The Conformist Read Free

me,” the other boy began to whine, twisting and turning, “Ow … ow!”
    “Confess you’re a rabbit.”
    “No … let me go.”
    “Confess you’re a rabbit.”
    In his hand Roberto’s ear was burning, hot and sweaty; tears sprang up in the blue eyes of his victim. He stammered, “Yes, all right, I’m a rabbit,” and Marcello let him go immediately. Roberto jumped down from the gate and as he was running away, he yelled: “I’m not a rabbit … when I said that I was thinking, ‘I’m not a rabbit!’ I tricked you.” He disappeared, and his voice, tearful and mocking, was lost in the distance, beyond the groves of the garden next door.
    This exchange left Marcello with a profound sense of distress. Roberto had refused him not only solidarity, but the absolution he sought and which seemed to him to be linked to that solidarity. So he was thrust back into abnormality, but not without having first shown Roberto how much it mattered to him to step out of it, to let himself go — he was perfectly aware of this — and yield to falsehood and violence. Now, added to his shame and remorse at having killed the lizards were the shame and remorse for having lied to Roberto about the motives that had driven him to ask for his complicity and for having revealed himself by that act of anger, when he had grabbed him by the ear. The first sin was joined by a second; and there was no way he could undo either of them.
    Every so often, among these bitter reflections, he revisited in memory the massacre of the lizards, almost hoping to find it purified of all remorse, a simple fact like any other. But right away he realized that he wished the lizards had never died; and at the same time, vividly and perhaps not completely unpleasantly — but for this very reason, it was all the more repugnant — he was struck again by that sense of excitement and physical turmoil he had experienced while he was hunting; and this was so strong that it even made him doubt that he would be able to resist the temptation to repeat the slaughter in the days to come. This thought terrified him: so he was not only abnormal, but, besides being unable to suppress his abnormality, he could not even control it. At that moment he was in his room, sitting at the table in front of an open book, waiting for dinner. He rose impetuously, went to the bed, and throwing himself onto his knees on the bedside rug and joining his hands as he usually did when he recited his prayers, said aloud in a tone that seemed to him sincere: “I swear before God that I will never again touch the flowers, or the plants, or the lizards.”
    Nevertheless, the need for absolution that had driven him to seek Roberto’s complicity lived on, changed now into its opposite: a need for condemnation. While Roberto could have saved him from remorse by falling in with him, he lacked the authority to confirm a sound base for that remorse and instill order in the confusionof Marcello’s mind with an irrevocable verdict. He was a boy like himself, acceptable as an accomplice but inadequate as a judge. But Roberto, in refusing his proposal, had invoked maternal authority to support his own repugnance. Marcello thought that perhaps he, too, could appeal to his mother. Only she could condemn or absolve him and, however it went, make some sort of sense of what he had done. In reaching this decision Marcello, who knew his mother, was reasoning in abstract, as if referring to an ideal mother — what she should have been, not what she was. In reality he doubted that there would be any good outcome of his appeal. But there it was; she was the only mother he had, and besides, his impulse to turn to her was stronger than any doubt.
    Marcello waited for the moment when his mother, once he was in bed, would come into his room to tell him good-night. This was one of the few times he could manage to see her alone, just the two of them; most of the time, during meals or on the rare walks he took