Alberto Moravia - Conjugal Love

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Conjugal Love: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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When Silvio, a rich Italian dilettante, and his beautiful wife agree to move to the country and forgo sex so that he will have the energy to write a successful novel, something is bound to go wrong: Silvio's literary ambitions are far too big for his second-rate talent, and his wife Leda is a passionate woman. Antonio, the local barber who comes every morning to shave Silvio, sparks off this dangerously combustible situation when Leda accuses him of trying to molest her. Silvio obstinately refuses to dismiss him, and the quarrel and its shattering consequences put the couple's love to the test.
Alberto Moravia earned his international reputation with frank, finely-observed stories of love and sex at all levels of society. In this new English translation of
, he explores an imperiled relationship with his customary unadorned style, psychological penetration, and narrative art.

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'What sort of things, for instance?' I asked.

I saw him grow serious; and then he answered, stressing his words in a slightly unctuous way: 'Well, you see, Signor Baldeschi, in the first place he's always annoying women. . '

'Really?'

'Ugh — and how!. . you've no idea…. Pretty or ugly, old or young, anything does for him.. . And not only in his shop, where they go to get their hair curled — but outside it too, ask anyone you like. . On Sundays he takes his bike and goes prowling round the countryside — as you might go out shooting. . it's disgusting. But I tell you, one of these days he's going to find someone who'll put a stop to his tricks. . ' Having now overstepped the limit of his usual reserve, Angelo had become loquacious, adopting a sort of moralizing tone, rather heavy and flattering, typical of a peasant who speaks more or less as he imagines his landlord likes him to speak.

'What about his wife?' I asked, interrupting him.

'His poor wife, what can she do? She cries and gets all worked up. . He's taught her to shave his clients, and every now and then he leaves her in charge of the shop and gets out his bike and tells her he's going into the town. . but instead of that he goes round looking for a girl. Why, last year. .'

I decided that Angelo had now given me all the information I needed; there was nothing more to be expected from him except more gossip about Antonio's shocking behaviour, and it seemed to me hardly dignified to drag it out of him and listen to it. And so I changed the conversation and soon afterwards sent him away.

When I was alone, I fell into a kind of thoughtful abstraction. So my wife had been right, or at least there was a strong probability that she had been right. This Antonio was a libertine, and it was even possible that he had actually tried to seduce my wife. I realized now that the mystery of Antonio — who did not seem to care much about his work, nor to be excessively fond of his family, nor interested in politics — did not exist. There was no mystery, and that was the whole mystery. Antonio was a commonplace Casanova, a perfectly ordinary fornicator. And those discreet, oily manners of his were the manners of a man who, as he himself had expressed it, was loved by women because he did not talk.

I had a strange feeling, almost of disappointment. At heart, and almost without realizing it, I had hoped that Antonio would not be so quickly and so easily deflated. I had liked Antonio, I now saw, just because there was in him — or so it had seemed to me — something mysterious. The mystery having been dispersed, nothing remained but a poor fellow who went about annoying women, all women, including, perhaps, women like my wife who were utterly out of his reach. There was something that irritated me in this discovery of the secret mainspring of the barber's life. Previously, if I had allowed myself to be infected by Leda's resentment, I might have hated him. Now that I knew all about him, however, I seemed to feel nothing except pity mingled with contempt — a feeling which was humiliating not only for him but for me also, since I now saw myself suddenly degraded to a mortifying rivalry with a village Don Juan.

And yet, strange to say, there persisted in me the conviction that he had not really dared to raise his eyes towards my wife; and that, as I had at first supposed, he had been led against his will to make his admiration clear to her in his own way. The fact that he was a libertine did not seem to me to destroy this supposition; it appeared, rather, to explain the facility with which he had become excited at the first chance contact — a facility easily understandable in an adolescent whose senses are always ready to trip him up, but unlikely in an experienced man of forty whose ardours may be supposed to have cooled. Only a libertine, accustomed to cultivate certain instincts to the exclusion of all others, could have a sensibility so prompt and so irresistible.

I went so far as to admit that, all things considered, he had not been altogether displeased at finding himself in that embarrassing situation, and that he had at the same time both encouraged and fought against it. But there seemed to me to be no doubt at all that, in the first instance, it had been not deliberate but accidental.

It is possible that this inclination on my part to consider Antonio as being initially innocent (and I still consider him to be so), may have derived, partly at any rate, from my own selfishness, that is, from my fear of having to give him the sack and shave myself. But, even if this was true, I was certainly not aware of it. I thought over the whole affair with extreme objectivity; and often there is nothing like objectivity — that is, the forgetting of the links that connect objective and subjective motives — to encourage self-deception. To my conviction of Antonio's innocence, and to the feeling of contemptuous pity that I now had for him, must be added my wife's exaggerated reaction, which, if I had even imagined that I could be jealous, destroyed from the very first moment every reason for jealousy. In any case I am not of a jealous nature — at least, I do not think so. In me every passion is finally dissolved in the acid of reflection — a method as good as any other for subduing passion by destroying, at the same time, both its tyrannical power and the suffering it brings.

After my conversation with Angelo, I went as usual for a walk with my wife. It was then for the first time that I genuinely felt I was deceiving her. I felt I ought to tell her all I had learned about Antonio; but I didn't want to because I was aware that to do so would be, as it were, to rekindle in her, more strongly than ever, that first flame of anger that seemed now to be spent. Uncertain and filled with remorse, I at last said to her, at a moment when she appeared rather absent-minded: 'Perhaps you're still thinking about Antonio's lack of respect?… If you really want me to, I'll get rid of him.'

I think that, if she had asked it of me, this time I should have satisfied her. In effect, my selfishness had received a shock; and I only needed a little encouragement to give her what she wanted. I saw her give a start: '. . Thinking about the barber?. . no, no, not at all… To tell the truth, I had really forgotten all about him.'

'But if you want me to, I'll get rid of him,' I insisted, encouraged by this indifference of hers which seemed to be quite sincere, and with the feeling of making a proposal that could not fail to be rejected.

'But I don't want you to,' she said, 'it doesn't matter to me in the least.. . Really, as far as I'm concerned, it's just as if nothing had happened at all.'

'You see, I was thinking. .'

'It's a thing that concerns you, and only you,' she concluded with a thoughtful air, 'for the reason that it's only you, now, who can be vexed, or not vexed, by his presence here. . '

'To tell the truth, it doesn't worry me.'

'Well then, why should you get rid of him?'

I was pleased at this reasonableness on her part, although I was again conscious of a vague sort of disappointment. But it was my fate, at that period, that the happiness of a creative instinct at last satisfied should have made me fail to analyse carefully any of the feelings which, one after the other, manifested themselves in me. Next day Antonio came again and I noticed with astonishment that that curious charm of his, far from being dispelled by Angelo's information, still remained intact. In fact, the mystery of which I had been aware before I knew anything about him, subsisted even now when I thought I knew everything. This mystery had been thrust back into a less accessible region, that was all. The thought came to me that it was rather like the mystery of all other things, both great and small: everything about them can be explained except their existence.

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