The Conformist (2 page)

This was the opening move of the game they shared, and Roberto replied as if reciting a lesson, “No, no one.…” And after a moment: “Have you studied?”

He spoke in a whisper, another agreed-upon procedure. Whispering himself, Marcello replied, “No, today I didn’t study … I didn’t feel like it … I’ll tell the teacher I was feeling sick.”

“I wrote my Italian essay,” murmured Roberto, “and I did one of the arithmetic problems, too … I still have another one to do … why didn’t you study?”

It was the question Marcello had been waiting for. “I didn’t study,” he answered, “because I was hunting lizards.”

He hoped that Roberto would say, “Oh, really … sometimes I hunt lizards, too,” or something of the kind. But Roberto’s face expressed no complicity, not even curiosity. Marcello added with an effort, trying to hide his own embarassment: “I killed them all.”

Roberto asked cautiously, “How many?”

“Seven in all,” replied Marcello. And then, forcing himself to a kind of technical and informative boast: “They were on the tree branches and on the stones … I waited till they moved and then I got them with just one blow of this rush … one blow each.” He made a satisfied face and showed the rush to Roberto.

He saw the other boy look at him with curiosity, not unaccompanied by a kind of amazement: “Why did you kill them?’

“Just because.” He hesitated; he was about to say, “Because I enjoyed it,” but then, without even knowing why, he held back and answered, “Because they’re harmful … don’t you know that lizards are harmful?”

“No,” said Roberto, “I didn’t know that … harmful to what?”

“They eat the grapes,” said Marcello, “about a year ago in the countryside they ate all the grapes off the arbour.”

“But there aren’t any grapes here.”

“And then,” he continued, without bothering to take notice of this objection, “they’re bad … one, instead of running away when it saw me, came right towards me with its mouth wide open.… If I hadn’t stopped it in time, it would have jumped me.” He was quiet for a moment and then added, more confidentially, “Haven’t you ever killed any?”

Roberto shook his head and answered, “No, never.” Then, lowering his eyes, he said contritely, “They say that you shouldn’t hurt animals.”

“Says who?”

“My mother.”

“They say a lot of things,” said Marcello, ever less sure of himself, “but try it, stupid.… I promise you it’s fun.”

“No, I won’t try it.”

“And why not?”

“Because it’s wicked.”

So there was nothing to be done about it, thought Marcello with disappointment. He felt an impulse of anger toward his friend, who, without even realizing it, had nailed him, confirmed him in his abnormality. Still, he managed to control himself and proposed: “Look, tomorrow I’m going hunting for lizards again. If you come hunting with me, I’ll give you that pack of Neapolitan cards.”

He knew that this was a tempting offer for Roberto, who had expressed a desire to own those cards many times. And in fact Roberto, as if illumined by a sudden inspiration, replied, “I’ll come hunting on one condition: that we take them alive and then
shut them up in a little box and then set them free … and you give me the pack of cards.”

“No way,” said Marcello, “The very best part is hitting them with this rush.… I bet you can’t do it.”

His friend said nothing. Marcello went on, “Come on, then, we agree on this … but you have to look for a rush, too.”

“No,” said Roberto obstinately, “I won’t come.”

“Why not? Those cards are new.”

“No, it’s no use,” said Roberto, “I’m not killing any lizards, not even if.…” He hesitated, trying to come up with an object of proportionate value, “not even if you give me your pistol.”

Marcello understood that there was nothing to be done, and all of a sudden he surrendered to the anger that had been boiling for some minutes in his breast. “You don’t want to because you’re a coward,” he said, “because you’re afraid.”

“Afraid of what? You make me laugh.”

“You’re afraid,” repeated Marcello, enraged, “You’re a rabbit … a real rabbit.” Suddenly, he thrust a hand through the bars of the railing and grabbed his friend by the ear. Roberto had red ears that stuck out, and it was not the first time that Marcello had grabbed them; but never with so much anger and such a pointed desire to hurt him.

“Confess you’re a rabbit.”

“No, let go of me,” the other boy began to whine, twisting and turning, “Ow … ow!”

“Confess you’re a rabbit.”

“No … let me go.”

“Confess you’re a rabbit.”

In his hand Roberto’s ear was burning, hot and sweaty; tears sprang up in the blue eyes of his victim. He stammered, “Yes, all right, I’m a rabbit,” and Marcello let him go immediately. Roberto jumped down from the gate and as he was running away, he yelled: “I’m not a rabbit … when I said that I was thinking, ‘I’m not a rabbit!’ I tricked you.” He disappeared, and his voice, tearful and mocking, was lost in the distance, beyond the groves of the garden next door.

This exchange left Marcello with a profound sense of distress. Roberto had refused him not only solidarity, but the absolution he sought and which seemed to him to be linked to that solidarity. So he was thrust back into abnormality, but not without having first shown Roberto how much it mattered to him to step out of it, to let himself go — he was perfectly aware of this — and yield to falsehood and violence. Now, added to his shame and remorse at having killed the lizards were the shame and remorse for having lied to Roberto about the motives that had driven him to ask for his complicity and for having revealed himself by that act of anger, when he had grabbed him by the ear. The first sin was joined by a second; and there was no way he could undo either of them.

Every so often, among these bitter reflections, he revisited in memory the massacre of the lizards, almost hoping to find it purified of all remorse, a simple fact like any other. But right away he realized that he wished the lizards had never died; and at the same time, vividly and perhaps not completely unpleasantly — but for this very reason, it was all the more repugnant — he was struck again by that sense of excitement and physical turmoil he had experienced while he was hunting; and this was so strong that it even made him doubt that he would be able to resist the temptation to repeat the slaughter in the days to come. This thought terrified him: so he was not only abnormal, but, besides being unable to suppress his abnormality, he could not even control it. At that moment he was in his room, sitting at the table in front of an open book, waiting for dinner. He rose impetuously, went to the bed, and throwing himself onto his knees on the bedside rug and joining his hands as he usually did when he recited his prayers, said aloud in a tone that seemed to him sincere: “I swear before God that I will never again touch the flowers, or the plants, or the lizards.”

Nevertheless, the need for absolution that had driven him to seek Roberto’s complicity lived on, changed now into its opposite: a need for condemnation. While Roberto could have saved him from remorse by falling in with him, he lacked the authority to confirm a sound base for that remorse and instill order in the confusion
of Marcello’s mind with an irrevocable verdict. He was a boy like himself, acceptable as an accomplice but inadequate as a judge. But Roberto, in refusing his proposal, had invoked maternal authority to support his own repugnance. Marcello thought that perhaps he, too, could appeal to his mother. Only she could condemn or absolve him and, however it went, make some sort of sense of what he had done. In reaching this decision Marcello, who knew his mother, was reasoning in abstract, as if referring to an ideal mother — what she should have been, not what she was. In reality he doubted that there would be any good outcome of his appeal. But there it was; she was the only mother he had, and besides, his impulse to turn to her was stronger than any doubt.

Marcello waited for the moment when his mother, once he was in bed, would come into his room to tell him good-night. This was one of the few times he could manage to see her alone, just the two of them; most of the time, during meals or on the rare walks he took with his parents, his father was always present. Although Marcello did not, instinctively, have much faith in his mother, he loved her; and perhaps even more than loving her, he admired her in a fond and perplexed manner, the way you might admire an older sister of singular habits and capricious character. Marcello’s mother, who had married very young, had remained morally and even physically a girl; besides which, though she was not at all intimate with her son, to whom she paid very little attention due to her numerous social obligations, she had never separated her own life from his. Thus Marcello had grown up in a continual tumult of rushed entrances and exits, of dresses tried on and thrown down, of telephone conversations as interminable as they were frivolous, of tantrums with tailors and salespeople, of quarrels with the maid, of continuous mood swings for the slightest reasons. Marcello could go into his mother’s bedroom at any moment, the curious and ignored spectator of an intimacy in which he had no part. Sometimes his mother, as if rousing herself from inertia because of some sudden remorse, would decide to devote herself to her son and would trail him behind her to a seamstress or milliner. On these occasions, constrained to sit on a stool
for long hours while his mother tried on hats and dresses, Marcello almost missed her usual whirling indifference.

That evening he understood right away that his mother was more rushed than usual; and in fact, before Marcello even had time to overcome his shyness, she turned her back on him and crossed the dark bedroom to the door, which had been left ajar. But Marcello did not intend to wait one more day for the judgement he needed. Pulling himself up to sit up in the bed, he called out in a loud voice: “Mamma.”

He saw her turn round on the threshold, with an almost irritable gesture.

“What is it, Marcello?” she asked, approaching his bed again.

Now she was standing close to him, backlit, white and slender in her black, low-cut dress. Her pale, delicate face, crowned by black hair, was in shadow; still, Marcello could make out its hurried, irritable, and impatient expression. Nontheless, carried away by his impulse, he announced: “Mamma, I have to tell you something.”

“Yes, Marcello, but make it quick … mamma has to go … papà is waiting.” Meanwhile she was fumbling with both hands at her neck, fiddling with the clasp of her necklace.

Marcello wanted to disclose the slaughter of the lizards to his mother and ask her if he had done something wrong. But her hurry made him change his mind — or rather, modify the statement he had mentally prepared. Lizards suddenly seemed to him animals too small and insignificant to catch the attention of such a distracted person. Right on the spot, without knowing why, he invented a lie that enlarged his own crime. He hoped, by the enormity of his guilt, to startle to life a maternal sensitivity which, in some obscure way, he knew to be obtuse and inert. He said with a sureness that amazed him: “Mamma, I killed the cat.”

At that moment his mother finally managed to make the two parts of the clasp come together. Her hands joined on her neck, her chin tucked to her breast, she was looking down and every once in a while beating the heel of her shoe on the floor in impatience. “Oh, yes,” she said in an uncomprehending tone, as if
emptied of attention by the effort she was making. Marcello reaffirmed, feeling insecure: “I killed it with my slingshot.”

He saw his mother shake her head in frustration and then take her hands from her neck, holding in one of them the necklace she had been unable to close. “This damned clasp,” she said angrily. “Marcello … be a good boy … help me put on my necklace.” She was sitting on the bed at a slant, her shoulders turned toward her son, and added impatiently, “But be sure to click the clasp shut … otherwise it will come undone again.”

As she spoke, she displayed to him her thin shoulders, naked to the middle of her back, white as paper in the light spilling in through the door. Her long slim hands with their sharp, red nails held the necklace suspended on her delicate neck, shadowed by curled tendrils like down. Marcello thought to himself that once the necklace was clasped, she would listen to him with more patience; leaning forward, he took the two ends and joined them with a single click. But his mother rose to her feet immediately and said, bending over to brush his face with a kiss: “Thanks … now go to sleep … good-night.” Before Marcello could even recall her with a gesture or a shout, she had vanished.

The following day was hot and overcast. Marcello, after eating in silence between his two silent parents, slid furtively out of his chair and went out into the garden through the French windows. As usual, digestion provoked in him a sort of dark unease mixed with a swollen, reflective sensuality. Walking slowly, almost on tiptoes on the crunching gravel under the shade of the trees buzzing with insects, he went to the gate and peered out. The road he knew so well appeared before him, sloping gently downward, flanked by two rows of pepper trees of a feathery, almost milky green. The road was deserted at that hour and strangely dark because of the low black clouds that blocked out the sky. Directly opposite, he glimpsed other gates, other gardens, other villas similar to his own. After observing the road attentively, Marcello detached himself from the gate, pulled the slingshot out of his pocket, and bent down to the ground. Mixed in among the minute chunks of gravel were a few larger white stones. Marcello chose one the size
of a nut, inserted it in the leather pouch of the slingshot, and began to stroll along the wall that separated his garden from Roberto’s. His idea, or rather his feeling, was that he was in a state of war with Roberto and must guard the ivy that covered the garden wall with the greatest attention and fire at the least movement — that is, let loose the stone he was holding so tightly in his slingshot. It was a game in which he expressed both his rancor at Roberto, who had not wanted to be his accomplice in the slaughter of the lizards, and the cruel and warlike instinct that had driven him to the slaughter to begin with. Naturally, Marcello knew very well that Roberto, who was usually asleep at that hour, was not spying on him from behind the foliage of the ivy; nonetheless, even knowing this, he acted with serious purposefulness, as if he were sure, instead, that Roberto was there. The ivy, old and gigantic, climbed all the way to the tips of the spikes of the railing, and its overlapping leaves, huge, dark, and dusty, like lace frills on the tranquil breast of a woman, were still and limp in the heavy, windless air. A couple of times it seemed to him that a very slight shudder made the foliage tremble; at least he pretended to himself that he had seen this shudder and immediately, with intense satisfaction, let fly his stone into the thick of the ivy.