Cesira is a farmer of the Ciociaria, arrived to Rome after having married a grocer, fundamentally honest and healthy, also being very attached to the stuff. Widow from some time, she has raised her daughter Rosa, in an entirely reserved and timid way, but with sincere confidence and tenderness. Meanwhile the war impends on Rome. The Germans have occupied the city and the Americans from the south press on the Germans. The life in the city has become impossible because the provisions are scarce and the dangers of the war are more and more threatening. For this reason Cesira and her daughter run away from Rome to shelter toward the mountains of the Ciociaria. But in contact with the new reality of the town and the country for the changed economic situation and for the shortage of food, they have a sad experience in the middle of the vices and the cowardices of men. The Germans and the fascists make discriminations of men and animals and of things; all the men steals as they can, all the men betrays for making space in the middle of so much poverty. Among so many dispersed, the two women meet Michele, the merchant Filippo’s son. Father and son don't get along; the son has studied and he has a great contempt for the middle class and for his father, who is boasted of not have split, because
fools are those people who believe to what there is written in the newspapers and they pay the taxes and they go to make the war and even they lose their life.
But Michele goes off and lifting himself of stroke with the dark face he says: Nobody is split here, except me. I’m split.
This character, as we have seen, Moravia has wanted to call him Michele like the protagonist of Gli Indifferenti, in reality he’s really the opposite, because he is decidedly and clearly a man who has broken any ideological relationship with the bourgeois mentality of the father and of the dispersed merchants, with the fascists and the Nazi. He feels himself a Marxist; he speaks and works convinced of his actions, he reproahces the people that aren’t convinced that the war of the fascist’s is an act of force and violence against every form of freedom; he interprets also the Gospel in Marxist key; we can remember as he intended to explain Lazzaro’s resurrection. And he dies coherently, rather he disappears from the scene, forced with the weapons to accompany some Germans who didn't know the road; and he dies really in the moment in which the Americans had broken down the German front, remaining in Rosetta’s and Cesira’s heart as an example of pure and innocent man as that landscape of nature, where the two poor women were sheltered, as if in that innocent and primitive place had been possible to feed the hope of the liberation.
But when the two women leave their shelter on the mountain, with the arrival of the anglo-Americans, poor as never, but rich of a new experience of life and pain, really in that moment their adventure is loosened in a bloodiest play. In fact they are reached by a group of Moroccan soldiers and violated in an abandoned church of country under an altar and an inverted image of the mother. They are among the most dramatic pages of the novel those in which the mother is forced to observe in the meats of the innocent daughter the consequences of the war, meats devastated as all the landscape in which their pain is framed without consolation. In her internal desperation, resigned in her impotence in front of so much crime, Cesira observes her daughter who changes day by day under her eyes; in fact she realizes that she gives herself to all the men who she meets and who succour her drivers and black men who makes bags. It seems almost that is changed also the ethic with the war; everything is different in the human and social relationships, a new sexual, social alienation has dreadfully made all different in the affections, in the relationships with the similar. Cesira feels herself almost extraneous in this world, she doesn't succeed to understand that in her daughter there has been a very deal serious psychic trauma, a desire of destruction of herself, a kind of revenge against the people who have made violence on her. It’s verified the words said by Michele explaining Lazzaro’s resurrection: we are putrefied, therefore we have to rise again; also the suicide that Cesira dreames hasn’t sense, because the life has to continue: So I had to continue to live; but as before, as always I would never have known, because the life was preferable to the death.