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made of sturdier metal than I, and that was the long and short of it. To extend the metaphor, he was made of tempered steel, like a sword, while I had been fashioned out of vulgar cast iron, the kind that stoves are made of and that breaks under a heavy blow.
As I’ve said, this sense of irredeemable and ineffable inferiority caused me great suffering. I did not know why this ancient rivalry had now become mixed with my political aspirations, intellectual ambitions, and moral hopes, but it seemed to me, deep down, that if I could not triumph over Maurizio, then the revolution too would fail; I would continue my life as a miserable, mediocre intellectual, and all my actions would continue in the same negative, abnormal vein as they now seemed to. Maurizio was the symbol of everything I sought to defeat within and outside of myself, and our struggle was the testing ground, as they say, of my personal strength and of all the ideas and principles I embraced. I don’t know which made me more unhappy: my awareness of the fact that we were built from different metals, or the importance I attributed to my stake in this after all quite modest rivalry. I knew that I suffered as only an impotent man can suffer, like a man who leaves a woman he has intended to deflower intact on the bed, sheets crumpled in vain.
Immersed in such bitter reflections, I walked mechanically in the darkness to the end of Maurizio’s street. Mechanically — almost without realizing it — I boarded a bus, got off at my stop, walked the rest of the way, climbed the stairs, entered the boardinghouse, and shut the door. Perhaps shaken by the sight of the empty room, a silent yet eloquent witness of my defeats and torments, I felt a sudden wave of rebellion well up inside me. Yes, it was true that Maurizio was made of a harder metal than I, but it was only partly true, and only in a world where men were judged as metal bars or cogs in a machine. In the real, human world, and beyond all poetic metaphors, this question of metals meant nothing, and the truth remained that Maurizio was a man like me and like many others; in other words, his strength lay only in my weakness. It was only because I thought
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or felt, or in any case had convinced myself, that Maurizio was stronger, that he in fact acquired this strength. I could now see that what I had to do was convince myself of the contrary, in other words arrive at the inalterable conviction that in reality Maurizio was weak, very weak, and that I, for a host of reasons, was vastly stronger. I had already expressed this conviction in abstract form, theoretically, by objectively examining Maurizio’s situation and establishing its weakness in comparison to my own. When he and I had spoken in the garden, I had argued: “I am the new man, and you are a relic of the past.” But even as I had exclaimed these precise, true words, I had felt that Maurizio, despite belonging to the past, was still superior. Why? Now I realized that it was because I believed in this new man only with my head, but not with the deepest fibers of my being, the part of us that allows us to hold and return the gaze of a rival, that lends authority to our voice and decisiveness to our gestures, and forms the basis of the true strength of powerful men. I needed to release this conviction from the antechamber of my mind and send it to the deepest recesses of my being, into my blood, my flesh, my true matter. But I realized that by a circuitous route I had returned to the question of matter, to the evaluation of man as metal, substance, chemical makeup. In desperation, and still drunk, I turned out the light and threw myself facedown on the bed fully dressed.
I’m not sure how long I lay like this, with my mouth pressed into the pillow and my body spread across the bed. I must have slept for about an hour, a sleep without dreams, dark and deep. When I awoke, my hand went automatically to the light switch; I saw that the clock on the dresser said it was four in the morning and realized that Nella had not yet returned. It occurred to me that perhaps she was really sick, to the point that she could not leave Maurizio’s villa, but then it occurred to me that her sickened state might only have been an excuse to spend the night at the villa. I did not have any deeper thoughts on the issue; this final hypothesis did not awaken worry, jealousy, or any other particular feeling. I began to undress, pulling off my clothes and throwing them on the floor far from the bed. I climbed under the covers and once again turned out the light. I think I fell asleep almost immediately, but this time my slumber did not last long. Little more than a quarter of an hour had passed when a light came on and I caught a glimpse of Nella between half-open lids swollen with sleep as she entered the room carefully, on tiptoe, trying
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to avoid making noise. I closed my eyes again, feigning sleep, and watched as she went back and forth, undressing quickly, putting her clothes away in the closet — carefully, as always — and placing her slip, stockings, and shoes on a chair at the foot of the bed. When she was completely undressed, she went over to the vanity table, sat down on the narrow stool in front of the mirror, and began to comb her hair with quick, energetic strokes. From the bed I could see her torso, almost adolescent and boyish except where it widened and grew paler in the discreet but clearly feminine width of the hips. Her mane of red hair, tinged with a metallic hue in the light of the lamp, made her shoulders appear even more narrow and her arms more child-like as she brushed her hair. Every so often she turned her head slightly, energetically brushing the hair to one side, and I could see, beneath her outstretched, raised arm, the round, heavy, buttery whiteness of her breast with its pink tip. As I gazed at her, so chaste and innocent, it occurred to me that I loved her and that I was lucky to have such a lover. Then, as she got up from the stool and tiptoed over to the bed, I closed my eyes quickly. She put one knee on the bed and leaned over me, her breasts hanging over my face. I could smell her breath, innocently soaked in the ardent fragrance of alcohol. She whispered, “Are you asleep?” I pretended not to hear her, and she repeated the question one more time, in a slightly more audible voice: “Are you sleeping?” She clearly wanted to wake me, but at the same time wanted to let me sleep, a childish contradiction which suddenly made me smile. “No, I’m awake,” I said, rousing myself and putting my arms around her waist. “I thought you were sleeping,” she said, panting, pressing her cool, solid, smooth, slippery body against me. As I kissed her, I stretched out one arm to turn out the light and then embraced her more tightly, with both arms. She returned my embrace with infantile, awkward ardor, murmuring: “Do you love me? Do you love me?”