The Conformist Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    “But say what you have to say … talk, damn it.”
    “I have nothing to say to you.”
    Marcello had just begun to understand that his killing the cat was not the reason for his parent’s bad mood when suddenly everything seemed to fall apart. His father repeated one more time: “Talk, goddamnit,” his mother shrugged her shoulders in answer; then his father grabbed a wineglass in front of his plate and, shouting loudly, “Are you going to talk or not?” he brought it down violently on the table. The glass broke, his father raised his wounded hand to his mouth with a curse, his frightened mother stood up from the table and rushed toward the door. His father was sucking the blood from his hand with an almost voluptuous pleasure, arching his eyebrows over it; but seeing his wife start to leave, he interrupted his sucking to shout at her: “I forbid you to go, do you hear me?” As an answer they heard the noise of the door being violently banged shut. His father got up, too, and sprang toward the door. Excited by the violence of the scene, Marcello followed him.
    His father had already started up the stairs, one hand on the railing, without losing his composure or even, apparently, hurrying; but Marcello, coming behind him, saw that he was climbing the steps two by two, almost flying in silence toward the landing as if he were an ogre from a fairytale clad in seven-league boots. And Marcello didn’t doubt for a moment that this calculated and menacing ascent