Alberto Moravia - Two Friends

“I’m not an intellectual,” I couldn’t help saying. “The reason why I like to discuss such matters even while gazing out at the view on a beautiful night is that I’m a Communist. I joined up after the war.”

He said nothing. “The revolution is coming,” I blurted out, “and when it does, there will be no place in it for people like you.”

He did not respond to my attack. Instead he turned to Nella, unexpectedly, and asked her: “ Signorina , are you a Communist like your boyfriend?”

I was surprised to hear her respond, shyly but firmly: “I haven’t joined the Party, but I agree with Sergio, naturally.” I felt her hand squeeze mine, and again felt irritated by the gesture, taking it to mean that she thought I was weak, despite my political affiliations, and needed her help. But I also felt a tinge of gratitude, and could not help squeezing her hand as well. Maurizio insisted: “Do you also believe that soon it will be the end of the road for the likes of me?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” he continued, “so we’re class enemies.”

“That’s right,” I said triumphantly.

“Well,” he said, after a short pause, “that shouldn’t keep us from being friends, at least until the revolution comes.”

I detected a sincere, friendly tone in his voice, and all of a sudden, as if pushed by an unexpected inspiration, I said: “We’ve always been friends … and I hope that before that day comes, we will become even more so.”

“What do you mean?”

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“I hope that eventually you will feel the same way I do … Then we will not only be friends, but also comrades.”

He was silent for a moment. I hoped he would say “perhaps”; I had never loved him as I did at that moment. But instead, after a long silence, he said, slowly: “Unfortunately, at least for the time being, I’m not looking for comrades …”

“Go to hell,” I thought, with some disappointment. Instead, I said, “You never know.”

As if struck by my good sense, Maurizio answered, “Yes, that’s true, one never knows.”

We remained there, gazing silently at the panorama. Finally, just as I was thinking, “Now I’ll tell him that I need to go home … He shouldn’t get the idea that I enjoy his company,” he suddenly took the initiative, saying brusquely, “I’ll take you home … It’s late.”

I bit my lip and followed him to the car. We did not speak during the drive. At a certain point Maurizio asked Nella, “Where do you live, signorina ?” With a slight note of satisfaction, she said, “with Sergio.”

When we arrived at our destination, he got out of the car and helped Nella to the curb. “Listen,” he said, “I have a few friends coming over on Sunday. I’d love it if you would join us … That is, if you don’t mind spending time with a bunch of capitalists.”

I answered that we would love to come and thought I detected a happy note in Nella’s voice as she said, “Of course, we’ll be there.” Once again, I became annoyed with her. Then the car drove away and we went inside.

[V]

In order to make clear how important this meeting

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was to me at the time, I should reiterate how firmly I believed in the imminence of a revolution in Italy. I was as convinced of it as I am of writing these words today. It seemed impossible that the disorder, poverty, corruption, and social disintegration which had befallen the country in those years would not lead to a revolution. I had no doubt that as soon as the Allied forces left, a revolution would break out, destroying everything in its path. But even more than the conditions in the country, what drove me to believe this was something that lay in the deepest recesses of my soul, something that I considered to be the only firm, luminous reality in my life, buried beneath the contradictory passions, the impotence, and the darkness. It was my rapt, ineffable, almost mystical hope for a better world, one where I would finally feel happy and at peace. It is impossible to explain in words what this hope meant to me; such feelings can be understood only by those who have experienced them. I can only say that my hope, which rendered the day-to-day reality that surrounded me almost unbearable, conjured a not-too-distant mirage of an almost perfect human society; it was my firm belief that the cruel imperfections of the present world were the result of social ills which the revolution would eliminate. Depending on one’s point of view, this mirage could be described as deceptively utopian, or as an achievable goal. I suppose that those who find pleasure in the world as it is, who love reality and do not believe that things can improve except in certain limited circumstances, would see this hope as a pipe dream. And those who do not see it as a mirage in the true sense, or who prefer this mirage to reality — because it creates a goal that is not immediate or material and allows them to project the best part of themselves upon that goal — fall into the category that is vulgarly referred to as idealists. I was an idealist, a concept which has become quite ridiculous in our time but which originally had a very precise meaning. I did not approve of the world as it was, either socially or personally; in other words I loved neither the world nor myself, and thus it was logical that I should believe in something that seemed to promise both a better world and a better self.

I imagine that such sentiments might drive a

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more simple man to religious exaltation; in the past, they might have driven even a cultivated man to such religious zeal. But I was not a simple man; as Maurizio liked to say, I was an intellectual, and we were no longer living in the Middle Ages, but rather in the twentieth century. Communism, whose theories I had studied in depth, seemed to provide a blueprint which, through mathematical calculations and hypotheses based on real-life experience and concrete, undeniable values, would lead to the construction of a solid edifice in the near future. I had examined Communist theory from every angle, and I was increasingly impressed by how closely enthusiasm and calculation, psychology and statistics, theory and practice, history and utopianism, means and ends, were bound together. Communist theory was like a marvelously well-built machine, in which moral and human factors fit together perfectly. In a century marked by scientific progress, Communist theory, which was ultimately as dependent on faith as Christianity, had the advantage of being expressed in the language of our time, which was not religious but scientific. In other words, Communist theory represented the embodiment of the ancient dream of total palingenesis, if one believed — as I did — that science was man’s truest path toward pulling himself out of the dark ages.

There was something else, in addition to my exalted, mystical hope and my confidence in science, which confirmed both my hope and my confidence: my acute, absolutely real sense of the decadent, faded, empty, spent, worn, tired state of the world that Communism intended to banish, by which I mean the world of which Maurizio was an amiable but typical representative. I felt that this world was irreparably doomed, not only in the vague future — one can say this about all living things — but now, in the very near future. The corruption and stultification of Maurizio’s world, which I sensed not only intellectually but even physically, could not go on for much longer. The world that blocked the way toward Communism was to me like a majestic old tree which has been devoured from the inside by insects, sustained only by its bark, so weak that it could be knocked over by a child despite its enormous size. Of course I realized

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that not everyone could see the internal corruption of that world, but it seemed to me that it would soon be apparent to all. I was simply more informed and more prescient. But soon, everyone would know that the tree was only a pile of dust. And then the revolution would erupt, as they say, spontaneously.