The Conformist (37 page)

Marcello hurled away the papers and picked up an illustrated French magazine. He was struck immediately by a photograph, printed on the second page as part of the whole journalistic coverage of the crime. It bore the caption
Tragedy of Gevaudan
Forest and must have been taken at the moment of discovery or shortly after. You could see underbrush, with the straight trunks of the trees bristling with branches, lighter splashes of sun between one trunk and another, and, on the ground, sunk in the tall grass, almost invisible at first sight in that shifting confusion of light and woodland shadow, the two bodies. Quadri was stretched out on his back and all you could see of him were his shoulders and head, and of this only the chin and the throat, sliced across with the black line of a knife cut. You could see Lina’s whole body, however, thrown partway across her husband’s. Marcello placed his lit cigarette calmly on the edge of the ashtray, took up a magnifying glass, and scrutinized the photograph with care. Although it was gray and out of focus, as well as being further blurred by splashes of sun and shade from the underbrush, he recognized Lina’s body, both slender and generous, pure and sensual, beautiful and strange: the broad shoulders under the delicate nape of the neck
and slender throat, the exuberant breasts above the wasp-small waist, the fullness of the hips and the elegant length of the legs. She was covering her husband with part of her body and with her widespread dress and seemed to want to speak into his ear; she was turned to one side, her face immersed in the grass, her mouth against his cheek. Marcello gazed at the photograph through the lens for a long time, trying to study every shadow, every line, every detail. It seemed to him that that image, full of an immobility that went beyond the mechanical immobility of the instant to reach the definitive immobility of death, breathed forth an air of enviable peace. It was a photograph, he thought, full of the last, profound stillness that must have followed the sudden, terrible agony. A few instants before all had been confusion, violence, terror, hatred, hope, and desperation; a few instants afterward, all was over and peaceful. He recalled that the two bodies had remained in the underbrush a long time, almost two days; and he imagined that the sun, after having warmed them for many hours and attracted the buzzing insects to them, had gone down slowly, leaving them to the silent shadows of the sweet summer night. The night dew had wept on their cheeks, the light wind had murmured through the highest branches and the bushes of the undergrowth. With sunrise the lights and shadows of the day before had returned, as if for a meeting, to play over the two outstretched, motionless figures. Cheered by the freshness in the air and the pure splendor of the morning, a bird had perched on a limb and sung. A bee had flown around Lina’s head, a flower had opened near Quadri’s ruined forehead. It was for them, so silent and still, that the babbling waters of the brooks that snaked through the forest had spoken, their bodies the inhabitants of the woods had skirted around — the secretive squirrels, the leaping, wild rabbits. And meanwhile, beneath them, the burdened earth had slowly shifted the rigid shapes of their bodies on their soft bed of grasses and moss; she was prepared for them, and had accepted their mute request that she receive them into her womb.

He started at a knock on the door, threw away the magazine, and shouted out, “Come in.”

The door opened slowly and for a moment Marcello saw no one. Then the broad, honest, peaceful face of agent Orlando peered warily in through the crack.

“May I, dottore?” asked the agent.

“Please come in, Orlando,” said Marcello in an official tone of voice. “Make yourself comfortable. Did you have something to tell me?”

Orlando came in, shut the door, and approached Marcello, staring at him intently. For the first time, Marcello noticed that everything was affable in that florid, heated face except for the small, deepset eyes, which sparkled weirdly beneath the bald forehead.

“Strange,” thought Marcello, looking at him, “how I wasn’t aware of that sooner.” He nodded to the agent to sit, and Orlando obeyed without saying a word, still fixing him with those shining eyes.

“A cigarette?” offered Marcello, pushing the box toward Orlando.

“Thank you, dottore,” said the agent, taking one. A silence followed. Then Orlando blew some smoke from his mouth, looked for an instant at the lit end of the cigarette, and said, “Do you know, dottore, what the most curious aspect of the Quadri affair is?”

“No, what?”

“It wasn’t necessary.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that after I got back from the mission, right after I crossed the border, I went to find Gabrio at S. to check in. Do you know the first thing he says to me? Have you received the counterorder? I ask: what counterorder? The counterorder, he says, to suspend the mission. And why is it suspended? It’s suspended, he answers, because all of a sudden in Rome they’ve discovered that right now it would be useful to have a rapprochement with France and they think the mission could compromise the negotiations. So I say: I didn’t receive any counterorder all the time I was in Paris, obviously it was sent too late.… Anyway, the mission has been carried out, as you’ll see in tomorrow morning’s papers. When I say this, he begins to yell: you’re all beasts, you’ve ruined me, this could blow French-Italian relations at a very delicate point of international politics, you’re criminals, what will I tell Rome now?
You’ll tell them, I answer calmly, the truth: that the counterorder was sent too late. Get it, dottore? All that effort, two people dead, and it wasn’t necessary, in fact it was counterproductive.”

Marcello said nothing. The agent breathed in another mouthful of smoke and then said, with the naive and satisfied emphasis of the uncultured man who loves to fill his mouth with solemn words: “Fate.”

A new silence followed. The agent went on, “But this is the last time I accept a mission like this … someone else can do it next time. Gabrio yelled, you’re beasts … but that’s not really true … we’re human beings, not beasts.”

Marcello ground out the cigarette he had smoked halfway down and lit another. The agent continued, “They can say what they want, but some things are really unpleasant … Cirrincione for one.”

“Who’s Cirrincione?”

“One of the men who was with me. Right after the hit, in all that confusion, I turn around for no special reason and what do I see? He’s licking his knife. I yell at him, what are you doing? Are you crazy? And he says, ‘Humpback’s blood is good luck.’ Understand? Barbarian … I almost shot him.”

Marcello lowered his eyes and reshuffled the papers on his desk mechanically. The agent shook his head in deprecation and then continued, “But what got to me most was the wife, she had nothing to do with it, she shouldn’t have died … but she threw herself onto her husband to protect him and took two slugs for him. He ran away into the woods where that barbarian Cirrincione reached him. She was still alive and I had to give her the coup de grace … that woman was braver than a lot of men.”

Marcello raised his eyes toward the agent to signify that the visit was over. The agent understood and got to his feet. But he didn’t leave immediately. He put his two hands on the desk, looked at Marcello for a long moment with his sparkling eyes, and then, with the same emphasis with which he had uttered, “Fate,” shortly before, he said, “Anything for the family and homeland, dottore.”

Suddenly Marcello knew where he had seen those eyes before, so strange and sparkling. Those eyes held the same expression as his father’s eyes — his father, who was even now locked up in an asylum for the mentally ill.

He said coldly, “Maybe the homeland didn’t require quite that much.”

“If it didn’t require it,” asked Orlando, leaning toward him a little and raising his voice, “then why did they make us do it?”

Marcello hesitated and then said dryly, “Orlando, you did your duty and that should satisfy you.”

He watched the agent make a slight, deferential bow, half of mortification and half of approval. Then, after a moment of silence he added gently, not sure himself why he was doing it — maybe somehow to dissipate the agent’s anguish, so similar to his own, “Do you have any children, Orlando?”

“Do I, dottore … I have five.” He pulled a large, worn wallet out of his pocket, extracted a photograph from it, and handed it to Marcello, who took it and looked at it. The picture was of five children lined up according to height and ranging in age from thirteen to six — three girls and two boys all dressed up for a party, the girls in white, the boys in sailors’ outfits. Marcello noticed that all five had round, peaceful, wise faces very like their father’s.

“They live in the village with their mother,” said the agent, taking back the photograph Marcello held out to him. “The oldest is already working as a seamstress.”

“They’re beautiful and they look like you,” said Marcello.

“Thank you, dottore … once again, dottore.” The agent stepped to one side to let Giulia by, then disappeared.

Giulia came up to Marcello and said immediately, “I was passing by and I thought I’d drop in and visit. How are you?”

“I’m just fine,” said Marcello.

Standing up in front of the desk, she looked at him uncertainly, doubtfully, apprehensively. Finally she said, “Don’t you think you’re working too hard?”

“No,” answered Marcello, with a fleeting glance out the open window. “Why?”

“You seem tired.” Giulia came around the desk and stood still for a moment, leaning against the armrest of the chair and looking at the newspapers scattered on the desk. Then she asked, “Is there anything new?”

“About what?”

“In the newspapers, about the thing with Quadri.”

“No, nothing.”

After another moment of silence she said, “I’m more convinced all the time that he was killed by men from his own party. What do you think?”

It was the official version of the crime, furnished to the newspapers by the propaganda offices the very morning the news arrived from Paris. Giulia, Marcello noticed, had grasped at it with a kind of willed positivity, almost as if hoping to convince herself.

He replied dryly, “I don’t know … I suppose it’s possible.”

“I’m convinced of it,” she repeated resolutely. After a moment’s hesitation, she went on ingenuously, “Sometimes I think that if that evening, in that nightclub, I hadn’t treated Quadri’s wife so badly, she would have stayed on in Paris and she wouldn’t have died … and I feel such remorse … but what could I do? It was her fault, since she wouldn’t leave me in peace for a minute.”

Marcello wondered if Giulia suspected anything about the part he had played in Quadri’s murder and then, after a brief reflection, he excluded the possibility. No love, he thought, could have survived such a discovery, and Giulia was telling the truth: she felt remorse at Lina’s death because she had been its indirect cause, though in a wholly innocent manner. He wanted to reassure her, but he could find nothing better than the word Orlando had already uttered with such emphasis.

“Don’t reproach yourself,” he said, putting an arm around her waist and drawing her close. “It was fate.”

She answered, lightly stroking his hair, “I don’t believe in fate. It was really because I loved you … if I hadn’t loved you, who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have treated her so badly, and she wouldn’t have gone and she wouldn’t be dead. What does fate have to do with it?”

Marcello recalled Lino, the primary cause of all the vicissitudes of his life, and explained thoughtfully, “When you say ‘fate’ you’re saying all these things, as well, love and all the rest of it. You couldn’t have not acted the way you acted, just as she couldn’t have not gone with her husband.”

“Then we can’t do anything?” asked Giulia in a dreamy voice, gazing down at the papers scattered across the desk.

Marcello hesitated and then answered, with profound bitterness, “Yes, we can know that we can’t do anything.”

“What good does that do?”

“For us, the next time … or for others who come after us.”

She broke from him with a sigh and went to the door. “Remember not to be late today,” she said from the threshold. “Mamma’s made a good dinner … and remember not to make any appointments for the afternoon. We have to go look at apartments together.” She waved good-bye and disappeared.

Left by himself, Marcello picked up a pair of scissors, carefully cut the photograph out of the French magazine, put it into a drawer next to some other papers, and closed the drawer with a key. At that moment the piercing wail of the noonday siren dropped into the courtyard out of the burning sky. Right afterwards, the close and distant bells of the churches began to chime.

E
VENING HAD FALLEN
, and Marcello, who had spent the day lying in bed smoking and thinking, got up and went to the window. Black against the green-tinged light of the summer dusk, the houses that surrounded his own rose up around bare cement courtyards relieved by small green yards and clipped myrtle hedges. An occasional window shone red in the twilight, and in the servants’ rooms he could see waiters in their striped working jackets and cooks in white aprons tending to the household chores, moving to and fro between the lacquered wardrobes and the flameless stoves of their electric kitchens. Marcello raised his eyes to gaze beyond the balconies of the apartments; the last smoky, purple wisps of sunset were vanishing in the evening sky. He lowered his eyes again and saw a car come in and stop in the courtyard, and the driver get out with a big white dog that immediately started running through the little plots of grass, whining and barking for joy. It was a wealthy neighborhood, completely new, built in the last few years; and looking at those courtyards
and those windows, no one would have guessed that the war had been going on for four years and that this very day, a government that had lasted for twenty had fallen. No one but him, thought Marcello, and all those who found themselves in his circumstances. For a moment an image flashed through his mind, of a divine rod suspended above the great city lying so peacefully under the clear sky, which struck at families here and there, hurling them into terror, consternation, and grief while their neighbors remained unscathed. His family was among those struck down, as he knew and as he had foreseen since the beginning of the war. It was a family like all others, with the same affections and the same intimacy, completely normal, with that normality he had sought so tenaciously for years and which now revealed itself to be purely exterior and entirely composed of abnormalities. He recalled saying to his wife, the day the war broke out in Europe, “If I were logical, I’d kill myself today,” and he remembered, too, the terror those words had caused her. As if she had known what they concealed, above and beyond the simple presentiment that the conflict would have an unfavorable outcome. He asked himself yet again whether Giulia knew the truth about him and the part he had played in Quadri’s death; and it seemed impossible to him, yet again, that she should know, although by certain signs she seemed to indicate she did.