For Moravia, La Ciociara

was his tribute as a novelist to the Resistance as a collective act

.
The setting is Ciociaria, southeast of Rome; the historical context is the period between October 1943 and June 1944, when this region was thrown into turmoil by the protracted stalemate in the Allied advance, caused by the Cassino defensive lines and the failure of the Anzio landings in January 1944.
The narrator and protagonist of the novel is Cesira: raised in Ciociaria, she married a Roman shopkeeper, a man who despises her, calling her «la burina».
And indeed, Cesira is coarse, plebeian, and rural, yet strong and pragmatic, a formidable, seasoned worker.
Her life revolves around the home, the shop, and her daughter Rosetta.
This is how her mother describes her at the beginning of the story:

she had a face like a little sheep, with large eyes, an expression sweet and almost poignant

; later she will have to admit

that this perfection was fragile and almost artificial, like that of a flower grown in a hot-house

.
For Cesira, the war is far away (

those sons of whores, let them butcher each other all they want, what do we care about their war?

).
And as another character will say,

war is only bad for fools.
(...) Let the Germans come, let the English come, let the Russians come, what must matter above all to us shopkeepers is still the shop, and if the shop is doing well, all is well

.
Cesira thinks the same way; indeed, she enriches herself through the black market throughout the war years.
After September 8th, Cesira finds herself flush with cash but devoid of provisions, forced to starve.
She decides to leave Rome and head to Ciociaria, to stay with her parents.
The train takes the two women as far as Fondi, where the railway line ends.
They find lodging with a shady family, whom they quickly abandon after Rosetta is subjected to the indecent advances of a petty Fascist hierarch.
They flee, then, into the mountains, to a wretched shepherd village where numerous families who fled Fondi have taken refuge.
In the extensive pages dedicated to the shared life of the evacuees and peasants, Moravia draws on his personal experience, to the extent that events and figures mirror those in his diary from those terrible days, when he was forced, alongside Elsa Morante, to seek shelter in Ciociaria.
The narrative, fluid yet prolix, is skillfully driven forward, thriving on the contrast between the harrowing realities of war (desolation, bombings, roundups, violence) and the splendid indifference of nature, which follows, immutable and cynical, the eternal cycle of the seasons.
The tale seems suspended, awaiting the arrival of the Allies, who are expected to bring «abundance».
Enter Michele.
a young intellectual, steadfast in his ideas and courageous in his conduct.
Unlike Rosetta, who owes her innocence to ignorance, Michele is keenly aware of what is transpiring, of the Nazi-Fascist oppression that affects not only the insular world of the evacuees, but all of Italy, driven toward general material and moral ruin.
A positive figure, he is trapped, as it were, in the life of the displaced, in the wretched and indolent day-to-day existence of waiting, focused solely on surviving somehow.
Finally, the Allies arrive; it ought to be liberation, but instead the situation deteriorates rapidly.
Some German soldiers take Michele away and subsequently execute him when the young man stands up in defense of a peasant family: Michele dies a hero.
The two women, alone and isolated, are caught off guard by a group of Allied soldiers, who rape Rosetta.
The rape changes the girl; once so innocent, she declares to her astonished mother:

him or someone else, it makes no difference to me.
(...) I want to make love because it's the only thing I like and feel like doing.
And from now on, I will always be like this

.
The rape, Michele's death, and the war profoundly alter Cesira as well: once a confident woman, she becomes uncertain, tormented, so much so that her sleep is plagued by nightmares, as though only the oneiric world might allow her to regain her original solidity; in one of these dreams, she imagines that Rosetta has married and that «she unbuttoned her bodice and gave her breast to the baby», but was it Rosetta or that poor madwoman she had encountered wandering the countryside amid the desolation of war?

Whatever his intentions, the author fails to convey the tragedy of war for civilians, and this for two reasons.
First of all, a pervasive pessimism regarding human nature prevails, leading to the passive acceptance of events, to resignation rather than rebellion, to submission—an attitude certainly not redeemed by the final chapter, in which grief would seem to restore perspective to Rosetta and Cesira.
It is a hypocritical and sickly-sweet appendix, calculated to avoid an ending too cynical to find favor with readers.
Secondly, Rosetta's metamorphosis from a good girl into a «whore» is implausible (is a rape overcome so easily?), smacks of the morbid, and mirrors a typically male conception of female sensuality.
In short, the gang rape is treated as an initiation, an abrupt way of discovering the «ugly things» of the world.
On the other hand,

she had now developed a taste for what the Moroccans had forced upon her

.
From a cathartic turning point, rape becomes the inexorable fate of all women.
One cannot be accused of being politically correct in stating that this Cesira-Moravia worldview is intolerable, in addition to draining all tension from the entire narrative.

The plot is admirably constructed, the characters are well drawn, and the writing is fluid, effortless, and accomplished with its airy phrasing.
The reader is led by the hand up to the rape, foreshadowed throughout the narrative by subtle hints and fleeting episodes; when it occurs, it seems inevitable.
Moravia confirms his immense gifts as a writer.

Why read it? Cesira is a victim, and her story is emblematic of what befalls civilians in all wars.

Two Women