Two Friends (2 page)

In
Version B
Sergio has joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to free himself from the label of intellectual; it is 1945, after the war, and he is working for a pittance as a film reviewer. Nella is here named Lalla, and the relationship with Sergio has been going on for some time. The couple lives together in a dingy Roman flat on a subsistence budget, their only luxury their sexual
compatibility. Moravia’s descriptions of the female anatomy are always particular, dwelling on peculiarities such as a small head or a long neck. The sexual relationship stands like an island apart from Sergio’s political obsession, which is articulated through the friendship-rivalry with Maurizio. Sergio has become a communist for selfish reasons, seeking in the Party what he lacks in his personal life. Though Maurizio had been a convinced fascist, Sergio believes he is a communist unawares, a ripe fruit ready to fall from the tree of the bourgeoisie. What is in fact ripening is the relation between Maurizio and Lalla, who admits that Maurizio has asked her to marry him and can provide her the material advantages she desires. The rivalry intensifies to the point where Maurizio proposes a deal: he will join the PCI if Sergio will let him sleep with Lalla. As Sergio dissects the offer, he wavers, sensing that a political commitment must be voluntary to be authentic. But by accepting Maurizio’s money, which he uses to buy Lalla a new wardrobe, he shows he is taking the offer seriously.

In the meantime, Lalla has befriended Moroni, a wealthy widower who takes English classes from her. Lalla, Sergio, and Maurizio set out for a weekend visit to Moroni’s country house. It is here that
Version B
reaches its perfunctory ending, as Lalla is drawn to the protector Moroni after his poignant confession of unending regret and undying love for his deceased wife, Laura, and after Sergio’s attempt to follow through with the “trade.” In contrast to Maurizio’s vanity and Sergio’s “love” for the Party, Moroni can offer true love to Lalla. Summarizing the outcome, Maurizio states: “We are the predestined cuckolds of history … we argue over humanity but instead it betrays us … and it betrays us because in truth we don’t love it for what it is without second ends.” Here
then is the unifying idea that Moravia requires in order to proceed to the following draft. The author seems to know at this point how the eventual work will end; faithful to a heuristic method, he now recommences and focuses more keenly on developing the characters and rendering the plot less schematic.

In
Version C
we are again at war’s end. Sergio, now a first-person narrator, explains how he joined the Party because Maurizio called him an intellectual and a bourgeois, labels he could not deny and found odious. By joining the Party, he reasons, he could erase those labels and turn the tables on Maurizio, whose sense of superiority and condescension derive from his wealth. The extent to which Maurizio exercises control over Sergio’s psyche (though the two rarely see one another) suggests a pathological attraction whereby Sergio projects his deepest desires and fears onto the figure of the Other.

Nella, who is twenty-three to Sergio’s twenty-seven, loves him with great passion and unquestioning allegiance. Sergio meets her at her workplace, an Allied military office in newly liberated Rome. Their immediate attraction to each other results in her being dismissed from her job for inappropriate behavior. A passionate embrace ensues as the couple repairs to the closest lavatory; almost as quickly, Nella agrees to move in with Sergio. Sergio senses he is loved but that Nella cannot truly comprehend him and his political commitment; this results in growing feelings of scorn and contempt (
dispetto, disprezzo
). The attempt to convert Maurizio to communism is not presented in terms of a “trade” of Nella, though the thought does occur to Sergio and might easily have been included had the draft been completed. As Simone Casini writes in his introduction to
I due amici
, here one sees both the selfish and the
disinterested sides of communism in Sergio’s thought, the latter being a faith in the regeneration of society.

Version C
has a subtler and richer narrative with more characters and mise en scène. Moroni is a small-time movie producer working with Maurizio who, when he meets Nella at a party at Maurizio’s house, offers her a screen test. But here the text abruptly ends. The cinematic theme will carry over into
Il disprezzo
(
A Ghost at Noon
), the novel Moravia will then go on to write. So too will the theme of contempt carry over, but with the tables turned, as the wife, Emilia, is overtaken by contempt for her screenwriter husband, Riccardo. In addition, one sees the first-person narration employed in
Version C
, which Moravia would now retain for all his future novels.

It is difficult to second-guess an author as methodical and circumspect as Moravia as to why one project is curtailed and another begun, but in the case of
Two Friends
one might suppose that the core idea of communism (or ideology itself) grew stale and could not support the emotional complexity that formed the basis of the author’s inspiration. This complexity was always a moral one in Moravia’s fiction, as we suggested above with reference to his essays.

Two Friends
is a kind of time capsule that seemingly survived only because of an oversight; its brilliant trajectories provide the material for a classic Moravian tale, founded on human foibles and psychological material that emerges unexpectedly from the unconscious. Here one sees the author’s method of eliminating and adding, combining and substituting episodes in complete redrafts of the same project. The prose possesses an economy and vividness that make the characters seem visibly present and gripped by a tense network of common emotions. By trusting in the intrinsic life of his
characters, Moravia allows them to steer the plot in the pursuit of what he once called “the absolute and moral justification of action.”
⁶
Herein lies the debt to Dostoevsky as well who, in Moravia’s view, had revolutionized the novel by displacing its focus from the world at large onto the interiority of the individual. In Italy this change had seen its first great exemplar in Italo Svevo.

Walter Benjamin has written of “the most European of all accomplishments, that more or less discernible irony with which the life of the individual asserts the right to run its course independently of the community into which he is cast.”
⁷
Moravia’s opus exemplifies this phenomenon, and
Two Friends
is no exception. It is ironic first of all—in Moravia’s view—that so many Italians were tolerant of authoritarian ideologies, such that the nation seemed poised after the fall of Fascism to forgive the regime and repeat its errors (there having been no systematic attempt to remove former Fascists from positions of power in the postwar era). There is irony in the commonplace assumptions about the social classes, in the physical descriptions of interiors and settings, and in the precise, often unflattering descriptions of the human figure. There is a parody as well of normal sexual behavior. Scenes of lovemaking are bold but not prurient; the reader is not titillated, but exposed to a kind of ritual carried out by the lovers—in a garret or a public building, or even while fully clothed on a streetcar ride—to satisfy their animal needs. There is irony too in the fresh and sullen beauty of the Moravian heroine; the
descriptions of the woman at her humble
toilette
suggest the paintings of Courbet or Vuillard. Lastly there is the self-irony by which Moravia instills in his protagonists the gist of his own personal crises. The author experienced an existential malaise throughout his adult life, whether it is called indifference, boredom, or contempt. Distrustful of the autobiographical direction in modern fiction, he succeeded in retaining the personalist core of his deepest presentiments and forged them into an exquisitely disinterested fiction.

Two Friends
comes at a pivotal point in the author’s career when the subject matter of his fiction and the mode of narration itself are shifting. It also coincides with a time of great debate concerning the social function of literature, in particular the novel form used to reflect the struggle between the social classes. If Moravia had respected the work of Zola and Verga in this regard, his inclination was not naturalistic but was founded on the interior reality and contradictions of the individual.
Two Friends
represents a heuristic key to understanding this phase of Moravia’s fiction; it is a phase when the Roman author is still committed to the working-class myth seen in
La romana
and
I racconti romani
(which will conclude with the publication of
La ciociara
) and yet has adopted a first-person narrator and inserted ample discussions of political ideas into the text, anticipating the Moravian essay-novel of the 1960s.

T
HOMAS
E. P
ETERSON

The numbers that appear in the margins indicate the numeration of the original typewritten pages in the so-called Dossier Number 6 [“Incartamento 6”] at the Fondo Alberto Moravia. The few that come from Dossier Number 4 are indicated with an asterisk.

The marking “[…]” indicates a break in the text; “<…>” indicates an addition.

The marking < in the right margin indicates the existence of an alternate version of the text, to be found in the appendix.

[…] The woman, a widow, lived alone in her tiny apartment.

231

Maurizio usually went to s her in the evenings. During the day he kept his old habits and often s Sergio. The woman, who was jealous and did not completely trust Maurizio, often subtly reproached him about his friendship with Sergio. She was a conventional woman; in her eyes, poverty was the worst possible defect a person could have. In her opinion, Maurizio, who was so much wealthier than Sergio, should associate only with his equals. Moreover, she believed that Sergio was not a true friend and attached himself to Maurizio only because of his wealth. How could Maurizio not see this? And on, and on. The woman, who was German by birth, concealed her hostility toward Sergio; in fact, she always affected a sickeningly sweet manner in his presence. But she often said to Maurizio: “I’m sure that if I made eyes at your dear friend, he would not think twice about betraying you.” Though Maurizio was convinced that this was not true, and was sure of Sergio’s loyalty, he did not vigorously protest, because, deep down, these insinuations were convenient to him. It was almost as if he thought that through this […].

The woman felt that she had heard enough, and

162

she sent Sergio away, with the pretext that Maurizio was so late already that he would probably not come at all.

That same evening, when Sergio was having dinner with his family, Maurizio called. Sergio came to
the phone, thinking that his friend wanted to make an appointment for the next day. But instead, Maurizio said: “What did you say to Emilia? What ideas have you gotten into your head?” He sounded irritated, but there was something else as well. Sergio thought he heard contempt in his voice. He answered vehemently: “Nothing that wasn’t true.” At the other end of the line, Maurizio’s voice pressed on, more violently: “Indiscreet and voluble as usual … There are things one just shouldn’t do … You don’t visit your friend’s lover in order to speak ill of him … You have no manners … It’s completely crazy.” Hearing these words, Sergio felt flames of anger and shame sweeping over him. He responded brusquely, “I only said the truth … Leave me alone, why don’t you? Good-bye!” and quickly slammed down the receiver.

Later, reflecting on this phone conversation, Sergio realized that he hated Maurizio, though he also felt a trace of regret. Despite their rivalry, Maurizio was still the only friend who mattered to him. He realized that the woman had drawn him into a kind of trap, and, as he reconstructed their conversations, he also realized that she had constantly tried to undermine his friendship with Maurizio. Still, Maurizio had been too quick to offend him and even, it seemed, to bring about a break between them. After lengthy and painful consideration, Sergio decided that he would not call Maurizio back. It was up to Maurizio, who had been so quick to insult him on the slightest pretext, to take the first step toward a reconciliation.

Maurizio, on the other hand, regretted his phone call almost immediately. But partly out of pride, and mainly out of fatuousness and selfishness, he did
not want to take the first step. He was convinced that

163

Sergio was somehow inferior to him, and that Sergio knew this; and he was convinced that his friend’s sense of inferiority would drive him to take the first step. Vaguely, and not in so many words, he sensed that he was not so sorry to lose Sergio. In recent times, Sergio had been overly critical and had made it quite clear to Maurizio that he disapproved of certain aspects of his personality. Maurizio was troubled by these criticisms, and it did not help that he had to admit that many of them were true. There was an additional factor that persuaded him not to seek a rapprochement with his overly candid friend.