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The Conformist

A Novel

Steerforth Press

CARRYING HIS HAT IN one hand and using the other to pull the sunglasses off his nose and tuck them back into the breast pocket of his jacket, Marcello entered the lobby of the library and asked the usher where he might find the newspaper files. Then he headed unhurriedly toward the broad stairway, at the top of which the large window on the landing shone brilliantly in the strong May light. He felt light and almost vacant, aware of his perfect physical well-being and youthful vigor; and the new suit he was wearing, gray and simply cut, added the no less pleasant sensation of neat and serious elegance which was to his taste. On the second floor, after filling out a request slip, he made his way to the reading room, to a counter behind which an old usher and a girl were standing. He waited until it was his turn and then handed in his form, asking for the major daily newspaper's files for 1920. He waited patiently, leaning against the counter, gazing out at the reading room in front of him. Countless rows of writing desks, each with a lamp with a green lampshade, were lined up all the way to the end of the room. Marcello surveyed these desks, sparsely populated for the most part by students, and mentally selected his own, the last one in the room, on the right at the end. The girl reappeared, holding the large bound file of the newspapers he had asked for in her arms. Marcello took the file and went to the desk.

He placed the file on the slanted desktop and sat down, taking care to hike his pants a bit above the knee; then he calmly opened the file and began to flip through its pages. The headlines had lost their original clarity, their black had become almost green; the paper had yellowed; the photographs had no highlights and looked blurred and confused. He observed that the bigger and more extensive the headlines, the more they gave off a sense of futility and absurdity: announcements of events that had lost importance and significance the very evening of the day they had appeared and which now, clamorous and incomprehensible, defied not only memory but imagination. The most absurd headlines, he noticed, were those accompanied by a more or less tendentious comment; at once exaggerated and hollow they reminded him of the extravagant ravings of a madman, which deafen but fail to move his listeners. Marcello compared his own feelings, faced with these headlines, to what he imagined he would feel when confronted with the headline that concerned him, and wondered whether even the news he was looking for would rouse the same sense of absurdity and emptiness in him. So this was the past, he thought, continuing to turn the pages, this uproar now silenced, this fury now spent, to which the very material of the newspaper, that yellowed paper that would soon crumble and fall into dust, lent a vulgar and contemptible character. The past was made up of mistakes, violence, deceits, foolishness, and lies, he thought again, reading the news items on the pages one after another; and these were the only things, day after day, that men considered worthy of publication and by which they wished to be remembered by generations to come. Normal life, with its depth, was absent from those pages; and yet, even as he was making these reflections — what else was he looking for if not the report of a crime?

He was in no hurry to find the report that involved him, though he knew the date with precision and could find it unerringly in a moment. Here was the twenty-second, the twenty-third, the twenty-fourth of October, 1920; he was getting ever closer, with every page he turned, to what he considered the most important fact of his life. But the newspaper made no preparations for the announcement; it ignored all the preliminaries. Among all those news items that had nothing to do with him the only one that concerned him would surface suddenly, without warning, as a fish rising to the bait will surface from the belly of the sea. He tried to joke with himself, thinking, "Instead of all these big headlines about political events, they should have printed: Marcello meets Lino for the first time, Marcello asks him for the gun, Marcello agrees to get in the car." But then the joke died in his mind and a sudden anxiety took his breath away: he had reached the date he was looking for. He turned the page hurriedly and found the news in the crime reports, as he had expected, with a headline above one column that read: Fatal Accident.

Before reading it he looked around, almost as if he were afraid of being observed. Then he lowered his eyes to the newspaper. The report said:

Yesterday the chauffeur Pasquale Seminara, residing at Number 33 Via della Camilluccia, accidently triggered off a few shots as he was cleaning a gun. Promptly treated, Seminara was taken by ambulance to the hospital of Santo Spirito, where doctors discovered a bullet wound in his chest near the heart and judged the case to be desperate. In fact, notwithstanding the medical attentions lavished upon him, Seminara died that evening.

The report could not have been more concise or conventional, he thought, rereading it. All the same, even the worn-out formulas of the most anonymous journalism revealed two important facts. The first was that Lino was really dead, something of which he had always been convinced but had never had the courage to confirm; the second was that this had been attributed, evidently by suggestion of the dying man, to accident. So he was completely shielded, safe from any consequence; Lino was dead, and his death could never be pinned on Marcello.

But it was not to reassure himself that he had finally determined to look in the library for news of what had happened so many years ago. His anxiety, never entirely soothed during those years, had not focused on the practical consequences of his action. Rather, he had crossed the library's threshold to discover how he would feel when Lino's death had been confirmed. From this feeling, he thought, he would be able to judge whether he was still the boy he had once been, obsessed by his own fatal abnormality, or the altogether normal man that he had afterwards wished to be and was convinced he was.

He felt an intense relief and, perhaps even more than relief, surprise, when he realized that the news printed on the yellowed, seventeen-year-old paper stirred no appreciable echo in his soul. He was like, he thought, someone who has kept a bandage wrapped over a deep wound for a long time, finally decides to remove it, and discovers with amazement that where he had thought to find at least a scar, the skin is smooth and seamless, without any mark of any kind. Looking up the report in the newspaper had been like taking off the bandage, he thought again, and discovering himself to be unmoved was like discovering that he was healed. How this healing had come about, he couldn't say. But without a doubt, it was not time alone that had produced such a result. He owed a lot to himself, as well, to his conscious desire, throughout all those years, to escape his abnormality and become like other people.

Still, with a kind of scrupulousness, raising his eyes from the newspaper and fixing them on the empty air, he willed himself to think explicitly about Lino's death, something which until now he had always instinctively avoided. The newspaper's report was written in the conventional language used for news, and this could also have contributed to his indifference and apathy; but seeing it again could not fail be vivid and tender, and, as such, capable of reawakening the ancient terrors in his soul if they were still there. So, following his memory, a pitiless and impartial guide leading him backward in time, he walked down the same path he had traveled as a young boy: the first encounter with Lino on the avenue; his own desire to own a gun; Lino's promise; the visit to the villa; the second meeting with Lino; the man's pederastic cravings; himself, pointing the pistol; the man crying hystrionically with open arms, kneeling next to the bed, "Kill me, Marcello ... Kill me like a dog." Marcello shooting almost as if he were obeying him; the man collapsing against the bed, pulling himself up, then falling still, tilted on his side. He realized immediately, as he examined all these details one by one, that the indifference he had noticed in himself when confronted with the news in the paper was now confirmed, had grown even stronger. In fact, not only did he feel no remorse, but the emotions of compassion, rancor, and repugnance for Lino, which had long seemed inseparable from that memory, did not even brush the motionless surface of his awareness. In other words, he felt nothing; and an impotent man lying alongside the naked and desirable body of a woman was not more inert than his mind confronted with that remote event in his life. He was glad of this indifference, a sure sign that there was no longer any relationship — not even hidden, not even indirect, not even suspended — between the boy he had been and the young man he now was. He was truly anther person, he thought again, closing the file very slowly and raising himself up from the desk, and although his memory was mechanically able to recall what had happened in that faraway October, in reality his whole being, even down to its most secret fibers, had forgotten it by now.

He walked slowly to the counter and gave the file back to the librarian. Then, still with the measured and vigorous composure that was his preferred attitude, he left the reading room and headed down the large stairway toward the lobby. It was true, he couldn't help thinking as he stepped over the threshold into the strong light of the street, it was true — the news item and his deliberate recollection of Lino's death had aroused no echo in his heart; but at the same time he did not feel quite as relieved as he had thought himself earlier. He recalled the feeling he had had as he leafed through the pages of the old newspaper: as if he were taking the bandages off a wound and finding to his surprise that it had healed perfectly. And he said to himself that maybe, under the unmarked skin, the old infection was still festering in the form of a closed and invisible abscess. He was confirmed in this suspicion not only by the fleeting quality of the relief he had felt for a moment when he discovered that Lino's death left him indifferent, but also by the faint melancholy that floated like a diaphanous funeral veil between his vision and reality. As if the memory of the fact of Lino, dissolved as it was by the powerful acids of time, had nonetheless cast an inexplicable shadow over all his thoughts and feelings.

As he walked slowly down the crowded, sunlit streets, he tried to establish a comparison between his self of seventeen years ago and his self of the present. He recalled that at thirteen he had been a shy boy, a bit feminine, impressionable, disordered, imaginative, impetuous, passionate. Now instead, at the age of thirty, he was not at all a shy man; on the contrary, he was perfectly sure of himself. He was altogether masculine in his tastes and attitudes, calm, orderly to an extreme, almost devoid of imagination, cold and controled. He seemed to remember, too, that there had once been an obscure and tumultuous richness inside him. Now instead, everything in him was clear although perhaps a little dull, and the poverty and rigidity of a few ideas and convictions had taken the place of that generous and confused abundance. Finally, he had been inclined toward intimacy, expansive, at times positively exuberant. Now he was closed, always in the same even-tempered mood, lacking spark and, if not actually sad, at least silent. But the most distinctive trait of the radical change effected in those seventeen years was the disappearance of a kind of excess of vitality caused by the seething of unusual, perhaps even abnormal, instincts; these had now given way, it seemed, to a certain gray and restrained normality. Only chance, he thought again, had kept him from submitting to Lino's desires; and certainly a clouded, unconscious, sensual inclination, combined with his childish greed, had contributed to his behavior, so full of coquetry and femine despostism, with the chauffeur. But now he was really a man, like so many others. He stopped in front of a store mirror and looked at himself for a long time, observing himself with objective detachment, without pleasure: yes, he was really a man like so many others, with his gray suit, his sober tie, his tall and well-proportioned figure, his dark, round face, his well-combed hair, his dark sunglasses. At the university, he recalled, he had suddenly discovered, with a kind of joy, that there were at least a thousand young men of his own age that dressed, spoke, thought, and behaved as he did. Now that figure could probably be multiplied by a million. He was a normal man, he thought with contemptuous and bitter satisfaction, beyond the shadow of a doubt, even if he couldn't say how it had happened.

Suddenly he remembered that he had finished his cigarettes and turned into a tobacconist's shop in the Piazza Colonna arcade. He went up to the counter and asked for his preferred brand at the same time that three other people asked for the same cigarettes, and the tobacconist slid them rapidly across the marble of the countertop toward the four hands holding out money — four identical packs, which the four hands picked up with identical gestures. Marcello noticed that he took the pack, squeezed it to see if it was fresh enough, and then ripped off the seal the same way the other three did. He even noticed that two of the three tucked the pack back into a small inner pocket in their jackets, as he did. Finally, one of the three stopped just outside the tobacconist's to light a cigarette with a silver lighter exactly like his own. These observations stirred a satisfied, almost voluptuous pleasure in him. Yes, he was the same as the others, the same as everyone. The same as the men who bought the same brand of cigarettes, with the same gestures, even the men who turned at the passage of a woman dressed in red, himself among them, to eye the quiver of her solid buttocks under the thin material of the dress. Even if, as in this last gesture, the similarity was due more to willed imitation in his case than to any real personal inclination.

A short, deformed newspaper seller came up to him, a bundle of papers in his arm, waving a copy and declaiming loudly, his face congested by the effort, some incomprehensible phrase in which the words VICTORY and SPAIN were still recognizable. Marcello bought the paper and read the headline that covered the whole top of the page attentively: once again, in the war in Spain, Franco's followers had won a victory. He was aware of reading this news with true satisfaction — one more demonstration, he thought, of his full and absolute normality. He had seen the birth of the war, from the first hypocritical headline, "What's Happening in Spain?" The war had spread, grown gigantic, become a dispute not only of arms but also of ideas. And gradually he became aware that he was following it with a singular emotion, completely divorced from any political and moral consideration (although such considerations came frequently to mind), very much like the feeling of a sports fan who roots for one football team against another. From the beginning he had wanted Franco to win, not fervently but with a sentiment both deep and tenacious, almost as if that victory would bring him confirmation of the goodness and rightness of his tastes and ideas, not only in the field of politics but also in all others. Perhaps he had desired and still desired Franco's victory for love of symmetry, like someone who is furnishing his house and takes care to collect furniture all of the same style and period. He seemed to read this symmetry in the events of the past few years, growing ever clearer and more important: first the advent of Fascism in Italy, then in Germany; then the war of Ethiopia, then the war in Spain. This progression pleased him, he wasn't sure why, maybe because it was easy to recognize a more-than-human logic in it, a recognition that gave him a sense of security and infallibility. On the other hand, he thought, folding the newspaper back up and putting it in his pocket, it couldn't be said that he was convinced of the justice of Franco's cause for reasons of politics or propaganda. This conviction had come to him out of nowhere, as it seems to come to ordinary, uneducated people: from the air, that is, as when someones says an idea is in the air. He sided with Franco the way countless other people did, common folk who knew little or nothing about Spain, uneducated people who barely read the headlines in the papers. For simpatia, he thought, giving a completely unconsidered, alogical, irrational sense to the Italian word. A simpatia that could be said only metaphorically to come from the air; there is flower pollen in the air, smoke from the houses, dust, light, not ideas. This simpatia, then, arose from deeper regions and demonstrated once more that his normality was neither superficial nor pieced together rationally and voluntarily with debatable motives and reasons, but linked to an instinctive and almost physiological condition, to a faith, that is, shared with millions of other people. He was one with the society he found himself living in, and with its people. He was not a loner, abnormal, crazy, but one of them: a brother, a citizen, a comrade; and this, after the long fear that Lino's murder would divide him from the rest of humanity, was highly consoling.

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Excerpted from The Conformist by Alberto Moravia, Tami Calliope. Copyright © 1999 R.C.S. Libri S.p.A. â" Milan. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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