Driven by moralistic impulses, Sergio Maltese is led astray by the notion that the promised liberation of his newfound ideology can somehow satisfy his personal need for love and friendship. As is true throughout Moravia’s fiction, the prose possesses an emphatic clarity about matters of indecision and doubt. The motivations of the subjects are translated through the minimal events of daily life, the gestures and pentimentos, the provisional agreements and sudden separations. Thus Sergio’s obsessive attempts to bargain with his sentiments — with his lover and his friend — for the sake of political ideology are translated into the language of material needs, desires, and lacks. In Moravia’s view, Sergio is converting his affection and esteem into a means rather than an end. Thus in his day-to-day living with his lover, the intrinsic morality of true affection is undermined by the attempts to convert it into a value, such as a new set of clothes or ultimately the desire that his bourgeois friend Maurizio capitulate by adopting Sergio’s chosen ideology of communism.
Version A begins “around 1938,” the year of the Italian Race Laws and the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, when Sergio Maltese, a sexual innocent, and his occasional friend Maurizio, an experienced but bored Don Juan figure, are twenty years old.5 It concludes after the fall of the Fascist regime on July 25, 1943. Sergio, the son of a government bureaucrat, is unemployed and finds himself in the grips of a “mortal lack of will.” Inert, Hamletic, apathetic, Sergio is an ardent anti-Fascist who is, nevertheless, ambivalent about what a Fascist defeat would mean for his country. His brother is fighting for Italy on the Russian front while the sons of the privileged classes, like Maurizio, have found ways to avoid combat service. The war years pass, arriving at the fall of Fascism and the Allied struggle to liberate Rome. Encountering his old friend Sergio, the dissipative, self-indulgent Maurizio invites him south to the island of Capri to wait out the end of the war (echoing an invitation made to Moravia by friend Curzio Malaparte, the author of La pelle). Sergio elects to stay in Rome, and as he drops off a copy of his first article for a new Resistance newspaper — a kind of j’accuse against those responsible for the Fascist debacle — at Maurizio’s house, an Allied bombing raid ensues, forcing Sergio, Maurizio, and Maurizio’s family into the air-raid shelter in the basement of the Villa Borghese (the Roman museum housing Bernini’s sculptures). Here one has a kind of bourgeois drama acted out in the darkness at the archetypal heart of Baroque Rome. Through the darkness, Sergio glimpses the feminine profile of Nella, a working-class woman whose name calls to mind the peasant heroine of Giovanni Verga’s early short story Nedda. In the concluding scenes of Version A (it is easy to speak of Moravia’s fiction in theatrical terms) Sergio accompanies Nella to her rented room (a seeming echo of Sonia’s apartment in Crime and Punishment), as one has a glimpse of the sexual theme that will be prominent in the other drafts. Version A succeeds in establishing a foundation, but does not yet cohere in the sort of unifying “idea” that Moravia demands of his novels.
In Version B Sergio has joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to free himself from the label of intellectual; it is 1945, after the war, and he is working for a pittance as a film reviewer. Nella is here named Lalla, and the relationship with Sergio has been going on for some time. The couple lives together in a dingy Roman flat on a subsistence budget, their only luxury their sexual compatibility. Moravia’s descriptions of the female anatomy are always particular, dwelling on peculiarities such as a small head or a long neck. The sexual relationship stands like an island apart from Sergio’s political obsession, which is articulated through the friendship-rivalry with Maurizio. Sergio has become a communist for selfish reasons, seeking in the Party what he lacks in his personal life. Though Maurizio had been a convinced fascist, Sergio believes he is a communist unawares, a ripe fruit ready to fall from the tree of the bourgeoisie. What is in fact ripening is the relation between Maurizio and Lalla, who admits that Maurizio has asked her to marry him and can provide her the material advantages she desires. The rivalry intensifies to the point where Maurizio proposes a deaclass="underline" he will join the PCI if Sergio will let him sleep with Lalla. As Sergio dissects the offer, he wavers, sensing that a political commitment must be voluntary to be authentic. But by accepting Maurizio’s money, which he uses to buy Lalla a new wardrobe, he shows he is taking the offer seriously.
In the meantime, Lalla has befriended Moroni, a wealthy widower who takes English classes from her. Lalla, Sergio, and Maurizio set out for a weekend visit to Moroni’s country house. It is here that Version B reaches its perfunctory ending, as Lalla is drawn to the protector Moroni after his poignant confession of unending regret and undying love for his deceased wife, Laura, and after Sergio’s attempt to follow through with the “trade.” In contrast to Maurizio’s vanity and Sergio’s “love” for the Party, Moroni can offer true love to Lalla. Summarizing the outcome, Maurizio states: “We are the predestined cuckolds of history … we argue over humanity but instead it betrays us … and it betrays us because in truth we don’t love it for what it is without second ends.” Here then is the unifying idea that Moravia requires in order to proceed to the following draft. The author seems to know at this point how the eventual work will end; faithful to a heuristic method, he now recommences and focuses more keenly on developing the characters and rendering the plot less schematic.
In Version C we are again at war’s end. Sergio, now a first-person narrator, explains how he joined the Party because Maurizio called him an intellectual and a bourgeois, labels he could not deny and found odious. By joining the Party, he reasons, he could erase those labels and turn the tables on Maurizio, whose sense of superiority and condescension derive from his wealth. The extent to which Maurizio exercises control over Sergio’s psyche (though the two rarely see one another) suggests a pathological attraction whereby Sergio projects his deepest desires and fears onto the figure of the Other.
Nella, who is twenty-three to Sergio’s twenty-seven, loves him with great passion and unquestioning allegiance. Sergio meets her at her workplace, an Allied military office in newly liberated Rome. Their immediate attraction to each other results in her being dismissed from her job for inappropriate behavior. A passionate embrace ensues as the couple repairs to the closest lavatory; almost as quickly, Nella agrees to move in with Sergio. Sergio senses he is loved but that Nella cannot truly comprehend him and his political commitment; this results in growing feelings of scorn and contempt (dispetto, disprezzo). The attempt to convert Maurizio to communism is not presented in terms of a “trade” of Nella, though the thought does occur to Sergio and might easily have been included had the draft been completed. As Simone Casini writes in his introduction to I due amici, here one sees both the selfish and the disinterested sides of communism in Sergio’s thought, the latter being a faith in the regeneration of society.