The Conformist (7 page)

“Say it, come on, why don’t you say it?”

A long silence followed. Lino looked first at Marcello’s hand, then at his face, and seemed to hesitate. Finally he released the boy’s hand again, but gently this time, rose, and took a few steps across the room. Then he came back to sit down and took Marcello’s hand again in an affectionate way, a little like a father or mother taking the hand of their child. He said: “Marcello, do you know who I am?”

“No.”

“I’m a defrocked priest,” burst out Lino in a sorrowing, heartfelt, pathetic voice, “a defrocked priest, thrown out of the boarding school where I taught for indecent behavior … and you, in your innocence, don’t realize what I could ask from you in exchange for this pistol you want so much … and I was tempted to
abuse your ignorance, your innocence, your childish greed! That’s who I am, Marcello.”

He spoke in a tone of deep sincerity; then he turned toward the head of the bed and, in a wholly unexpected way, began to address the crucifix indignantly without raising his voice, as if complaining. “I’ve prayed to you so often … but you’ve abandoned me … and I always, always give in … why have you abandoned me?”

These words lost themselves in a kind of murmur, as if Lino were talking to himself. Then he rose from the bed, went to get the cap he had left on the sill, and said to Marcello, “Let’s go. Come on, I’ll take you back home.”

Marcello said nothing. He felt stunned and unable, for the moment, to judge what had happened. He followed Lino down the hallway and then across the living room. Outside in the clearing the wind was still gusting around the big black car under an overcast, sunless sky. Lino got into the car and he sat beside him. The car began to move, rolled down the driveway, drove gently through the gateway onto the road. For a long time neither of them spoke. Lino drove as before, his upper body erect, the cap’s visor pulled over his eyes, his gloved hands resting on the steering wheel. They had covered a good bit of road when he asked unexpectedly, without turning his head, “Are you sorry you don’t have the pistol?”

At these words the avid hope of owning the object so greatly desired was rekindled in Marcello’s heart. After all, he thought, maybe nothing was lost yet. He answered sincerely, “Sure, I’m sorry.”

“So,” asked Lino, “if I made an appointment with you for tomorrow at the same time as today, would you come?”

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” Marcello replied judiciously, “but Monday’s all right … We can meet on the avenue, the same place as today.”

The man said nothing for a moment. Then, suddenly, in a loud and sorrowful voice, he shouted: “Don’t talk to me anymore … don’t look at me anymore … and if you see me on the avenue at noon on Monday, don’t pay attention to me, don’t say hello to me … understand?”

“What’s the matter with him?” thought Marcello, rather annoyed. And he answered, “I don’t care if I see you … it’s you that made me come to your house today.”

“Yes, but it must never happen again, never again,” declared Lino. “I know myself and I know for certain that tonight all I’ll do is think of you … and that Monday I’ll be waiting for you on the avenue, even if today I decide not to do it.… I know myself … but you must pay no attention to me.”

Marcello said nothing. Lino went on, still with the same fury, “I’ll think of you all night long, Marcello … and Monday I’ll be on the avenue … with the pistol … but you should ignore me.”

He kept circling the same phrase, repeating it: and Marcello, with his cold and innocent perspicacity, understood that, in reality, Lino wanted to make the appointment and that, on the pretext of warning him off, he was actually doing so.

After a moment of silence, Lino asked once more, “Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“What did I say?”

“That Monday you’ll be waiting for me on the avenue.”

“That’s not all I said to you,” said the man sorrowfully.

“And that,” finished Marcello, “I should ignore you.”

“Right,” confirmed Lino, “no matter what. Look, I’ll call out to you, I’ll plead with you, I’ll follow you with the car … I’ll promise you anything you want … but you have to keep on going and not listen to me.”

Marcello replied impatiently, “All right, I understand.”

“But you’re just a child,” said Lino, passing from fury to a kind of caressing sweetness, “and you won’t be able to resist me … you’ll come, there’s no doubt … you’re a child, Marcello.”

Marcello was offended. “I’m not a child, I’m a boy. And besides, you don’t know me.”

Lino stopped the car very suddenly. They were still on the hill road, under a high garden wall. A little ahead you could glimpse the arch of a restaurant, adorned with Venetian lanterns. Lino turned toward Marcello. “Really,” he asked, with a kind of painful
anxiety, “Would you really refuse to come with me?”

“Aren’t you,” asked Marcello, who by now knew the rules of the game, “the one who’s asking me to?”

“Yes, it’s true,” said Lino desperately, starting up the automobile again, “yes, it’s true … you’re right … it’s me, madman that I am, who’s asking you to … me.”

After this exclamation, he said no more and there was silence. The car descended to the bottom of the road and traveled once more through the filthy streets of the poor neighborhood. Here was the broad avenue with its high plane trees, naked and white, the heaps of yellow leaves on the deserted sidewalks, the factories full of windows. Here was the neighborhood where Marcello lived.

Lino asked without turning, “Where is your house?”

“It’s better if you stop here,” said Marcello, aware of the pleasure he was giving the man by this token of complicity, “otherwise they might see me getting out of your car.”

The automobile came to a halt. Marcello got out and Lino handed him his books through the window, saying decisively, “Monday, then, on the avenue, same place as today.”

“But I,” said Marcello, taking the books, “have to pretend I don’t see you, right?”

He saw Lino hesitate and experienced a feeling of almost cruel satisfaction. Lino’s eyes, burning intensely in their sunken sockets, smoldered at him with a look both imploring and anguished. Then he said passionately, “Do what you think … do what you want with me.” His voice ended in a kind of sing-song, yearning lament.

“I warn you, I’m not even going to look at you,” Marcello informed him for the last time.

He saw Lino make a gesture he didn’t understand, but that seemed one of desperate assent. Then the car moved away, distancing itself slowly in the direction of the avenue.

E
VERY MORNING
M
ARCELLO
was awakened at a fixed hour by the cook, who felt a particular affection for him. She would come into his bedroom in the dark carrying a breakfast tray, which she would place on the marble top of the chest of drawers. Then Marcello would watch as she hung onto the cord of the Persian blinds with both arms and pulled it up with two or three jerks of her robust body. She would put the breakfast tray on his knees and stand there to watch him eat, ready, as soon as he had finished, to throw back his covers and urge him to get dressed. She helped him with this, handing him his clothes, sometimes kneeling to put on his shoes. She was a lively, merry woman, full of good common sense; she had conserved the accent and affectionate habits of the province in which she was born.

That Monday Marcello woke up with a confused memory of having heard, while he was sleeping the night before, a burst of angry voices coming either from the first floor or from his parents’ bedroom. He waited until he had consumed his breakfast and
then casually asked the cook, “What happened last night?”

The woman gazed at him in pretended and exaggerated surprise. “What do I know, nothing.”

Marcello understood that she had something to say: the false surprise, the mischevious sparkle of her eyes, her whole attitude denoted it.

He said, “I heard some yelling.…”

“Oh, yelling,” said the woman, “but that’s normal. Don’t you know that your papà and mamma yell at each other a lot?”

“Yes,” said Marcello, “but they were yelling louder than usual.”

She smiled and, leaning over with two hands on the headboard of the bed, said, “At least if they yell they may understand each other better, don’t you think?”

This was one of her habits: to ask questions that required no answer, that were actually affirmations. Marcello asked, “But why were they yelling?”

The woman smiled again. “Why do people yell? Because they don’t get along.”

“Why don’t they get along?”

“Them?” she cried, glad of the boy’s question. “Oh, for a thousand reasons.… One day it might be because your mamma wants to sleep with the window open and your papà doesn’t … another day because he wants to go to bed early and your mother likes to go to bed late.… There’s never a shortage of reasons, is there?”

Marcello said suddenly, with gravity and conviction, as if expressing a long-held sentiment: “I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

“And what would you like to do?” cried the woman, even more gaily. “You’re little, you can’t just run away from home … you have to wait till you’re big.”

“I would prefer it,” said Marcello, “if they put me in a boarding school.”

The woman looked at him tenderly and then declared loudly, “You’re right … in a boarding school at least you’d have someone who gave you a thought. Do you know why they were yelling so much last night, your papà and mamma?”

“No, why?”

“Wait, I’ll let you see.” She went to the door quickly and disappeared. Marcello heard her rush down the stairs and wondered once more what could have happened the night before. In a moment he heard the cook climbing back up the stairs; then she came into the bedroom with an air of gay mystery. She held in her hand an object Marcello recognized right away: a large photograph, taken when Marcello was scarcely more than two years old. You could see his mother, dressed in white, with her son, also in a little white gown, in her arms, a white bow in his long hair.

“Look at this photograph,” cried the cook happily. “Your mamma came back from the theater last night and walked into the living room and the first thing she saw, on the piano, was this photograph.… Poor thing, she almost fainted … just look at what your papà did to this photograph!”

Marcello looked at the photograph in astonishment. Someone, using the point of a pen knife or bodkin, had pierced holes in the eyes of both mother and son and then, with a red pencil, had drawn many small marks under both of their eyes, as if to indicate bloody tears spurting from the four holes. The thing was so strange and unexpected and so obscurely dismal that Marcello didn’t know what to think for a moment.

“It’s your papà that did this,” cried the cook, “and your mamma was right to yell at him.”

“But why did he do it?”

“It’s a piece of witchcraft, do you know what witchcraft is?”

“No.”

“When you want to harm someone … you do what your papà did … sometimes instead of poking holes in the eyes, you poke holes in the chest … right around the heart … and then something happens.”

“What happens?”

“The person dies, or some accident happens to him … it depends.”

“But,” stammered Marcello, “I’ve never done anything wrong to papà.”

“And what has your mamma done to him, then?” shouted the cook indignantly. “But do you know what your father is? Crazy! And you know where he’ll end up? In Sant’Onofrio, in the madhouse! And now get up, get dressed, it’s time you went to school … I’m going to put this picture back.” She ran off, wholly happy, and Marcello was left alone.

Feeling blank, unable to explain the incident of the photograph in any way to himself, he started to get dressed again. He had never experienced any particular feeling for his father, so that his hostility, justified or not, did not grieve him; but the cook’s words about the maleficent powers of witchcraft gave him something to think about. Not that he was superstitious and really believed that all it took to harm someone was to poke holes in the eyes of a photograph; but this madness of his father’s reawoke in him an apprehension that he imagined he had definitively put to rest. It was the terrified and powerless sense of having entered into the orbit of a disastrous destiny, which had obsessed him all summer, and which now, as if answering the call of an evil attraction when faced with that photograph stained with bloody tears, was rekindled in his soul and stronger than ever.

What was disaster, he asked himself, what was it if not the black dot lost in the azure blue of the most serene skies that all of a sudden enlarges, becomes huge, becomes an awful, pitiless bird swooping down on its chosen one like a vulture on carrion? Or the trap that you have been warned against, that you can even see perfectly clearly, and in which, all the same, you can’t help putting your foot? Or even a curse of clumsiness, imprudence, and blindness insinuated into your gestures, your senses, your blood? This last definition, he felt, was the most appropriate one, since it traced the source of disaster to a lack of grace, and the lack of grace to an intimate, obscure, native, inscrutable fate, to which his father’s act, like a sign pointing to the entrance of a grim and fatal road, had recalled his attention. He knew that this fate required him to kill; but what frightened him most was not so much the thought of homicide as the sense of being predestined for it, whatever he might do. He was terrified, that is, by the idea that even his
awareness was ignorance — but ignorance of so particular a kind that no one would deem it such, least of all himself.

But later, at school, with childish inconstancy, he suddenly forgot these premonitions. His desk-mate happened to be one of his tormentors, a boy by the name of Turchi, the oldest and most ignorant student in the class. He was the only one who, having taken a few boxing lessons, knew how fistfight professionally; his hard and angular face under crewcut hair, with its snub nose and thin lips, sunk down into an athlete’s sweatshirt, already seemed that of a professional boxer. Turchi understood nothing of Latin; but when the boys gathered in clusters on the streets outside of school, and he raised a gnarled hand to remove the last tiny vestige of a cigarette butt from his mouth and, wrinkling the many lines on his low forehead into a look of sufficient authority, declared: “What I say is, Colucci’s going to win the championship,” all the boys were struck dumb and full of respect. Turchi, who could on occasion demonstrate, by taking his nose between his fingers and dislocating it to one side, that he had a broken septum just like real boxers, was not only avid about boxing but also about football and any other popular and violent sport. He maintained a sarcastic attitude toward Marcello, almost sober in its brutality. It had been Turchi, in fact, who had held Marcello’s arms two days ago while the others dressed him in the skirt; and Marcello, remembering this, believed he had finally found, this morning, a way to win his scornful and inaccessible respect.