams and the woman who judged and despised me on the basis of a miserable commonplace; Penelope, faithful to her absent husband for ten long years, and the typist, suspecting self-interest where there was none. And, in order to have the Emilia I loved and to bring it about that she judged me for what I was, I should have to carry her away from the world in which she lived and introduce her into a world as simple as herself, as genuine as herself, a world in which money did not count and in which language had retained its integrity, a world—as Rheingold had pointed out to me—after which I could aspire, certainly, but which did not in fact exist.
In the meantime, however, I had to go on living, that is, moving and operating in that same world of Battista’s and Rheingold’s. What should I do? I felt that in the first place I ought to free myself from the painful sense of inferiority inspired in me by the absurd suspicion of my own innate and, so to speak, natural, despicableness. For, when all was said and done, this—as I have already mentioned—seemed to be the underlying idea in Emilia’s attitude towards me, the idea of a baseness which was, so to speak, constitutional, and due not to behavior but to nature. Now I was convinced that no one could be said to be despicable in himself, irrespective of all outward appearance and all relationship with others. But in order to free myself from my sense of inferiority I had also to convince Emilia of this.
I recalled the threefold image of Ulysses which the Odyssey script had held out to me and in which I had discerned three possible modes of existence—Battista’s image, Rheingold’s, and finally my own, which I felt to be the only true one and which, in substance, was that of Homer. Why did Battista, Rheingold and I myself have three so very different conceptions of the figure of Ulysses? Precisely because our lives and our human ideals were different. Battista’s image, superficial, vulgar, rhetorical and senseless, resembled the life and the ideals—or rather, the interests—of Battista; Rheingold’s, more real, but diminished and degraded, was in accordance with the moral and artistic possibilities of Rheingold; and finally mine, without doubt the loftiest yet the most natural, the most poetical yet the most true, was derived