Later that same day, Lalla went to her rented room,
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gathered a few belongings in some boxes tied with twine, along with a tattered old suitcase, and moved into my room at the boardinghouse, where there were two beds. I had proposed the idea, almost timidly, and she quickly accepted, saying simply: “You made me lose my job … You ruined me … now you have to take care of me.” And thus began one of the most difficult, and also one of the happiest, periods of my life.
4) Version C, typescript p. 270
[These lines describe Nella’s and Sergio’s feelings as they ride the bus to Maurizio’s house.]
[…]I was proud of her and of her beauty, and I wanted Maurizio to see her and admire her, just as I admired her at that moment.
Finally, when it was already quite late, we left the apartment and took a bus to Maurizio’s. He lived in a neighborhood which, twenty years earlier, had been one of the most elegant and modern in the city. Now other, newer neighborhoods had sprung up around it, so that what had once been practically a suburb had become almost part of the city center. On the bus I noticed that Nella seemed uncomfortable and avoided looking me in the eye. It occurred to me that as she reflected on what had happened earlier at home, she felt hurt, and I suffered a pang of guilt. As soon as we stepped off the bus, she said:
Finally, when it was already quite late, we left the apartment and took a bus to Maurizio’s neighborhood. Recently, new neighborhoods had sprung up around it, so that what had once been practically a suburb had become almost part of the city center. As the bus drove along, I became distracted thinking about Maurizio and our visit. Examining my feelings, I realized that I felt driven by an aggressive, pugnacious impulse, and at the same time I was tormented by a fear of not being up to the task at hand. It never occurred to me to think that this was just a simple visit, without particular significance, like so many others; I knew that this was not the case, and in a sense I was preparing myself for what I thought awaited me. But instead of analyzing my own feelings of inferiority toward Maurizio and consciously replacing those subjective feelings with objective goals — as one often does in such cases — I tried instead to analyze his superiority, which was all in my mind, and to discover his points of weakness. As I have said before, to me it seemed that Maurizio’s superiority sprang from his vitality, a quality that was mysterious and impossible to pin down, something I sensed but could not define. At the same time I believed that his social status was his greatest weakness; in other words, I believed that he belonged to a social class which I considered to be irreparably doomed. I realized that if I could impart this sense of doom, this fear […]
NOTE ON THE TEXT
I. MATERIALS
The typescript pages of the three unpublished drafts of Sergio and Maurizio’s story are in the archives of the Fondo Alberto Moravia in Rome. They consist of 258 typescript pages, on Fabriano Extra Strong paper measuring approximately 28 × 22 centimeters (11 × 8½ inches), unnumbered by the author. The numeration, provided by the archive, reflects the order in which the pages were discovered. Many pages had been damaged over the years and were recently restored.
A REDISCOVERED SUITCASE
The pages were found in a suitcase which was discovered, in poor condition, in the spring of 1996. According to Moravia’s heirs and the directors of the Fondo, it was in the basement of Moravia’s home on the Lungotevere della Vittoria. Another suitcase — which can be seen in photographs taken by Serafino Amato in the special edition of the Quaderni del Fondo Moravia (journal of the Fondo Moravia) dedicated to the exhibit Moravia and Rome (November 2003, pp. 2–3, 201–203), had been discovered, in better condition, a few months earlier, in September 1995. The two suitcases contained various pages written by the author, including materials relating to several novels, such as La ciociara (Two Women), La noia (Boredom), and L’attenzione (Attention), as well as stories which were later included in Racconti romani (Roman Tales), Nuovi racconti romani (New Roman Tales), and L’automa (The Fetish). Thus all of these papers date from the fifties and early sixties, and certainly before 1963, the year Moravia moved out of his home on the Via dell’Oca and into his new home on the Lungotevere. It is possible that the writer, or someone else, filled the suitcases during the move in a somewhat disorderly fashion, packing recent and relevant texts and documents, not to be confused with material Moravia was actively working on at the time. It is also possible that these papers remained in the suitcases, untouched, from 1963 until they were discovered thirty years later.
This may explain their survival. As has been noted by several sources, the writer was known to destroy his preparatory materials once a book had been published. We recall the account of Sebastian Schadhauser (a German sculptor and friend of Moravia’s), transcribed from a video at the Fondo Moravia. Schadhauser accompanied Moravia on several trips during the seventies and eighties, and assisted him during his convalescence from a hernia:
During that period I often lit the fireplace in order to burn manuscripts. When [Moravia] finished writing something, he was in the habit of burning the manuscripts. He didn’t keep manuscripts, he burned them. Also the corrected proofs. When he received proofs from a newspaper, he would correct them, and then when they came back from the editor, he would burn them. There is a fireplace in the corner of his house on the Lungotevere della Vittoria. It’s set at a diagonal, like this. He would light a fire there and burn papers. During that period, I did it because he couldn’t get up. But he burned all of his manuscripts. I don’t think there are many manuscripts in circulation. He had this habit. For him, the finished work was the published work. The rest, he burned.
Up to the present, no other drafts or notes related to Moravia’s novels from before the seventies have been found; there are only a few clean proofs, kept by his editor, which reflect the final version of the work (there is one typescript of La romana (The Woman of Rome) and one of La noia). The situation with the more recent novels is somewhat different; the Fondo Moravia has several drafts that survived in the writer’s home. Of course, it is possible that in the future other lost typescripts or manuscripts will be found, especially if they were given by the author to friends, relatives, or editors, as in the case of a typescript of Il disprezzo (Contempt), that was discovered in 2002. This was an almost final draft of the novel, and it is now in the collection of the Fondo Moravia. But until now the only texts that have survived from the writer’s office are those discovered in the suitcase at the house on Lungotevere della Vittoria, which escaped the flames thanks to the vicissitudes of the move.
In order to understand the dimensions of Moravia’s directive and to evaluate the typescript pages that have survived, we must pause to reflect on the very small number of pages that have been discovered.
It is of course impossible to quantify the total number of typescript pages produced by the author over the course of preparing a novel, but based on the meager resources — letters and interviews — to be found in the “Notes on the Texts” in Bompiani’s Classici edition of Opere complete di Alberto Moravia (Complete Works), volumes 1–4, we could estimate the number to be around one thousand pages, over two thousand in the case of the longer novels. For example, the typescript pages relating to the composition of La ciociara, La noia, and L’attenzione found in the two suitcases represent only a small fraction of the total preparatory materials relating to those works (about a fifth). This would mean that the 258 pages relating to the three versions of this unpublished novel would have been only one small part of the complete preparatory work. If they represent early versions of the novel, that would mean that there was still much work to be done before the completion of the final version.