The Conformist (31 page)

Marcello said, between clenched teeth, “Please take me to my hotel.”

“Oh, come on, what does it matter? Just for a moment.”

“I only got in because I was running late and it was convenient for you to drive me there. So now drive me there.”

“Funny, I thought you wanted to be kidnapped, instead. You’re all like that, you want to be forced.”

“I assure you that you’re mistaken, adopting this tone of voice with me. I’m not what you think I am at all. I’ve already told you that and now I’m telling you again.”

“How suspicious you are! I don’t think anything … go on, don’t look at me that way.”

“You asked for it,” said Marcello, thrusting his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket. When he had left Rome, he had brought a little pistol with him; and instead of leaving it in the suitcase where Giulia might find it, he always kept it on him. He drew the weapon out of his pocket and pointed it discreetly, in such a way so that the driver couldn’t see it, at the old man, who had been regarding him with an air of affectionate irony. But then he lowered
his eyes. Marcello saw him become suddenly serious and make a perplexed, almost uncomprehending face.

Marcello said, “You see? And now order your driver to take me to my hotel.”

The man grabbed the microphone immediately and shouted out the name of Marcello’s hotel. The car slowed down and turned off into a cross street. Marcello put the gun back in his pocket and said, “That’s better.”

The old man said nothing. He seemed to have recovered from his surprise now and was looking at Marcello attentively, studying his face. The car came out onto the river road and started running beside the parapets. Suddenly Marcello recognized the entrance to his hotel, with its revolving door under the glass roof. The car stopped.

“Allow me to offer you this flower,” said the old man, taking a gardenia out of the vase and holding it out to him. Marcello hesitated, and the man added, “For your wife.”

Marcello took the flower, thanked him, and leapt out of the car in front of the driver, who was waiting bareheaded beside the open door. He seemed to hear — or maybe it was a hallucination — the voice of the old man saying, in Italian, “Good-bye, Marcello!” But he did not turn around; squeezing the gardenia between two fingers, he walked swiftly into the hotel.

H
E WENT TO THE CONCIERGE’S
desk and asked for the key to the room.

“It’s up there,” said the concierge, after peering into the key cabinet. “Your wife took it. She went upstairs with a lady.”

“A lady?”

“Yes.”

Wildly disturbed and at the same time immensely happy, after his encounter with the old man, to be excited in this way just at the news that Lina was in the room with Giulia, Marcello headed for the elevator. Stepping into it, he glanced at his wristwatch and saw that it was not yet six. He had all the time in the world to carry Lina off on some pretext, sit down with her in some dark corner of the hotel lounge, and decide about the future. Right after that he would make a definitive break with agent Orlando, who was to call at seven. These coincidences felt like good omens. While the elevator was ascending, he glanced at the gardenia he was still squeezing between his fingers and was suddenly sure that the old
man had given it to him, not for Giulia, but for his real wife, Lina. It was up to him now to give her some token of their love.

He rushed down the corridor to his room and entered without knocking. It was a large room with a double bed and a small entrance hall that also led to the bathroom. Marcello approached the door noiselessly and hesitated a moment in the darkness of the vestibule. Then he realized that the door to the bedroom was ajar and that light was seeping through it, and he was seized with a desire to spy on Lina without being seen himself, thinking of it, almost, as a way to make sure whether Lina really loved him. He put his eye to the crack and looked in.

A lamp shone on the bedside table; the rest of the room was wrapped in shadow. He saw Giulia sitting against the bolster, her back against the pillows, all wrapped up in a white cloth: the thick, soft towel from the bathroom. She was holding the towel to her breasts with both hands, but seemed unable or unwilling to keep it from opening widely at the bottom to reveal her belly and legs. Crouching on the floor at Giulia’s feet, within the circle of the wide, white skirt, in the act of embracing her legs with both arms, her forehead pressed to Giulia’s knees and her breasts against Giulia’s shins, was Lina. Without reproof, on the contrary, with a kind of amused and indulgent curiosity, Giulia was stretching her neck to observe the woman who, because of her own somewhat supine position, she could see only imperfectly. Finally Lina said in a low voice, without moving, “You don’t mind if I stay here like this for a little while?”

“No, but soon I’ll have to get dressed.”

Lina went on, after a moment of silence, as if picking up a previous conversation, “You’re so stupid, though … what would it matter to you? When you yourself said that if you weren’t married, you wouldn’t have anything against it.”

“Maybe I said that,” replied Giulia flirtatiously, “so as not to offend you. And anyway, I am married.”

Watching, Marcello saw that now, even as she was talking, Lina had withdrawn an arm from Giulia’s legs and was sliding her hand slowly, tenaciously up her thigh, pushing back the edge of
the towel in her progress. “Married,” she said with intense sarcasm, without interrupting her slow advance, “but look at who you’re married to.”

“He’s fine with me,” said Giulia.

Now Lina’s hand had crept from Giulia’s hip to her naked groin, as hesitant and insinuating as the head of a snake. But Giulia took it by the wrist and pushed it back down, saying in an indulgent tone, rather like a nanny reproaching a restless child, “Don’t think I don’t see you.”

Lina held Giulia’s hand and began to kiss it slowly, reflectively, every once in a while nuzzling her whole face in its palm forcefully, like a dog. Then she said breathily and with intense tenderness, “Silly little thing.”

A long silence followed. The concentrated passion that emanated from Lina’s every gesture was in singular contrast to Giulia’s distraction and indifference. She no longer seemed even curious and, while abandoning her hand to Lina’s kisses and caresses, looked around like someone in search of a pretext. Finally, she reclaimed her hand and started to get up, saying, “Now I really have to get dressed, though.”

Lina was quick to jump to her feet and exclaim: “Don’t move! Just tell me where the stuff is, I’ll dress you myself.”

Standing up with her back to the door, she hid Giulia completely. Marcello heard his wife’s voice say, with a laugh, “So you want to be my maid, as well.…”

“Why not? It means nothing to you … and it gives me so much pleasure.”

“No, I’ll get dressed by myself.” Giulia emerged, completely naked, from the clothed figure of Lina as if splitting off from her, passed on tiptoes in front of Marcello’s eyes, and vanished at the bottom of the room. Then he heard her voice saying, “Please don’t watch me. Actually, turn around. You make me embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed in front of me? I’m a woman, too.”

“You’re a woman in a manner of speaking. You look at me the way men do.”

“Then say straight out that you want me to go.”

“No, stay here, just don’t look at me.”

“I’m not looking at you, silly, do you think it matters to me whether I look at you?”

“Don’t get mad, try to understand me. If you hadn’t talked to me that way at first, I wouldn’t be embarrassed now and you could look at me as much as you like.” This came out in a suffocated voice, as from inside a dress being pulled over her head.

“Don’t you want me to help you?”

“Oh, God, if you really want to so much.…”

Decisive yet unsure in her movements, at once hesitant and aggressive, aroused and humiliated, Lina moved, passed for a moment in profile in front of Marcello, and disappeared toward the part of the room from which Giulia’s voice was coming. There was a moment of silence and then Giulia exclaimed, impatiently but not angrily, “Auffa, how tiresome you are!”

Lina said nothing.

Now the light from the lamp fell on the empty bed, illuminated the dip left by Giulia’s hips in the damp towel. Marcello withdrew from the crack and went back down the hall.

After he had taken a few steps away from the door, he became aware that his surprise and distress had made him do something significant without realizing it: he had crushed the gardenia the old man had given him, and which he had intended to give to Lina, mechanically between his fingers. He let the flower drop onto the carpet and headed for the stairs.

He went down to the ground floor and out along the Seine, in the false, misty light of the dusk. Lights were already lit — the white lamps in clusters on the far bridges, the paired yellow headlights of cars, the rectangular orange illuminations of windows; and the night was rising like dark smoke to the clear green sky behind the black profiles of the spires and roofs on the opposite shore. Marcello walked over to the parapet and leaned his elbows on it, looking down at the darkened waters of the Seine, which now seemed to bear streaks of jewels and circles of diamonds on the back of its black waves. What he was feeling was already more like the mortal quiet that follows the disaster than the tumult of
the disaster itself. He understood that for a few hours that afternoon he had believed in love. Now instead he realized that he was wandering through a profoundly shaken, parched, and soured world, in which the gift of real love did not exist, only sensual relations, from the most natural and common to the most abnormal and bizarre. Certainly what Lina had felt for him had not been love; nor was love what Lina felt for Giulia; his own relationship with his wife could not be called love; and maybe even Giulia — so indulgent, almost tempted by Lina’s advances — didn’t love him in the true sense of the word. In this dark and flashing world, like some stormy twilight, these ambiguous figures of men-women and women-men who crossed paths at random, doubling and mingling their ambiguity, seemed to allude to an equally ambiguous significance connected, he felt, to his own destiny and to the proven impossibility of escaping it. Since love was not, and for this reason alone, he would carry out his mission and persist in his intention to create a family with the animal-like and unpredictable Giulia. This was normality: this makeshift solution, this empty form. Outside of it, all was confusion and anarchy.

He also felt pushed to act this way by the clarity that now illuminated Lina’s behavior. She despised him and probably hated him, as well, as she had declared when she was still being honest; but in order not to cut short their relationship and so preclude the possibility of seeing Giulia, whom she wanted so badly, she had pretended to be attracted to him. But now Marcello understood that he could expect neither comprehension nor pity from her; and faced with this irremediable and definitive hostility, armored by sexual abnormality, political aversion, and moral contempt, he felt a sharp and powerless pain. So, that pure and intelligent light spilling from her eyes and forehead that had so fascinated him would never be bent over him, lovingly to calm and illumine him. Lina preferred to abase and humiliate it in sensual flattery, supplication, and hellish embraces. At this point he recalled that when he had seen her thrust her face against Giulia’s knees, he had been struck by the same sense of profanation that he had felt in the brothel at S., watching the prostitute Luisa let Orlando
embrace her. Giulia wasn’t Orlando, he thought; but he had not wanted that forehead to abase itself before anyone, and he had been disappointed.

Night had fallen while he had been thinking. Marcello straightened up and turned toward the hotel. He was in time to glimpse the white figure of Lina coming out and moving hurriedly toward an automobile parked close by beside the sidewalk. He was struck by her happy and almost furtive air, like a marten or weasel escaping from a hen house with her prey in her mouth. It was not the attitude of someone who has been rejected, he thought; quite the opposite. Maybe Lina had managed to wring some promise out of Giulia; or maybe Giulia, from weariness or sensual passivity, had yielded to some caress that meant nothing to her, as indulgent as she was toward herself and others, but precious to Lina. Meanwhile the woman had opened the car door and gotten in, sitting down sideways and then drawing in her legs. Marcello watched her drive by, her beautiful face in profile both elegant and proud, her hands on the wheel. The car continued on into the distance, and Marcello went back into the hotel.

He walked upstairs and entered the room without knocking. Everything was in order. Giulia was completely dressed, sitting in front of the bureau mirror, combing her hair. She asked calmly, without turning around, “Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” answered Marcello, sitting down on the bed. He waited a minute and then asked, “Did you have fun?”

Immediately his wife turned halfway around on her seat and said vivaciously, “Yes, a lot … we saw so many beautiful things! I left my heart in at least ten stores.”

Marcello said nothing. Giulia finished combing her hair in silence and then got up and came over to sit beside him on the bed. She was wearing a black dress with a wide, low neckline from which the two dark, glowing, solid spheres of her breasts thrust up like two beautiful fruits from a basket. A scarlet cloth rose was pinned near one shoulder. Her sweet young face with its large, shining eyes and luxuriant mouth was wearing its usual expression of lazy sensuality. She smiled, perhaps unconsciously, and between
her lips painted with vivid lipstick, he saw her regular, brilliantly white teeth.

She took his hand affectionately and said, “Guess what happened to me.”

“What?”

“That lady, Professor Quadri’s wife … just think, she’s not a normal woman.”

“Meaning?”

“She’s one of those women who love women. And the thing is, if you can imagine it, she fell in love with me, just like that, at first sight.… She told me so after you left. That’s why she was so insistent that I stay at her house to rest. She made me a real, proper declaration of love … who would have thought it?”