The Conformist (32 page)

“And you?”

“I really wasn’t expecting it. I was about to fall asleep because I was so tired … I didn’t understand her at first. Finally I got it, and then I wasn’t sure
what
to do.… It was a real, furious passion, you know, just like a man’s. Tell me the truth, would you have expected that from a woman like her, so controlled, with such a good hold on herself?”

“No,” replied Marcello gently, “I wouldn’t have expected it … just as,” he added, “I wouldn’t expect you to reciprocate such effusions.”

“What’s this? Are you jealous by any chance?” she cried, bursting into joyful, flattered laughter. “Jealous of a woman? Even if, let’s say, I had paid any attention to her, you still shouldn’t be jealous … a woman’s not a man. But don’t worry, almost nothing happened between us.”

“Almost?”

“I’m saying ‘almost,’ ” she replied in a reticent tone, “because, seeing her so desperate, I let her hold my hand while she was driving me back to the hotel.”

“Just hold your hand?”

“Well, well, you are jealous,” she exclaimed again, very happy. “You’re jealous for sure. I didn’t know this aspect of you. All right then, if you really want to know,” she added after a moment, “I let
her give me a kiss, too … but like a sister kisses a sister. Then, since she was so demanding she was annoying me, I sent her away — that’s all. Now tell me, are you still jealous?”

Marcello had insisted that Giulia talk about Lina chiefly to rediscover yet one more time the basic difference between him and his wife: he, shaken to the core all his life by something that had never happened; his wife, instead, open to all experiences, indulgent, her flesh shedding its memories even before her mind forgot them.

He asked gently, “But you … have you ever had this kind of relationship in the past?”

“No, never,” she answered decisively. This curt tone was so unusual in her that Marcello knew she was lying right away.

He insisted, “Come on, why lie? A person who didn’t know about these things wouldn’t behave the way you did with Signora Quadri. Tell the truth!”

“But why does it matter to you?”

“It interests me to know about it.”

Giulia lowered her eyes and was silent for a moment; then she said slowly, “You know the story about that man, that lawyer? Up until the day I met you he’d given me a real horror of men … so I had a friendship, but it didn’t last long … with a girl my own age, a student. She really loved me and it was this affection, above all, at a time when I needed it so much, that convinced me. Then she became possessive, demanding, and jealous and so I broke it off … every once in a while I see her in Rome, here and there. Poor thing, she still loves me.”

Now, after a moment’s reticence and embarrassment, her face resumed its usual placid expression. Taking his hand, she added, “Don’t worry, don’t be jealous. You know I only love you.”

“I know it,” said Marcello. Now he recalled Giulia’s tears in the train and her suicide attempt, and he understood that she had been sincere. While she had seen, in a conventional way, betrayal in her missing virginity, she actually attached no importance to these past mistakes of hers.

Meanwhile, Giulia was saying, “I tell you, that woman is really crazy … you know what she wants? She wants to take us all to
Savoy in a few days, they have a house there. Just think, she’s already drawn up a schedule.”

“What schedule?”

“Her husband’s leaving tomorrow. She’s going to stay a few more days in Paris, though.… for her own business, she says, but I’m convinced she’s staying because of me. She wants us to all leave together and go spend a week with them in the mountains. That we’re on our honeymoon doesn’t enter her head … for her, it’s as if you didn’t exist. She wrote me the address of their house in Savoy and made me swear I’d persuade you to accept the invitation.”

“What’s the address?”

“There it is,” said Giulia, pointing to a piece of paper on the marble of the bedside table, “but why? You’re not thinking of accepting?”

“No, but you, maybe.”

“For God’s sake, do you really think I attach any importance to that woman? When I told you I sent her away because she was annoying me with her demands.…”

Meanwhile, she had risen from the bed and, still talking, left the room. “By the way,” she yelled from the bathroom, “someone called for you a half an hour ago … a man’s voice, an Italian.… He didn’t want to say who he was. But he left me a number and asked you to call as soon as you could.… I wrote the number down on that same piece of paper.”

Marcello picked up the paper, pulled a notebook out of his pocket, and carefully wrote down the address of the Quadri’s house in Savoy, as well as Orlando’s number. He felt, now, as if he had come back to his senses after the ephemeral exaltation of that afternoon; he knew it, above all, by the automatic quality of his actions and the melancholy resignation that accompanied them. So it was all over, he thought as he put the notebook back in his pocket, and that fleeting apparition of love in his life had been nothing more in the end than a shock in the process of settling down to that same life in its definitive form. He thought of Lina again for a moment and seemed to glimpse a manifest sign of destiny in her sudden passion for Giulia, since it had not only furnished him the address
of the house in Savoy, but had also made sure that when Orlando and his men showed up, she would not yet be there. Quadri’s solitary departure and Lina’s decision to stay in Paris suited the mission’s plan perfectly; if things had gone otherwise, he didn’t see how Orlando and he could have carried it out.

He got up, shouted out to his wife that he would be waiting for her in the lobby, and left. There was a telephone booth at the end of the hall and he walked toward it slowly, almost automatically. Only when he heard the agents’ voice asking him jocularly from the receiver, “So, dottore, where are we having this little dinner?” did he emerge from the fog of his own thoughts. Calmly, speaking softly but clearly, he began to inform Orlando about Quadri’s trip.

W
HEN THEY GOT OUT OF
the taxi on a little sidestreet in the Latin Quarter, Marcello looked up at the sign. Le Coq au Vin was written in white letters on a brown background on the second-floor level of an old gray house. They went into the restaurant. A red velvet sofa ran all around the sides of the room; the tables were lined up in front of the sofa; old rectangular mirrors in gilt frames reflected the central chandelier and the heads of the few customers in a tranquil light. Marcello recognized Quadri right away, seated in a corner next to his wife, smaller than her by a head, dressed in black, studying the wine list over his glasses. Lina, on the other hand, who was sitting up straight and immobile in a black velvet dress that emphasized the whiteness of her arms and breasts and the pallor of her face, seemed to be anxiously watching the door. Seeing Giulia, she stood up suddenly and behind her, almost hidden by her, the professor stood up, too. The two women shook hands. Marcello raised his eyes casually and saw, suspended in the unremarkable yellow light of one of the mirrors,
an incredible apparition: the head of Orlando, watching him. At the same moment, the restaurant’s grandfather clock roused itself; its metallic bowels began to writhe and complain; at last it began to strike the hours.

“Eight o’clock,” he heard Lina exclaim contentedly. “How punctual you are.”

Marcello shivered and, as the clock continued to strike, each stroke lugubrious, solemn, and sonorous, he held out his hand to shake the hand that Quadri was offering him. The clock struck the last hour loudly and then he remembered, pressing his palm against Quadri’s, that this handshake, according to the agreement, was to point out the victim to Orlando. Suddenly he was almost tempted to lean over and kiss Quadri on the left cheek, just as Judas — with whom he had jokingly compared himself that afternoon — had done. In fact, he seemed to feel the rough touch of that cheek beneath his lips and marveled at the power of the suggestion. Then he lifted his eyes to the mirror again: Orlando’s head was still there, suspended in the void, his eyes fixed on them. Finally all four of them sat down, he and Quadri on the chairs and the two women opposite them on the divan.

The wine steward came with the list, and Quadri began to order the wines with minute attention to detail. He seemed completely absorbed in his task and held a lengthy discussion with the steward about the quality of the wines, which he evidently knew very well. At last he ordered a dry white wine to go with the fish, a red wine to accompany the roast, and some champagne on ice. The wine steward left, the waiter appeared, and the same scene was repeated: competent discussions concerning the foods, hesitations, reflections, questions, answers, and finally a decision to order three courses — antipasto, then fish, then meat. In the meantime Lina and Giulia were speaking to each other in low voices, and Marcello, his eyes fixed on Lina, had fallen into a kind of a trance. He still seemed to hear the frenzied striking of the pendulum clock at his back as he shook Quadri’s hand; he still seemed to see Orlando’s bodiless head looking at him in the mirror. And he understood that he had never before this moment
found himself so concretely faced with his destiny, as if it were a stone standing in the middle of a crossroads with two roads diverging around it, each different from the other and equally definitive. He came to as he heard Quadri asking, in his usual indifferent tone, “Been around Paris?”

“Yes, a bit.”

“Like it?”

“Very much.”

“Yes, it’s a lovable city,” said Quadri, as if he were talking to himself and almost making a concession to Marcello, “but I wish you would direct your attention to the point I was making yesterday. This isn’t the vice-ridden city full of corruption the Italian newspapers make it out to be.… You surely subscribe to this idea, which actually has nothing to do with reality.”

“I don’t have that idea of Paris,” said Marcello, a little surprised.

“It would astonish me if you didn’t,” said the professor without looking at him. “All the young people of your generation have ideas of this kind. They think that to be strong one must be austere, and in order to feel austere they fabricate scapegoats that don’t really exist.”

“I don’t think I’m particularly austere,” said Marcello dryly.

“I’m sure you are, and now I’ll prove it to you,” said the professor. He waited until the waiter had placed the antipasto plate on the table and then went on, “Let’s see … I bet that while I was ordering the wines, you were secretly surprised that I could appreciate such things … isn’t that right?”

How had he figured that out? Marcello admitted reluctantly, “You may be right, but I wasn’t judging you. It just seemed strange because you seem so — to use your own word — austere.”

“Nothing like you are, dear boy, nothing like you are,” repeated the professor with pleasure, “and then, let’s go on … tell the truth: you don’t like wine and you don’t understand it.”

“No, to tell the truth, I hardly ever drink,” said Marcello, “but how important is that?”

“Very important,” said Quadri calmly. “Extremely important. And I’ll make another bet — that you don’t appreciate good food.”

“I eat …,” began Marcello.

“To live,” finished the professor triumphantly, “and that makes my point. And finally, I’m sure you have a prejudice against love. For example, if you’re in a park and you see a couple kissing, your first impulse is condemnation and disgust, and you very probably infer that the city the park is in is shameless … isn’t that how it is?”

Now Marcello got what Quadri was driving at. He said forcefully, “I don’t infer anything. The truth is I was probably born without a taste for these things.”

“Not only that, but people who
do
have a taste for them seem guilty and so despicable to you … confess the truth.”

“No, that’s wrong, they’re just different from me, that’s all.”

“Who’s not with us is against us,” said the professor, making an abrupt sortie into politics. “That’s one of the mottoes repeated so cheerfully in Italy and other places, too, these days, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, he had begun to eat with such vigorous enjoyment that his glasses had fallen down on his nose.

“I really don’t think,” said Marcello dryly, “that politics enter into these things.”

“Edmondo,” said Lina.

“Dear.”

“You promised me we wouldn’t talk politics.”

“But in fact we’re not talking politics,” said Quadri. “We’re talking about Paris. And the conclusion — since Paris is a city in which people love to drink, eat, dance, kiss each other in the parks, in other words, have fun — is that I’m sure his judgment of Paris can’t help but be unfavorable.”

This time Marcello said nothing.

Giulia replied for him, smiling, “Well, I like the people in Paris a lot. They’re so gay!”

“Well said,” answered the professor in approval. “Signora, you should heal your husband.”

“But he’s not sick.”

“Yes he is, he’s sick with austerity,” said the professor, his head bent over his plate. And he added, almost forcing the words through his teeth, “Or rather, his austerity is only a symptom.”

Now it was apparent to Marcello that the professor, who, according to Lina, knew everything about him, was amusing himself, playing with him somewhat like a cat with a mouse. Still, he couldn’t help thinking that this was a very innocent game compared to his own, so dark, begun that afternoon at Quadri’s house and destined to end bloodily at the villa in Savoy.

He asked Lina, with a sort of melancholy flirtatiousness, “Do I really seem so austere, even to you?”

He saw her look at him with a cold and reluctant glance in which he could read, to his sorrow, the deep aversion she felt for him. Then, evidently, Lina decided to take back up the role of a woman in love that she had set out to play, because she answered, forcing herself to smile, “I don’t know you well enough … but certainly you give the impression of being very serious.”

“Oh, yes,” said Giulia, gazing with affection at her husband. “Just think, I may have seen him smile a dozen times since I’ve known him … serious is the word, all right.”