The Conformist (42 page)

His daughter turned from the window and asked, “Have we already arrived?”

“No, we haven’t arrived, we’re just stopping for a minute,” said Giulia, taking her in her arms and helping her get out of the car.

Once they were out, she said they might as well take advantage of the stop to satisfy the child’s natural needs, and Marcello stayed next to the car while Giulia, holding Lucilla by the hand, walked a little ways away. She was walking slowly without leaning toward her daughter, who was wearing a short white dress and a big bow in her hair, which flowed loosely down her back, and was chattering away with her usual animation, lifting her face every so often toward her mother as if asking her a question. Marcello asked himself what place his daughter would have in the free, new future his sudden exaltation had painted for him shortly before; and he told himself with vivid affection that if nothing else, he would know enough to steer her toward a life inspired by entirely different values than the ones that had guided his own. Everything in his daughter’s life, he thought, should be spirited and inspired, graceful, light, limpid, fresh, and adventurous; everything in it should resemble a landscape that knows neither fog nor the close
oppression of heat, but only the swift, purifying storms that render the air clearer and colors brighter. Nothing should remain of the bloody pedantry that up until yesterday had been his own fate. Yes, he thought again, she must live in full freedom.

Lost in reflection, he left the roadside and strolled toward the woods that shaded the other side. The trees were tall and thick with leaves; beneath them blackberry brambles and other wild briars grew up in a tangle; and under these he could see grasses and flowers in the woodland shadow, and a bellflower of a blue that was almost purple. The bellflower was simple, its petals streaked with white; when he brought it to his nostrils, he smelled a bitter scent of grass. This flower had grown in the shaded tangle of the underbrush, thought Marcello, in the little bit of earth clinging to the barren tuff; it had not sought to limit the taller, stronger plants or to recognize its own destiny so that it could accept it or reject it. In full unconsciousness and freedom, it had grown where the seed had happened to fall, up until the day he had picked it. To be like that solitary flower on a strip of moss in the dark underbrush, he thought, was a truly humble, natural destiny. Whereas the voluntary humility of an impossible adaptation to a deceptive normality concealed only vanity, pride, self-love reversed.

He came to at the sound of his wife’s voice, saying, “Let’s go, then,” and took back his place at the wheel. The car wound swiftly up the curving road, following the slope of the hill scattered with oak trees and then, after a thick tract of brush, emerged through a notch in the hill onto the vista of an immense plain. The close humidity of July blurred the distant horizons, ringed by blue mountains; in the golden, slightly foggy light Marcello made out a solitary, craggy hill in the midst of the plain, surmounted by a village of a few houses huddled together under the towers and walls of a castle as if by an acropolis. He could see the gray sides of the houses suspended vertically along the highway that wound around the hill in spirals; the castle was square, with a rough, cylindrical tower to one side; the village was a rosy color and the sun burning in the sky struck deadly sparks from the windows of the houses. The road ran straight on at the foot of the hill, an absolutely
straight stretch toward the farthest boundaries of the plain; opposite the hill, on the other side of the road, lay the vast, razed, yellowing green of an airfield. In contrast to the ancient homes of the village, everything in the airfield looked new and modern: the three long hangars, camouflaged in green, blue, and brown; the antenna from the top of which a red and white flag was waving; the many shining pieces of equipment, placed as if at random around the edges of the camp.

Marcello observed this landscape at length while the car, turning round one bend after another of the steep road, descended swiftly toward the plain. The contrast between the ancient fortress and the very modern airfield felt full of meaning to him, although a sudden distraction kept him from being able to pinpoint its precise significance. At the same time he became aware of a strange sense of familiarity, as if he had already seen this landscape in the past. But he knew it was the first time he had ever driven down this road.

Once the car had reached the bottom of the hill, it turned onto a straight stretch that seemed interminable. Marcello speeded up and the speedometer’s arrow climbed gradually to eighty, then ninety kilometers an hour. The road was now running between two stretches of metallic yellow harvested fields, without a tree or a house. Evidently, thought Marcello, the inhabitants all lived in the village and came down in the morning to go to work in the fields. Then in the evening, they returned to the village.…

His wife’s voice distracted him from his reflections. “Look,” she said, pointing toward the airfield. “What’s happening?”

Marcello looked and saw that a lot of people were running back and forth across the great razed field, waving their arms. At the same time, strange sight in the dazzling light of the summer sun, a sharp, red, almost smokeless tongue of flame licked up from one of the hangars. Then another flame burst upwards from the second roof, yet another from the third. The three fires joined and merged into one, which moved violently in all directions while clouds of black smoke drifted to earth, hiding the hangars and billowing outward. Meanwhile, all signs of life had vanished and the airfield was deserted once more.

Marcello said calmly, “An air raid.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No, they will have passed over already.”

He speeded up; the arrow of the tachometer climbed to a hundred, a hundred and twenty kilometers. Now they were beneath the town; you could see the spiraling road, the sides of the houses, the castle. At the same time, Marcello heard the angry iron roar of the attacking airplane behind him. He could distinguish, in all the noise, the thick hail of bullets from a machine gun and understood that the plane was behind them and would soon be on top of them; the noise of its engine was in line with the road, as direct and inflexible as the road itself. Then the metallic roar was above them, deafening, just for a moment before receding into the distance.

He felt a strong blow to the shoulder, like a punch, and then a deathly weariness. Desperate, he managed to gather his forces and stop and park the car on the edge of the road.

“Let’s get out,” he said in a spent voice, putting his hand on the door and opening it.

The door opened and Marcello fell out. Then, dragging himself forward with his face and hands in the grass, he pulled his legs out of the car and lay on the ground near the ditch. But nobody spoke and nobody, though the door remained open, got out of the car. Just then he heard the roar of the airplane banking and turning again. He thought once more, “God, let them not be hit … they’re innocent.”

And then, resigned, his mouth in the grass, he waited for the plane to return. The car with its open door was silent, and he had time to understand with a sharp sorrow that no one would get out. Finally the plane was on top of him, trailing after it, as it distanced itself in the burning sky, silence and the night.