The Conformist (12 page)

Why, for example, he thought again, right after he had offered to combine his honeymoon trip with the mission, had he felt the painful sensation of having committed an act of unasked-for servility or obtuse fanaticism? Because, he told himself, his offer had been made to that sceptical, scheming, corrupt man, that unworthy and hateful secretary. It was he, just by his presence, who had inspired shame in Marcello for an act so deeply spontaneous and selfless. And now, as the bus rolled from one stop to the next, he reassured himself that he would have felt no shame if he had not found himself in front of a man like that, for whom neither loyalty nor dedication nor sacrifice existed, only calculation, prudence, and his own interests. In fact, Marcello’s offer had not been the result of any mental speculation but had emerged from the obscure depths of his nature, which surely proved that his posture of social and political normality was authentic. Someone else, the secretary for example, would have made such an offer only after long and sly reflection, whereas he had simply improvised. As for the impropriety of combining his honeymoon with his political mission, it wasn’t worth wasting the time to examine it. He was what he was and everything he did was right if it conformed to what he was.

Lost in these thoughts, he got down from the bus and headed toward a street in the white-collar district; pink and white oleanders were planted beside the sidewalk. The massive, shabby palazzi of the state employees opened their huge entranceways onto the street, and he caught glimpses of vast and squalid courtyards behind them. Alternating with the entranceways were modest shops, which Marcello knew well by now: the tobacconist’s, the baker’s, the greengrocer’s, the butcher’s, the grocery store. It was noon, and even among those anonymous buildings the tenuous, ephemeral joy characteristic of the suspension of work and the reunion with family revealed itself in many ways: kitchen smells wafting out of the half-open windows on the ground floors; badly dressed men in such a
hurry they practically ran through their front doors; bits of radio voices, fragments of sound from record players. From an enclosed garden in a recess of one of the palaces, the espalier of climbing roses on the railing greeted his passage with a wave of sharp, dusty fragrance. Marcello quickened his pace, turned into entranceway number nineteen along with two or three other employees — imitating their haste with satisfaction — and headed up the stairs.

He started to climb slowly up the broad flights, in which squalid shadow alternated with brilliant light from the large windows on the landings. But on the second floor he recalled that he had forgotten something: the flowers that he never failed to bring his fiancée, every time he was invited to lunch at her house. Happy to have remembered in time, he ran back downstairs and into the street and went directly to the corner of the palazzo, where a woman huddled up on a stool displayed seasonal flowers in jars. He hastily chose a half-dozen roses, the most beautiful the florist had, long and straight-stemmed, a dark red. Holding them to his nose and breathing in their perfume, he re-entered the palazzo and climbed the stairs, this time to the top floor. Here only one door opened onto the landing; a very short flight of steps led to a rustic porch, beneath which the strong light of the terrace was shining.

He rang the bell, thinking, “Let’s hope her mother doesn’t come to the door.”

His future mother-in-law, in fact, displayed an almost yearning love for him that embarrassed him deeply. In a moment the door opened, and in the twilight of the entrance hall Marcello made out, to his relief, the figure of the maid — who was almost a child — bundled up in a white apron too big for her, her pale face crowned by a double twist of black braids. She shut the door behind them, not without poking her head out a moment to look curiously around the landing; and Marcello, flaring his nostrils to breathe in the strong cooking smells that filled the air, passed on into the living room.

The living-room window was half-shut to keep the heat and light from coming in, but it was not too dark for him to distinguish
the dark faux-Renaissance-style furniture cluttering the room among the thin shadows. They were heavy, severe, densely carved pieces, and formed a strange contrast with the room’s knick-knacks, all shoddily made and common in taste, that were scattered over the shelves and on the table: a small nude woman kneeling on the edge of an ashtray, a blue majolica sailor playing a harmonica, a group of black-and-white dogs, two or three lamps shaped like blossoms or flowers. There were a lot of metal and porcelain ashtrays that had originally contained, as he knew, the
confetti
, or sugared wedding almonds, that friends and relatives of his fiancée had given them. The walls were papered with fake red damask, and landscapes and still lifes painted in bright colors and framed in black were hanging from them. Marcello sat down on the couch, already sporting its summer slipcover, and looked around with satisfaction. It was truly a bourgeois apartment, he reflected once again, product of the most conventional and modest middle class, similar in every way to the other apartments of that same palazzo and that same district. And this was the most pleasant aspect of it for him: the sensation of viewing something very common, even cheap, and yet perfectly reassuring. He realized that he felt, at that thought, an almost abject sense of pleasure at the ugliness of the place. He had grown up in a beautiful, tasteful home and knew very well that everything that surrounded him was ugly beyond remedy; but it was exactly what he needed, this anonymous ugliness — one more thing he would have in common with his peers. He recalled that for lack of money, at least in the first years, Giulia and he would live in that house once they were married, and he almost blessed his poverty. Acting by himself, following the dictates of his own taste, he could never have put together a house this ordinary and ugly. Soon this would be his living room; as the Liberty-style bedroom in which his future mother-in-law and her deceased husband had slept for thirty years would be his bedroom; and the mahogany dining room in which Giulia and her parents had consumed their meals twice a day their whole lives long would be his dining room. Giulia’s father had been an important official in some ministry,
and this house, assembled according to the fashion of the times when he was young, was a kind of temple pathetically erected in honor of the twin divinities, respectability and normality. Soon, he thought again with an almost greedy, wanton joy that was also sad, he would insert himself by right into this normality and respectability.

The door opened and Giulia came in impetuously, still talking to someone in the hallway, maybe the maid. When she had finished speaking, she shut the door and came quickly toward her fiancé. At twenty, Giulia was as full-bodied as a woman of thirty, with a coarse, almost common shapeliness that was still fresh and solid, revealing both her youth and some unknown, carnal illusion and joy. She had an extremely white complexion and large eyes, limpid, dark, and languid; thick, beautifully wavy chestnut hair; blooming red lips. Watching her come toward him, dressed in a light outfit with a masculine cut from which the curves of her exuberant body seemed to explode, Marcello couldn’t help thinking with renewed pleasure that he was marrying a totally normal, completely ordinary girl, very like the living room that had given him such solace a moment before.

A similar solace, almost a relief, came over him again when he heard her drawling, good-natured, Roman vernacular saying, “What beautiful roses … But why? I already told you you shouldn’t bother. It’s not as if it’s the first time you’ve come to lunch with us.” Meanwhile she went over to a blue vase perched on a column of yellow marble in a corner of the room, and put the roses in it.

“I like bringing you flowers,” said Marcello.

Giulia heaved a sigh of satisfaction and let herself fall full-length on the couch next to him. Marcello looked at her and saw that a sudden embarassment had taken the place of the willful nonchalance of the moment before, an unmistakable sign that she was about to be aroused. All of a sudden she turned to him and threw her arms around his neck, murmuring, “Kiss me.”

Marcello put his arm around her waist and kissed her on the mouth. Giulia was sensual and during these kisses, almost invariably
requested by her from a reluctant Marcello, there was always a moment when her sensuality insinuated itself aggressively into the kiss, transforming the chaste and expected character of their relationship as fiancés. This time again, just as their lips were about to separate, she suddenly shuddered with desire, and encircling Marcello’s neck with one arm, glued her mouth back firmly to his. He felt her tongue thrust between his lips and begin to move rapidly, twisting and rolling in his mouth. Meanwhile, Giulia had grabbed one of his hands and guided it up to squeeze her left breast. She was blowing through her nostrils and sighing heavily, with an innocent, hungry, animal sound.

Marcello was not in love with his fiancée, but he liked Giulia, and these sensual embraces never failed to excite him. All the same, he didn’t feel inclined to return her rapturous caresses: he wanted his relations with his fiancée to remain within the traditional bounds. It almost seemed to him that greater intimacy might bring back into his life the disorder and abnormality he had been trying so hard to shake off. So after a while he removed his hand from her breast and gently, slowly pulled it away.

“Uh, how cold you are,” said Giulia, drawing back and looking at him with a smile, “really, there are times I could think you didn’t love me.”

Marcello said, “You know I love you.”

Changing subject rapidly, as she often did, she said, “I’m so happy … I’ve never been this happy. By the way, did you know this morning mamma insisted again that we take her bedroom … she’ll move into that little room at the end of the hallway. What do you think? Should we accept?”

“I think,” said Marcello, “she’d be hurt if we refused.”

“That’s what I think, too. Imagine, when I was a little girl I dreamed of sleeping in a bedroom like that one someday. Now I don’t know if I like it that much anymore … do you like it?” she asked in a tone both doubtful and pleased, but afraid to hear his opinion of her taste, as if hoping for approval.

Marcello was quick to reply, “I like it very much. It’s really beautiful.” And he saw that these words gave Giulia visible satisfaction.

Filled with joy, she planted a kiss on his cheek and then continued, “I met Signora Persico this morning and I invited her to the reception. Can you believe she didn’t know I was getting married? She asked me so many questions … When I told her who you were, she said she knew your mother, she’d met her at the seashore a few years ago.”

Marcello said nothing. Talking about his mother, with whom he had not lived for years and whom he rarely saw, was always very unpleasant for him. Luckily Giulia, unaware of his discomfort, changed the subject again.

“Speaking of the reception, we’ve made the guest list. Do you want to see it?”

“Yes, show it to me.”

She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to him. Marcello took it and looked at it. It was a long list of people, grouped by families: fathers, mothers, daughters, sons. The men were indicated not only by name and last name but also by their professional titles: doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers; and when they had them, by honorifics:
commendatori
, high-ranking officers, knights. Next to each family Giulia, to be on the safe side, had written down the number of people in the family: three, five, two, four. Almost all the names were unknown to Marcello, yet he seemed to have known them always: all members of the middle and lower middle class, professionals and state employees; all people who undoubtedly lived in apartments like this, with living rooms like this and furniture like this; and who had daughters very much like Giulia to marry off, and who married them off to young men with degrees and jobs very much (he hoped) like himself. He examined the long list, dwelling on certain of the more common, typical names with a deep satisfaction tinged, nonetheless, with his usual cold and motionless melancholy.

“Who is Arcangeli, for example?” he asked at random. “Commendatore Giuseppe Arcangeli with his wife Iole, daughters Silvana and Beatrice, doctor son Gino?”

“No one, you don’t know them. Arcangeli was a friend of poor papà’s, at the ministry.”

“Where does he live?”

“Just a minute away, in Via Porpora.”

“What’s his living room like?”

“Do you know how funny you are, with your questions?” she exclaimed, laughing. “What do you think it’s like? It’s a living room, like this, like a lot of others … why does it interest you that much to know what Arcangeli’s living room is like?”

“Are his daughters engaged?”

“Yes, Beatrice is … But why?”

“What’s her fiancé like?”

“
Uffa …
the fiancé, too … All right, her fiancé has a strange name. Schirinzi, and he works in a notary public’s office.”

Marcello noted that there was no way to infer anything about her guests from Giulia’s responses. Probably they had no more character in her mind than they had on the page: names of respectable, indistinguishable, normal people. He skimmed the list again and stopped randomly at another name.

“Who’s Dottor Cesare Spadoni, with his wife Livia and lawyer brother Tullio?”

“He’s a pediatrician. His wife was one of my friends at school, maybe you’ve met her: really pretty, dark, small, pale … Her brother’s a handsome young man … They’re twins.”

“And Cavaliere Luigi Pace with his wife Teresa and four sons Maurizio, Giovanni, Vittorio, Riccardo?”

“Another of poor papà’s friends. The sons are all students … Riccardo’s still going to the
liceo
.”

Marcello realized that it was useless to keep asking for details about the people written down on the list. Giulia could not tell him much more than what was on the list itself. And even if she informed him in every particular about the characters and lives of those people, he thought, her information could hardly exceed the extremely narrow confines of her judgement and intelligence. But he was aware of being happy — almost voluptuously though joylessly so — to enter and form part of this ordinary society, thanks to his marriage. A question was still on the tip of his tongue, however, and after a moment of hesitation, he decided to ask it.