“Yes.”
“But why? Wasn’t it simpler to just tell the truth?”
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“He didn’t want you to know.”
“He loves me too,” she said, in a reflective tone, looking at Sergio. “If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been so circumspect.” She caressed her dress: “So I owe all of this to Maurizio.”
Sergio remembered what she had said earlier: “I’m a whore … If someone gives me presents and treats me well, I can’t help loving him.” And suddenly he became furious; he was overwhelmed by a wave of contempt and a powerful desire to hurt her. He shouted: “Yes, you owe it all to him! So now you will love him, you can’t help it! You said it yourself, you can’t help loving a man who gives you presents … Go ahead and love him, you whore …” He leaned over and grabbed Lalla’s arm, slapping her several times. He kept repeating “whore,” and striking her again and again. Lalla tried to protect herself, but at the same time she seemed to offer her face for him to slap. After two more blows, she turned away on the pillow. Sergio began to pace up and down.
Lalla continued to cry. Then she got up and stood in front of the mirror on the dresser. Sergio was surprised to see that she did not come to him and try to gain his forgiveness for a crime she had not committed. “The other day,” she began, slowly, “you asked me to do something and I chose to try to forget and never bring up the subject again. But after the way you’ve treated me … I’ve decided that I’m going to go to Maurizio’s room and do as you ask … Afterward, you can make a deal with Maurizio, he can join the Party, or not … but if I go, I won’t come back … Maurizio gave me these clothes, he loves me, he’ll treat me well. Why should I stay with you?” As she said this firmly, she walked toward Maurizio’s door.
Sergio watched her with a bitter feeling of impotence and jealous rage. He wanted to stop her, to tell her that it wasn’t true, that he loved her and did not want her to give herself to Maurizio. But he found that he could not utter a single word. Perhaps Lalla
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expected, or even hoped, that he would call her back.
So it seemed to him from the lassitude with which she walked toward the door. Sergio swallowed hard but remained silent. Lalla slowly opened the door, and Sergio could hear Maurizio’s surprised voice asking, “Who is it?” The door closed behind her.
Sergio waited a few moments, almost hoping that she would return. Now that Lalla had done what he had asked, he felt an anguish very much like jealousy. It was an acute, impatient anxiety that came in waves, like the edge of a saw against a tree trunk, or a pendulum: for a moment it would become overpowering, then less intense — a kind of torpor, but still painful. Then another pang, like a loud noise ringing out in the silence, or a wisp of fog lifting to reveal a forest; the pain would rise again, and then die down. He realized that perhaps for the first time in his life, and certainly for the first time with Lalla, he was jealous; until then he had considered her a kind of object, contemptible and without value. He was surprised at his emotions, so unlike the pattern of his relations with her. He could not admit to himself that his jealousy was quite natural, almost humiliatingly so. What disturbed him most was the idea of the sexual act, the notion that the most intimate, hidden part of Lalla’s body was now at Maurizio’s disposal, revealed for his pleasure. Like all betrayed husbands and lovers, the furor of his jealousy was focused upon the sexual act, upon the cavity that Lalla would offer up to Maurizio’s sex. This coarse, objective, barbaric fetishism was unpleasant to him, but he could do nothing to control it: the act, the sexual coupling, tormented him. He was like other men: farmers, workmen, the simplest of people. As he lost himself in these reflections and images, he strained to hear what was happening in the next room. As yet, he had heard no sighs, no creaking springs, nor any other sound that might accompany lovemaking. Almost involuntarily, he got up and pulled a revolver from one of the pockets
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of his overcoat, where he had put it that morning. Like a sleepwalker, he opened the door to Maurizio’s room.
He expected to see them naked on the bed in an embrace. Instead, the room was bathed in a white, tranquil light that streamed in through the window, which was filled with the white afternoon sky. Maurizio sat in his shirtsleeves, completely dressed, on the bed next to the dresser, smoking. He barely raised his eyes toward Sergio as he entered the room. “What’s wrong?” he asked, calmly.
“Lalla’s not here,” Sergio muttered.
“No, clearly, she’s not,” Maurizio answered, simply. “Unless she’s hiding in one of the closets … You may look if you like.” His tone was sarcastic; it was clear from his expression that he knew what had happened between Sergio and Lalla.
Sergio felt ridiculous. The revolver, symbol of his conventional, vulgar jealousy, weighed heavily in his pocket. He sat down. “Wasn’t she here?”
“She came in for a moment, but then she ran off.”
Maurizio paused before going on: “I could hardly believe it but she did what you promised … She came in here to offer herself to me … just as we had agreed.”
“She offered herself to you?”
“Yes,” Maurizio answered, with a kind of cruelty, “she sat right here on the bed, embraced me, and offered me her lips … just like that.”
Sergio bit his lip: “What did you do?”
Maurizio laughed. “I’ll tell you … I hadn’t expected her to come so soon, or perhaps I just wasn’t ready … but I turned her away.”
“You turned her away?”
“Yes, I felt that my freedom was worth more than her love or her person … Faced with the choice of possessing her and becoming a Communist, on the one hand, or not joining the Party and giving her up,
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I chose the latter.”
Sergio observed him in silence. He felt like a man who has long desired an object and decides to buy it at any price, but then overhears another customer who declares it to be of no value; suddenly Lalla, who a moment earlier had seemed irreplaceable, lost all her value and uniqueness. He felt his image of Lalla deflating, losing weight, becoming hollow and deconsecrated; she became a valueless object, like before. As the scale tipped away from his love for Lalla, it tipped more and more toward his political beliefs and Maurizio’s conversion. Lalla had been turned away, and Maurizio would not join the Party; Sergio would once again feel inferior to his friend. This thought loomed over him. He remembered the feeling of insecurity and impotence that had taken hold during his first conversations with Maurizio, and his desperate will to overcome his friend’s arguments. He saw everything clearly now: on the one hand, there was Lalla, a woman like any other who had been willing to give her body to the dancer at Moroni’s party, who was insufferably sentimental, and whose beauty meant nothing, like everything that is not the product of reason; on the other hand, everything he had fought and struggled for. Suddenly he said, in a trembling voice: “But you said you loved her.”
Maurizio said calmly: “I did love her … or rather I desired her intensely … I still do.”
“So why did you turn her away?”
“No reason.”
“No reason is not an answer.”
“Well, it seemed to me that you were getting the better deal.”
“Why?” Sergio asked, sincerely intrigued.
Maurizio spoke calmly and slowly: “I’ll explain it to
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you … I desire Lalla … but if you look closely, what is Lalla? A woman like so many others … I have a strong desire to make love to her … but this love is not so different from what I could experience, for example, in a brothel … I would make love to her on this bed, and then she would get up, return to you, and I would be left with the memory of an embrace which was no different from any other. We’re no longer children … only children believe that women are irreplaceable … But the truth is that women are all interchangeable.” He laughed, adding: “I remember something that happened long ago … I went to a brothel … I was eighteen … My cheeks were burning, with a mixture of shame and desire, and I was as nervous as if it had been a romantic assignation. It was the first time I had been to such a place, and I felt intimidated … Perhaps because of this, I turned away one woman after another; none of them lived up to my expectations … Finally, the madame came over and said, almost affectionately: ‘Women are all the same, one is just as good as the next … Take it from me, my boy, they’re all the same.’ I remember she said this with deep conviction, and after that I no longer had the courage to refuse and took the next one who came along … I can’t remember whether or not I was satisfied with my choice.”