The Conformist (21 page)

He was about to look out into the corridor when the door opened and Giulia came in. She was only wearing a skirt and
blouse; she had taken off her jacket and was carrying it over her arm. Her ample breasts thrust exuberantly against the white linen of the blouse, informing it with the faint rose color of her flesh; her face was lit up with happy satisfaction. Only her eyes, larger, more languid and melting than usual, revealed both trepidation and desire, an almost frightened excitement. Marcello noticed all this with satisfaction: Giulia was truly a bride, on the verge of giving herself up for the first time. She turned a little awkwardly (she always moved awkwardly, he thought, but hers was a lovable clumsiness, as if she were a healthy, innocent animal) to shut the door and close the curtain; then, standing in front of him, she started to hang up her jacket on one of the hooks of the luggage rack. But the train was going very fast; it switched tracks abruptly, and the whole car seemed to tilt. Giulia fell on top of him. She righted herself mischievously, by sitting down on his knees and throwing her arms around his neck. Marcello felt the whole weight of her body on his thin knees and put an arm mechanically around her waist.

She said softly, “Do you love me?” and lowered her face, searching his mouth with her own.

They kissed for a long time, as the train continued to roll forward with complicit speed, so that at every jolt their teeth bumped together and Giulia’s nose seemed to want to penetrate his face. At last they separated and Giulia, without getting off of his knees, conscientiously took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped his mouth, saying, “You have at least a ton of lipstick on your lips.”

Marcello, whose knees were growing numb, took advantage of another jolt of the train to slide her heavy body off onto the seat.

“You bad boy, don’t you want me?” she said.

“They haven’t come in to make up the bunks yet,” he said, a little embarrassed.

“Just think,” she said without transition, “this is the first time I’ve ever been in a sleeping car.”

Marcello couldn’t help smiling at the innocence in her voice and asked, “Do you like it?”

“Yes, I like it a lot.” She looked around again. “When are they coming to make up the beds?”

“Soon.”

They fell silent. Marcello looked at his wife and realized that she was looking back at him with a new expression, shy and apprehensive, which overlay but did not erase the happy radiance of a moment before. She saw that he was staring at her and smiled at him apologetically; without saying a word, she took one of his hands in hers and squeezed it. Then two tears sprang up in her tender, liquid eyes and slid down her cheeks, followed by two more. Giulia wept even as she kept gazing at him and trying pitifully to smile between the tears. Finally she lowered her head with a sudden impulse and began to kiss his hand furiously. Marcello felt disoriented by these tears; Giulia was generally gay and unsentimental, and he had never seen her cry before.

However, she left him no time for supposition, since she stood up and said hurriedly, “Excuse me for crying … but I was thinking how much better you are than me and how unworthy I am of you.”

“Now you’re talking like your mother,” said Marcello with a smile.

He watched her blow her nose and then answer calmly, “No, mamma says these things without knowing why. But I have a real reason.”

“What reason?”

She looked at him for a long moment and then explained, “I have to tell you something and after I do maybe you won’t love me anymore … but I have to tell you.”

“What?”

She replied slowly, gazing at him attentively, as if she wanted to discover the expression of contempt she feared at the first moment of its appearance, “I’m not what you think I am.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m not … I mean, I’m not a virgin.”

Marcello looked at her and suddenly understood that the normal character he had until now attributed to his wife did not, in reality, exist. He did not know what was hidden beneath that initial confession, but he now knew for certain that Giulia was
not, according to her own statement, what he had believed her to be. He was struck by a sense of satiety already at the thought of what he was about to hear and felt a desire, almost, to refuse the confidence. But above all, he needed to reassure her; and this would be easy, since in truth he cared nothing at all about her famous virginity, whether or not it was intact. He replied in an affectionate tone, “Don’t worry about it … I married you because I love you, not because you were a virgin.”

Giulia said, shaking her head, “I knew it, I knew you had a modern mentality … that it wouldn’t be that important to you … but I had to tell you all the same.”

“A modern mentality,” Marcello couldn’t help thinking, almost amused. The phrase was so like Giulia; it made up for her missing virginity. It was an innocent phrase, though of an innocence different than what he had supposed. He said, taking her hand, “Come on, let’s not think about it anymore.” And he smiled at her.

Giulia smiled back. But as she smiled, tears filled her eyes again and ran down her cheeks.

Marcello protested: “Come on, what’s wrong now? When I told you it doesn’t matter?”

Giulia made a strange gesture. She threw her arms around his neck but hid her face against his chest, bending her head so that Marcello could not see it.

“I have to tell you everything.”

“Everything what?”

“Everything that happened to me.”

“But it doesn’t matter.”

“I beg of you … maybe it’s a weakness … but if I don’t tell you, I’ll feel like I’m hiding something.”

“But, why?” asked Marcello, caressing her hair. “So you’ve had a lover … someone you thought you loved … or someone you really loved … why should I know about it?”

“No, I didn’t love him,” she replied immediately, almost spitefully, “and I never thought I loved him. We were lovers, you could say, right up to the day you proposed to me. But he wasn’t young
like you … he was an old man of sixty, disgusting, harsh, demanding, bad … a family friend, you know him.”

“Who is he?”

“The lawyer Fenizio,” she said briefly.

Marcello started. “But he was one of the witnesses.…”

“Right, he insisted. I didn’t want him there, but I couldn’t refuse. It was already a lot that he let me get married.…”

Marcello recalled that he had never liked the lawyer, Fenizio, whom he had often encountered at Giulia’s house: a little, bald, blondish man with gold glasses, a sharp nose that wrinkled when he laughed, a mouth without lips. A very calm and cold man, he remembered, but even in that calm coldness, aggressive and petulant in his own unpleasant way. And strong: one day when it was hot he had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, revealing large white arms swollen with muscles.

“But what did you see in him?” he couldn’t help exclaiming.

“He saw something in me … and very early … I wasn’t just his lover for a month or a year, it was six years.”

Marcello made a rapid mental calculation: Giulia was twenty-one now, or anyway, just a little over that. Stunned, he repeated, “Six years.”

“Yes, six years. I was fifteen when … do you understand what I’m saying?”

Giulia, he observed, although speaking of things that to all appearances still grieved her, talked in her usual drawling, good-natured tone of voice as if relaying the most irrelevant gossip. “You might say he began abusing me the same day poor papà died … if it wasn’t that same day, at least it was that same week. Well, actually, I can tell you the exact date: just eight days after my father’s funeral … my father, mind you, whose intimate and trusted friend he was.…”

She fell silent for a moment, as if to underline by her silence the impiety of the man; then she went on: “Mamma did nothing but cry, and naturally, she was in church a lot … He came by one evening when I was alone in the house; mamma had gone out and the maid was in the kitchen. I was in my bedroom sitting at
my desk, concentrating on writing my homework for school … I was in the fifth form at the ginnasio and was getting ready to earn my diploma … He came in on tiptoes, walked up in back of me, bent over my homework, and asked me what I was doing. I told him, without turning around — I wasn’t suspicious at all, first of all because I was as innocent, and you can believe this, as a two-year-old baby, and then because he was almost like a relative to me … I called him “uncle,” just imagine … so I told him that I was working on my Latin essay and he — do you know what he did? He grabbed me by the hair, with just one hand, but hard … he did that often, as a joke, because I had magnificent hair, long and wavy, and he used to say that it tempted his fingers. Well, feeling him pull on it, I thought it was a joke this time, too, and I said to him, ‘Stop it, you’re hurting me,’ but instead of letting me go, he forced me to get up and, holding me at arm’s length, he guided me toward the bed, which was where it is now, in the corner near the door. Just think, I was so innocent I still didn’t understand, and I said to him, I remember, ‘Let me go … I have to do my homework.” Right then he let go of my hair … but no, I can’t tell it to you.…”

Marcello was about to ask her to go on, thinking that she was ashamed; but Giulia, who had only stopped to increase the effect of her story, continued: “Although I wasn’t yet fifteen, I was already very developed, like a woman … well, I didn’t want to tell you because just to talk about it still hurts me … He let go of my hair and grabbed my breasts, so hard that I couldn’t even scream and I almost passed out … maybe I really did faint … then, after he grabbed me, I don’t know what happened. I was stretched out on the bed and he was on top of me and I understood everything and all my strength had left me and I was like an object in his hands, passive, lifeless, without any will of my own. So he had his way with me.… Later I cried, and then, to console me, he told me he loved me, that he was crazy about me, you know, the usual things. But he also told me, in case I wasn’t convinced, that I shouldn’t talk about it to my mother unless I wanted to ruin him. It seems that papà, at the end, made some business mistakes and
that now our living conditions depended completely on him, Fenizio … He came back other times after that day, but not with any consistency, always when I didn’t expect him. He would come into my bedroom on tiptoe, lean over me, and ask me in a severe voice, ‘Have you done your homework? No? Then come do it with me.…’ and then usually he would grab me by the hair and lead me at arm’s length to the bed. I’m telling you, he had a real thing about taking me by the hair.” She laughed almost affectionately at this memory, this habit of her old lover’s, as one might laugh at some characteristic and lovable trait. “We went on that way for almost a year. He kept swearing that he loved me and that if he didn’t have a wife and children he’d marry me … and I’m not saying he wasn’t sincere … but if he really loved me the way he said he did, there was only one way to show it: leave me alone. After a year, I’d had enough … I was desperate, I made an attempt to free myself. I told him I didn’t love him and that I would never love him, that I couldn’t keep going on this way, that I couldn’t manage to do anything anymore, that I was struggling, that I hadn’t gotten my diploma, and that, if he didn’t leave me alone, I would have to give up my studies … And then he — do you know what he did? He went and told mamma that he understood my temperament and was convinced I wasn’t cut out for studying and that since I was sixteen already, it would be better for me to go to work. Right off he offered me the position of secretary in his office … understand? Naturally, I resisted as hard as I could, but mamma, poor thing, told me I was an ingrate, that he had done and continued to do so much for us, that I shouldn’t let a chance like that slip out of my fingers, and finally, I was forced to accept … Once I was in the studio with him all day long, as you can imagine, there was no way to quit. So I started up again and finally I just got into the habit of him and stopped rebelling, you know how it is. I thought there was no more hope for me, I had become a fatalist. But a year ago, when you told me you loved me, I went straight to him and told him that this time it was over for good. But he’s vile, he’s a coward; he protested, threatening to go and tell you everything … do you know what I did then? I grabbed a sharp
paperknife that he had on the desk and I put the point to his throat and I said, ‘If you do, I’ll kill you,’ and then I said, ‘He’ll find out about our relationship … that’s only right … but I’ll be the one to tell him, not you … from today on, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t even exist. And if you just try to put yourself between him and me, I’ll kill you, I may go to jail but I’ll kill you,’ and I said it in a certain tone so that he knew I meant it. And from then on he didn’t breathe a word, except to avenge himself by writing that anonymous letter where he talked about your father.…”

“Ah, that was him,” Marcello couldn’t help exclaiming.

“Of course. I recognized the paper and the typewriter right away.”

She was quiet for a moment; then, immediately anxious, she took Marcello’s hand and added, “Now I’ve told you everything and I think I feel better … but maybe I shouldn’t have told you, maybe now you won’t be able to stand me, maybe you’ll hate me.”

Marcello did not answer her; he remained silent for a long time. Giulia’s story had roused neither hatred in him toward the man who had abused her, nor pity for her whom he had abused. The apathetic and reasonable way in which she had told it, even as she was expressing disgust and contempt, excluded feelings as clear as anger and pity. As if by contagion, he even felt inclined to a viewpoint much like hers, a mixture of indulgence and resignation. What he did feel was an overwhelmingly physical sense of astonishment, disconnected from any judgement whatsoever, as if he had fallen into an unforeseen pit. And on the rebound, his habitual melancholy deepened, confronted with this unexpected confirmation of a norm of decadence to which he had hoped that Giulia would prove an exception. But strangely, his conviction of Giulia’s profoundly normal character remained unshaken. Normality, as he suddenly understood, did not consist in staying away from certain experiences, but in the way these experiences were evaluated. Destiny had dictated that both he and Giulia would have something to hide, and consequently to confess, in their lives. But while he felt entirely unable to speak of Lino, Giulia had not hesitated to disclose her relationship with the lawyer to
him; and she had chosen the most suitable moment to do so, according to her own ideas: the moment of matrimony, which, in her mind, abolished the past and opened the door to a whole new way of life. This thought pleased him because, despite everything, it confirmed Giulia’s normality, which consisted precisely in her capacity for redemption through the customary, ancient means of religion and love. Distracted by these thoughts, he turned his eyes to the window without realizing that his silence was frightening his wife.