“So you were always my enemy?” Sergio asked in a breathless voice.
“On an ideological level, yes … Of course you are an intelligent, pleasant person … but this is quite a debacle for you, isn’t it?”
“A debacle?”
“Well, you’ve done the following,” Maurizio said, counting on his fingers; “you’ve accepted money from me for the woman you love, you attempted to sell her to me, and, when I rejected her, you desperately tried to make me reconsider … all of this in order to secure a political conversion that will never take place.”
“Perhaps,” Sergio said, exasperated, “but you’ll be the loser in the end … You’ll go on living without a positive purpose.”
“To the contrary,” Maurizio said. “The positive purpose of my life is the opposite of the base actions I
have pushed you to commit: a respect for humanity and a rejection of the idea that a person can be used as a means to an end, even a noble one; respect for oneself; and the freedom to choose, a freedom that all men and women possess … a freedom which, in Lalla’s case, you did not respect.”
They heard a scream. Lalla was now sitting upright on the bed, half naked, tired, upset: “Finally, one of you has said something that is true … Neither of you has shown any respect for my right to choose … You have done so in the name of Communism, and you in the name of anti-Communism … You’ve both treated me like an object … but I’ve had enough.”
They stared at her in bewildered silence. She pulled up the strap of her dress and continued, now in a low voice, rendered hoarse by the power of her emotions: “I want to reclaim my freedom … I’ve come to a decision … The two of you should go back to Rome today … I will stay here with Moroni.”
“With Moroni?” Sergio asked, sarcastically.
“Yes, Moroni,” she said, suddenly angry. “At least I
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know that if I decide to marry him, as he wishes it, he will love me … without getting mixed up in debates about Communism and anti-Communism … He’ll hold me in his arms, love me, say sweet things to me, take me, make love to me, make babies with me, and make me feel like I am living with a man made of flesh and blood and not with a marionette like the two of you. You may not realize it, but you’re just like two marionettes.”
“And what about Moroni?”
“Moroni is different … Even if the Communists take over and he loses everything, he will be a man;
the two of you are just puppets without a drop of blood in your veins. Your heads are full of words … You’re just the same, the two of you … Even if things change, for me nothing would change.”
Sergio stood up. He realized he had offended her and was suddenly terrified of losing her. “Lalla, please forgive me,” he began, “I’m so sorry … from now on I’ll love you and think of nothing else … Of course you’re hurt … I promise I will never do it again … We’ll live together and I’ll love you forever.”
“It’s too late,” she said bitterly. “Why don’t you just go to bed with the Communist Party … and he can go to bed with his political party … I, on the other hand, will go to bed with a real man … Giacomo … Giacomo …,” she called out, in a loud voice. The door opened and Moroni entered, as if on cue. Lalla called out to him: “Giacomo, come here,” and he went to her, standing next to the bed. “From this moment, he is my fidanzato,” she said. “Take a good look, and then please do me a favor and get out.”
Maurizio stood up. “Let’s go, Sergio. It’s best,” he said, with an almost satisfied air. But Sergio insisted, “But, Lalla …”
“You don’t believe me,” she yelled, with a kind of fury, “but I will make love to him right here in front of you, and you can’t do anything about it … Come here, Giacomo, make love to me,” she said, making space for him on the bed, and then bending over to unbutton his trousers. Moroni looked embarrassed. Then she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, still saying, “Come here, make love to me.”
Now feeling less awkward, Moroni began to caress Lalla, with a strange smile on his lips. Sergio could see it was all over for him. He took a step toward
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the door as Lalla repeated, “Make love to me, make love to me.” She was naked to the waist, with Moroni next to her, already half undressed. Sergio and Maurizio left the room; Maurizio walked ahead, with a haste that seemed almost triumphant, merciless. They went downstairs, still pursued by Lalla’s voice crying out “Make love to me, make love to me,” and finally they stepped outside. Her voice still rang in their ears as they stood in the courtyard. The car was there. Maurizio got in. “It’s really better if we leave,” he said. In shock, Sergio tried to say something but did not have the strength to oppose him. He climbed into the car, and they left.
[VII]
For a long time, Maurizio drove in silence. They had
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taken the tree-lined road out of Olevano, shaded by leafy, old plane trees, and now they were descending quickly toward the valley. The town loomed higher and higher above them, with its houses perched on the rocks, their stone sides indistinguishable from the smoky gray hillside, punctuated here and there by bushes of capers and broom. As soon as they were on the open road, Maurizio sped up. The speedometer rose to fifty, then to sixty miles per hour. Sergio did not speak; he was still trying to understand the catastrophe that had befallen him back at Moroni’s provincial manor. Finally, Maurizio asked, “What are you thinking about?”
Sergio struggled to speak. “I was thinking that I should have stayed in Olevano … Why did we leave in such a rush?”
Maurizio answered slowly: “We left because we had no business there … Lalla will marry Moroni, and he’ll love her, just as she said. We were superfluous.”
“I should have insisted,” Sergio said, in a desperate tone; “maybe I could have persuaded her.”
“Yes, but then you would have returned to Rome and life would have gone back to the way it was, and you would have started to hate and despise her once again. She would have left you in any case.”
He was silent for a moment, then added: “It’s better this way … A woman cannot go on forever in a situation like yours … At a certain point the cord breaks … I think it happened at just the right time.”
“But you never loved her,” Sergio said angrily. “I did, and I still do.”
“Nonsense … You never loved her either … You only loved yourself … or rather, you loved the Party, which was just an extension of yourself.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes it is … You became a Communist because you weren’t strong enough to live on your own merits … And then once you became a Communist, you
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became disenchanted, because you realized that your weaknesses had not changed. So you tried to prove to yourself that Communism is the most important thing, your raison d’être. You had only one way to prove this to yourself … by sacrificing Lalla on the altar of your political credo. And that’s what you did. Why are you complaining?”
Sergio wanted to say that he was complaining because he felt an acute, powerful, unbearably bitter pain, where just a few hours earlier he had felt security and a conviction of his dominion over Lalla. And that his pain had taken the shape of an unfillable, gaping hole, as if the spot in his heart which until now had been filled by Lalla had suddenly suffered a terrible spasm, revealing its emptiness. But he knew he could not confide in Maurizio. They were not friends. In fact, as Maurizio had said earlier, they were enemies, and there was nothing he could do about it. As if guessing his thoughts, Maurizio added: “You would be less disappointed, or perhaps not at all, if you had a new convert to the cause sitting next to you rather than a complete enemy of your ideas … Isn’t that right?”