Alberto Moravia - Two Friends

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was opening up to him, and realized once again that despite everything, his friend still occupied a place in his heart. As if guessing at his thoughts, Maurizio said: “I haven’t been well for some time … I think I smoke too much.” He threw away the cigarette he had just lit. “Or maybe I drink too much … And you know”—he hesitated for a moment and lowered his eyes almost shamefully—“the years go by and I realize I’m not young anymore.”

Gently, almost as if fearing that he would interrupt the flow of Maurizio’s confidences, Sergio said: “You’re only twenty-seven.”

“I know,” answered Maurizio, “but, I don’t know if it’s the same for you … probably not, because your life is so different from mine … but even though I’m twenty-seven, I feel as if I were forty. I notice it especially in my relations with women.” He stopped and was suddenly quiet, and seemed almost to regret having spoken.

“What do you mean, in your relations with women?”

“Well, you see,” Maurizio said, uncomfortably, “I have a lot of dealings with women … Let’s just say, I don’t have many distractions … And for some time it has felt like it’s always the same thing, and I’m bored.” After a moment he continued, in an exasperated tone: “It’s always the same — the meeting, the amusing repartee to show my interest, the invitation to go for a drive, dinner, or a day at the beach, the first kiss, then the second, then the third, and finally, the surrender. Every woman gives herself with the same gestures, the same words, the same objections, and the same impulses as the one who came before and the next one … You can see how all this could become a bore,” he said, raising his voice slightly as if Sergio had contradicted him.

“I agree, of course,” Sergio said, with a smile that he knew to be slightly false. The smile of a man who has never been in love with a woman.

“It’s a bore,” Maurizio went on. “It almost sickens me … When I put my hand on a girl’s breast for the first time, it feels like the same breast as the last time, with another girl … And that goes for everything else, as well … Do you know what happened to me recently? After overcoming a woman’s final resistance I sent her away. I told her that I had a serious

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venereal disease and did not want to infect her. She was horrified, but I knew that if I insisted, illness or no illness, she would still be willing … They’re all the same, and I too keep repeating myself … All of this leads me to think that my youth is finished. What more is there to say?”

He seemed unhappy, but his uncomprehending, innocent sadness was like that of an animal that suddenly feels something amiss — a lessening or a change in its vitality — and cannot understand the cause. Maurizio did not understand the war or what was happening in his own house, just as he did not understand the illness of his cat and dog; in fact, he did not seem to understand even himself. After a pause, he said, “This is why I want to go to Capri. It’s relatively quiet there because of the war. I want to spend a summer alone, without anyone around, so I can reflect a bit. Meanwhile, the war will end and then I will return to Rome and make a decision.”

“What decision?”

“I don’t know … maybe I’ll find a job … or maybe I’ll get married … I’ll have lots of children and become a paterfamilias.” He said this with a certain sour note in his voice, unsentimentally, with a kind of coarseness that Sergio envied, if only momentarily. “Why are you smiling?” Maurizio asked. “Don’t you think I would be a good father?”

“I’m sure you would,” Sergio answered, now smiling sincerely.

“After all,” Maurizio said, more calmly, “this is more or less how things have always been. A young man would have a good time and then, later, he would get married. Why should I be different? I’ll get married, I’ll be faithful to my wife, I’ll work … A wife, children, and a job — it’s probably what I need.”

“What do your parents think of your plans?” Sergio asked, not knowing what to say.

“Oh, nothing. They don’t know … I am, as my father likes to say, his greatest worry in life. My mother

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behaves as if I were still seven years old … but they know nothing about my life.” By now Maurizio was speaking with complete openness, in a voice filled with fervor. He got up from the couch, went to a cabinet in a corner of the room, and opened it, revealing a bar, bottles, and mirrors gleaming. He poured himself a generous portion of whiskey. “Would you like some?” he asked.

“At this time of day? No, thank you.”

“It picks me up,” Maurizio said, pouring some water into the glass. “I confess that I was almost afraid that you would accept, because it has become very hard to find and can only be bought at a very high price … I had a good supply at the beginning of the war but it’s almost gone now.”

“Did your family stock up on many provisions before the war?” Sergio asked, gently.

“I’m not sure,” Maurizio said vaguely, slightly surprised at the question. “I think so … When the war began, and for months after that, my mother did nothing but accumulate things, as if we were under siege … I think we have enough clothes and food to last us several years.” He returned to the couch and sat sideways, with one leg over the armrest, glass in hand. “Tell me the truth … You must see me as a kind of glutton: drinking, smoking, making love to women.”

Sergio hesitated and peered closely at his friend before answering: in effect, the word Maurizio had chosen fit him quite well. His face, once so fresh and youthful, now clouded and impure, was that of a glutton. “No,” he said finally, “I think you look tired.”

“I am,” Maurizio said in a tone that was suddenly innocent and plaintive, almost like that of a child. “You know, I hardly sleep. The doctor says there’s nothing wrong with me … but I don’t sleep at all, even when I take pills.”

“You need to rest,” Sergio hazarded.

“Yes,” Maurizio answered with conviction, “I need to rest. In Capri I’ll eat, exercise, sleep … it’s exactly what I need. It’s probably just this heat and this

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damned war.”

“What are you saying? I thought you didn’t give a damn about the war.”

“That’s right, I don’t … and why should I? I didn’t declare it and I have nothing to lose or to gain from it … But they just won’t leave us alone, will they?”

“But you didn’t fight in the war.”

“I’m not crazy … I was an officer for a few months and then I managed to get myself demobilized … My father knows someone at the ministry of defense.”

Feeling a wave of resentment, Sergio retorted: “My brother was deployed to the Russian front.”

“You should have told me,” Maurizio said, surprised. “We could have arranged for him to stay here.”

“My family belongs to the class of people who do what has to be done and pay the price for the rest of us,” Sergio said, darkly.

Maurizio did not react to his comment. “You know what troubled me the most? Emilia’s death.”

“Emilia is dead?” Sergio exclaimed in surprise.

“Yes, she died in tragic circumstances … I heard about it by chance from a German living in Italy … poor thing … She was Jewish, you know, and they came to arrest her … She jumped out of a window so they wouldn’t take her … She must have been about fifty … What a way to die. At the time, it didn’t affect me … I never really loved her and so much time had passed … But then I began to have trouble sleeping and I realized that whenever I lay in my bed I was thinking about her, or rather about the time when we were lovers … I suppose that my unconscious mind was marked by her death. In any case, perhaps it’s a coincidence.”