“Tomorrow at six at your house.” It is the invitation that Mira extends to her friend, sending him into turmoil. So the following morning, shaken and restless, he leaves the house in an attempt to fill the few hours that separate him from that meeting as best he can. He gets on the bus, goes into a bar to have a coffee, goes to see Enrico, his best friend, who is also emotionally involved with Mira; here she discovers that the girl has just called Enrico to meet him at the same time, probably to throw him off track. Then he goes to the tailor, where he discovers that Walter, perhaps the only man towards whom Mira really feels something certain and definitive, has just been released from prison and could therefore reappear and take her away from both of them. During these few hours, the boy has time to retrace Mira’s past, the way in which he passes from one man to another without ever fading away and without providing certainties to anyone. He finally returns home and waits; Mira reaches him, drags him into a sensual vortex halfway between pleasure and repulsion, then asks him to take her home, introduces her parents to her friend and, fully dressed, leaves him there to get into a car and disappear in the night. The young man, convinced that Mira is spending the evening in a nightclub, runs to the Nautical Club for a hand of baccarat, to raise some money for the evening, and then goes to the Night Owl, to guzzle liters of Pernod, with the clouded hope of finding Mira again…
In a similar alternation of actions lined up with a logical sense yet without due consequence, Raffaele La Capria, one of the greatest exponents of twentieth-century Italian literature, known mainly for his Ferito a morta (1961), drags us into a world post-war and post-adolescence of impatient waiting: the wait for a woman, a desire to be filled, a sense of completeness. Against the backdrop of a post-war period halfway between the enjoyable and the conventional, it shows us the conflict that moves its protagonist in the few hours that separate him from the meeting with the object of his desires, the reflections on his friendship with Enrico, whose foundations he would not like to destroy, and seeks support in his friend’s perhaps elusive and risk-disinclined character, who sublimates his aspirations into politics, but also offers him a new and more conscious way of approaching reality. Mira’s unattainability is not an intrinsic quality of the girl, but a lack of the protagonist, who, as an incomplete individual, does not have the ability to hold her close even when he holds her in his arms. Through a novel that is also a stream of consciousness, an alternation of thoughts and actions, La Capria invites us, through the metaphor of waiting for something to come true, to reflect on completeness, on that split between bourgeois convention and authenticity that prevents to fully enjoy love and passion, in the extreme attempt to be a “man” and not just a “character”.
