ROME LETTER
645
manipulators who try with cunning to control this mechanism and to
subject other people by violence are spared the common degradation.
No matter how powerful and armed the individual, he remains always
at the mercy of his weakness, and can dominate everything except his
own character and the consequences of his actions; the terrible dictator
Tereseo, at the end, does not dominate anything, neither his woman,
his subordinates, nor his subjects.
Moravia has rightly said of the comedy which he drew out of his
novel that it is "a mixture of political satire, afntasy, psychological dra–
ma, and passion. More than a satire of dictatorship, it is a satire of that
world which eixsts and takes shape, when a dictatorship exists."
I would say that even more than a satire of dictatorship, the comedy
is a satire of what happens to human relations when men are blinded
by the illusion and presumption that they can dominate reality through
the mechanism of politics. Then the opaque entanglement of existence
reaches a state of paroxysm, and there is a universal masquerade, in
which no one can say who is strong and who is weak, who is the puppet,
who the puppeteer. The one certain thing is that both ingenuous pas–
sions and Machiavellian slyness carry their own destruction within them–
selves. This is one of Moravia's characteristic themes, and it reappears
in tragic form in
Beatrice Cenci.
Though in the novel Moravia only hinted at political satire,
in
the
play he pushed it as far as he could while still remaining within the
limits of farce. In his play he attacked not only the ridiculous dictator–
ship but also the ingenuity and ingenuous two-facedness of the revolu–
tionaries, and declared even more emphatically than in his novel that his
position was to resist the temptation of taking sides, because he was con–
vinced that the human condition cannot be resolved in politics. The
only truth which politics brings to light, according to Moravia, is the
foolish ambiguity of everything; the fact that no matter how much he
tries, the individual remains a muddy mixture, a victim of his own dim
vision and of the cold mechanics of the world. The most reevaling char–
acters in the play are, on one side, Perro the policeman, the black mind
of intrigue, and on the other Saverio, the innocent, inevitable victim.
The strongest and most typical of Morovia's scenes in the play are
that in which Perro, pretending he is a revolutionary, patiently explains
to Saverio the organization of the party (in this case a caricature of
the Communist party), and secondly, the scene in which he brings out
the moral of the story while arguing with the Chief of Police that there
is no point in trying to secure oneself from duplicity when the game of
power is in fact a double game altogether. To the Chief of Police who
