The Conformist Read Online Free

move. All in the same moment he thought that Roberto was not there, that it wasonly a game and that, since it was only a game, he could hurl the stone; and at the same time, that Roberto was there and that he should not hurl the stone unless he wanted to kill him. Then, with instant and thoughtless decision, he pulled back the bands and let fly the stone into the heart of the leaves. Not content with this, he bent down, feverishly inserted another stone in the slingshot, shot it, put in a third stone and shot that one, too. By now he had put fears and scruples aside and no longer cared whether Roberto was there or not; he felt only a sense of hilarious and bellicose excitement. Finally, panting, having torn the foliage to shreds, he let the slingshot drop to earth and clambered up onto the garden wall. As he had foreseen and hoped, Roberto was not there. But the bars of the railing were very widely spaced, allowing him to stick his head through into the adjacent garden. Stung by he knew not what curiosity, he did so and looked down.
    On Roberto’s side of the garden there was no creeper, only a flowerbed planted with iris that ran between the wall and the graveled path. Then Marcello saw, right under his eyes between the wall and the row of white and purple iris, lying on its side, a large gray cat. An unreasoning terror took his breath away as he noted the animal’s unnatural position: lying sideways, with its paws stretched out and relaxed, its muzzle abandoned to the soil. Its fur, thick and bluish gray, appeared slightly ruffled and bristly and at the same time lifeless, like the feathers of certain dead birds he had observed a while back on the marble table of the kitchen. Now his terror increased. He jumped down, pulled out a pole supporting a rosebush, clambered back up and, stretching his arm through the bars, managed to poke the flank of the cat with the earthy tip of the pole. But the cat did not move. All of a sudden the iris on their tall green stems, with their white and purple corollas tilted forward, surrounding the motionless gray body, looked funereal, like so many flowers placed by a compassionate hand around a cadaver. He threw the pole away and, without bothering to shove the ivy back into position, leapt down to the ground.
    He felt himself prey to various terrors and his first impulse was to run and shut himself up in a closet, a shed, anywhere, actually,where there was darkness and closure, to escape from himself. He was terrified, first of all, for having killed the cat, and then, maybe even more so, for having announced this killing to his mother the night before: an incontestable sign that he was, in some fatal and mysterious way, predestined to commit acts of cruelty and death. But the terror aroused in him by the death of the cat and the meaningful premonition attached to this death were as nothing compared to the terror inspired in him by one idea — that while killing the cat he had, in reality, intended to kill Roberto. It was only by chance that the cat had died in place of his friend. A not insignificant chance, however, since it was undeniable that there had been a progression from the flowers to the lizards, from the lizards to the cat, and from the cat to the murder of Roberto, thought about and desired and, although not executed, still possible and perhaps even inevitable. So he was abnormal, he couldn’t help thinking, or rather feeling, with a vivid, physical awareness of this abnormality, an abnormal person marked by a solitary and threatening destiny, already launched on a bloody path on which no human force would be able to stop him. Full of these thoughts, he circled frantically in the small space between the house and the gate, lifting his gaze every once in a while to the windows, almost in hopes of seeing the figure of his frivolous and scatterbrained mother appear there. But by now there was nothing more she could do for him, even if she had been able to do anything to begin