The Conformist (27 page)

“Would you have stayed in France?”

“Yes, maybe.”

“And your career? Would you have thrown up your career?”

“Without you it wouldn’t have made sense anymore,” he explained calmly. “I do what I do because you’re here.”

“But what would you have done, then?” She seemed to feel an almost cruel pleasure at imagining him alone, without her.

“Oh, I would have done what anyone does who abandons his own country and profession for this sort of reason … I would have adapted to a job of some kind: bus boy, sailer, chauffeur … or I would have enlisted in the Foreign Legion … But why does it matter to you so much to know?”

“Just because … just talking … the Foreign Legion? Under another name?”

“Probably.”

“Where is the Foreign Legion based?”

“In Morocco, I think. And in other places, too.”

“In Morocco … and instead I stayed here,” she murmured, wrapping herself around him with a kind of greedy, jealous strength.

A silence followed; Giulia stopped moving, and when Marcello looked at her, he saw that she had closed her eyes and appeared to be asleep. Then he, too, closed his eyes, hoping to drowse off. But he wasn’t able to go to sleep, although he felt prostrated by a deathly weariness and torpor. He experienced a deep and sorrowful sensation, as if in complete rebellion against his own being; and a strange analogy came to his mind.

He was a wire, none other than a human wire, through which a
terrible current of energy was flowing continuously, which was not up to him to refuse or accept. A wire like those high-tension wires attached to poles that say: Danger of Death. He was nothing but one of those conducting wires; and sometimes the current hummed through his body without bothering him, actually infusing him with greater energy instead. But at other times — like now, for instance — it felt too strong to him, too intense, and he wanted not to be a taut and vibrating wire but to be pulled down and abandoned to the rust on some trash heap, at the bottom of some office courtyard. And anyway, why was
he
the one who had to endure transmitting the current, while so many people were not even brushed by it? And again, why did the current never interrupt itself, why did it never cease, even for a single moment, to flow through him? The comparison split and divided, branching off into questions without answers; and meanwhile his willful, melancholy torpor kept growing, swirling into his mind like fog, obscuring the mirror of his consciousness. Finally he drowsed off, and it seemed to him that sleep had interrupted the current in some way, and that for once he was really a length of rusty wire, thrown into a corner with the rest of the trash. But at that same moment he felt a hand touching his arm; he jerked awake and sat up to see Giulia standing by the bed, completely dressed, with her hat in her hand. She said, in a low voice, “Are you sleeping? Don’t we have to visit Quadri?”

Marcello pulled himself up with an effort and stared into the half-light of the room for a moment, mentally translating, “Don’t we have to murder Quadri?”

Then he asked, almost as if he were joking, “What if we didn’t go to Quadri’s? What if we took a nice nap instead?”

It was an important question, he thought, looking up at Giulia from under his lashes; and maybe it wasn’t too late to throw everything to the wind. He saw her consider it uncertainly, almost unhappy, it seemed, that he was proposing to stay in the hotel now that she had prepared to go out.

Then she said, “But you’ve already slept … almost an hour. Besides, didn’t you tell me that this visit to Quadri was important for your career?”

Marcello was silent for a moment and then replied, “Yes, it’s true, it’s very important.”

“Well, then,” she said gaily, leaning down to give him a kiss on the forehead, “what are you doing thinking about it then? Get a move on, get up and get dressed, don’t be a lazybones.”

“But I’d rather not go there,” said Marcello, pretending to yawn. “I’d like to just sleep,” he added, and this time he felt he was sincere. “Sleep and sleep and sleep.”

“You can sleep tonight,” answered Giulia lightly, walking over to the mirror and looking at herself attentively. “You took on a responsibility, it’s too late by now to change the plans.”

She spoke with good-natured wisdom, as usual; and it was surprising, thought Marcello, and at the same time obscurely significant, that she always said the right things without knowing it. Right then the phone on the bedside table rang. Marcello, lifting himself up on one elbow, picked up the receiver and put it to his ear. It was the porter, informing him that he had reserved a sleeping car for tonight going to Rome.

“Cancel it,” said Marcello without hesitation. “The lady’s not going now.”

Giulia threw him back a glance of timid gratitude from the mirror in which she had been examining herself.

Marcello hung up the phone and said, “That’s it, then … They’ll cancel it and that way you won’t leave.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“What gets into your head?”

He got out of bed, slipped on his shoes, and went into the bathroom. While he was washing and combing his hair, he wondered what Giulia would have said if he had revealed the truth about his profession and their honeymoon to her. He felt he could safely say that not only would she not have condemned him, but in the end she would actually have approved of him, although she would probably have been frightened and perhaps would even have asked him if it was really necessary that he do what he did. Giulia was good, that went without saying, but not outside the sacred limits of intimate affection; as far as she was concerned, beyond
these limits lay a world that was obscure and confused, in which it could even happen that a bearded, hunchbacked professor might be murdered for political purposes. Agent Orlando’s wife, he concluded inside himself as he emerged from the bathroom, must feel and reason the same way.

Giulia, who was waiting for him, sitting on the bed, got up and said, “Are you mad because I didn’t let you sleep? Would you have preferred not to go to Quadri’s?”

“Not at all, you did the right thing,” answered Marcello, preceding her down the corridor. He felt refreshed now and it seemed to him that he no longer felt any sense of rebellion against his own fate. The current of energy was flowing through his body even now, but without pain or difficulty, as if through a natural channel. Outside the hotel, beside the Seine, he gazed at the gray profile of the immense city beyond the parapets, under the vast, cloudless sky. The booths of used books were lined up in front of him and the strolling passers-by stopped to glance over them. He even seemed to see the badly dressed young man, with his book under his arm, walking up the sidewalk toward Notre Dame. Or maybe it was someone else, similar in his way of dressing, his attitude, even his destiny. But he felt he was looking at him without envy, even if it was with an ice-cold, motionless sense of impotence. He was himself and the young man was the young man, and there was nothing to be done about it. A taxi passed and he stopped it with a wave of his hand and climbed in after Giulia, giving Quadri’s address.

W
HEN MARCELLO ENTERED
Quadri’s house, he was immediately struck by how different it was from the apartment in which he had visited him for the first and last time in Rome. This apartment house, situated in a modern neighborhood at the end of a winding street, and which looked, with its many rectangular balconies protruding from a smooth facade, like a big bureau with all its drawers open, had already given him the sense of a retiring and anonymous lifestyle, devoted to a kind of social camouflage; as if Quadri, establishing himself in Paris, had wished to mingle with and become lost in the undifferentiated mass of the well-to-do French bourgeoisie. Then, once he had entered the building, the difference became even greater: the residence in Rome had been old, dark, cluttered with furniture, books, and papers, dusty and neglected; but this place was bright, new, and clean, with very little furniture and not a trace of the scholarly life. They waited for some minutes in the living room, a bare, spacious room with a single group of armchairs confined to a corner
around a low table with a glass top. The only sign of taste beyond the common was a large painting hung on one of the walls, the work of a Cubist painter: a cold and decorative mixture of spheres, cubes, cylinders, and parallel lines in various colors. Of books — all those books that had struck Marcello in Rome — there was not a one. He seemed to be, he thought — looking at the wooden, wax-waxed floor, the long light curtains, the empty walls — on a modern theater stage, in a brief and elegant production whose set was designed for a drama of few characters and only a single situation. What drama? Doubtlessly his and Quadri’s; but, although the situation was known to him already, he felt inexplicably that not all the characters had revealed themselves yet. Someone was still missing, and who knows? That person’s arrival might completely change the situation itself.

Almost as if to confirm this faint presentiment, the door at the end of the living room opened and instead of Quadri, a young woman came in, probably the same woman, thought Marcello, with whom he had spoken in French on the phone. She walked toward them across the mirrorlike floor. She was tall and singularly elastic and graceful in her way of walking, dressed in a white summer dress with a flared skirt. For a moment Marcello couldn’t keep himself from staring, with a sort of furtive pleasure, at the shadowed outline of her body, whose contours were visible within the transparency of the dress; the shadow was opaque but its outlines were precise and elegant, as if she were a gymnast or a dancer. Then he raised his eyes to her face and felt sure that he had already seen her before, although he didn’t know where or when. She approached Giulia, took both her hands in her own with an almost fond familiarity, and explained to her, in correct Italian flavored with a strong French accent, that the professor was busy and would be a few more minutes. She greeted Marcello much less cordially, he thought, almost obliquely, keeping her distance; then she invited them both to sit down. While she talked with Giulia, Marcello studied her attentively, trying to pinpoint the faint memory that led him to think he had seen her before. She was tall, with large hands and feet, broad shoulders, and an
incredibly slender waist that emphasized her generous breasts and ample hips. Her long, slender neck supported a pale face innocent of rouge, young but weary, as if consumed by some worry, with a spirited, anxious, restless, intelligent expression. Where had he seen her? As if she felt observed, she suddenly turned toward him; and then he understood, from the contrast between her intense, troubled gaze and the luminous serenity of her high white forehead, where he had already met her, or rather, where he had met someone like her: in the brothel at S., when he had gone back in to retrieve his hat and had found Orlando in the company of the prostitute Luisa. To tell the truth, the similarity consisted completely in the particular shape, whiteness, and radiance of the forehead, which resembled a royal diadem in both of them; in all other respects the two women differed appreciably. The prostitute had had a wide, thin mouth, while this woman’s mouth was small, full, and tightly closed, like a tiny rose, thought Marcello, with thick, slightly wilted petals. Another difference: the whore’s hand had been womanly, smooth, and fleshy, while this one had almost a man’s hand, hard, red, and nervous. Lastly, Luisa had possessed that horrible, hoarse voice so frequently heard in women of her profession, while this woman’s voice was dry, clear, and abstract, pleasing as elegant, rational music is pleasing — a classy voice.

Marcello noticed these similarities and differences; and then, while the woman was talking with his wife, he also noticed the extreme coldness of her attitude toward him. Maybe, he thought, Quadri had informed her about his past political stance, and she would have preferred not to receive him. He wondered who she could be. Quadri, as far as he remembered, was not married; judging from her unofficial manner, she might be a secretary, or simply an admirer in the guise of a secretary. He thought back to the feeling he had experienced in the brothel at S., when he had watched the whore Luisa go upstairs followed by Orlando: an emotion of impotent rebellion, of harrowed pity. And all of a sudden he understood that that emotion had been, in reality, sensual desire masked by spiritual jealousy, which he was now feeling in its entirety, completely unmasked, for the woman sitting in
front of him. She pleased him in a disturbing, even overwhelming way that was new to him, and he wanted to please her, too; and the hostility revealed by her every gesture pained him as if he were still an adolescent.

At last he said, almost despite himself, and thinking not of Quadri but of her, “I get the impression that our visit is not to the professor’s liking … perhaps he’s too busy.”

The woman replied immediately, without looking at him, “On the contrary, my husband told me that he would be very pleased to see you. He remembers you very well … everyone who comes from Italy is welcome here. He
is
very busy, it’s true … but he especially appreciates you coming to visit … wait a minute, I’ll go see if he’s ready.”

These words were uttered with an unexpected solicitude that warmed Marcello’s heart.

When she had left, Giulia asked without showing any real curiosity, “Why do you think Professor Quadri doesn’t want to see us?”

Marcello answered calmly, “The hostile attitude of the signora made me think it.”

“How strange,” exclaimed Giulia. “She gave me the exact opposite impression. She seemed so happy to see us … as if we already knew each other. Had you already met her before?”

“No,” he replied, feeling as if he were lying, “never before today. I don’t even know who she is.”

“Isn’t she the professor’s wife?”

“I don’t know. As far as I know, Quadri’s not married … maybe she’s his secretary.”

“But she said ‘my husband,’ cried Giulia, surprised. “Where was your head? She said it just like that: ‘my husband.’ What were you thinking about?”