“At this time of day? No, thank you.”
“It picks me up,” Maurizio said, pouring some water into the glass. “I confess that I was almost afraid that you would accept, because it has become very hard to find and can only be bought at a very high price … I had a good supply at the beginning of the war but it’s almost gone now.”
“Did your family stock up on many provisions before the war?” Sergio asked, gently.
“I’m not sure,” Maurizio said vaguely, slightly surprised at the question. “I think so … When the war began, and for months after that, my mother did nothing but accumulate things, as if we were under siege … I think we have enough clothes and food to last us several years.” He returned to the couch and sat sideways, with one leg over the armrest, glass in hand. “Tell me the truth … You must see me as a kind of glutton: drinking, smoking, making love to women.”
Sergio hesitated and peered closely at his friend before answering: in effect, the word Maurizio had chosen fit him quite well. His face, once so fresh and youthful, now clouded and impure, was that of a glutton. “No,” he said finally, “I think you look tired.”
“I am,” Maurizio said in a tone that was suddenly innocent and plaintive, almost like that of a child. “You know, I hardly sleep. The doctor says there’s nothing wrong with me … but I don’t sleep at all, even when I take pills.”
“You need to rest,” Sergio hazarded.
“Yes,” Maurizio answered with conviction, “I need to rest. In Capri I’ll eat, exercise, sleep … it’s exactly what I need. It’s probably just this heat and this
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damned war.”
“What are you saying? I thought you didn’t give a damn about the war.”
“That’s right, I don’t … and why should I? I didn’t declare it and I have nothing to lose or to gain from it … But they just won’t leave us alone, will they?”
“But you didn’t fight in the war.”
“I’m not crazy … I was an officer for a few months and then I managed to get myself demobilized … My father knows someone at the ministry of defense.”
Feeling a wave of resentment, Sergio retorted: “My brother was deployed to the Russian front.”
“You should have told me,” Maurizio said, surprised. “We could have arranged for him to stay here.”
“My family belongs to the class of people who do what has to be done and pay the price for the rest of us,” Sergio said, darkly.
Maurizio did not react to his comment. “You know what troubled me the most? Emilia’s death.”
“Emilia is dead?” Sergio exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes, she died in tragic circumstances … I heard about it by chance from a German living in Italy … poor thing … She was Jewish, you know, and they came to arrest her … She jumped out of a window so they wouldn’t take her … She must have been about fifty … What a way to die. At the time, it didn’t affect me … I never really loved her and so much time had passed … But then I began to have trouble sleeping and I realized that whenever I lay in my bed I was thinking about her, or rather about the time when we were lovers … I suppose that my unconscious mind was marked by her death. In any case, perhaps it’s a coincidence.”
He had told this story in a casual, conversational
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tone. Evidently, Sergio thought, her death had not affected him too deeply; similar cases were quite frequent, even, one might say, normal. But Maurizio’s unconscious, as he had said, adopting a term from psychoanalysis, which was all the rage, had been shaken. Sergio asked himself whether Maurizio’s unconscious might be aware of other things, or at least sense them, and he concluded that perhaps his friend was not completely sincere, not only with Sergio but with himself. He was trying to protect himself, that was all. And if he felt the need to defend himself, perhaps all was not lost. Gently, Sergio asked: “I don’t understand … what do you mean by your ‘unconscious’?”
“You know,” Maurizio said, awkwardly, “it’s like when you fall and you think you haven’t hurt yourself … Then a few days later it starts to hurt and you get a bruise … The unconscious … don’t you know what it is?”
“You’re the one who doesn’t know,” Sergio thought, changing the subject. “Maybe you should fall in love … If you could fall in love, everything would be all right. You’d be able to sleep, and all the rest.”
“I can’t fall in love,” Maurizio said sincerely, with clear bitterness. “Either a woman jumps into bed with me too quickly, or something is missing … Either way, I soon lose interest. I have no illusions … It’s been years since I’ve been in love.”
“So how are you planning to go about getting married?”
“Finding a wife is a different matter … You don’t need to be in love. I’ll get married and we’ll have four or five kids. I won’t be in love with her but she’ll still be my wife … No, love isn’t for me.”
Maurizio shook his hand and then lit another cigarette. Sergio insisted: “But wouldn’t you like to fall in love?”
Maurizio was pouring himself another glass. Just as he was about to answer, he stopped, holding up one finger as if commanding Sergio to be silent.
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Sergio watched in surprise. Sergio could hear a low rumbling from outside, barely distinguishable from the silence, almost part of it. Then, like an airplane engine gaining speed, the noise grew, louder and louder, eventually becoming a howl. “The alarm siren,” Maurizio said, calmly.
Sergio instinctively jumped up. These were the first air raids they had experienced, and the sound of the siren, linked to the idea of bombs falling out of the sky, inspired an agitation in him that was not quite fear but rather a sensation like being immersed in freezing water. It was the sensation of passing too quickly from a state of safety and calm to one of danger and tension. He bit his tongue as he looked over at Maurizio and saw that he was still sitting in his chair with an indifferent air. He began to pace up and down, saying: “I’m tense and this wailing irritates my nerves.”
They heard doors slamming on the second floor and feet descending the stairs. The alarm began again after a short pause; it rose upward and spread out above them, evoking with its spiraling sound the immensity of the burning August sky over the defenseless city. The door to the living room opened and several people rushed in.
Sergio knew some of them. One was Maurizio’s mother, a tall, fair-haired woman with cerulean eyes set in a red, swollen face; she was simultaneously bony and curvaceous, and it seemed as if the abundant curves of her breasts, hips, and thighs clung to her skeleton without concealing its great size and brittleness. Maurizio’s father also appeared; he was a large, tall man with a reddish complexion and youthful appearance despite his completely bald head. He was elegant, taciturn, terribly calm, and slightly sly, just as Sergio remembered him. Maurizio’s sister
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appeared; she did not seem to belong in that family, and in fact she was a daughter from the mother’s first marriage. Maurizio’s mother had been widowed at an early age and had remarried soon after the death of her first husband. This daughter, Marisa, could now be called an old maid; she was very beautiful, tall, with a limpid expression and a large nose, big, melancholy eyes, a dark complexion and delicate features. She must have been in her thirties. Sergio remembered her as a very elegant, worldly, but also sweet and gentle, young woman, whose many love interests were a constant subject of conversation, but who for some reason had never married. The fourth and final member of the group was an old woman whom he did not recognize. Her expression spoke of a great but almost pathetic goodness; she was thin, with a large nose and whiskers, with ashen skin and watery blue eyes. She must be a governess or a lady companion or perhaps a poor relation, or all three, Sergio thought, observing her servile attitude even at this moment of intense agitation.