Two Friends Read Online Free Page A

and talk to Maurizio.
    On one of these occasions, Maurizio was sitting in his car, parked on an elegant street. As Sergio—gloomy and sloppily dressed—walked toward him along the sidewalk, Maurizio called out casually: “Well, how is the intellectual doing today? What have you been up to?”
    The word “intellectual” had an unpleasant ring to it, but in some strange way Sergio knew it to be tinged with truth. He heard himself say, almost resentfully: “Who are you calling an intellectual?”
    “Why, you of course,” Maurizio said, smiling.
    “Me?” Sergio repeated, as if the word sounded strange applied to him. “So you consider me an intellectual?”
    “Of course,” Maurizio said, smiling, “otherwise, what are you?” He laughed, adding, “See you later, Sergio … Got to run … Good luck.” He turned on the ignition and drove off.
    Sergio ruminated on Maurizio’s words for a long time. On the one hand, he realized that the word “intellectual”—like the word “bourgeois” and many
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    others—had been degraded over time to the point that it now had a decidedly negative connotation. On the other hand, he could not help but recognize that despite Maurizio’s coarseness and ignorance, he had done something that Sergio, with all his education and subtlety, had never been capable of: he had defined him in a single word. Wasn’t he in fact an intellectual? And how had he managed not to realize this before? After that meeting, he reflected oftenon his appearance and his state of mind, and each time was forced to recognize that Maurizio’s jocular, off-the-cuff epithet fit him perfectly. To begin with, he had the physical attributes of the intellectual: he wore glasses and was on the small side, and often wore a serious expression on his unshaven face; his clothes were frayed and worn, his pockets full of slips of paper, his shoes covered in mud. Not to speak of his personality and his attitude: he was educated, intelligent, and versatile enough to quickly scribble an article on almost any subject, or write film reviews—as he did, for a second-rate newspaper—but not dedicated enough to be a professional writer, dependable and serious. As he saw it, the word “intellectual” was a kind of cliché, and in fact Maurizio was someone who often expressed himself in clichés. And yet, it was true that Sergio’s appearance and personality fit the cliché; here was the proof that clichés are often based on realities and behaviors that are actually quite common. In the end, he realized that he was an intellectual precisely because it displeased him that he should be seen as one by others. But no matter how he tried, he could not free himself of this displeasure, or accept Maurizio’s epithet with indifference or, better yet, with pride. He did not know why it displeased him so much; in part it was of course because he saw being an intellectual as something completely negative. But more important, it displeased him because it was Maurizio who had defined him in this way and, by so doing, had placed Sergio in a clear category, defined him as a type, with no possibility of change or surprise. Worse yet, it proved that Maurizio had a negative, unfavorable opinion of him.
    It was just before the start of the war, sometime
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    around 1938, and, like everyone around him, Sergio was suffering from the suffocating weight of the tempest, heavy with war and destruction, which was gathering over Europe’s skies. In his case, the suffering was redoubled by his feelings of impotence and lack of confidence. Though he was opposed to all dictatorial regimes, he feared that his opposition was not strong enough, or decisive enough, or based on reasons that were sufficiently well founded or convincing. He envied the Fascists, for whom the choice was so clear, and he also envied Maurizio, to whom these events were clearly and uncomplicatedly indifferent. One day when they bumped into each other in the street,