The Conformist (22 page)

Then he felt her try to hug him and heard her voice asking him, “Aren’t you going to say something? Then it’s true … I disgust you … Tell the truth: you can’t stand me anymore and I disgust you.”

Marcello would have liked to reassure her, and moved to turn around and hug her. But a jolt of the train led his gesture astray so that, without wanting to, he poked her in the face with his elbow. Giulia interpreted this involuntary blow as a gesture of rejection and stood up immediately. At that moment the train entered a tunnel, with a long, melancholy whistle and a thickening of shadows against the glass of the little windows. In the midst of the roar and rumble, doubled by vaults’ answering echo, he thought he heard a wailing cry emerge from Giulia as, holding her arms stretched out in front of her, swaying and stumbling, she moved toward the door of their compartment.

Surprised, he called without getting up, “Giulia!”

As answer he saw her, still in that sorrowful, stumbling way, open the door and disappear into the corridor.

For a moment he stayed where he was, then, suddenly alarmed, he rose and went out, as well. Their compartment was in the middle of the car; right away he saw his wife moving hurriedly down the deserted corridor toward the end where the exit door was. Watching her flee down the broad, soft carpet between the mahogany walls, the threat she had made to her old lover came back to him: “If you talk, I’ll kill you,” and he thought that he had perhaps ignored, till now, an aspect of her character, mistaking her easygoing good nature for a passive cowardice. In the selfsame
moment he saw her lean down and jerk at the handles of the door. In one leap he reached her and grabbed her by the arms, forcing her to stand back up.

“What are you doing, Giulia?” he asked in a low voice, despite the rumbling of the train. “What did you think? It was the train … I wanted to turn around and instead I hurt you.”

She was rigid between his arms, as if preparing for a struggle. But at the sound of his voice, so tranquil and so sincerely surprised, she seemed to calm down immediately. She said after a moment, bowing her head, “Forgive me, maybe I was mistaken, but I had the impression you hated me and so I wanted to end it all … It wasn’t an act, if you hadn’t come I would really have done it.”

“But why? What were you thinking of?”

He saw her shrug her shoulders. “Just because, just to stop struggling so hard … For me, getting married was a lot more important than you thought. When I seemed to … when I thought you couldn’t stand me anymore, I felt, I just can’t go on anymore.…” She shrugged her shoulders again and added, lifting her face at last toward his and smiling, “Think, you would have become a widower the day you were married.”

Marcello gazed at her for a moment without speaking. Clearly, he thought, Giulia was sincere; she had truly attached much more importance to getting married than he could imagine. Then, with a sense of astonishment, he understood that this humble statement demonstrated a complex participation in the wedding ritual, which was for Giulia — unlike himself — truly what it should and must be, neither more nor less. Thus it was hardly surprising that after such passionate devotion, she should think of killing herself at the first disappointment. He told himself that this was almost a kind of blackmail on Giulia’s part: either you forgive me or I kill myself; and once more he experienced relief, at finding her to be so completely what he had wanted. Giulia had turned around again and seemed now to be looking out the little window. He put his arms around her waist and murmured in her ear, “You know I love you.”

She turned immediately and kissed him with a passion so violent that Marcello was almost frightened. This is the way, he
thought, that certain devotees kiss the feet of the statues, the crosses, the reliquaries in churches. Meanwhile, the noise of the tunnel gave way to the usual swift beat of the wheels running in open air; and they separated. Still, they remained standing one against the other, hand in hand in front of the window, contemplating the darkness of the night.

“Look,” said Giulia finally, in a normal tone of voice, “look down there … what can it be? A fire?”

And in fact a fire now shone in the center of the dark glass like a red flower.

Marcello said, “Who knows?” and lowered the window.

The mirrorlike gleam of glass disappeared from the night, a cold wind blew in their faces, but the red flower remained — whether far or near, high or low was hard to tell — mysteriously suspended in the dark. After looking for a long time at those four or five petals of flame, which seemed to shift and throb, he turned his gaze toward the escarpment of the railroad track along which the faint lights of the train were sliding, as were his and Giulia’s shadows, and was suddenly seized with an acute sense of bewilderment.

Why was he on that train? And who was the woman standing by his side? And where was he going? And who was he, exactly? And where did he come from? This bewilderment caused him no suffering; on the contrary, it pleased him, being an emotion with which he was familiar and which constituted, perhaps, the very foundation of his most intimate being.

“Yes,” he thought coldly, “I’m like that fire, down there in the night … I’ll flare up and then I’ll go out, without reason, without sequel … a bit of destruction suspended in the dark.”

He was roused by the sound of Giulia’s voice saying, “Look, they must have made up the beds already,” and understood that, while he had been lost in contemplation of that faraway fire, she had never ceased thinking about their love or, to put it more precisely, the imminent union of their two bodies — what she was doing in the moment, in other words, and nothing else. She was already headed, with a kind of contained impatience, toward their compartment; Marcello followed her at a little distance.

He delayed on the threshold to let the conductor pass through into the corridor, and then he went in. Giulia was standing in front of the mirror, seeming not to care that the door was still open; she was taking off her blouse, unbuttoning it from the bottom up.

She said without turning, “You take the top bunk. I’ll take the bottom one.”

Marcello closed the door, climbed up onto the bunk, and began to undress right away, putting his clothes onto the luggage rack as he took them off. Then he sat on top of the covers holding his knees in his arms, naked and waiting. He heard Giulia moving around, heard a glass tinkle against a metal bracket, a shoe fall onto the rug on the floor, and other small sounds. Then with a dry click, the brightest of the lights went out, yielding to the violet glow of the nightlight; and Giulia’s voice said, “Do you want to come here?”

Marcello stuck out his legs, turned around, put one foot onto the bunk below, and crouched down to one side to get in. As he did so, he saw Giulia naked and supine, one arm thrown over her eyes, her legs outstretched and spread wide. In the false, low light, her body was the cold white of mother-of-pearl, stained with black at the groin and armpits and with dark pink at the tips of her breasts. She looked inanimate, not only because of this deathlike pallor, but also because of her perfect, abandoned immobility.

But when Marcello got on top of her she came to life all of a sudden, with the violence of a trap springing shut, drawing him to her and throwing her arms round his neck, opening her legs and locking her feet at his back. Later she pushed him away harshly and huddled against the wall, curled up on herself with her forehead pressed to her knees. And Marcello, lying by her side, understood that what she had taken from him with such fury and then closed up around and cherished with such jealousy in her own womb, no longer belonged to him; it would grow inside her. And he had done this, he thought, to be able to say at least once: “I have been a man like all other men … I have loved, I have joined myself to a woman and generated another man.”

A
S SOON AS HE THOUGHT
Giulia was asleep, Marcello got up from the bed, put his feet on the floor, and began to get dressed. The room was immersed in a cool, transparent half-light that hinted at the beautiful June sun flooding both sky and sea. It was a real Riviera hotel room, high and white, decorated with blue stucco flowers, stems, and leaves. The furniture was all light wood in the same floral style as the stucco-work, and a large green palm stood in a corner. When he was dressed, he tiptoed to the shutters and pushed them aside to look out. Right away he saw the shining expanse of the sea, made even vaster by the perfect clarity of the horizon. It was a limpid, almost violent blue, and every wave seemed afire, beneath the gentle breeze, with a tiny sparkling flower of sunlight. Marcello lowered his eyes from the sea to the promenade. It was deserted: no one was sitting on the benches that faced out to sea in the shade of the palms; no one was walking on the clean gray asphalt.

He stared out at this vista for a long time, then closed the shutters again and turned to look at Giulia stretched out on the bed. She was naked and sleeping. She was lying on one side, and the position of her body thrust up a round, pale, full hip, from which her torso seemed to hang limp and lifeless, like the stem of a wilted flower in a vase. Her back and hips, as Marcello knew, were the only tight, solid parts of that body; on the other side, invisible but present to his memory, was the softness of her belly, falling into soft folds on the bed, and of her breasts, pulled down by their weight, one on top of the other. He could not see his wife’s head, since it was hidden by her shoulder; and remembering how he had possessed her only a few minutes before, he suddenly had the sensation of looking not at a person but at a machine made of flesh, lovely and lovable but brutal, made for love and love alone.

As if awakened by his merciless gaze, she suddenly moved and sighed deeply, then said in a clear voice, “Marcello.”

He went to her quickly and said with affection, “I’m here.”

He watched her turn over, heavily shifting her weight of feminine flesh from one side to the other; then she raised her arms blindly and wrapped them around his hips. Then, with her hair falling over her face, she nuzzled him slowly and persistently with her nose and mouth, searching out his sex. She kissed it with a kind of humble and passionate fetishism, remained motionless for a moment with her arms still around him, and then fell back onto the bed, conquered by sleep, her face wrapped in her hair. She had fallen asleep again in the same position as before, except that she had changed sides and now lay on her right side inside of her left. Marcello slipped his jacket from a hanger, tiptoed to the door, and went out into the hall.

He walked down the broad, echoing staircase, crossed the threshold of the hotel, and stepped out onto the promenade. The sun, reflected from the sea in blades of sparkling light, dazzled him for a moment; he closed his eyes, and, as if called up from the darkness, the sharp odor of horse urine assailed his nostrils. He found the carriages behind the hotel in a strip of shade, three or
four in a row with their drivers asleep on their boxes and the passenger seats draped in white covers. Marcello went up to the first carriage and climbed in, calling out the address, “Via dei Glicini.” He saw the coachman launch a brief, meaningful look at him and then crack his whip over the horse without saying a word.

The carriage rolled along the seashore for a good while and then entered a short street full of villas and gardens. At the end of the street the Ligurian hill rose skyward, luminous, covered in vineyards and dotted with silver olive trees, an occasional tall red house with green windows standing upright on its slopes. The street they were on led straight toward the foot of the hill; at a certain point the sidewalks and asphalt stopped, yielding to a kind of grassy path. The carriage came to a halt and Marcello raised his eyes: at the end of a garden he could see a gray, three-story house with a black roof of slate tiles and mansard windows.

The driver said dryly, “It’s here,” took the money, and turned the horse around quickly. Marcello thought that he had been offended, perhaps, at having to bring him to this place; but maybe, he reflected as he pushed on the gate, he was simply attributing to the coachman the revulsion he felt himself.

He walked down a path between two hedges whose glossy leaves and small white flowers were dulled with dust. He had always hated these houses and had been to one only two or three times, as an adolescent, bringing back with him each time a sense of revulsion and repentance as of something unworthy of him, which he shouldn’t have done. Sick at heart, he climbed the two or three steps and pushed on the glass-paned door, setting off a gossipy alarm, then found himself in a Pompeian entrance hall in front of a stairway with a wooden railing. He recognized the sickly-sweet stench of face powder, sweat, and male semen; the house was immersed in the silence and torpor of the summer afternoon. While he was looking around, a kind of maid emerged from who knows where, dressed in black, with a white apron tied at the waist, small, slim, with the sharp face of a ferret enlivened by two brilliant eyes; she appeared before him with a shrill “good morning” uttered in a cheerful voice.

“I have to speak to the
padrona
,” he said, taking off his hat with perhaps excessive urbanity.

“All right, handsome, you can talk to her,” answered the woman in dialect, “but in the meantime go into the salon … The
padrona
will come … go in there.”

Marcello, offended by her familiarity and by the misunderstanding, nonetheless let himself be pushed toward a half-open door. The salon appeared in the dim half-light, long and rectangular, deserted, with little sofas covered in red material lined up all around the walls. The floor was as dusty as the waiting room of a train station; even the cloth of the couches, filthy and threadbare, confirmed the squalor of this public place within the intimacy and secrecy of the house. Marcello, unsure of himself, sat down on one of the sofas. At the same time, like a belly whose bowels, after long immobility, suddenly discharge their burden, there came from all over the house a disintegration, a clatter, a ruinous rush of feet down the wooden stairs. And then what he had feared would happen happened. The door opened and the petulant voice of the maid announced: “Here are the young ladies … all for
you
.”