The Conformist

T
HROUGHOUT HIS CHILDHOOD
, Marcello was as fascinated by objects as a magpie. Perhaps because at home his parents, more from indifference than austerity, had never thought to satisfy his desire to possess; or perhaps because other instincts, deeper and as yet obscure, took on in him the mask of greed; he was constantly assailed by furious desires for the most diverse objects. A pencil with an eraser at the tip, an illustrated book, a slingshot, a ruler, a portable rubber inkpot — any trifle could stir his soul, first to an intense and unreasoning longing for the coveted thing, then, once he possessed it, to an astonished, enchanted, unlimited satisfaction. Marcello had a room all his own in the house, where he slept and studied. Here, all the objects scattered on the table or closed up in the drawers held for him the character of things still sacred or lately deconsecrated, according to whether their acquisition was recent or long-standing. They were not, that is, similar to the other objects found in the house, but slivers of experience lived through or yet to come, bearing the whole weight
of passion and mystery. Marcello was aware, in his own way, of this singular character of his possessiveness and, while he obtained an ineffable enjoyment from it, at the same time he suffered, as if from a guilt that continually renewed itself and left him no time even to feel remorse.

Among all these objects, however, those that attracted him most, perhaps because they were forbidden him, were weapons. Not just the pretend weapons children play with — tin rifles, cap guns, wooden daggers — but real weapons, in which the idea of menace, danger, and death is not conveyed by the familiar shape alone, but is instead the whole reason for their existence. With a toy pistol one played at death without the slightest possibility of actually inflicting it, but with grownup pistols death was not only possible but imminent, like a temptation held in check by prudence alone. Marcello had held these real weapons in his hands a few times, a rifle for hunting in the country, the old pistol that his father had shown him in a drawer one day, and each time he had experienced a thrill of connection, as if his hand had finally found a natural extension in the grip of the gun.

Marcello had many friends among the children of the neighborhood, and he soon realized that his taste for weapons had deeper and more obscure origins than their innocent military infatuations. When they played at soldiers they pretended to be pitiless and fierce, but in reality they pursued the game for love of playing, aping those cruel attitudes without any real participation. For him, instead, it was the opposite: it was cruelty and ferocity that sought an outlet in playing at soldiers and, when that was denied him, in other pastimes all attuned to his taste for destruction and death. At that time Marcello was cruel without remorse or shame, completely naturally, since cruelty provided him with the only pleasures he didn’t consider insipid; and this cruelty was still childish enough so as not to awaken suspicions in himself or in others.

He happened, for example, to go down to the garden in the heat of the day, toward the beginning of summer. It was a small but lush garden in which plants and trees flourished in wild disorder, abandoned years ago to their natural luxuriance. Marcello
went down to the garden armed with a length of thin and flexible rush that he had torn from an old carpet beater in the attic; and for a while he wandered aimlessly through the playful shadows of the trees and the blazing rays of the sun, along the graveled pathways, observing the plants. He felt that his eyes were sparkling, that his whole body was opening him to a sensation of well-being that seemed to merge with the general vitality of the luxuriant, light-filled garden, and he was happy. But it was a cruel and aggressive happiness, almost yearning to measure itself in contrast to the unhappiness of others. When he saw, in the midst of a flower bed, a beautiful patch of daisies crowded with white and yellow blossoms, or a tulip, its red corolla upright on a green stem, or then again, a clump of lilies, with their tall, white, fleshy petals, Marcello would strike a single blow with his rush, making it whistle through the air like a sword. The rush sliced neatly through the flowers and leaves, which fell cleanly to earth beside the plant, leaving the stems upright and headless. Doing this, he felt a burst of vitality, the delicious satisfaction from venting an energy too long suppressed, but at the same a precise and inexplicable sentiment of power and justice. As if those plants had been guilty and he had punished them and had felt, too, that it was his right to punish them. But he was not altogether ignorant of the forbidden and blameworthy aspects of this pastime. Every once in a while, almost despite himself, he would turn a furtive glance toward the house, afraid that his mother from the living room window, or the cook from the window in the kitchen, might be observing him. And he realized that what he feared was not so much a scolding as the simple witness of acts that he himself perceived to be abnormal and mysteriously soaked in guilt.

The passage from flowers and plants to animals was imperceptible, as it is in nature. Marcello would not have been able to say when he realized that the same pleasure he experienced when he broke the plants and beheaded the flowers revealed itself to be even more intense, more profound, when he inflicted the same violence on animals. Perhaps it was only chance that thrust him on this path, a blow from the rush that, instead of mangling a shrub, struck
a lizard across the back as it dozed on a branch; or perhaps it was a mix of boredom and satiety that prompted him to seek out new targets on which to exercise his as yet unconcious cruelty. In any case, one silent afternoon when everyone in the house was sleeping, Marcello suddenly found himself, struck as if by a thunderbolt of remorse and shame, standing over a massacre of lizards. There were five or six lizards that he had managed, in various ways, to flush out onto the branches of trees or the stones of the garden wall, striking them dead with a single blow of the rush just at the moment in which, suspicious of his looming presence, they sought to escape toward some refuge. Just how he had arrived at this point he would not have been able to say, or rather, he preferred not to remember, but by now it was all over and nothing remained except the sun, blazing and impure, on the bloody corpses, filthy with dust, of the dead lizards. He was standing on the cement walkway on which the lizards lay, the rush gripped in his fist, and he still felt on his face and throughout his body the excitement that had invaded him during the slaughter, no longer pleasurably passionate as it had been then, but already colored by remorse and by shame. He was also aware that this time a particular turmoil, new to him and inexplicably physical, had been added to his usual feeling of cruelty and power; and in the midst of his shame and remorse, he experienced a confused sense of terror. As if he had discovered within himself a completely abnormal character, of which he ought to be ashamed, which he must keep secret so as to feel ashamed only before himself and not before others, and that, in consequence, would separate him forever from the society of his peers. There was no doubt, he was different from other boys of his age who, whether together or alone, did not devote themselves to pastimes such as this. What was more, he was different in a definitive way. Because the lizards were dead, there was no doubt about that, and this death and the cruel, crazed things he had done to inflict it were irreparable. He actually was those actions, as in the past he had been other actions, entirely innocent and normal.

That day, to confirm this discovery, so new and painful, of his own abnormality, Marcello wanted a confrontation with a young
friend of his, Roberto, who lived in the house next door. Towards dusk Roberto, having finished his studies, came down to the garden; and until the dinner hour, by mutual consent of their families, the two boys played together, sometimes in one of their gardens, sometimes in the other. Marcello waited impatiently for that moment throughout the long, silent afternoon, alone in his bedroom, stretched out on the bed. His parents had gone out and there was no one in the house except the cook, whose voice he heard at intervals as she sang softly to herself in the kitchen, on the ground floor. Usually in the afternoon he played or studied by himself in his room; but that day neither games nor studies attracted him; he felt incapable of doing the least thing and at the same time furiously impatient in his idleness. Alarm over the discovery he seemed to have made and the hope that this alarm would be dissipated by his imminent meeting with Roberto both paralyzed and set him on edge. If Roberto would only tell him that he, too, killed lizards and that he liked to kill them and saw no harm in killing them, it seemed to Marcello that all sense of abnormality would disappear and he would be able to look with indifference on the slaughter of the lizards, as on an incident devoid of meaning and without consequences. He could not have said why he attributed such authority to Roberto. Dimly he thought that if Roberto also did these things and in that way and with those feelings, it would mean that everyone did them; and what everyone did was not only normal but good. At the same time, these reflections were not very clear in Marcello’s mind and presented themselves more as feelings and profound impulses than as precise thoughts. But it seemed to him that he could be sure of one thing: his tranquillity of mind depended on Roberto’s answer.

In this hope and distress, he waited impatiently for the twilight hour. He was just about to doze off when a long, warbling whistle reached him from the garden: it was the agreed-upon signal with which Roberto let him know he had arrived. Marcello got out of bed and, without turning on any lights, in the penumbra of sunset, walked out of his room, descended the stairs, and looked out onto the garden.

In the dim light of the summer dusk the trees were motionless and gloomy; in the shadow of their branches it seemed already night. Floral exhalations, the odor of dust, and heat rising from the sun-warmed earth stagnated in the dense, still air. The gate that divided Marcello’s garden from Roberto’s had vanished completely beneath a gigantic ivy, so thick and deep that it resembled a wall of enveloping leaves. Marcello went straight to a corner at the bottom of the garden where the ivy and the shadows were thickest, scrambled up onto a large stone, and with a single deliberate gesture pushed aside a whole mass of the creeper. It was he who had invented that kind of doorway in the foliage of the ivy, to add a sense of secrecy and adventure to the game. Once the ivy was moved aside, the bars of the railing appeared and, between them, the thin, pale face and blond hair of his friend Roberto. Marcello stood on tiptoes on top of the stone and asked, “Has anyone seen us?”