Two Friends (14 page)

“Are you looking for something?” he asked.

“I’m looking for my argument,” he wanted to say, intoxicated not so much by the wine as by the illusory, almost feverish lucidity he felt. But he said nothing and instead made a vague gesture. Maurizio insisted, with a touch of irony: “Perhaps you too would like to …?” Sergio laughed, putting his hand on Maurizio’s arm. “No, I’m fine. I’m not in the mood to inspect your house today.”

Maurizio did not respond, and they returned to the sitting room together. Without sitting down, Maurizio said, “Sergio, you haven’t convinced me, but we must discuss this again in the future … as soon as possible, in fact.”

His tone was serious and solicitous, but Sergio could not help laughing. Patting his friend on the shoulder, he said: “You don’t give a damn about Communism … You have other things on your mind.”

“What do you mean?”

Maurizio sounded so serious, almost threatening, that Sergio took a step back. “I was just joking … I know that you mean what you say, and that one day you’ll become a good Communist, maybe even a better

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one than I.”

“That would be impossible.”

Lalla returned, walking toward them. She was clearly drunk, and moved with difficulty, pausing languidly and swaying her hips, which she did not normally do when she was sober.

“Let’s go, Lalla,” Sergio said.

“Yes, let’s go.”

They shook hands in the foyer. “See you soon,” Maurizio said, opening the door.

“See you soon,” Lalla replied.

Sergio said nothing. They traversed the garden and went out into the street, arm in arm.

They were silent during the bus ride home. Sergio was still drunk but could already feel the alcohol receding little by little. Lalla seemed lost in thought; he couldn’t tell whether she was still drunk. But as they were getting off the bus, she tottered, whispering: “Hold my arm; I really drank too much.”

Sergio took her arm and led her down the crowded sidewalk. “Shall we go to the café?” He too was whispering.

They almost never spent time at home; their rented room was just a place to sleep, and when they weren’t
with friends, they were at the café. But she answered: “No, I feel almost sick … let’s go home.”

Sergio said nothing and led her in the direction of the rooming house. The small street where they lived was close by. They walked slowly, and when they reached the door, Sergio asked, “Don’t you want some dinner?”

“I told you I feel sick … and it’s a good thing too. That way we can save some money.”

Sergio noticed that as soon as they were alone, Lalla gave up her worldly, flirtatious attitude and adopted the disappointed, bitter, and irritating tone he knew

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so well. Annoyed by her constant complaints about their poverty, he decided to tell her that he had seen everything: the hand-holding and the rest of it. They climbed the stairs and went into their room. Without removing her coat, Lalla walked over to the bed and lay down.

Sergio watched her for a moment and then lit a cigarette as he settled into his usual armchair, by the window. From there he could see the whole room: the screen concealing the washstand, which was decorated with little red circles, each of which contained a tiny black devil; the table in the middle of the room, made out of crude wood, with four round legs, beneath a lamp with a white shade; the low, wide bed in the corner with its iron headboard decorated with curlicues and knobs; the chest at the foot of the bed, made out of the same crude wood as the table, with a marble top; the tall, narrow armoire in the other corner, which, because of the meagerness of their wardrobe, contained more than a few empty hangers. The room was large but cold and depressing as a tomb
despite the central heating. It was the furniture, Sergio reflected, that emanated this coldness; the furnishings were dead, their souls departed long ago in the warehouse of some secondhand dealer. Lying on the bed, amid all this dead furniture, Lalla projected an irreducible, aggrieved vitality, a silent but steady protest against the poverty and penury that surrounded them. She lay on her side without moving, and the round mass of her raised hip seemed to conceal the rest of her body, which was invisible from where Sergio sat. He focused his gaze on this part of her body, so prominently displayed. After a moment, he asked: “What’s wrong? Can you please tell me what’s wrong?”

“I don’t feel well. I drank too much,” the hip responded.

Quickly, as if bringing up an inconsequential subject, he said, “I saw you holding hands with Maurizio … Don’t think I didn’t see you.”

There was a brief pause. Then: “I wasn’t holding

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his hand; he grabbed my hand and held it tightly, against my will,” the hip said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Fine, don’t believe me,” the hip answered, indifferently.

As his mind cleared, Sergio began to feel the first pangs of jealousy. It was almost painful, like what a man might feel if he possessed only one thing in the world and feared he might lose it. Lalla’s indifference was proof that she no longer loved him, and that she was in love with Maurizio. Unable to control himself, he asked: “Are you … do you like Maurizio?” He could tell that his voice was strained and anguished.

“I do like him.”

“Do you love him?”

“No”

“You’re lying.”

The hip did not respond. Sergio waited a moment and then said in an exasperated voice: “If you love Maurizio and you want to be with him, don’t hesitate … go …”

The hip responded hesitantly, slowly: “You’ve taken leave of your senses.”

“No, I haven’t,” he said angrily, “you
were
holding his hand … I saw you pressing up against him … And you had already been in that house … I could tell.”

The hip answered quickly, simply: “It’s true, I had been there before.”

“You see … you’re lovers.”

“That’s not true.”

“But you say you’ve been to his house before.”

The hip was silent for a moment and then, slowly and quietly, said: “I’ve been there twice … Maurizio is in love with me and he invited me to his house to talk … so we talked …”

“And then?”

“Then nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Nothing … I told him that I love you and that I couldn’t love two people at once.”

“What did he say?”

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“Nothing … He was unhappy, of course.”

“But do you really love me?”

As he uttered these words he felt his throat tightening, almost as if he was about to cry. There was a pause, and then the hip said, “Come here.”

Sergio obeyed and went over to sit next to the hip on the bed. The hip said: “Give me your hand.”

Sergio obeyed. He stretched his arm over the hip, in the direction of the invisible head. He felt her take his hand, and then the slight pressure of her lips against his skin. She gave him an awkward, drunken, indolent kiss. “I love you,” she said, “but if you don’t believe me it’s all right. I feel sick.”

“But why did you go to his house? And why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why should I tell you? I wanted to know what he had to tell me … If I had told you, I wouldn’t have been able to go.”

“In short, Maurizio asked you to betray me … to visit him in secret and make love to him.”

After a brief pause, she said: “No, he’s a decent person. That’s not what he wanted.”

“So, what was it then?”

“He asked me to marry him.”

“Marry him?”

“Yes.”

“And you said no.”

“Right.”

“Why?”

This time she did not answer. Sergio shook her shoulder, alarmed. “Why?” he repeated, and the same steady voice said: “Because I know I would end up loving him … I don’t love him now, but if I agreed to marry him, and I knew that I could have all the things that I needed, and live a better life, I know that

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I would end up loving him … I would love him out of gratitude … Many women love out of gratitude, and I would be one of them.”

“So you don’t love me.”

“I do love you … I love you because with you there’s no question of gratitude; it’s just love and nothing else … I prefer this love to the kind that springs from gratitude, that’s all.”

Sergio could not stop himself from expressing disgust: “You’re a whore.”

“Yes, I’m a whore … you said it. I like Maurizio, I like his house, I like his money, his comfortable life … If I think about this, I can’t help feeling that I’m a whore … and that’s why I won’t marry him … because I don’t want to become a whore …”

Sergio said aloud what he was thinking: “You’re either a whore or you’re not … If you are a whore, there’s no point trying not to be.”

“Why not?” the voice continued. “It’s a question of temptation: I could become a whore, just as you could become a thief, for example. But if I’m with you and I love you, then I’m not a whore … It’s a question of what one does. We are what we do … If I don’t behave like a whore, then I’m not one.”

“So you’re with me because you don’t want to become a whore.”

“Precisely.”

He did not respond. After a brief pause, the voice said: “Could you go to the sink, and bring me a moist towel?”

He did as she asked: picked up a towel, dipped it in cold water, and returned. A hand reached out and took the towel. The voice said: “I feel better now. I’ll tell you another thing. I’m a whore, it’s true, but how could I not be?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that my way of life goes against every instinct, every desire in my body … I am mortified, disgusted by poverty. I want a house of my own … I think about it day and night. Even a small house, but full of my things, my clothes, my chair, my kitchen, my sitting room. I’m tired of going from furnished room to furnished room, from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, eating half portions at the trattoria. I’m tired of being poor … can’t you understand

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that?”

He touched his face and realized that his eyes were filled with tears. In a pained voice, he said: “I’ll find a job and buy you a house.”

“You’ll never be able to buy me a house,” she said, “only Maurizio can give me that … So you see, when I think about all the things that I need, that I want, that I would like to have, I feel like a whore, just as you said, from the soles of my feet to the top of my head … a whore … and I feel that if I married Maurizio I would truly become just that. I would love him because he can give me the things that I so desperately, desperately need.”

Sergio began to cry. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “You’ve never said any of this before,” he said, after a short silence.

“I hinted at it … but I didn’t want to make you suffer. Poor little thing,” she said, in a tender voice, “you’re already so agitated that I didn’t want to add yet another thing to worry about. But what do you think? When we make love and I have to go wash myself with cold water in a dirty old bucket behind that grimy screen, don’t you think I wish I could have a nice tiled bathroom, with a big tub full of boiling
water? I’m constantly mortified by our miserable existence, constantly …”

“If you feel so mortified, why don’t you accept Maurizio’s offer … Why don’t you marry him?” Sergio asked, with a note of desperation.

“Because then I would feel humiliated in another way … I would feel like a whore, as I said. I wouldn’t be able to help loving him passionately, if only because I would feel bound to him by my comfortable life. But it would be at the cost of my dignity. I would feel like a whore, and I would be humiliated.”

Sergio desperately searched for something solid within himself, something to hold on to in the midst of the dejection brought on by these cruel words. Then, like a man who sees a dim light in the shadows and realizes that, no matter how faint, it is still a light and the shadows are merely shadows, he said: “One day all of this will change … That is what we’re fighting for … so that everyone can live comfortably and no woman must feel like a whore.”

She answered in a measured tone: “Yes, that is what you Communists are fighting for … it’s true … but by the time you reach your goal, I’ll be long gone.”

“Don’t you believe in us?”

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“How can you say that, after I’ve chosen to stay with you rather than accept Maurizio’s offer?”

She sat up on the bed and removed the wet cloth from her forehead, dropping it on the floor. She looked over at Sergio. “So, shall we go down for our usual half portion, or shall we just stay here and continue humiliating each other?”

“Let’s go,” he said.

She looked at him. “Come here. Kiss me.”

He leaned forward and his lips touched hers. She smelled of alcohol, and it was clear that she was still drunk. They kissed. “Love matters to me,” she said, “more than a house, money, or anything else … Don’t you know that?”

“Yes,” he said quietly, looking down.

“Let’s go.”

For about a week they did not see Maurizio. As their visit receded into the past, Sergio began to feel increasingly unsure of his love for Lalla, and more obsessed by the idea of getting his revenge by convincing Maurizio to convert to Communism. His feelings were complex and difficult to explain. On the one hand, he felt something like contempt for this woman whom he possessed and who loved him; on the other, he felt a strong attraction toward his friend, whom he had not been able to win over and who seemed to be slipping through his fingers. He was also afflicted by a more recent and deeper crisis of self-confidence. He felt excessively ambitious, neurotic, like a mediocre salesman who, after a touch of whiskey, becomes excited about his dreams, while his friend, Maurizio, remained calm and sure of himself, lucid, unmoved. He often thought back to their visit and realized that he could not remember it without feeling an unpleasant, burning sense of humiliation. He was ashamed of his earnestness, of his candor, and of his zeal, which now seemed weak
and cowardly. He wanted to prove to Maurizio—but

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mainly to himself—that he still held some cards, perhaps the best ones. He felt that they were fighting a duel, though a hidden one, undertaken with non-lethal weapons. He could not shake off the shame of having lost the first round. For some reason, the fact that Lalla had chosen him over Maurizio and his flattering, seductive offer did not console Sergio in the least. In truth, Lalla was superfluous, insignificant to his struggle, which was not about love but about politics. In the realm of love, he was victorious, at least for now, but this victory meant nothing. In the realm of politics, he had been defeated, and he was unable to conceal the sting of this defeat.