The Conformist Read Online Free PDF Page B

just for you.”
    Marcello, without saying a word, left the cat, sat down, and began to eat the cake. The maid said, “Well, I just don’t understand certain things … they have so much time during the day, they have so much space in the house, and instead they have to quarrel right at the table in front of the child.”
    The cook replied sententiously, “If you don’t want to take care of your children, it’s better not to bring them into the world.”
    The maid observed, after a brief silence, “He could be her father at his age … it’s obvious they don’t get along.…”
    “If it was only a matter of that.…” said the cook, casting a meaningful look in Marcello’s direction.
    “And what’s more,” continued the maid, “in my opinion that man’s not normal.…”
    At this word Marcello pricked up his ears, though he continuedslowly eating his cake.
    “She thinks so, too, just like me,” the maid went on, “Do you know what she said to me the other day when I was undressing her for bed? Giacomina, one day or another my husband will kill me. I said to her: But, Signora, why are you waiting around for him to do it? And she.…”
    “Ssshhh.…” interrupted the cook, indicating Marcello. The maid understood and asked Marcello, “Where are Papà and Mamma?”
    “Upstairs in the bedroom,” replied Marcello. And then all of a sudden, as if driven by an irresistible impulse: “It’s really true that Papà isn’t normal. Do you know what he did?”
    “No, what?”
    “He killed a cat,” said Marcello.
    “A cat? How?”
    “With my slingshot.… I saw him in the garden, he was following a gray cat that was walking on the wall.… Then he picked up a stone and aimed at the cat and hit him in the eye. The cat fell into Robertino’s garden and then I went to see and I saw it was dead.”
    As he went on talking he was carried away, without, however, abandoning the tone of an innocent, who with unconscious and candid naivtè recounts some crime he has witnessed.
    “Just think,” said the maid, clasping her hands, “a cat … a man of that age, a gentleman, taking his son’s slingshot and murdering a cat … it stands to reason he’s abnormal.”
    “Who’s wicked to beasts is wicked to Christians, too,” said the cook. “It starts with a cat and he ends up killing a man.”
    “Why?” asked Marcello suddenly, lifting his eyes from the plate.
    “Well, that’s what they say,” replied the cook, giving him a caress. “Even though,” she added, turning to the maid, “it’s not always true.… That man who murdered all those people in Pistoia.… I read it in the newspaper … you know what he’s doing now, in prison? He’s raising a canary.”
    The cake was finished. Marcello got up and left the kitchen.

2
    D URING THE SUMMER , at the seashore, the terror of that destiny so simply expressed by the cook, “It starts with a cat and he ends up killing a man,” gradually vanished from Marcello’s mind. He still thought often about that kind of inscrutable, pitiless mechanism with which his life had seemed enmeshed for a few days; but with ever less fear, taking it more as an alarm signal than the conviction without appeal that he had thought it to be for some time. The days passed happily, ablaze with sunshine, intoxicated by seasalt, filled with amusements and discoveries; and with every day that passed Marcello felt he was winning a victory, not so much over himself, as he had never felt guilty in any direct and voluntary way, as over the obscure, maleficent, astute, and extraneous force, colored completely with the dark shades of fatality and misfortune, that had carried him almost despite himself from the extermination of the flowers to the massacre of the lizards and from this to the attempt to murder Roberto. He felt this force as everpresent and menacing though no longer impending; but ashappens sometimes in nightmares when, terrified by the presence of a monster, we hope