The Conformist (18 page)

“You know what the doctor says? That one of these days I could die from them.”

“Then why don’t you quit?”

“You tell me why I should quit.”

Alberi got back into the car, adjusting his sunglasses on his nose. Marcello’s mother leaned forward and put a hand on the chauffeur’s shoulder. It was a thin, transparent hand, with the skin stretched over the tendons and stained with red and bluish splotches, and scarlet nails so dark they were almost black. Marcello would have preferred not to look, but couldn’t help himself. He saw the hand move across the man’s shoulder to tickle his ear with a light caress.

His mother said, “Now we’re going to the clinic.”

“Very good, Signora,” said Alberi, without turning around.

She closed the dividing glass and threw herself back on the cushions while the car rolled gently forward. As she fell back on the seat, she looked askance at her son and said, to Marcello’s surprise, since he had not expected such intuition from her, “You’re angry because I caressed Alberi, aren’t you?”

As she said it, she looked at him with her childish, desperate, and slightly feverish smile. Marcello couldn’t manage to modify the expression of disgust on his face.

“I’m not angry,” he answered. “I would have preferred not to see it.”

She said, without looking at him, “You can’t understand what it means to a woman not to be young anymore … It’s worse than death.”

Marcello said nothing. Now the car was rolling silently under the pepper trees, whose feathery branches brushed against the window glass.

His mother added after a moment, “Sometimes I wish I were already old. I’d be a thin, clean old woman.” She smiled happily, already distracted by this fantasy. “I’d be like a dried flower pressed between the pages of a book.” She put a hand on Marcello’s arm and asked, “Wouldn’t you prefer to have an old woman like that for a mother, well-seasoned, well-preserved, as if she were in mothballs?”

Marcello stared at her and answered in embarrassment, “Someday you’ll be like that.”

She became serious and said, looking up at him under her lashes and smiling miserably, “Do you really believe that? I don’t. I’m convinced that one of these mornings you’ll find me dead in that room you detest so much.”

“Why, mamma?” asked Marcello; but he realized that his mother was speaking seriously and that she might even be right. “You’re young and you have to live.”

“That doesn’t mean I won’t die soon — I know, they read it to me in my horoscope.” Suddenly she stuck her hand out in front of his eyes and added, without any transition, “Do you like this ring?”

It was a big ring with an elaborately worked bezel and a hard stone of a milky color.

“Yes,” said Marcello, barely glancing at it, “it’s pretty.”

“You know,” said his mother, changing the subject again, “sometimes I think you got everything from your father. When he could still reason, he didn’t like anything, either … Beautiful things didn’t mean a thing to him. All he thought about was politics, like you.”

This time, he wasn’t sure why, Marcello couldn’t repress his vivid irritation.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that there’s nothing in common between my father and me. I am a perfectly reasonable, normal person … He, on the other hand, even before he was in the clinic — as far as I recall, and you’ve always confirmed it — was always … how shall I put it? A little overexcitable.”

“Yes, but you do share something in common. Neither of you enjoy life and you don’t want anyone else to enjoy it, either …” She looked out the window a moment and then added suddenly, “I’m not coming to your wedding. You shouldn’t feel offended, you know I don’t go anywhere. But since you’re my son, after all, I think I should give you a present … what would you like?”

“Nothing, mamma,” answered Marcello indifferently.

“What a shame,” said his mother coyly. “If I’d known you didn’t want anything, I wouldn’t have spent the money. But now I’ve already bought it … take it.” She rummaged around in her purse and dragged out a small white box tied with a rubberband. “It’s a cigarette case … I’ve noticed you put the pack in your pocket.”

She opened the box and drew out a flat, heavily lined silver case and clicked it open, offering it to her son. It was filled with Oriental cigarettes and she took the opportunity to take one of them and ask Marcello to light it.

A little embarrassed, he looked at the open cigarette case on his mother’s knees without touching it and said, “It’s very beautiful, I don’t know how to thank you, mamma … it may be too beautiful for me.”

“
Uffa
,” she said, “how boring you are.”

She closed the case and stuck it with a graceful, willful gesture into Marcello’s jacket pocket. The car turned a corner awkwardly, and she fell onto him, taking advantage of the moment to put both her hands on his shoulders and say, pulling back a little to look at him, “Give me a kiss for the present, will you?”

Marcello leaned over and brushed his lips against his mother’s cheek.

She threw herself back on her seat and said with a sigh,
bringing one hand to her breast, “What heat … When you were little, I wouldn’t have had to ask you for that kiss. You were such an affectionate child.”

“Mamma,” said Marcello suddenly, “do you remember the winter babbo got sick?”

“Do I,” said his mother easily. “It was a terrible winter … He wanted to leave me and take you away with him. He was already crazy … Luckily, I say luckily for you, he went mad altogether and then they could see I was right to want to keep you with me. Why?”

“Well, mamma,” said Marcello, careful to avoid looking at her, “that winter my dream was not to live with you, you and babbo, anymore, and to be sent off to a boarding school. It didn’t keep me from loving you, but … you see, when you say I’ve changed since then, you’re saying something wrong. I was the same way then as I am now, and then as now I couldn’t stand all the chaos and disorder … that’s all.”

He had spoken dryly and almost harshly, but regretted it almost immediately when he saw the hurt expression that darkened his mother’s face. All the same, he didn’t want to say anything that would sound like a retraction; he had told the truth, and unfortunately, could tell nothing but the truth. But at the same time he felt the oppression of his usual melancholy return stronger than ever, reawakened by his unpleasant awareness of having failed in filial pity.

His mother said, in a resigned tone, “Maybe you’re right.” The car came to a halt.

They got out and walked toward the clinic gate. The street was in a peaceful neighborhood, on the edges of an ancient ducal villa. It was a short street: on one side five or six small, old palazzi were lined up in a row, partially hidden by the trees; on the other ran the railing of the clinic grounds. At the end, the old gray wall and thick vegetation of the ducal park cut off any further vista.

Marcello had visited his father at least once a month for many years; all the same, he was not yet accustomed to these visits and felt, every time, a sense of dismay mixed with dejection. It was almost the same sensation, but even stronger, than the one inspired
in him by his visits to his mother, in the villa where he had spent his childhood and adolescence: his mother’s disorder and corruption seemed still reparable, but there were no remedies for his father’s madness, which seemed to suggest a more general and entirely irremediable disorder and decay. He felt it this time, too, as he entered the clinic at his mother’s side: a hateful uneasiness that oppressed his heart and made his legs fold at the knee. He knew he had turned pale and for a moment, just as he was glimpsing the black lances of the clinic’s railing, he experienced a hysterical desire to renounce the visit and go off on some excuse. His mother, who was unaware of his turmoil, stopped in front of a small black gate, pressed the porcelain button of a doorbell, and said, “Do you know what his latest fixation is?”

“What?”

“He thinks he’s one of Mussolini’s ministers … it started up about a month ago … maybe because they let him read the papers.”

Marcello frowned but said nothing. The gate opened and a young attendant in a white shirt appeared: heavy, tall, blond, with a shaved head and a white, rather puffy face.

“Hello, Franz,” said his mother graciously. “How are things going?”

“Today we’re feeling better than yesterday,” said the attendant, with his own particular, harsh German accent. “Yesterday we were doing very badly.”

“Very badly?”

“We had to wear the straight-jacket,” explained the attendant, continuing to make use of the plural, like a simpering governess when she speaks of children.

“The straight-jacket … what a horror.”

Meanwhile they had entered and were walking along the narrow path between the garden wall and the clinic wall.

“The straight-jacket, you should see it … it’s not really a shirt but more like two sleeves that hold his arms still … before I saw it, I thought it was a real, true nightshirt like the ones with the fret at the bottom … it’s so sad to see him tied up that way with his arms so tight to his sides.” His mother continued to talk lightly, almost gaily.
They circled round the clinic and emerged in a clearing in front of the main facade. The clinic, a white, three-story villa, looked like a normal house except for the bars that obscured the windows.

Hurriedly climbing the steps that led to the porch, the attendant said, “The professor is waiting for you, Signora Clerici.” He preceded the two visitors into a bare, dark entranceway, and went to knock on a closed door above which, on an enamelled nameplate, one could read: Administration.

The door opened right away and the director of the clinic, Professor Ermini, exploded out of it, precipitating himself, with all the impetuousness of his massive and towering bulk, toward the visitors.

“Signora, my respects … Dottor Clerici, good-day.” His booming voice resounded like a bronze gong in the frozen silence of the clinic, between those bare walls. Marcello’s mother held out a hand which the professor, bending his huge body wrapped in its white coat with visible effort, tried gallantly to kiss; Marcello, on the contrary, limited himself to a sober greeting. The professor’s face very strongly resembled a barn owl’s: big round eyes, great curved nose like a beak, red moustache drooping over the wide, clamorous mouth. But its expression was unlike the melancholy nightbird’s; far from it, it was jovial — even if the joviality was studied and shot through with veins of cold cunning. He preceeded Marcello and his mother up the stairs.

When they were halfway up the flight, a metal object hurled with great force from the landing sailed, ricocheting, down the stairs. At the same time, a piercingly sharp scream rang out, followed by scornful laughter. The professor bent down to pick up the object, an aluminum plate.

“Donegalli,” he said, turning to the two visitors, “no fear … we’re just dealing with an old woman who’s usually as peaceful as she can be, except that now and then she decides to throw whatever she finds at hand … hah hah … she’d be a
bocce
champion, if we’d let her.” He continued to chat as they went down a long corridor, between two rows of closed doors. “And how is it, Signora, that you’re still in Rome? I thought you’d already be in the mountains or at the seaside.”

“I’m leaving in a month,” said his mother. “But I don’t know where I’ll go … I’d like to avoid Venice for once.”

“A word of advice, Signora,” said the professor, turning the corner of the corridor, “go to Ischia. I was there the other day on an outing … it’s a marvel. We went into a certain Carminiello’s restaurant and ate a fish soup that was simply a poem.” The professor turned halfway and made a vulgar but expressive gesture with two fingers at the corner of his mouth. “A poem, I tell you:
tocchi
[morsels] of fish this big … and then, a little of everything —
polpetto, scorfanello, palombetto, ostricuccia tanto buona, totanuccio
, and all with a
sughillo
alla marinara … garlic, oil, tomato, peperoncino … Signora, I say no more.”

Having adopted a false, jocular Neapolitan accent to describe the fish soup, the professor now fell back into his native Roman dialect, adding, “Do you know what I said to my wife? What do you bet we get a little cottage in Ischia before the year’s out?”

Marcello’s mother said, “I prefer Capri.”

“But that’s a place for intelligentsia and homosexuals,” said the professor, with a kind of distracted brutality. At that moment a heart-stopping scream reached them from one of the cells. The professor approached the door, slid open the spy-hole, looked in for a minute, closed the spy-hole again, and then, turning around, concluded, “Ischia, dear woman … Ischia’s the place: fish soup, sea, sun, life in the open air … nothing beats Ischia.”

The attendant Franz, who had preceded them by a few paces, was waiting for them now, standing motionless by one of the doors, his massive figure outlined in the pale light from the window at the end of the hall.

“Has he taken the medicine?” the professor asked in a low voice.

The attendant nodded in the affirmative. The professor opened the door and entered, followed by Marcello and his mother.

It was a little bare room, with a bed attached to the wall and a small table of white wood in front of the window, which was barred with the usual grating. With a thrill of revulsion, Marcello saw — seated at the table, his back to the door, intent on writing — his father. A fury of white hair stuck out from his head, above a
slender neck lost in the wide collar of a stiff, striped jacket. He was sitting a little crookedly, his feet thrust into enormous felt slippers, his elbows and knees turned out, his head leaning to one side. He was just like a puppet with broken strings, thought Marcello. He did not turn around at the entrance of his three visitors; on the contrary, he seemed to redouble his zealous attention to writing.

The professor went to put himself between the window and the table and said, with false joviality, “Major, how’s it going today, eh? How’s it going?”

The madman did not answer but limited himself to raising a hand as if to say, “One moment, don’t you see that I’m busy?”