The Conformist Read Online Free PDF

was provoked by his mother’s wild haste as she escaped up the stairs just ahead of him, climbing them one by one, her legs hampered by her tight skirt. “Now he’s going to kill her,” thought Marcello, following his father. When she reached the landing, his mother made a little run for her bedroom, not soswiftly, however, as to keep her husband from slipping through the crack of the door behind her. Marcello saw all this while ascending the stairs on his short child’s legs on which he could neither vault two stairs at a time like his father nor skip up them in a hurry like his mother. When he got to the landing he noticed that the din of the chase had now strangely given way to a sudden silence. The door to his mother’s bedroom was still open. Marcello, somewhat hesitantly, walked to the threshold and looked in.
    At first, in the half-light at the end of the bedroom, he saw only the two huge, filmy window curtains on either side of the wide, low bed, lifted up to the ceiling by some current of wind in the room so that they almost brushed the ceiling lamp. These silent, dazzlingly white curtains suspended in midair in the dark bedroom gave it a sense of being deserted, as if his parents in the heat of the chase had flown out of the wide-open windows into the summer night. Then in the strip of light from the hallway, which fell on the bed through the open door, he finally made out his parents. Or rather, he saw only his father, from the back, under whom his mother had vanished almost completely except for her hair, spread across the pillow, and one arm raised toward the headboard of the bed. This arm sought convulsively to grip the headboard with its hand, but to no avail; and meanwhile his father, crushing his wife’s body under his own, was making gestures with his shoulders and hands as if he wanted to strangle her. “He’s killing her,” thought Marcello with conviction, standing still on the threshold. At that moment he felt an unusual sensation of cruel and aggressive excitement, and at the same time a strong desire to interfere in the struggle — whether to give a hand to his father or to defend his mother he didn’t know. Simultaneously, he was almost encouraged by the hope of seeing his own crime cancelled out by this, so much more serious one: what, in fact, was the murder of a cat compared to that of a woman? But just when he had overcome his hesitation and was moving across the threshold, fascinated and filled with violence, his mother’s voice, not strangled at all — on the contrary, almost caressing — murmured softly, “Let me go,” while, in contradiction to this plea, the arm she had till now keptraised to find the edge of the headboard, lowered itself to circle the neck of her husband. Astonished, almost disappointed, Marcello backed out into the hallway.
    Very slowly, trying not to make any noise on the stairs, he went back down to the first floor and wandered toward the kitchen. Now he was stung once more by curiosity to know whether the cat that had jumped down from the windowsill in the dining room was the one he had feared he had killed. Pushing open the kitchen door, he found a tranquil, homey scene: the middle-aged cook and the young maid sitting down to eat at the marble table in the white kitchen, between the electric stove and the icebox. And on the floor beneath the window, the cat, absorbed in licking milk from a bowl with its rosy tongue. But, as he realized immediately with disappointment, it was not the gray cat but a completely different cat, with stripes.
    Unsure how to justify his presence in the kitchen, he went over to the cat, squatted down, and caressed its back. Without bothering to stop licking the milk, the cat began to purr. The cook got up and went over to close the door. Then she opened the icebox, took out a slice of cake on a plate, put it on the table and, pulling up a chair, said to Marcello: “Do you want a little of last night’s cake? I set it aside