The Conformist (17 page)

“For the family and homeland”: this phrase, innocent despite the emphasis, similar to a beautiful banner of bright colors unfurling on a sunny day in a playful breeze while the fanfare resounds and the soldiers pass by, this phrase echoed in his ear, stirring and melancholy, a mixture of hope and sorrow. “For the family and homeland,” he thought, “is enough for Orlando … why shouldn’t it be enough for me?”

He heard the sound of an engine in the garden near the entrance and rose immediately, with an abrupt movement that made the lizard run off. Without hurrying, he left the pergola and began to walk toward the entrance. An old black automobile was parked in the driveway, not far from the still-open gate. The driver, dressed in white livery with blue braiding, was just closing it, but when he saw Marcello he stopped and took off his cap.

“Alberi,” said Marcello in his quietest voice, “today we’re going to the clinic, don’t bother to put the car back in the garage.”

“Yes, Signor Marcello,” replied the chauffeur. Marcello looked at him askance. Alberi was a young man with an olive complexion and eyes as black as coal, their whites the shining white of porcelain. He had very regular features, clenched white teeth, and black, carefully pomaded hair. Although not tall, he gave one a sense of great proportion, perhaps because of his very small hands and feet. He was Marcello’s age but appeared older, due, perhaps, to the Oriental languor expressed in his every feature, a languor destined, it seemed, to turn to fat with the passage of time. Marcello looked at him again, as he closed the gate, with profound aversion; then he set off toward the villa.

He opened the French doors and walked into the living room, which was almost in darkness. He was immediately assailed by the stench that fouled the air, still faint in comparison to the other rooms in which his mother’s ten Pekinese dogs wandered freely, but all the more noticeable here where they were rarely allowed. Opening the window, he saw for a moment, in the pale light he had let in, the furniture draped in its gray dustcovers, the carpets rolled and perched upright in the corners, the piano muffled in sheets held in place by pins. He crossed the living room and dining room, passed through the hallway, and started up the stairs. Halfway up on a marble step (the threadbare carpet had disappeared some time ago and had never been replaced) there was a mound of dog turds and he circled around it so as not to step in it.

When he reached the landing, he went to the door of his mother’s bedroom and opened it. Before he had even had time to open it completely all ten Pekinese, like a long-contained flood suddenly spilling over, launched themselves between his legs and scattered in a flurry of barking throughout the hallway and down the stairs. Uncertain and annoyed, he watched them run away, graceful creatures with their plumed tails and sullen, almost catlike faces. Then, from the bedroom immersed in shadow, he heard the voice of his mother.

“Is that you, Marcello?”

“Yes, mamma, it’s me … but these dogs?”

“Let them go, poor saints … they’ve been shut in all morning … let them go where they want.”

Marcello frowned to signal his displeasure and went in. At once he felt that he could not breathe the air in that bedroom. The closed windows had contained the mingled odors of the night — the different smells of sleep, dogs, and perfume — and the heat of the sun burning behind the shutters seemed already to have fermented and soured the air. Rigid, wary, almost as if he feared by moving to dirty himself or be contaminated by those smells, he went to the bed and sat down on its edge, his hands on his knees.

Now, slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the half-light, he could see the whole bedroom. Beneath the window, in the diffuse light coming from the long, stained, yellowed curtains, which seemed to be made of the same limp material as the many pieces of underwear strewn around the room, a number of aluminum plates full of dog food were lined up in a row. The floor was littered with shoes and stockings; in a dark corner near the bathroom door he caught sight of a pink bathrobe, draped over a chair where it had been thrown the night before, half on the floor, its sleeve hanging empty. His cold glance, full of disgust, turned from the room to the bed where his mother lay. As usual, she had not thought to cover herself at his entrance and was partly naked. Stretched out, her arms raised and her hands joined behind her head against the backboard quilted in worn, soiled blue silk, she stared at him in silence. Under her mass of hair, spread out in two great dark wings, her face appeared thin and pinched, almost triangular, devoured by eyes enlarged and darkened by shadow so as to appear almost deathlike. She was wearing a transparent, light green slip that barely covered the top of her thighs; and again, this made him think, not of the mature woman she was, but of an aged and withered little girl. Her scrawny upper chest showed like a rack of small, sharp bones; behind their veil, her flattened breasts were revealed by two dark, round stains on an absolutely flat surface. But her thighs, above all, roused both repugnance and pity in Marcello: skinny and meager, they were those of a child of twelve who
has not yet grown into her woman’s curves. His mother’s age showed in certain softened stretchmarks on her skin and in her coloring: a chilly, nervous white stained by mysterious bruises, some of them bluish, others livid.

“Blows,” he thought, “or bites, from Alberi.”

But beneath the knee her legs appeared perfect, with tiny feet and straight, narrow toes.

Marcello would have preferred not to let his mother see his displeasure, but once more he could not hold himself back. “How many times have I told you not to receive me like this, half-naked,” he said in annoyance, without looking at her.

She replied, impatiently but without rancor, “Oh, what an austere son I have,” pulling an edge of the cover up over her body. Her voice was hoarse, and this, too, was unpleasant to Marcello. He remembered hearing it, in his childhood, as sweet and pure as a song; the hoarseness was the effect of alcohol and abuse.

He said, after a moment, “So, today we go to the clinic.”

“Let’s go, then,” said his mother, pulling herself up and looking for something behind the headboard of the bed, “though I don’t feel well and our visit will mean absolutely nothing to him, poor thing.”

“He’s still your husband and my father,” said Marcello, taking his head in his hands and looking at the floor.

“Yes, he surely is,” she said. Now she had found the light switch and turned it on. On the bedside table the lamp, which seemed to Marcello to be enveloped in a woman’s blouse, gave out a faint illumination.

“But even so,” she continued, sitting up in bed and putting her feet on the floor, “I’ll tell you the truth, sometimes I wish he would die … especially since he wouldn’t even be aware of it. And I wouldn’t have to spend any more money on the clinic … I have so little. Just think,” she added, in sudden complaint, “just
think
, I may have to give up the car.”

“So, what’s wrong with that?”

“A lot,” she said, with childish resentment and impudence. “The way things are, with the car, I have an excuse to hire Alberi
and see him whenever I want. Afterwards, I won’t have the excuse any more.”

“Mamma, don’t talk to me about your lovers,” said Marcello calmly, digging the nails of one hand into the palm of the other.

“My lovers … he’s the only one I have. If you’re going to talk to me about that hen of a fiancée, surely I have the right to talk about him, poor dear, who’s so much nicer and more intelligent than she is.”

Strangely, these insults to his fiancée, spoken by his mother who could not abide Giulia, did not offend Marcello. “Yes, it’s true,” he thought, “it may even be that she resembles a hen — but I like her the way she is.” He said, in a gentler tone, “All right, will you get dressed? If we want to go to the clinic, it’s time to get moving.”

“Of course, right away.” Light, almost a shadow, she crossed the room on tiptoes, grabbed the pink robe from the chair in passing and, throwing it around her shoulders, opened the bathroom door and disappeared.

Immediately, as soon as his mother had gone, Marcello went to the window and threw it open. Outside the air was hot and still, but he still felt an acute relief, as if he were looking out, not onto the stifled garden, but onto an iceberg. At the same time, it almost seemed to him that he could feel the movement of the inside air in back of him, heavy with perfumes gone sour and the stink of animals, as it flowed gradually and slowly out through the window, dissolved into space — as if the air itself were vomiting forth from the jaws of the fouled house. For a long moment he stayed there, his eyes lowered to gaze at the thick foliage of the wisteria whose branches circled the window; then he turned back toward the room. Once again he was struck by its disorder and sloppy shabbiness; this time, however, he was inspired more by sorrow than disgust. He seemed suddenly to remember his mother as she had been in her youth, and experienced a vivid, heartfelt sensation of dismayed rebellion against the decadence and corruption that had changed her from the young girl she had been to the woman she was. Something incomprehensible, something irreparable was surely at the source of this transformation: not age or passion or
financial ruin or lack of intelligence, and not any other precise reason — something he felt without being able to explain it and that seemed to him to be all of a piece with that life; indeed, something that had been, at one time, her best quality and which had later become, by some mysterious transmutation, her fatal flaw. He withdrew from the window and approached the chest of drawers, on which, perched among the many knick-knacks, there was a photograph of his mother as a young woman. Looking at that delicate face, those innocent eyes, that sweet mouth, he asked himself with horror why she was not still as she had been. With this question, his disgust for every form of corruption and decadence resurfaced, rendered even more unbearable by a bitter feeling of remorse and filial sorrow: maybe it was his fault that his mother was reduced to such a state, maybe if he had loved her more or in a different way, she would not have fallen into such squalid and irremediable abandon. He noted that at this thought his eyes had filled with tears, so that the photo now appeared all cloudy, and he shook his head hard. At the same moment, the door to the bathroom opened and his mother, in her robe, appeared on the threshold. Immediately she threw up her arm to cover her eyes, exclaiming, “Shut it! Shut that window! How can you stand all this light?”

Marcello went over swiftly to lower the shutter; then he approached his mother and, taking her by the arm, made her sit next to him on the edge of the bed and asked her gently, “And you, mamma, how can you stand all this mess?”

She looked at him, unsure and embarassed. “I don’t know how it happens … I know everytime I use something I should put it back in its place … but somehow I never manage to remember.”

“Mamma,” said Marcello suddenly, “every age has its way of being decorous … mamma, why have you let yourself go this way?”

He was holding one of her hands; in the other hand she was holding a cane up in the air, from which a dress was hanging. For a moment he seemed to glimpse in those enormous and childishly miserable eyes a sentiment of almost self-aware sorrow; his mother’s lips, in fact, began to tremble slightly.

Then, suddenly, a spiteful expression drove out all other emotion and she exclaimed, “You don’t like anything I am or anything I do, I know … You can’t stand my dogs, my clothes, my habits … but I’m still young, my dear, and I want to enjoy life in my own way. Now leave me alone,” she concluded, withdrawing her hand abruptly, “or I’ll never get dressed.”

Marcello said nothing. His mother went to a corner of the bedroom, shrugged her robe off onto the floor, then opened the closet and pulled on a dress in front of the closet-door mirror. Clothed, the excessive thinness of her sharp hips, hollow shoulders, and nonexistent breasts revealed itself even more clearly. She looked at herself for a moment in the mirror, smoothing her hair with one hand; then, hopping a little, she slipped on two of the many shoes scattered all over the floor.

“Now let’s go,” she said, taking her purse from the bureau and heading toward the door.

“Aren’t you going to put a hat on?”

“Why? There’s no need to.”

They started down the stairs.

His mother said, “You haven’t talked to me about your wedding.”

“I’m getting married the day after tomorrow.”

“And where are you going for your honeymoon?”

“To Paris.”

“The traditional honeymoon trip,” said his mother. When they had reached the vestibule, she went to the kitchen door and warned the cook, “Matilde, don’t forget now … Let the dogs back in the house before dark.”

They went out into the garden. The car was there, black and opaque, parked in the driveway behind the trees.

His mother said, “So it’s decided, you don’t want to come stay here with me. Even though I don’t like your wife, I would have made the sacrifice … and then I have so much room.”

“No, mamma,” replied Marcello.

“You prefer to live with your mother-in-law,” she said lightly, “in that horrible apartment: four rooms and a kitchen.”

She bent down to pick up a blade of grass, but swayed and
would have fallen if Marcello, ever ready, had not supported her, taking her by the arm. Under his fingers he felt the meager, soft flesh of her arm, which seemed to move around the bone like a rag tied around a stick, and once again he felt compassion for her. They got into the car; Alberi held the door open, with his cap in his hand. Then Alberi climbed into his own place behind the wheel and drove the car out of the gate.

Marcello took advantage of the moment when Alberi got out again to shut the gate behind them to say to his mother, “I’d come stay with you gladly, if you fired Alberi and put a little bit of order in your life … and if you quit those injections.”

She looked at him askance with uncomprehending eyes. But a shiver ran from her pointed nose down to her little, withered mouth, where it turned into a faint, distraught smile.