The Time of Indifference by Alberto Moravia

First published:Gli indifferenti, 1929 (English translation, 1953)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1929

Locale: Rome

Principal Characters:

• Mariagrazia Ardengo, a middle-aged widow
• Carla Ardengo, Mariagrazia’s twenty-four-year-old daughter
• Michele Ardengo, Mariagrazia’s son, a first-year law student
• Leo Merumeci, a forty-two-year-old businessman and the lover of Mariagrazia and Carla
• Lisa, Leo’s former mistress

The Novel

On the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday, Carla Ardengo longs to escape her dreary existence, to find a new life. Visiting the Ardengos this evening is Leo Merumeci. He is a frequent guest because he is the lover of Carla’s widowed mother, Mariagrazia, and the holder of the mortgage on the Ardengos’ fashionable villa. Leo has become tired of Mariagrazia, who has been his mistress for fifteen years; he propositions Carla, and she agrees to come to his apartment the next day.

Lisa, who had been Leo’s lover and fiancee before he met Mariagrazia, is also at the villa. Mariagrazia suspects that Lisa and Leo want to renew their affair and that Lisa has come to her house to arrange a rendezvous. The object of her quest, however, is not Leo but Michele, Mariagrazia’s son. Just as Carla consents to give herself to Leo, Michele agrees to see Lisa.

Leo’s attempted seduction suffers a setback at Carla’s birthday party the next day. To make her more pliable, he fills her glass again and again with champagne, so that by the end of the meal she is drunk. They go for a walk on the villa’s grounds, where they happen upon an old shed conveniently equipped with a bed. Just as Leo prepares to have sex with Carla, she becomes ill from the wine, and he must wait until night to consummate the affair.

Lisa’s hopes, too, are temporarily dashed. She has lured Michele to her apartment with the promise of interesting a rich relative in him and so securing a good position for the youth. When Michele arrives the next morning, no relative is waiting. Lisa goes into the hallway, pretending to call him, but Michele sees that she does not even pick up the phone, and he leaves.

When Michele returns later that day, he finds Leo alone with Lisa; again Michele leaves. By the time he makes his third visit, Lisa knows all about Leo’s relationship with Carla. Michele accuses Lisa of chasing after Leo, but she replies that Leo would not have her; he already has Michele’s sister.

Although Michele does not feel anger on learning about his sister’s affair, he senses that he should act. He buys a cheap pistol, goes to Leo’s apartment, and tries to kill him. Michele has forgotten to load the gun, so his attempted murder fails. Carla, who has been sleeping with Leo, emerges from the bedroom to learn the cause of the confusion. Michele seizes the opportunity to urge her to abandon Leo, arguing that the family can sell the villa and pay Leo what they owe him.

Leo knows that if the Ardengos put the villa on the market they will get far more than the eight hundred thousand lira that they owe him. He will thus lose the house, his new mistress, and perhaps his old mistress as well. Consequently, he offers to marry Carla, allow the Ardengos to continue to live in the villa, and find Michele a job. Michele still opposes the marriage, but Carla consents because, even though she does not love Leo, she is eager for the money, fine clothes, and parties that the marriage will bring her.

Following the confrontation at Leo’s apartment, the two Ardengo children return home. Carla and her mother prepare to attend a masked ball, a fitting emblem of the life of concealment that they lead. Michele and Lisa, meanwhile, plan yet another tryst, and he promises that this time he will not rebuff her advances.

The Characters

Michele is the first of a number of effete intellectuals appearing in Alberto Moravia’s fiction. He would like to feel passion, to love Lisa and despise Leo, but he cannot. His only response to life is indifference, because he lacks any moral sense. Although he pretends to be angry when he learns that his sister has become Leo’s mistress, he had in fact considered “selling” Carla to him in exchange for an allowance. If Leo had preferred Lisa, Michele was prepared to give her up for the same terms.

Whereas Michele feels nothing, Carla suffers deeply. Seeing her present life as barren, she longs for change and will do anything to effect it. She even agrees to Leo’s proposition and then his proposal, only to realize, too late, that nothing has been altered; she is merely taking her mother’s place.

Lisa, too, hopes for redemption. She thinks that Michele will bring “sunshine, blue sky, freshness, enthusiasm” into her gray world. Given Michele’s character, Lisa is doomed to disappointment: Enthusiasm is hardly one of his attributes. The gap between her imagination and reality is evident when her would-be lover first comes to her apartment. She has been fantasizing about an elaborate seduction, but all that she can say when Michele arrives is, “Well, how goes it?” At the end of the novel her affair with Michele is still inchoate despite Michele’s promise to accept her advances. Even if they do sleep together, her life will change no more than Carla’s, since neither Leo nor Michele can offer any realistic hope of salvation.

Michele, Carla, and Lisa would like to change their situation but cannot. Mariagrazia and Leo, on the other hand, want everything to stay the same. The former dreads poverty and the loss of social position so much that she consents to her daughter’s marriage to her own former lover, a man who claims to regard Carla as his “almost daughter.” Leo, too, wants to retain his comforts, including the pleasant Ardengo villa and sex with Carla. If he must sacrifice nominal bachelorhood to keep these, he will, but he tells himself at the end of the novel, “Even when you’re married, you’ll be the same old Leo.” He will still chase any woman he desires and will remain a frequent guest of Mariagrazia.

Critical Context

Moravia’s depiction of middle-class life as dull, gloomy, and false shocked and stimulated Italian audiences when the novel first appeared. The product of a bourgeois upbringing, Moravia revealed his own boredom with that existence. His critique went beyond a personal aversion to middle-class values: It anticipated the existential view that people have become so self-absorbed that they cannot relate to any world outside themselves. Moravia’s characters are as much strangers as Albert Camus’, and like Jean-Paul Sartre’s, they can find no exit from their self-enclosed worlds.

Moravia’s work thus provided a powerful and early exploration of the modern condition. Equally significant for Italian literature, it did so in the novel form. Italy was known as the land of poets: Dante, Petrarch, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. In 1929, the Italian novel was barely one hundred years old. Moravia had attempted to write this novel as a tragedy rather than as prose fiction, and many of these dramatic elements remained in the final version. For example, it relied heavily on dialogue and monologue, and it adhered closely to Aristotle’s unities of time and place, with the locale confined to three houses in Rome and the action unfolding over a period of forty-eight hours. By choosing to use the novel rather than a more classical genre, however, Moravia encouraged others to adopt that mode as well and so impelled Italian fiction toward its important place in world literature.

Bibliography

Kibler, Louis. “Imagery as Expression: Moravia’s Gli indifferenti,” in Italica. XLIX (1972), pp. 315-334.

Pedroni, Peter N. “Playing at Living: Form and Content in Moravia’s Gli indifferenti,” in Perspectives on Contemporary Literature. VI (1980), pp. 104-109.

Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas. “Moravia’s Indifferent Puppets,” in Symposium. XXIV (1970), pp. 44-54.

Ross, Joan, and Donald Freed. The Existentialism of Alberto Moravia, 1972.