The Conformist Read Online Free Page B

contained, and punctual violence whose purpose, it would seem, was to burden the simplest gestures with significance. Now, this evening, at the table, Marcello noticed right away that his father was strongly emphasizing, as if to call attention to them, habitual actions of no particular importance. He took up his glass, for example, drank a sip, and then returned it with a harsh bang to its place on the table; he reached for the saltcellar, took a pinch of salt from it and then put it down with another loud bang; he grabbed the bread, broke it in half, and then put it back with a third bang. As if invaded by a sudden mania for symmetry, he began to square off — still banging everything around — the silverware surrounding his plate, so that the knife, fork, and spoon met each other at right angles around the circle of his bowl. If Marcello had been less preoccupied with his own guilt he would easily have recognized that these gestures, so dense with meaningful and pathetic energy, were not directed at him but at his mother, who, in fact, at each of these blows, withdrew into her own dignity with certain condescending sighs and certain long-suffering arcs of her eyebrows. But worry blinded him, so that he did not doubt that his parents knew all; surely Roberto, rabbit that he was, had told on him. He had wanted to be punished, but now,seeing his parents so cross, he felt a sudden horror of the violence he knew his father capable of in similar circumstances. Just as his mother’s demonstrations of affection were sporadic, casual, obviously dictated more by remorse than maternal love, so his father’s severities were sudden, unjustified, excessive — provoked, one might say, more by a desire to catch up after long periods of distraction than by any instructive intent. All of a sudden, after some complaint by his mother or the cook, his father would remember that he had a son, would scream, throw a fit, and hit him. The beatings frightened Marcello most of all, because his father wore on his little finger a ring with a massive bezel that somehow, during these scenes, was always turned in to the palm of his hand, thus adding to the humiliating harshness of the slap a more penetrant pain. Marcello suspected that his father turned the bezel round on purpose, but he wasn’t sure.
    Intimidated and afraid, he began to concoct a plausible lie in furious haste: he had not killed the cat, Roberto had — and in fact, the cat was lying in Roberto’s garden, so how could he have killed it through the ivy and the garden wall? But suddenly he remembered that the night before he had announced to his mother the cat’s murder, which had then actually happened the next day; and he understood that any lie was out of the question. As distracted as she was, surely his mother would still have mentioned his confession to his father and he, no less certainly, would have established a connection between this confession and Roberto’s accusations; so there was no possibility of lying about it. At this thought, passing from one extreme to the other, he felt a renewed impulse of desire for punishment, as long as it came soon and was decisive. What kind of punishment? He remembered that Roberto had spoken one day about boarding schools, as places parents sent their wayward sons for punishment, and to his surprise he found that he longed vividly for this sort of penalty. It was an unconscious weariness of his disordered and loveless family life that expressed itself in this desire, not only causing him to yearn for what his parents would have considered a chastisement, but also leading him to trick himself and his need for it by reasoning almostslyly that he would, in this way, simultaneously pacify his own remorse and improve his condition. This thought immediately gave rise to images that should have been disheartening but were instead enticing: a severe, cold, gray building with large windows barred by gratings; icy dormitories bereft of