Alberto Moravia - Two Friends

“To your health,” he said in a cordial, sincere tone.

I had nothing left to say; in my drunken state, I

could now see two Major Parsons, with two noses, two mustaches, and four eyes. But perhaps the second face was not Parson’s but Maurizio’s … In fact, I now saw that the second face was pale, with dark eyes and a dark mustache. Suddenly I realized that indirectly and by proxy, Maurizio had once again scored an easy victory, taking advantage of my weakness. Brusquely, I said: “Excuse me, major … I need to go see what Nella is up to,” and without waiting for his response I ambled off, “like a whipped dog,” I reflected, with my tail between my legs.

The crowd in the dining room had thinned and Nella was gone. I went back to the sitting room: no sign of Nella. I went out into the garden, scanned the terrace and the adjacent paths, but she was nowhere to be seen. As I returned toward the bar, Gisella, the woman who was in love with Maurizio, grabbed my arm: “Are you looking for your girlfriend?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Well then, no use looking for her on the ground floor; you should check upstairs … in Maurizio’s bedroom.”

I took her response squarely, like a slap in the face; and just as if she had struck me, I was stunned for a moment, my mind blank. The meaning of her words was clear, and yet I was incredulous. Then I remembered that Maurizio had accepted the challenge I had foolishly made in my drunken confession, and I realized that he intended to humiliate me by courting Nella and stealing her away from me. It was coarse and vulgar to attack me in the private realm, since he could not do so on an ideological level. And though I knew that Maurizio was neither coarse nor vulgar, I

also knew that he would not have hesitated to stoop to such measures to humiliate me. Cuckoldry, I thought

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with little reflection, was one of the preferred methods for proving one’s strength in bourgeois society. It seems strange to say, however, that even as I thought this I felt no pangs of jealousy. While Maurizio perhaps hoped to humiliate me by stealing Nella, I perceived in this cuckoldry an opportunity to humiliate him. In other words, though I did not yet know when or how, Maurizio’s potential desire for Nella was a possible point of weakness which might lead to my victory. I thought this as I climbed the stairs in the front of the house up to the second floor. Once I was upstairs, I did not hesitate: one of the doors was open, and I was convinced that it was the bedroom Gisella had alluded to so maliciously.

The room was almost dark, except for a small lamp next to a large, low bed that almost filled the room. I could just make out a figure lying on the bed — Nella — in the light of a small lamp which illuminated her chest and arms. Maurizio was not lying next to her, as Gisella’s jealous words had implied. He was sitting beside the bed and pressing a white towel, probably moist, to her forehead. I realized immediately what was going on and said in an unsteady voice: “What happened? Are you feeling sick?”

Without looking up, Maurizio said: “It’s nothing … she just drank too much.”

Out of the darkness, where her head lay buried in the pillow, I heard Nella’s hesitant, halting voice: “I thought I was hungry … but as soon as I ate I felt sick.”

Once again I felt ashamed: for having thought ill of Maurizio and for having assumed that he had behaved basely. But I still suspected him of attempting to turn the tables in order to make me appear ignoble. Drawing closer, I said, “What a disastrous evening …”

“Why?” Maurizio asked, now looking up at me. “Are you bored?”

“Quite to the contrary … but Nella and I both got drunk, and we’ve made fools of ourselves.”

Maurizio said nothing. Nella’s voice rang out: “I feel better now … I want to go home.”

As she said this she tried to sit up, but as soon as

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she did so she emitted a groan and fell back on the pillow. “Uff, I feel awful.”

Maurizio, now standing, said to me, across the bed: “I think it’s better if we leave her alone for a moment.”

I reflected on the evening, which I had described a moment earlier to Maurizio as disastrous; I thought back to the downstairs rooms, filled with odious party guests. And suddenly I said, quite forcefully, looking at the clock: “I want to leave … It’s terribly late.”

“You go,” Nella moaned, “I’ll come later … as soon as I feel a bit better.”

“All right,” I said, almost shocked at my own words, “I’ll go … Maurizio will bring you home.” I felt sincere. I truly could not stand to stay at the party, or in Maurizio’s house, one minute longer. Maurizio walked around the bed and pushed me gently toward the door: “Let’s leave her alone … Listen, if you need anything, just ring this bell.” He said these last words in a gentle, quiet voice, and then, still pushing my arm slightly, led me out of the room.

“So you’ll bring her home?” I asked, uneasily.

“Don’t worry.”

We returned downstairs. For some reason, when we reached the ground floor, I turned to Maurizio and said, “We need to talk, the two of us.”

“Whenever and as often as you like,” he answered. We shook hands and I left, walking with determination.

As soon as I was outside, my self-assurance abandoned

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me. I felt lost. As I walked down the street, the events of the evening returned to me, like a row of disheveled actors in the glare of the footlights. I saw myself ringing the doorbell, aggressive and convinced of my inevitable victory; and later, at the party, careening between the extremes of my own suspicion and the unpleasantness of others, uncertain, angry, and awkward, thrown about like a cork in the tempestuous seas. Once again I told myself that I had gone to Maurizio’s house planning to make him dance to my tune, but instead had been played. As I examined everything I had done that evening I realized angrily that there was not a single action I was not ashamed of. In addition, every action was connected to the one that came before and the one that followed by a common thread, a common theme: my own confusion, impotence, and inescapable sense of inferiority. This was particularly notable given that in every case I had been the one to become enraged and to take action, but each time my actions had been misguided. Meanwhile Maurizio, the undisputed victor, had not become the slightest bit upset nor been pushed to act in any way; he had simply behaved like a polite, generous host. In other words by doing nothing he had come out victorious, while I had spent the evening running around and growling like a nervous, unhappy dog, accomplishing nothing. I became even more dejected; this was the reason why I considered Maurizio to be superior, though his superiority was neither moral, intellectual, nor rational, but rather something physical and truly inalterable, something that seemed to emanate not from his humanity, but from his very nature, something, in other words, which I sensed but could not explain, just as one can feel the power of an animal even before seeing it, or feel the magnetism of a particular personality without understanding its cause. Had this superiority been merely a social, moral, or intellectual issue, I would have felt calmer and would have been able to blame my defeat on the alcohol I had consumed. I had faith in the revolution; I was convinced of Maurizio’s ethical weakness; I felt intellectually superior. I understood, however, that Maurizio’s superiority was a material question; despite his defects, his unpleasant social position, and his intellectual limitations he was

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made of sturdier metal than I, and that was the long and short of it. To extend the metaphor, he was made of tempered steel, like a sword, while I had been fashioned out of vulgar cast iron, the kind that stoves are made of and that breaks under a heavy blow.