Two Friends (33 page)

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noticed that I was staring at her legs, she pulled the hem of her skirt down below her knees. We continued to talk; I can’t quite remember what we discussed, nothing in particular. It was the kind of conversation dictated by desire, roughly equivalent to certain kinds of birdsong or animal calls. The substance was not important, and perhaps she did not even hear what I said, but my tone of voice came through and she must have felt it beating down on her like a ray of sun through a window. Finally she stood up. “I’ll go find out if the major can see you,” she said. As she walked across the room, I stared at her again and confirmed my first impressions of her. I could not help thinking that she was a woman of the people, down to her fingertips: provocative, vulgar, coarse. She was wearing ugly shoes with heels that were too high, an ugly, stretched-out skirt, and a loose sweater over a worn blouse. But in those threadbare clothes, the animal-like, aggressive quality of her beauty was almost more powerful. Her clothes surrounded her without touching her, it seemed; they were meant to be torn off, violently, in the fury of an amorous passion. As soon as she returned, saying “Not yet, you’ll have to wait a bit longer,” I grabbed her by the skirt, baring her thigh as I pulled her toward me. She did not pull away, and instead twisted her head to one side, rubbing her lips against mine, hard. Then she said, softly, “Let go … not here.” Her lips were covered in a dense, thick lipstick, and this was what got us into trouble. At that very moment, the door opened and the British major looked out. He saw me sitting, my mouth covered in lipstick, and Lalla
standing in front of me, her skirt still in my hand and slightly raised, exposing part of her leg. Calmly, he said: “
Signorina
, your services are no longer required.” He said the words in an objective tone, without reproach, as if dismissal were the automatic result of the lipstick on my lips. Then he closed the door. Lalla was upset, I suppose, but showed it for only a brief moment as she stood facing the door with a surprised expression. Then she shrugged. “Well, let’s go,” she said, heading straight for the coatrack, from which she took her hat and a small umbrella the size of a fan. Somewhat dejected, but still feeling excited and stimulated by her proud, aggressive attitude, I followed her silently as

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she gathered her things, picked up her bag, and put on her jacket. “Sooner or later I was going to have to leave this dump,” she said, almost as if to console me and diminish my sense of guilt. When she was ready she opened the door. But before leaving, she took one final look at the office and said, “Good riddance.” We walked out into the hallway. I was still following her, feeling guilty and embarrassed, but also darkly aware that there was something strange, abnormal going on inside of me. She turned to look at me and began to laugh, almost ostentatiously, arching her shoulders and pushing her belly forward, in an almost provocative gesture. “Where do you think you’re going looking like that?” she asked. The hallway was empty, and the door that led to the bathroom was ajar. She opened it, pulled me inside, and closed it behind her, pushing me against the mirror. I saw then that my mouth and cheek were still covered in lipstick; it looked like a kind of ridiculous, obscene red mustache. “Were you planning to walk around the city like that?” she added,
laughing. Now she was near me, and I could not help grabbing her skirt once again, pulling her toward me as I had earlier in the office. This time she did not protest. She stretched out her hand and shut the door, locking it from the inside. With her other hand she assisted me, unzipping her skirt, shimmying out of it and leaning forward, lifting her hips and opening her legs, grabbing hold of the edge of the sink and lowering her head, as if to rinse her hair with water. I took her like this, from behind and standing up, like a bull taking a cow or a stallion a mare, except that we were not standing in a field of flowers but rather in a narrow bathroom, in front of a mirror and a sink. There was no whispering brook, only the gurgle of pipes. But the sensation was the same, that of a concrete, sensual impulse, a physical communion so perfect that it transcended the limits of blood and the senses and touched our souls. I remember that even as I stood there, still holding her firmly, I kissed her face humbly, full of gratitude, and she did the same. Later, we walked in the street, and it felt as if we did not really know how we had ended up there, as if we had been walking in a dream or had flown out of the window.

Later that same day, Lalla went to her rented room,

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gathered a few belongings in some boxes tied with twine, along with a tattered old suitcase, and moved into my room at the boardinghouse, where there were two beds. I had proposed the idea, almost timidly, and she quickly accepted, saying simply: “You made me lose my job … You ruined me … now you have to take care of me.” And thus began one of the most difficult, and also one of the happiest, periods of my life.

4)
Version C
, typescript p. 270

[
These lines describe Nella’s and Sergio’s feelings as they ride the bus to Maurizio’s house
.]

[…]I was proud of her and of her beauty, and I wanted Maurizio to see her and admire her, just as I admired her at that moment.

Finally, when it was already quite late, we left the apartment and took a bus to Maurizio’s. He lived in a neighborhood which, twenty years earlier, had been one of the most elegant and modern in the city. Now other, newer neighborhoods had sprung up around it, so that what had once been practically a suburb had become almost part of the city center. On the bus I noticed that Nella seemed uncomfortable and avoided looking me in the eye. It occurred to me that as she reflected on what had happened earlier at home, she felt hurt, and I suffered a pang of guilt. As soon as we stepped off the bus, she said:

Finally, when it was already quite late, we left the apartment and took a bus to Maurizio’s neighborhood. Recently, new neighborhoods had sprung up around it, so that what had once been practically a suburb had become almost part of the city center. As the bus drove along, I became distracted thinking about Maurizio and our visit. Examining my feelings, I realized that I felt driven by an aggressive, pugnacious impulse, and at the same time I was tormented by a fear of not being up to the task at hand. It never occurred to me to think that this was just a simple visit, without particular significance, like so many others; I knew that this was not the case, and in a sense I was preparing myself
for what I thought awaited me. But instead of analyzing my own feelings of inferiority toward Maurizio and consciously replacing those subjective feelings with objective goals—as one often does in such cases—I tried instead to analyze his superiority, which was all in my mind, and to discover his points of weakness. As I have said before, to me it seemed that Maurizio’s superiority sprang from his vitality, a quality that was mysterious and impossible to pin down, something I sensed but could not define. At the same time I believed that his social status was his greatest weakness; in other words, I believed that he belonged to a social class which I considered to be irreparably doomed. I realized that if I could impart this sense of doom, this fear […]

The typescript pages of the three unpublished drafts of Sergio and Maurizio’s story are in the archives of the Fondo Alberto Moravia in Rome. They consist of 258 typescript pages, on Fabriano Extra Strong paper measuring approximately 28 × 22 centimeters (11 × 8½ inches), unnumbered by the author. The numeration, provided by the archive, reflects the order in which the pages were discovered. Many pages had been damaged over the years and were recently restored.

The pages were found in a suitcase which was discovered, in poor condition, in the spring of 1996. According to Moravia’s heirs and the directors of the Fondo, it was in the basement of Moravia’s home on the Lungotevere della Vittoria. Another suitcase—which can be seen in photographs taken by Serafino Amato in the special edition of the
Quaderni del Fondo Moravia
(journal of the Fondo Moravia) dedicated to the exhibit
Moravia and
Rome
(November 2003, pp. 2–3, 201–203), had been discovered, in better condition, a few months earlier, in September 1995. The two suitcases contained various pages written by the author, including materials relating to several novels, such as
La ciociara
(
Two Women
)
, La noia
(
Boredom
), and
L’attenzione
(
Attention
), as well as stories which were later included in
Racconti romani
(
Roman Tales
)
, Nuovi racconti romani
(
New Roman Tales
), and
L’automa
(
The Fetish
). Thus all of these papers date from the fifties and early sixties, and certainly before 1963, the year Moravia moved out of his home on the Via dell’Oca and into his new home on the Lungotevere. It is possible that the writer, or someone else, filled the suitcases during the move in a somewhat disorderly fashion, packing recent and relevant texts and documents, not to be confused with material Moravia was actively working on at the time. It is also possible that these papers remained in the suitcases, untouched, from 1963 until they were discovered thirty years later.

This may explain their survival. As has been noted by several sources, the writer was known to destroy his preparatory materials once a book had been published. We recall the account of Sebastian Schadhauser (a German sculptor and friend of Moravia’s), transcribed from a video at the Fondo Moravia. Schadhauser accompanied Moravia on several trips during the seventies and eighties, and assisted him during his convalescence from a hernia:

Up to the present, no other drafts or notes related to Moravia’s novels from before the seventies have been found; there are only a few clean proofs, kept by his editor, which reflect the final version of the work (there is one typescript of
La romana
(
The Woman of Rome
)
and
one of
La noia
). The situation with the more recent novels is somewhat different; the Fondo Moravia has several drafts that survived in the writer’s home. Of course, it is possible that in the future other lost typescripts or manuscripts will be found, especially if they were given by the author to friends, relatives, or editors, as in the case of a typescript of
Il disprezzo
(
Contempt
), that was discovered in 2002. This was an almost final draft of the novel, and it is now in the collection of the Fondo Moravia. But until now the only texts that have survived from the writer’s office are those discovered in the suitcase at the house on Lungotevere della Vittoria, which escaped the flames thanks to the vicissitudes of the move.

In order to understand the dimensions of Moravia’s directive and to evaluate the typescript pages that have survived, we must pause to reflect on the very small number of pages that have been discovered.

It is of course impossible to quantify the total number of typescript pages produced by the author over the course of preparing a novel, but based on the meager resources—letters and interviews—to be found in the “Notes on the Texts” in Bompiani’s Classici edition of
Opere complete di Alberto Moravia
(
Complete Works
), volumes 1–4, we could estimate the number to be around one thousand pages, over two thousand in the case of the longer novels. For example, the typescript pages relating to the composition of
La ciociara, La noia
, and
L’attenzione
found in the two suitcases represent only a small fraction of the total preparatory materials relating to those works (about a fifth). This would mean that the 258 pages relating to the three versions of this unpublished novel would have been only one small part of the complete preparatory work. If they represent early versions of the novel, that would mean that there was still much work to be done before the completion of the final version.

The pages found in the two suitcases were immediately handed over to the Fondo Alberto Moravia, which was new at the time. The Fondo, in turn, passed them on to the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence (directed by Enzo Siciliano) in September of 1995 and April 1996. There, they were numbered, indexed, and partially restored. In April 1999 they were returned to the Fondo Moravia, where they still reside, and where we were able to refer to them during the preparation of the multivolume “Classici Bompiani” edition.

Even if further study of these pages relating to the story of Sergio and Maurizio might have suggested the possibility of an alternative order, we decided to keep the original numeration provided by the archive because it documents the order in which the pages were originally found (in the suitcase). If in fact this order was
determined by Moravia himself, we can derive useful information from it, as we will see, in the task of identifying the texts.

Among the pages found in the first, more battered, suitcase were those related to an unfinished project. In the absence of a title, they are identified in the Fondo Moravia under the heading “Sergio Maurizio.” For this edition, we decided to use the title
I due amici
(Two friends). These pages date from the period 1951–1952 and are the oldest example we now have of Moravia’s compositional methods. The aforementioned typescript for
La romana
(
The Woman of Rome
), in the collection of the late Valentino Bompiani, is different: it is in a completed draft, ready to be be sent out to readers.