One Man, Two Pictures

THE REAL SILVESTRI (188 pp.)--Mario Soldati--Knopf ($2.95).

No man may really know what makes his best friend tick, but Italian Author Soldati, a movie director as well as a resourceful novelist, knows that a woman can best supply the answers, or at least plant them in the wondering mind. Who was the real Silvestri? The mild, sweet, physically unattractive fellow who wrote poetry, loved nature and lived meagerly off his ancestral estate--or an unsuccessful lover who was willing to use blackmail if necessary to bring his friend's wife to bed and marriage? There are several replies of sorts in this excellent short novel, a book that suggests more than it tells and tells no more than it must to make its point: that love and friendship are both too precarious to bear close examination.

When Aurora comes to Italy from France at war's end, she brings gentle Silvestri to his knees at first meeting. Unfortunately for him, she is completely dominated by an American friend of his who has easily slipped from military government into real estate. Aurora's show-girl history is slightly tawdry, but her stunning figure and simple mind persuade Silvestri that she is his great love. To Aurora, Silvestri is a hapless, tiresome romantic. What she wants is a real man, preferably one with money. As it turns out, she finds both, but not in the same person.

The story is unfolded five years after Silvestri's death by a mutual friend, a middle-aged Italian lawyer who looks on Silvestri as a kind of saint. The heart of the novel lives in the juxtaposed pictures that emerge from the recollections of the devoted friend and the disgusted woman. By the time Aurora is finished with her account, the old friend has been shaken, and by book's end he knows an old truth but one not easily come by: that people know about others only what is comfortable to know. The "real Silvestri'' is another man entirely. This is the way of the world, the reader is apt to say, and it will happen again tomorrow. But it will take a writer of Soldati's talent to tell it again as well as it is told here.

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