Italian with Tears

TWO WOMEN (339 pp.)--Alberto Moravia--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.95).

Novelist Alberto Moravia (The Woman of Rome, Conjugal Love ) has often written about sex as man's hex. In Two Women he all but abandons sensuality for sorrow, all but ignores the battle of the sexes for the real war that raged across his native Italy in the '405. The result is a novel curiously dated as to period and theme, but strikingly different as a work from Moravia.

The two women are a 35-year-old mother and her 18-year-old daughter. Cesira is a widowed shopkeeper whose sole strength is her daughter's need of her. Rosetta's convent education has scarcely prepared the girl for a world in which the bombers seem almost to have crowded God out of the heavens. When the bombing of Rome appears imminent, the two women flee southeast to the mountain fastnesses where Cesira was born. The return of the native proves harsh.

In a Pigsty. The quality of the peasants' mercy is severely war-strained. When the slatternly mistress of the first refuge proposes to barter away Rosetta's virginity with the local Fascist bullyboys in exchange for her deserter sons' safety, Cesira and daughter take to the mountain roads in a predawn escape. Their next haven is a dirt-floored hut. This time they fall in with a family of peasants who wash their feet in a common basin, slurp up their daily bread-and-bean mush from a common bowl, and sleep on wooden planks padded with corn shucks. But the peasants' manners are not quite so crude as their characters--grasping, thieving, sullen, vicious, cynical.

The most unsympathetic foreigner would hesitate to paint such a venomous rogues' gallery of Italians, but the reader's conviction is likely to be that Novelist Moravia has drawn his straight from life. After Mussolini's return to power in 1943 as a Nazi puppet, Moravia, who had been editing an anti-Fascist magazine, hid out for nine months "in a pigsty on top of a mountain'' near Monte Cassino. For chapters on end, readers of Two Women may feel that they are doing the same.

In a Church. With a typically sardonic Moravian twist, it is Allied troops who finally break the two women's morale. Before the desecrated altar of a shattered church, Rosetta is raped by a squad of French Moroccan soldiers. Her traumatic reaction is to become indiscriminately promiscuous. Cesira, in turn, is reduced to robbing one of her daughter's slain paramours. At novel's end, only the profound Latin conviction that the first duty of life is to go on living keeps the two women sane as they travel the long road back to Rome.

What is strong and moving about Two Women stems from the unblinking Italian taste for realismo and Author Moravia's vividly tactile imagery, which makes the reader smart with the sting of his heroines' indignities. What is weak and irritating is Leftist Moravia's implicit conviction that war is really a bloody reprise of the class struggle. The only emotion more persuasive than pity that he displays in Two Women is self-pity. When it comes to man's fate--the tragedy that lies too deep for tears--Moravia, the master weeper, refuses to open any wound that a woman's handkerchief cannot staunch.

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