The Conformist (19 page)

The professor launched a glance of complicity at Marcello’s mother and said, “Still those memoranda, eh, Major? But won’t they be too long? Il Duce doesn’t have time to read things that are too long … he’s always brief and concise … brevity, concision, Major.”

The madman repeated his gesture of acknowlegement, raising and agitating his bony hand; then, with the strange fury particular to him, he flung a piece of paper through the air over his inclined head. It fell down in the middle of the room and Marcello leaned over to pick it up. It contained only a few incomprehensible words written in a calligraphy full of flourishes and underlines. Maybe they weren’t even words. While he was examining the piece of paper, the madman began hurling away others, always with the same, furiously busy gesture. The pieces of paper flew over his white head and scattered around the room. Gradually, as he continued to launch the paper, the madman’s gestures became ever more violent until the whole room was now filled with pieces of graph paper.

Marcello’s mother said, “Poor dear … he always did love writing.”

The professor leaned a little toward the madman. “Major, here are your wife and your son. Don’t you want to see them?”

At last, this time, the madman spoke, in a low, stumbling, hurried, hostile voice, just like someone who has been disturbed while doing an important job. “They should come by again tomorrow … that is, if they have no concrete proposals to make … 
don’t you see that I have a waiting room full of people I can’t find time to see?”

“He thinks he’s a minister,” Marcello’s mother whispered.

“Minister of Foreign Affairs,” confirmed the professor.

“The Hungarian affair,” said the madman suddenly in a swift, low, labored voice, continuing to write, “the Hungarian affair … that government chief in Prague … what are they doing in London? And why don’t the French understand? Why don’t they understand? Why? Why? Why?”

Each “why” was uttered by the madman in an ever louder voice, until, at the final “why,” offered up almost in a shout, the madman leapt from the chair and turned to face his visitors. Marcello raised his eyes and looked at him. Beneath his bristling white hair, the thin, ruined face, dark and deeply scored by vertical wrinkles, appeared to assume an expression of contrite and solemn gravity, an expression almost anguished from the effort to adapt to an imaginary occasion calling for both rhetoric and ceremony. He held one of his papers at eye level, and without further comment, in a strange and breathless haste, began to read it:

“Duce, chief of heroes, king of the earth and of the sea and of the sky, prince, pope, emperor, commander, and soldier” — here the madman made a gesture of impatience, tempered however by a certain amount of formality, as if to signify, “etcetera, etcetera” — “Duce, in this place that” — the madman made a new gesture, as if to say, “I’ll skip over this, these things are superfluous,” then continued, “In this place I have written my memoranda, which I beg you to read from the first” — the madman stopped and stared at his visitors — “to the last line. Here are the memoranda.”

After this debut, the madman threw the piece of paper into the air, turned to the desk, took up another one, and began to read the memoranda. But this time Marcello could not grasp a single word. The madman read in a clear, very loud voice, it’s true, but a singular haste made him slide one word into another, as if the entire discourse were no more than one continuous word of a length never seen before. The words, thought Marcello, must melt on his tongue before he could even pronounce them; it was almost as if
the devouring fire of madness had dissolved their shapes like wax, amalgamating them into one single soft, elusive, indistinct oratorical material. Gradually, as he read, the words seemed to penetrate more deeply one into the other, shortening and shrinking, and the madman himself began to seem overwhelmed by the verbal avalanche. With growing urgency he began to throw away the papers after reading just the first lines; then, all of a sudden, he ceased to read entirely, leapt with surprising agility onto the bed, and there, withdrawing into a corner and standing upright against the wall, began — or so it appeared — to deliver a speech.

Marcello gathered that he was addressing a crowd more by his gestures than by his words, which were as disconnected and senseless as ever. Exactly like an orator standing on an imaginary balcony, the madman would raise both arms to the ceiling, lean down to thrust out a hand as if to imply some subtlety, threaten them with his closed fist, lift both open palms to the level of his face. At a certain point, the imaginary crowd to whom the madman was speaking must certainly have broken out into applause, since he, with the characteristic gesture of the downturned palm, seemed to be calling for silence. But clearly the applause not only did not cease, but grew in intensity, since the madman, after requesting silence once more with his supplicatory gesture, jumped down from the bed, ran to the professor, grabbed him by the sleeve, and asked, in a tearful voice, “Will you make them shut up … what does applause matter to me … a declaration of war … how can you make a declaration of war, if they keep you from speaking by clapping?”

“We’ll make the declaration of war tomorrow, Major,” said the professor, looking down at the madman from his towering height.

“Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” yelled the madman, giving way to an instantaneous rage in which anger and desperation were all mixed up, “always tomorrow … the declaration of war has to be made right away.”

“And why is that, Major? What’s it matter to us? In this heat? Those poor soldiers — do you want them to make war in this heat?” The professor shrugged his shoulders slyly.

The madman stared at him, perplexed; evidently the objection disconcerted him. Then he shouted, “The soldiers will eat ice cream! We eat ice cream in the summer, don’t we?”

“Yes,” said the professor, “we eat ice cream in the summer.”

“Right, then,” said the madman with a triumphant air, “ice cream, lots of ice cream, ice cream for everyone.”

Muttering to himself, he went over to the table and, standing up, grabbed the pencil, wrote a few hurried words on one last piece of paper, then came back to hand it to the doctor.

“Here is the declaration of war. I can’t deal with it anymore … you take it to whoever will … these bells, oh, oh, these bells!” He gave the paper to the doctor and went over to huddle on the floor in the corner near the bed like a terrified beast, squeezing his head between his hands and repeating in anguish, “These bells … can’t these bells stop a minute?”

The doctor glanced at the piece of paper and then handed it to Marcello. At the top of the page was written: “Slaughter and gloom,” and underneath, “The war is declared,” all in the usual large handwriting full of flourishes. The doctor said, “Slaughter and gloom is his motto. You’ll find it written on all those papers. He’s fixated on those two words.”

“The bells,” moaned the madman.

“But does he really hear them?” asked Marcello’s mother, perplexed.

“Probably so. They’re aural hallucinations, like the applause earlier. Mentally ill people can hear different kinds of sounds … even voices saying words … or animal cries, or engine noises, a motorcycle, for example.”

“The bells!” screamed the madman in a terrible voice.

Marcello’s mother backed up toward the door, murmuring, “But it must be so frightening. Poor dear, who knows how much he suffers … if I find myself under a belltower when the bells are ringing, I feel like I’m going mad.”

“Does he suffer?” asked Marcello.

“Wouldn’t you suffer if for hours and hours you heard huge bronze bells ringing as loud as they could right next to your ear?”
The professor turned toward the sick man and added, “Now we’re going to make the bells stop ringing … we’re going to send the bellringer off to sleep. We’ll give you something to drink and you won’t hear them anymore.”

He nodded to the attendant, who left immediately; then, turning to Marcello, he said, “These are fairly serious sorts of anguish.… The afflicted person passes from a frenetic euphoria to a profound depression. A little while ago when he was reading, he was exalted, now he’s depressed. Would you like to say something to him?”

Marcello stared at his father, who continued to moan piteously, his head between his hands, and said in a cold voice, “No, I have nothing to say to him, and besides, what would be the use? He wouldn’t understand me anyway.”

“Sometimes they understand,” said the professor. “They understand more than you think; they recognize people, they trick even us doctors … eh, eh, it’s not so simple.”

Marcello’s mother approached her husband and said affably, “Antonio, do you recognize me? This is Marcello, your son. He’s getting married the day after tomorrow … do you understand? He’s getting married.”

The madman looked up at his wife almost hopefully, as a wounded dog looks at his master, who is leaning over him and asking him in human words what’s wrong.

The doctor turned toward Marcello, exclaiming, “Wedding, wedding … Dear dottore, I knew nothing about this. My most heartfelt congratulations … very sincere best wishes.”

“Thank you,” said Marcello dryly.

His mother said ingenuously as she headed for the door, “Poor dear, he doesn’t understand. If he understood, he’d be unhappy, the same way I’m unhappy.”

“Please, mamma,” said Marcello briefly.

“It doesn’t matter, your wife has to please you and nobody else,” answered his mother conciliatorily. Then she turned toward the madman and said, “Good-bye, Antonio.”

“The bells,” whimpered the madman.

They went out into the hallway and crossed paths with Franz, who was coming in with a glass of sedative in his hand.

The professor closed the door and said, “It’s curious, dottore, how the insane keep themselves informed and up-to-date, how sensitive they are to everything that touches the collective. Now there’s Fascism, there’s Il Duce, and so you’ll find a lot of them that fixate, like your father, on Fascism and Il Duce. During the war you couldn’t even count the insane that thought they were generals and wanted to stand in for Cadorna or Diaz … and more recently, when Nobile flew to the North Pole, I had at least three patients who knew for certain where the famous red tent could be found, and they had invented a special gadget to rescue the survivors. Crazy people are always up-to-date. Actually, despite their madness, they don’t stop participating in public life, and it’s precisely their madness they use to participate in it — good, upstanding, crazy citizens that they are, of course.”

The doctor laughed coldly, very much satisfied by his own humor. Then he turned to Marcello’s mother (but with the clear intention of flattering Marcello) and said, “But as far as Il Duce is concerned, we’re all as crazy as your husband, isn’t that right, Signora? All crazy as loons, we should be treated with the cold shower and the straightjacket … All Italy is just one big insane asylum, eh, eh, eh.”

“As far as that goes, my son is crazy for sure,” said his mother, innocently seconding the doctor’s adulation. “In fact, on our way here I said to Marcello that there were points of similarity between him and his father.”

Marcello slowed his pace so as not to hear them. He saw them walk toward the end of the hall and then turn and disappear, still chatting. He stopped. He was still holding the scrap of paper on which his father had written his declaration of war. He hesitated, then pulled his wallet out of his pocket and put the piece of paper in it. Then he hurried forward and reached the doctor and his mother on the ground floor.

“Well … good-bye, Professor,” said his mother, “but that poor dear … is there really no way to cure him?”

“For now science can do nothing,” replied the doctor without any solemnity, as if repeating a dull, mechanical formula.

“Good-bye, Professor,” said Marcello.

“Good-bye, dottore, and again — sincere and hearfelt congratulations.”

They walked down the graveled pathway, came out onto the street, and headed for the car. Alberi was there, next to the open door with his cap in his hand. They got in without saying anything and the car started up.

Marcello was silent for a moment and then said, “Mamma, I’d like to ask you a question. I think I can speak to you frankly, can’t I?”

“What question?” asked his mother distractedly, looking into the mirror of her compact and touching up her face.

“The man I call father, the man we just visited — is he really my father?”

His mother started to laugh. “Really, sometimes you are
so
strange. Why shouldn’t he be your father?”

“Mamma, at that time you already had,” Marcello hesitated and then finished, “lovers. Could it be … ?”

“Oh, it couldn’t be anything, absolutely nothing,” said his mother, with calm cynicism. “The first time I decided to cheat on your father, you were already two years old. The really curious thing is,” she added, “that it was with just exactly this idea, that you were someone else’s son, that your father’s madness began … He was obsessed with the idea that you weren’t his son. And you know what he did one day? He took a photograph, of me and of you when you were a baby.…”

“And he poked holes in both our eyes,” finished Marcello.

“Oh, you already knew,” said his mother, a little surprised. “Well, then, that was the real beginning of his madness. He was obsessed by the idea that you were the son of someone I was seeing back then, from time to time … useless to tell him it was his own imagination … You’re his son, all right, it’s enough to look at you.”

“Actually, I resemble you more than him,” Marcello couldn’t help saying.

“Both of us,” said his mother. She put the compact back in her purse and added, “I already told you: if nothing else, you both have this fixation on politics — he as a madman and you, thank God, as a sane person.…”

Marcello said nothing and turned his face to the window. The idea of resembling his father inspired intense disgust in him. Familiar relationships based on flesh and blood had always repulsed him. But the resemblance his mother was alluding to not only repulsed, but obscurely frightened him. What link was there between his father’s madness and his own most secret being? He recalled the phrase he had read on the scrap of paper, “Slaughter and gloom,” and shivered painfully. As far as gloom went, he wore it like a second skin, more sensitive than his real skin; and as to slaughter.…