The Conformist Read Free Page A

with his parents, his father was always present. Although Marcello did not, instinctively, have much faith in his mother, he loved her; and perhaps even more than loving her, he admired her in a fond and perplexed manner, the way you might admire an older sister of singular habits and capricious character. Marcello’s mother, who had married very young, had remained morally and even physically a girl; besides which, though she was not at all intimate with her son, to whom she paid very little attention due to her numerous social obligations, she had never separated her own life from his. Thus Marcello had grown up in a continual tumult of rushed entrances and exits, of dresses tried on and thrown down, of telephone conversations as interminable as they were frivolous, of tantrums with tailors and salespeople, of quarrels with the maid, of continuous mood swings for the slightest reasons. Marcello could go into his mother’s bedroom at any moment, the curious and ignored spectator of an intimacy in which he had no part. Sometimes his mother, as if rousing herself from inertia because of some sudden remorse, would decide to devote herself to her son and would trail him behind her to a seamstress or milliner. On these occasions, constrained to sit on a stoolfor long hours while his mother tried on hats and dresses, Marcello almost missed her usual whirling indifference.
    That evening he understood right away that his mother was more rushed than usual; and in fact, before Marcello even had time to overcome his shyness, she turned her back on him and crossed the dark bedroom to the door, which had been left ajar. But Marcello did not intend to wait one more day for the judgement he needed. Pulling himself up to sit up in the bed, he called out in a loud voice: “Mamma.”
    He saw her turn round on the threshold, with an almost irritable gesture.
    “What is it, Marcello?” she asked, approaching his bed again.
    Now she was standing close to him, backlit, white and slender in her black, low-cut dress. Her pale, delicate face, crowned by black hair, was in shadow; still, Marcello could make out its hurried, irritable, and impatient expression. Nontheless, carried away by his impulse, he announced: “Mamma, I have to tell you something.”
    “Yes, Marcello, but make it quick … mamma has to go … papà is waiting.” Meanwhile she was fumbling with both hands at her neck, fiddling with the clasp of her necklace.
    Marcello wanted to disclose the slaughter of the lizards to his mother and ask her if he had done something wrong. But her hurry made him change his mind — or rather, modify the statement he had mentally prepared. Lizards suddenly seemed to him animals too small and insignificant to catch the attention of such a distracted person. Right on the spot, without knowing why, he invented a lie that enlarged his own crime. He hoped, by the enormity of his guilt, to startle to life a maternal sensitivity which, in some obscure way, he knew to be obtuse and inert. He said with a sureness that amazed him: “Mamma, I killed the cat.”
    At that moment his mother finally managed to make the two parts of the clasp come together. Her hands joined on her neck, her chin tucked to her breast, she was looking down and every once in a while beating the heel of her shoe on the floor in impatience. “Oh, yes,” she said in an uncomprehending tone, as ifemptied of attention by the effort she was making. Marcello reaffirmed, feeling insecure: “I killed it with my slingshot.”
    He saw his mother shake her head in frustration and then take her hands from her neck, holding in one of them the necklace she had been unable to close. “This damned clasp,” she said angrily. “Marcello … be a good boy … help me put on my necklace.” She was sitting on the bed at a slant, her shoulders turned toward her son, and added impatiently, “But be sure to click the clasp shut … otherwise it will come undone again.”
    As she