170
to pay his way if he remained idle. He responded evasively that there was no point in looking for work under the circumstances, with war about to break out. But he knew that this response was inspired by the deep indolence he felt rather than by a sense of reality. There was work to be had, and it probably would not have been so difficult to secure a job. The truth was that he did not even have the strength to look.
[III]
He often bumped into Maurizio around town, and each time, he was struck by his friend’s lighthearted mood. It seemed to him that Maurizio was interested only in the pursuit of his own pleasures. He was usually in his car with one girl or another; the girls were constantly changing, and because of their slightly embarrassed, submissive attitude, Sergio knew that they were involved in a love affair with Maurizio. Maurizio often asked Sergio what he was up to but never seemed particularly interested in Sergio’s response, which, it must be said, was always the same: “Writing, reading, and waiting.” He seemed to consider Sergio a kind of sad sack, an idler, in other words an intellectual, and Sergio no longer cared to prove him wrong. He knew he was an intellectual of the worst sort, a man whose intelligence was neither creative nor useful and served only to poison and paralyze him like a subtle venom. Furthermore, even though Maurizio realized that war was about to break out, he did not seem to attribute any importance to this imminent threat. “None of this has anything to do with me,” he commented to Sergio one day. “Do you know what history is? An excuse to do nothing and to let oneself go, maybe even to stop brushing one’s teeth in the morning. After all, what’s the point of brushing one’s teeth?” Sergio was struck by this summary, which so perfectly encapsulated his own situation. With the excuse that war was about to break out, he no longer bothered to brush his teeth, or, in other words, to fight the effects of time. Like the destructive waters of a flood, time flowed over him, leaving him inert, like the corpse of a drowned man.
This condition of inertia, discomfort, and shame
171
lasted until the end of the war. Sergio had not been called up, because he suffered from myopia, but he could not decide whether this was a blessing or a curse. Though from the beginning he considered the war to be unjust and a lost cause, taking arms would have at least meant doing something or, better yet, letting himself be swept up in something. The war dragged on, month after month, as merciless and inflexible as an illness that must run its course and will end only after it has exhausted its virulence. Sergio felt this illness in his blood, like a poisonous fever that precludes any struggle. He waited, like many others, for the war to reach its foregone and predetermined end. At times he asked himself why he had never reacted in some way even though he was aware of the true reasons behind the conflict, as well as its absurdity and the baseness and incompetence of the men who had driven the country to war and were now conducting it. But always he came to the same conclusion: “I can do nothing but be aware of the fact that I can do nothing.” His impotence was part of the air he breathed, a substance buried in the objects that surrounded him, in their appearance, in time itself. Later, he would remember those years — which after all had contained different seasons and climates — as one endless day, as when the scirocco blows and the colorless, cloudless sky weighs heavily on the rooftops. The air is opaque and stifling, without a whisper of wind, colors fade, and objects lose their shape and become part of an undistinguished morass, devoid of all potency or light, benign and disagreeable at the same time. He realized obscurely that for others, these years might have a quite different color: for example, for members of the regime, who had jumped into this increasingly desperate war; for its enemies, whose hope grew day by day. But he did not feel himself to be on one side or the other; even though he shared both desperation and hope, he could not find a real reason to chose one feeling over the other and join either side.
What tormented him the most, in addition to his
172
impotence, was his awareness of its profound causes. The truth was that even as he wished with all his might that the regime would crumble, even at the cost of a total disaster, he was upset — without quite knowing why — whenever the regime or one of its allies was defeated on the battlefield. He realized that the regime’s victories did not upset him as he would have wished them to. Quite to the contrary, each victory inspired an obscure, shameful sense of satisfaction. In other words, he both desired and did not desire the regime’s downfall, both hated and did not hate it. What he said out loud was not always true, and what he felt in the shelter of solitude was often in contrast with his words. He asked himself what could be the reason for this unconquerable duplicity, but he was unable to pinpoint its source. At the time, one of his younger brothers had been called up and was fighting with the Italian army on the Russian front. Whenever he was gladdened by a German victory in Russia, he wondered whether his affection for his brother — with whom he was very close — was the root cause of this contradictory, painful attitude. But he had to admit that the real motives were deeper and more obscure. In truth, as he had often suspected, he did not want the German armies to be defeated, because such a defeat would lead to disaster, a disaster he was not prepared to confront. Deep down, he preferred to go on living in this deceptive, bitter limbo, between disgust and impotence, and he knew that such a disaster would put an end to it, forcing him to take some sort of action. Yes, he thought to himself, he was this limbo, this malady, this ambivalence between one and another. This limbo, this malady, was his raison d’être, wretched and bitter as it was, but he had no other. And precisely because he knew that he could not find any other reason to justify his existence, he did not want the malady to end. All of this seemed to confirm Maurizio’s careless comment. Sergio reflected: “I am nothing but an intellectual of the worst sort, in other words a man who is aware of all the reasons for action and yet is incapable of acting.” Rereading Pascal’s Pensées, he came upon the great philosopher’s definition of man: That which distinguishes man from a clump of reeds
173
is the fact that the reeds do not know that they are being crushed and a man does. “Man is a thinking reed.” Bitterly, Sergio had concluded that there was no better description for him. But it seemed to him that Pascal was mistaken about one thing: a thinking reed, in Sergio’s opinion, was far inferior to a simple reed. Not thinking was better than thinking without acting.
At home, everyone took him for a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Fascist. His family, who was not Fascist while at the same time not daring to be anti-Fascist, did its best to avoid political discussions, never referring to the war or the political situation in Sergio’s presence. He knew that his mother and father and two sisters would have been saddened by any anti-Fascist declarations from him because they loved his brother, who was fighting in Russia, and feared for his life. They simply wanted him to come home, and they knew that a defeat would impede his return. So he was silent. And still, he felt tossed around by his own impotent duplicity, like a fragile vessel buffeted by a tempestuous sea. On the rare occasions when he met with one of his very few remaining friends, he spoke of his desire for a German defeat. But as soon as he was alone, he realized with profound self-contempt that when he read the papers and saw that defeat seemed more and more inevitable and imminent, he felt a pang of disappointment and bitterness. This ambivalence vexed and disgusted him and inspired in him a gradual, funereal melancholy, as if he were suffering from an unnamable, mysterious disease for which there is no known cure.