Contempt (14 page)

And so, between us, there was a silence that was only broken from time to time by some quite unimportant remark: “Will you have some wine? Will you have some bread? Some more meat?” I should like to describe the intimate quality of this silence because it was that evening that it was established for the first time between us, never to leave us again. It was, then, a silence that was intolerable because perfectly negative, a silence caused by the suppression of all the things I wanted to say and felt incapable of saying. To describe it as a hostile silence would be incorrect. In reality there was no hostility between us, at least not on my side; merely impotence. I was conscious of wanting to speak, of having many things to say, and was at the same time conscious that there could now be no question of words, and that I should now be incapable of finding the right tone to adopt. With this conviction in my mind, I remained silent, not with the relaxed, serene sensation of one who feels no need to speak, but rather with the constraint of one who is bursting with things to say and is conscious of it, and runs up against this consciousness all the time, as against the iron bars of a prison. But there was a further complication: I felt that this silence, intolerable as it was, was nevertheless, for me, the most favorable condition possible. And that if I broke it, even in the most cautious, the most affectionate manner, I should provoke discussions even more intolerable, if possible, than the silence itself.

But I was not yet accustomed to keeping silent. We ate our first course, and then our second, still without speaking. At the fruit, I was unable to hold out any longer, and I asked: “Why are you so quiet?”

She answered at once: “Because I’ve nothing to say.”

She seemed neither sad nor hostile; and these words, too, held the accent of truth. I went on, in a didactic tone: “A short time ago you said things that would need hours of explanation.”

Still in the same sincere tone, she said: “Forget those things. Try and imagine I never said them.”

I asked hopefully: “Why should I forget them? I should forget them only if I knew for certain that they are not true...if they were just words that escaped you in a moment of anger.”

This time she said nothing. And again I hoped. Perhaps it was true: it was as a reaction from my violence that she had said she despised me. Cautiously, I insisted: “Now confess, those horrible things you said to me today were not true...and you said them because at that moment you thought you hated me and you wanted to hurt me.”

She looked at me and was again silent. I thought I detected—or was I wrong?—a faint glistening of tears in her big dark eyes. Encouraged, I put out my hand and took hers as it lay on the tablecloth, saying: “Emilia...they weren’t true, then?”

But now she pulled away her hand with unusual violence, drawing back not only her arm but, it seemed to me, her whole body. “They
were
true.”

I was struck by her accent of complete, albeit disconsolate, sincerity as she answered. It was as though she were aware that, at that moment, a lie would have put everything to rights again, anyhow for some time, at least in appearance; and clearly, just for a second, she had been tempted to tell such a lie. Then, on reflection, she had rejected the idea. I felt a new and sharper stab of pain, and, bending my head, murmured through my clenched teeth: “But do you realize there are certain things that can’t be said to anyone, just like that, without any justification...not to anyone, least of all to your own husband?”

She said nothing; all she did was to gaze at me, with apprehension almost; and indeed, my face must have been distorted with rage. At last she replied: “You asked for it and I told you.”

“But it’s up to you to explain.”

“How do you mean?”

“You’ve got to explain why...why you despise me.”

“That I shall never tell you...not even if I were on the point of death.”

I was struck by her unusually resolute tone. But my surprise did not last long. I was filled with a fury which now permitted no time for reflection. “Tell me,” I insisted, and again I seized her hand, but this time in a far from caressing manner, “tell me...why do you despise me?”

“I’ve already said I shall never tell you.”

“Tell me...if not, I shall hurt you.” Beside myself with rage, I twisted her fingers. She looked at me in surprise for a moment, then screwed up her mouth in pain; and, immediately afterwards, the contempt of which hitherto she had merely spoken, showed itself clearly in her expression. “Stop it,” she said roughly; “so you want to hurt me now, as well.” I noticed this “as well,” in which there appeared to be an allusion to other severities that I wished to inflict upon her, and was left breathless. “Stop it...aren’t you ashamed of yourself? The waiters are watching us.”

“Tell me why you despise me.”

“Don’t be a fool; leave me alone.”

“Tell me why you despise me.”

“Ow!” She wrenched her fingers away with a violent jerk that knocked a tumbler off the table. There was a sound of broken glass, and she jumped up and walked away towards the door, saying loudly: “I’m going to wait for you in the car... while you pay the bill.”

She went out, and I was left sitting motionless where I was, humiliated, not so much from shame (it was true, as she had said, that all those idle waiters had been watching us the whole time and had not missed a single word or gesture of our quarrel) as by the strangeness of her behavior towards me. Never before had she spoken to me in that tone, never before had she abused me. The words “as well” continued, moreover, to echo in my ears like a new and unpleasant enigma that had to be solved, amongst so many others: how and when had I inflicted those things upon her of which, with her “as well” she was now complaining? At last I summoned the waiter, paid the bill, and followed her out.

Outside the restaurant, I found that the weather, which all day had been cloudy and uncertain, had turned to a thick drizzle. A little farther on, in the darkness of the open space, I could just see the figure of Emilia standing beside the car: I had locked the doors, and she was waiting there, patiently, in the rain. I said, in a shaky voice: “I’m sorry, I’d forgotten I had locked the car”; and heard her voice, quite quietly, answer: “Never mind...it’s not raining much.” Once again, at those forgiving words, hope of a reconciliation reawakened, crazily, in my heart: how was it possible to be filled with contempt, if one spoke in a voice so quiet, so kindly? I opened the door, got into the car, and she got in beside me. I started the engine, and said to her, in a voice that seemed to me, all of a sudden, strangely hilarious, almost jovial: “Well, Emilia, where would you like to go?”

She answered without turning, looking straight ahead: “I don’t know...wherever you like.”

Without waiting, I drove off. As I said, I now had a kind of jovial, carefree, hilarious feeling; it seemed almost as though, by turning the whole affair into a joke, by substituting lightness for seriousness and, frivolity for passion, I might succeed in solving the problem of my relations with Emilia. I do not know what it was that possessed me at that moment: perhaps desperation, like an over-potent wine, had gone to my head. I said, in an amused, deliberate playful tone: “Let’s go wherever luck takes us...we’ll just see what happens.”

I felt absurdly awkward as I said these words; rather like a cripple trying to demonstrate a dance-step. But Emilia did not speak, and I abandoned myself to this new humor of mine, which I imagined to be an inexhaustible stream but which very soon turned out to be no more than a thin and timid trickle. I was now driving along the Via Appia, of whose cypresses and brick ruins and white marble statues and Roman pavement, with its big, irregular paving-stones, I caught a glimpse now and then by the light of the headlamps on the road in front, through the thousand glistening threads of rain. I went straight on for a little and then said, in a tone of false elation: “Let’s forget, for once, who we are, and imagine we’re two young students looking for a quiet corner, far away from indiscreet eyes, where they can make love in peace.”

Still she said nothing, and I, encouraged by her silence, went a short distance farther along the road and then brought the car suddenly to a stop. It was pouring with rain now; the windshield-wipers, going backwards and forwards on the glass, did not move fast enough to sweep away the streams of water. “We’re two young students,” I said again in an uncertain voice; “I’m called Mario and you’re Maria...and we’ve at last found a quiet place though it’s rather wet. But inside the car we’re all right...Give me a kiss.” As I said this, with the decisiveness of a drunken man, I put my arm around her shoulders and tried to kiss her.

I don’t know what I was hoping for: what had occurred in the restaurant should have made me understand what I ought to expect. At first Emilia tried to withdraw herself, with quite a good grace and in silence, from my embrace; then, when I persisted and, taking her chin in my hand, tried to turn her face towards mine, she thrust me harshly away. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Or are you drunk?”

“No, I’m not drunk,” I murmured; “give me a kiss.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she answered with honest indignation, thrusting me away again. After a moment she went on: “And then you wonder that I tell you I despise you ...when you behave like this...after what has happened between us.”

“But I love you.”

“I don’t love
you
.”

I felt ridiculous, but in a distressed kind of way, like someone who realizes he has been forced into a position which has the double disadvantage of being both comic and irreparable. But I was not yet disposed to consider myself beaten. “You’re going to give me a kiss; if you won’t do it for love, I’ll make you do it,” I muttered in a voice that was meant to be brutal and masculine. And I threw myself upon her.

She said nothing this time, but she opened the door, and I fell forward on to the empty seat. She had jumped out of the car and run away down the road, despite the rain which was now falling very heavily.

I paused for a moment in astonishment, confronted by this empty seat. Then I said to myself: “I’m an idiot,” and I too got out of the car.

It was raining really hard, and when I put my foot to the ground I felt myself plunge up to the ankle in a puddle. Exasperated, I called out: “Emilia...come on, come back here and don’t worry. I won’t touch you.”

From some point that was indistinguishable in the darkness but not very far off, she answered: “Either you stop it, or I walk back into Rome.”

I said, in a voice that trembled: “Come along, I promise anything you wish.”

It was still raining heavily; the water was running down between the collar of my coat and my shirt-collar, wetting the back of my neck in a disagreeable fashion, and I felt it trickling over my forehead and the sides of my head. The headlamps of the car lit up only a small stretch of the road, together with a fragment of ruined Roman brickwork and a tall black cypress, truncated by the darkness; and, strain my eyes as I might, I was unable to see Emilia. Disheartened, I called again: “Emilia. Emilia...” and my voice ended on an almost tearful note.

At last she came forward out of the darkness into the beam of the headlamps, and said: “Do you promise you won’t touch me?”

“Yes, I promise.”

She went over and got into the car, adding: “What sort of a joke is this? I’m soaked through now...and my head’s dripping. Tomorrow morning I shall have to go to the hair-dresser.”

I got into the car too, in silence, and we started off at once. She sneezed, then, a couple of times, very loudly, in a vindictive way, as if to let me see I had made her catch a cold. But I did not take up the challenge: I was driving now as though in a dream. An ugly dream, in which I was really called Riccardo and I had a wife who was called Emilia and I loved her and she did not love me, in fact, she despised me.

I AWOKE NEXT morning languid and aching, and with a deep and pervading sense of repugnance for what awaited me that day and the days following, whatever was destined to happen. Emilia was still asleep, in the bedroom; and I lay idle for a long time in the half-darkness, on the divan in the living-room, slowly and disgustedly regaining full consciousness of the reality which sleep had made me forget. Turning things over in my mind, I realized that I had to decide whether I would accept or refuse the
Odyssey
script; I had to know why it was that Emilia despised me; I had to find the way to win back Emilia’s affections.

I have said that I was feeling exhausted, languid, inert; and this almost bureaucratic manner of summarizing the three vital questions of my life was, fundamentally, as I immediately realized, nothing more than an attempt to deceive myself with regard to an energy and a lucidity that I was very far from possessing. A general, a politician, a businessman will try, in this way, to get a close hold on the problems he has to solve, to reduce them to clear-cut objects, easily handled and lifeless. But I was not a man of that type; on the contrary. And, as for the energy and lucidity which I pretended to myself I possessed at that moment, I felt they would fail me completely once I passed from reflection to action.

I was well aware, however, of my insufficiency; and as I lay on my back on the divan with my eyes closed, I became conscious that, as soon as I attempted to formulate a reply to these three questions, my imagination no longer rested on the firm ground of reality but soared away into the vacant heaven of aspiration. Thus in imagination I saw myself doing the
Odyssey
script as though it were nothing at all; reaching an explanation with Emilia and discovering that the whole story of her contempt for me, in appearance so terrible, sprang in reality from a childish misunderstanding; and finally being reconciled with her. But, as I thought of these things, I realized that all I had in view was the happy conclusions which I longed to achieve: between these conclusions and the present position lay a gaping void which I was totally unable to fill—to fill, anyhow, with anything that had even the slightest quality of solidity and coherence. My ambition—to put it briefly—was to solve the problem of my present position in accordance with my highest desires, but I had not the least idea of how I should contrive to do it.