The Conformist (3 page)

Right after the hit, he bent down hurriedly, gathered another pebble, and repositioned himself for combat, his legs spread wide, his arms stretched out before him, his slingshot ready to fire. You never knew; Roberto could be behind the leaves aiming at him that very moment, with the advantage of being hidden while he, instead, was completely in the open. Finally, playing this game, he reached the bottom of the garden, where he had cut out the doorway in the ivy. Here he stopped, watching the garden wall with attention. In his fantasy, the house was a castle, the railings hidden by the creeper the fortified walls, and the opening a dangerous and easily crossed breach. Then, suddenly and this time without any possibility of doubt, he saw the leaves move from right to left, trembling and rocking. Yes, he was sure of it, the leaves were moving and someone must have made them move. All in the same moment he thought that Roberto was not there, that it was
only a game and that, since it was only a game, he could hurl the stone; and at the same time, that Roberto was there and that he should not hurl the stone unless he wanted to kill him. Then, with instant and thoughtless decision, he pulled back the bands and let fly the stone into the heart of the leaves. Not content with this, he bent down, feverishly inserted another stone in the slingshot, shot it, put in a third stone and shot that one, too. By now he had put fears and scruples aside and no longer cared whether Roberto was there or not; he felt only a sense of hilarious and bellicose excitement. Finally, panting, having torn the foliage to shreds, he let the slingshot drop to earth and clambered up onto the garden wall. As he had foreseen and hoped, Roberto was not there. But the bars of the railing were very widely spaced, allowing him to stick his head through into the adjacent garden. Stung by he knew not what curiosity, he did so and looked down.

On Roberto’s side of the garden there was no creeper, only a flowerbed planted with iris that ran between the wall and the graveled path. Then Marcello saw, right under his eyes between the wall and the row of white and purple iris, lying on its side, a large gray cat. An unreasoning terror took his breath away as he noted the animal’s unnatural position: lying sideways, with its paws stretched out and relaxed, its muzzle abandoned to the soil. Its fur, thick and bluish gray, appeared slightly ruffled and bristly and at the same time lifeless, like the feathers of certain dead birds he had observed a while back on the marble table of the kitchen. Now his terror increased. He jumped down, pulled out a pole supporting a rosebush, clambered back up and, stretching his arm through the bars, managed to poke the flank of the cat with the earthy tip of the pole. But the cat did not move. All of a sudden the iris on their tall green stems, with their white and purple corollas tilted forward, surrounding the motionless gray body, looked funereal, like so many flowers placed by a compassionate hand around a cadaver. He threw the pole away and, without bothering to shove the ivy back into position, leapt down to the ground.

He felt himself prey to various terrors and his first impulse was to run and shut himself up in a closet, a shed, anywhere, actually,
where there was darkness and closure, to escape from himself. He was terrified, first of all, for having killed the cat, and then, maybe even more so, for having announced this killing to his mother the night before: an incontestable sign that he was, in some fatal and mysterious way, predestined to commit acts of cruelty and death. But the terror aroused in him by the death of the cat and the meaningful premonition attached to this death were as nothing compared to the terror inspired in him by one idea — that while killing the cat he had, in reality, intended to kill Roberto. It was only by chance that the cat had died in place of his friend. A not insignificant chance, however, since it was undeniable that there had been a progression from the flowers to the lizards, from the lizards to the cat, and from the cat to the murder of Roberto, thought about and desired and, although not executed, still possible and perhaps even inevitable. So he was abnormal, he couldn’t help thinking, or rather feeling, with a vivid, physical awareness of this abnormality, an abnormal person marked by a solitary and threatening destiny, already launched on a bloody path on which no human force would be able to stop him. Full of these thoughts, he circled frantically in the small space between the house and the gate, lifting his gaze every once in a while to the windows, almost in hopes of seeing the figure of his frivolous and scatterbrained mother appear there. But by now there was nothing more she could do for him, even if she had been able to do anything to begin with. Then, with a flash of hope, he ran down to the bottom of the garden again, climbed up to the wall, and looked out through the bars of the railing. He had almost persuaded himself that he would find the place he had first seen the motionless cat empty. But the cat had not gone away, it was still there, gray and immobile within the funeral wreath of the white and purple iris. And its death was confirmed, with a macabre sense of rotting carrion, by a black file of ants that had turned aside from the pathway and marched up the flowerbed, right up to the muzzle and even the eyes of the cat. He looked at it and all of a sudden, almost as if superimposed there, he seemed to see Roberto in place of the cat, he too stretched out among the iris, he too inanimate,
with ants coming and going through his spent eyes and half-open mouth. With a thrill of horror, he tore himself away from this terrible contemplation and jumped down. But this time he was careful to pull the doorway of ivy back into place. For now, along with remorse and terror at his own self, he felt the fear of discovery and punishment blossom within him.

Still, as much as he feared it, he felt simultaneously that he
wanted
to be discovered and punished, if for no other reason than to be stopped in time on this slippery incline, at the end of which, inevitably it seemed, murder awaited him. But his parents had never punished him that he remembered; and this was not so much due — as he vaguely comprehended — to any educated concept excluding punishment as to indifference. Thus to the suffering incurred by suspecting himself to be the author of a crime and, above all, to be capable of committing other, even graver ones, was added that of not knowing whom to turn to to be punished, or even what that punishment might be. Marcello was dimly aware that the selfsame mechanism that had driven him to confide his guilt to Roberto in hopes of hearing him say it was not a crime but a common thing that everyone did, was now urging him to make the same revelation to his parents in the contrary hope: to see them exclaim with indignation that he had committed a horrible crime for which he must atone with appropriate pain. And it mattered little to him that in the first case Roberto’s absolution would have encouraged him to repeat the action which, in the second case, would instead have exposed him to severe condemnation. In reality, as he himself understood, in both cases he longed to escape from the terrifying isolation of his abnormality at any cost and by any means.

Maybe he would have decided to confess the cat’s murder to his parents if, that same evening at dinner, he had not had the sensation that they already knew all about it. In fact, when he sat down at the table, he noted with a mixture of dismay and uncertain relief that his father and mother seemed hostile and bad-tempered. His mother, her childish face assuming an expression of exaggerated dignity, sat very upright with her eyes lowered, in a
clearly contemptuous silence. Opposite her, his father revealed, by different but no less speaking signs, analogous feelings of temper. His father, who was many years older than his wife, often gave Marcello the disconcerting sensation of being relegated, along with his mother, to a communal realm of infancy and submission, as if she were not his mother but his sister. He was thin, with a dry, wrinkled face, only rarely illuminated by brief bursts of joyless laughter, and in which two traits, undoubtedly linked to the same source, were especially notable: the inexpressive, almost mineral sheen of his bulbous eyes and the frequent flicker, under the drawn skin of his cheek, of who knew what frenetic nerve. Perhaps he had retained, from his many years in the army, a taste for precise gestures and controlled attitudes. But Marcello knew that when his father was angered, his control and precision became excessive, turning into their opposites — that is, into a strange, contained, and punctual violence whose purpose, it would seem, was to burden the simplest gestures with significance. Now, this evening, at the table, Marcello noticed right away that his father was strongly emphasizing, as if to call attention to them, habitual actions of no particular importance. He took up his glass, for example, drank a sip, and then returned it with a harsh bang to its place on the table; he reached for the saltcellar, took a pinch of salt from it and then put it down with another loud bang; he grabbed the bread, broke it in half, and then put it back with a third bang. As if invaded by a sudden mania for symmetry, he began to square off — still banging everything around — the silverware surrounding his plate, so that the knife, fork, and spoon met each other at right angles around the circle of his bowl. If Marcello had been less preoccupied with his own guilt he would easily have recognized that these gestures, so dense with meaningful and pathetic energy, were not directed at him but at his mother, who, in fact, at each of these blows, withdrew into her own dignity with certain condescending sighs and certain long-suffering arcs of her eyebrows. But worry blinded him, so that he did not doubt that his parents knew all; surely Roberto, rabbit that he was, had told on him. He had wanted to be punished, but now,
seeing his parents so cross, he felt a sudden horror of the violence he knew his father capable of in similar circumstances. Just as his mother’s demonstrations of affection were sporadic, casual, obviously dictated more by remorse than maternal love, so his father’s severities were sudden, unjustified, excessive — provoked, one might say, more by a desire to catch up after long periods of distraction than by any instructive intent. All of a sudden, after some complaint by his mother or the cook, his father would remember that he had a son, would scream, throw a fit, and hit him. The beatings frightened Marcello most of all, because his father wore on his little finger a ring with a massive bezel that somehow, during these scenes, was always turned in to the palm of his hand, thus adding to the humiliating harshness of the slap a more penetrant pain. Marcello suspected that his father turned the bezel round on purpose, but he wasn’t sure.

Intimidated and afraid, he began to concoct a plausible lie in furious haste: he had not killed the cat, Roberto had — and in fact, the cat was lying in Roberto’s garden, so how could he have killed it through the ivy and the garden wall? But suddenly he remembered that the night before he had announced to his mother the cat’s murder, which had then actually happened the next day; and he understood that any lie was out of the question. As distracted as she was, surely his mother would still have mentioned his confession to his father and he, no less certainly, would have established a connection between this confession and Roberto’s accusations; so there was no possibility of lying about it. At this thought, passing from one extreme to the other, he felt a renewed impulse of desire for punishment, as long as it came soon and was decisive. What kind of punishment? He remembered that Roberto had spoken one day about boarding schools, as places parents sent their wayward sons for punishment, and to his surprise he found that he longed vividly for this sort of penalty. It was an unconscious weariness of his disordered and loveless family life that expressed itself in this desire, not only causing him to yearn for what his parents would have considered a chastisement, but also leading him to trick himself and his need for it by reasoning almost
slyly that he would, in this way, simultaneously pacify his own remorse and improve his condition. This thought immediately gave rise to images that should have been disheartening but were instead enticing: a severe, cold, gray building with large windows barred by gratings; icy dormitories bereft of decoration with rows of beds aligned beneath high white walls; dull schoolrooms full of desks, with the teacher’s desk at the end; naked corridors, dark stairways, massive doors, unbreachable gates — everything, that is, as it might be in a prison, yet all preferable to the inconsistent, agonizing, unbearable freedom of his father’s house. Even the thought of wearing a striped uniform and having his head shaved like the boarding-school boys he had sometimes run across as they filed down the street in columns — even this thought, humiliating and almost repugnant, seemed pleasant in his present desperate aspiration toward any kind of order and normality.

Lost in these daydreams, he was no longer looking at his father but at the tablecloth, dazzling with white light, onto which fell at intervals the nocturnal insects that had flown through the open window to collide against lampshade. Then he raised his eyes just in time to see, right behind his father on the windowsill, the profile of a cat. But before he could distinguish its color, the animal leapt down, crossed the dining room, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. Although he was not absolutely sure of it, nevertheless his heart swelled with joyous hope at the thought that it might be the cat that he had seen, a few hours before, stretched immobile among the iris in Roberto’s garden. And he was happy in this hope, since it was a sign that, after all, he valued the life of the animal more than his own destiny.

“The cat!” he cried out, in a loud voice. Then throwing his napkin on the table and stretching a leg from his chair, he asked, “Papà, I’m done, can I get up?”

“You stay right there,” said his father in a threatening tone. Marcello, intimidated, risked: “But the cat is alive.…”

“I already told you to stay in your place,” replied his father. Then, as if Marcello’s words had broken the long silence for him, as well, he turned toward his wife, saying: “All right, say something, speak.”

“I have nothing to say,” she responded with a show of dignity, her eyelids lowered, her mouth twisted in contempt. She was dressed for evening, in a low-cut black dress; Marcello noticed that she was squeezing a small handkerchief between her thin fingers, dabbing her nose with it every so often. With her other hand she kept grabbing up a piece of bread and then letting it fall back onto the table — but not with her fingers, with the tips of her nails, like a bird.