Two Friends (3 page)

Even though he was still very young, Maurizio had already developed a Don Juan–like attitude—he could not tolerate a serious bond with a woman, and preferred to pursue many light, inconsequential affairs rather than devote himself to a singular, deep relationship. For some time now, this woman’s attachment had been an inconvenience to him, especially because his lucid intuition told him that this attachment was not unselfish on her part. On the day of his conversation with Sergio, Maurizio had gone to see Emilia and told her what had happened. He explained that his friendship had probably come to an end. The woman did not hide her satisfaction, and Maurizio suddenly realized—though he had not reflected on this possibility before—that the quarrel with his friend might also be an opportunity to free himself of this woman. He told her that she should not be so happy, since after all Sergio had always been and was still his best friend; that she had done her best to come between them; that she had probably
encouraged Sergio to speak ill of him in order to create discord between them. This was the truth of the matter, and Maurizio had been able to see it by remembering her attitude as well as Sergio’s. She confirmed his intuition by exclaiming: “There you go; you trust Sergio more than me … Who knows what that hateful man has said?” Maurizio answered that Sergio had said nothing at all, and that he was not the least bit hateful. He would probably never see Sergio again, but he regretted the loss of a friend who, all in all, had always shown himself to be affectionate and loyal. At this point the woman became irritated

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and responded that evidently, if he spoke to her in this manner, he was more attached to Sergio than he was to her. This was the reaction that Maurizio had been hoping for with childish shrewdness. Quickly, and with a certain coldness, he told her that she was right; he was more attached to Sergio than to her. The woman, who until then had flattered herself with the idea that she held Maurizio through the power of sensuality, responded brutally that he should go back to his dear Sergio and leave her alone. Maurizio immediately got up and left.

Once he was in the street, he breathed a great sigh of relief. Without much difficulty, he had managed to free himself of a relationship, one which might have been difficult to extricate himself from under different circumstances. Regarding his friend, he once again reflected: if Sergio called, all the better, and if not, tant pis. Maurizio’s cynical nonchalance had another cause as well: he was interested in another, much younger woman, who was receptive to his advances. He climbed into his car and went directly to her place.

The days passed and the two separations became definitive. Sergio did not call, and Emilia was unable to reach Maurizio; he had ordered that whenever she called she should be told he was out. She wrote him a letter, called again, wrote another letter, and then resigned herself to the situation and found another lover. Sergio didn’t call. Maurizio continued down the path he had laid for himself. The girl who replaced Emilia was herself replaced, and on it went. Maurizio was twenty years old and thought only of love.

Sergio was also twenty years old, but he had other

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things on his mind. Whereas Maurizio rushed headlong down the path suggested by his senses and his youth—a path unencumbered by ambition, material struggles, scruples, or emotional aspirations—Sergio found himself, because of the ambitions, emotional aspirations, oppressive material struggles, and scruples that constantly tormented him, in the difficult situation of a traveler seeking a path through a desert or a forest never before visited by man. He had no precise vocation, only a certain intellectual attitude toward life and a facility for writing; he was poor, and his dreams for the future were vast but vague. Youth did not inspire in him the same joyful, fulfilling vigor felt by Maurizio; if anything, his youth inspired a continual discomfort and struggle between contradictory emotions and purposes. He was extremely serious and felt seriously about
everything he did, read, loved, discussed, or experienced. And yet he was not able to free himself—despite all his seriousness—from a constant feeling of insecurity and impotence, in other words from what is usually referred to as an inferiority complex. This complex had many elements, all of which seemed to converge toward something that he was unable to identify but was obscurely aware of. He felt socially inferior to Maurizio and Maurizio’s circle; he felt inferior to the women he pursued; and he felt inferior to so-called men of action. To Sergio, action required innumerable profound, subtle reflections which usually resulted in inaction, out of fear or shyness. Instinctively, he sought an explanation for his frame of mind, but he might never have pinpointed it if Maurizio had not revealed it to him by chance, with cruel carelessness. It was a few years after their break. Because they lived in the same city, they often crossed paths. Whenever this happened, Sergio was stone-faced, embarrassed, filled with unspoken reproaches

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and a feeling of irritated impotence mixed with a secret attraction. Maurizio—to whom Sergio was simply one acquaintance among many—treated him with the jovial, indulgent condescension one affects with old schoolmates with whom one has lost touch. During these casual encounters, he would greet Sergio with jokes and quick repartee, aggravating his friend’s sense of inferiority and ill-concealed rivalry. These meetings, which usually took place on the street or in cafés or other public places, were always very brief. After inquiring about work and life, Maurizio would depart with a joke and a smile, leaving Sergio to feel unhappy and wonder in vain
why, given that there was no longer real friendship between them, he even bothered to stop and talk to Maurizio.

On one of these occasions, Maurizio was sitting in his car, parked on an elegant street. As Sergio—gloomy and sloppily dressed—walked toward him along the sidewalk, Maurizio called out casually: “Well, how is the intellectual doing today? What have you been up to?”

The word “intellectual” had an unpleasant ring to it, but in some strange way Sergio knew it to be tinged with truth. He heard himself say, almost resentfully: “Who are you calling an intellectual?”

“Why, you of course,” Maurizio said, smiling.

“Me?” Sergio repeated, as if the word sounded strange applied to him. “So you consider me an intellectual?”

“Of course,” Maurizio said, smiling, “otherwise, what are you?” He laughed, adding, “See you later, Sergio … Got to run … Good luck.” He turned on the ignition and drove off.

Sergio ruminated on Maurizio’s words for a long time. On the one hand, he realized that the word “intellectual”—like the word “bourgeois” and many

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others—had been degraded over time to the point that it now had a decidedly negative connotation. On the other hand, he could not help but recognize that despite Maurizio’s coarseness and ignorance, he had done something that Sergio, with all his education and subtlety, had never been capable of: he had defined him in a single word. Wasn’t he in fact an intellectual? And how had he managed not to realize this before? After that meeting, he reflected often
on his appearance and his state of mind, and each time was forced to recognize that Maurizio’s jocular, off-the-cuff epithet fit him perfectly. To begin with, he had the physical attributes of the intellectual: he wore glasses and was on the small side, and often wore a serious expression on his unshaven face; his clothes were frayed and worn, his pockets full of slips of paper, his shoes covered in mud. Not to speak of his personality and his attitude: he was educated, intelligent, and versatile enough to quickly scribble an article on almost any subject, or write film reviews—as he did, for a second-rate newspaper—but not dedicated enough to be a professional writer, dependable and serious. As he saw it, the word “intellectual” was a kind of cliché, and in fact Maurizio was someone who often expressed himself in clichés. And yet, it was true that Sergio’s appearance and personality fit the cliché; here was the proof that clichés are often based on realities and behaviors that are actually quite common. In the end, he realized that he was an intellectual precisely because it displeased him that he should be seen as one by others. But no matter how he tried, he could not free himself of this displeasure, or accept Maurizio’s epithet with indifference or, better yet, with pride. He did not know why it displeased him so much; in part it was of course because he saw being an intellectual as something completely negative. But more important, it displeased him because it was Maurizio who had defined him in this way and, by so doing, had placed Sergio in a clear category, defined him as a type, with no possibility of change or surprise. Worse yet, it proved that Maurizio had a negative, unfavorable opinion of him.

It was just before the start of the war, sometime

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around 1938, and, like everyone around him, Sergio was suffering from the suffocating weight of the tempest, heavy with war and destruction, which was gathering over Europe’s skies. In his case, the suffering was redoubled by his feelings of impotence and lack of confidence. Though he was opposed to all dictatorial regimes, he feared that his opposition was not strong enough, or decisive enough, or based on reasons that were sufficiently well founded or convincing. He envied the Fascists, for whom the choice was so clear, and he also envied Maurizio, to whom these events were clearly and uncomplicatedly indifferent. One day when they bumped into each other in the street, Maurizio had said: “Why get upset … what can we do about it? And if we can’t do anything, why get upset?” Sergio envied the few resolute anti-Fascists he knew, Communists and the like, because their attitude was as clear as that of the Fascists. But he was not able to distill his doubts and disgust into an unambiguous attitude, a plan of action. Even though he hated Fascism, he felt that it had wormed its way into his blood, not in the form of political allegiance, but rather as a kind of torpor and mortal passivity, like a poison that slowly intoxicates and weakens the body. He was confronted once again with his feeling of impotence, but this time it not only affected his personal life but encompassed the destiny of the nation and humanity as a whole. This thought paralyzed him and infused him with a kind of deadly inertia. Later he would remember this period as a nightmare he had experienced with his eyes open, like a dream where all is a blur and
nothing happens and yet one is overcome by a sense of unjustified and terrifying oppression from which one does not have the will or strength to free oneself. In addition, for some reason during that period he was not commissioned to write any of the articles that normally kept him afloat; and to make matters worse, most of his few friends had left the city, either because they had been drafted or for other reasons.

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Sergio found himself alone and out of work and began to lead a solitary, monotonous existence, filled with uneasiness and anxiety. He lived at home with his father—an office worker of middling importance—and mother, and his two older sisters, unmarried and by now decidedly spinsterish. He spent most of the day in his small bedroom, reading and daydreaming, and went outside only to buy cheap cigarettes from the tobacconist across the street. Or else he wandered the streets, not daring to sit down at a café because he had no money. His daily cigarette runs and solitary meanderings filled him with a dull, subdued, deadening, airless melancholy, almost as if he were not living but rather dreaming that he was alive, in a world where the talk was increasingly of war and violence, a world that was plunging, like a rock down a steep hill, toward the abyss, an abyss that could be seen and measured. He was simply waiting, for events that he could neither avoid nor change in any way, not even within the narrow arena of his personal feelings. Every morning he bought a newspaper and cigarettes; he went home, read the front page, and then threw the newspaper aside, picked up a book, and tried to read. It was summertime and his room, facing a courtyard, was suffocating and hot.
Sergio lay on his bed, book in hand, half naked, and tried to concentrate. But he was only partly successful. He was easily distracted and would inevitably begin to inspect the few worn-out furnishings in his room, or gaze out the window at the little balconies hanging from the wall across the way, loaded with belongings. Even when he managed to read, it seemed to him, as when he took walks or did anything else, that he used only one part of his brain, almost mechanically, while the rest remained far away and preoccupied, though he could not quite say with what. He took a funereal, almost morbid pleasure in this solitary, silent, passive, wan existence, while at the same time reproaching himself for it, seeing it as further proof of his impotence and lack of self-confidence. At home, his parents—however timidly and discreetly—pushed him to work, implying that they could not continue

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to pay his way if he remained idle. He responded evasively that there was no point in looking for work under the circumstances, with war about to break out. But he knew that this response was inspired by the deep indolence he felt rather than by a sense of reality. There was work to be had, and it probably would not have been so difficult to secure a job. The truth was that he did not even have the strength to look.

He often bumped into Maurizio around town, and each time, he was struck by his friend’s lighthearted mood. It seemed to him that Maurizio was
interested only in the pursuit of his own pleasures. He was usually in his car with one girl or another; the girls were constantly changing, and because of their slightly embarrassed, submissive attitude, Sergio knew that they were involved in a love affair with Maurizio. Maurizio often asked Sergio what he was up to but never seemed particularly interested in Sergio’s response, which, it must be said, was always the same: “Writing, reading, and waiting.” He seemed to consider Sergio a kind of sad sack, an idler, in other words an intellectual, and Sergio no longer cared to prove him wrong. He knew he was an intellectual of the worst sort, a man whose intelligence was neither creative nor useful and served only to poison and paralyze him like a subtle venom. Furthermore, even though Maurizio realized that war was about to break out, he did not seem to attribute any importance to this imminent threat. “None of this has anything to do with me,” he commented to Sergio one day. “Do you know what history is? An excuse to do nothing and to let oneself go, maybe even to stop brushing one’s teeth in the morning. After all, what’s the point of brushing one’s teeth?” Sergio was struck by this summary, which so perfectly encapsulated his own situation. With the excuse that war was about to break out, he no longer bothered to brush his teeth, or, in other words, to fight the effects of time. Like the destructive waters of a flood, time flowed over him, leaving him inert, like the corpse of a drowned man.