Two Friends Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 wasinterested 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
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    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 ora 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 hedid 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
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    impotence, was his awareness of its profound causes. The truth was that even as he wished with all his might that the