Free The Conformist by Alberto Moravia

instead of poking holes in the eyes, you poke holes in the chest … right around the heart … and then something happens.”
    “What happens?”
    “The person dies, or some accident happens to him … it depends.”
    “But,” stammered Marcello, “I’ve never done anything wrong to papà.”
    “And what has your mamma done to him, then?” shouted the cook indignantly. “But do you know what your father is? Crazy! And you know where he’ll end up? In Sant’Onofrio, in the madhouse! And now get up, get dressed, it’s time you went to school … I’m going to put this picture back.” She ran off, wholly happy, and Marcello was left alone.
    Feeling blank, unable to explain the incident of the photograph in any way to himself, he started to get dressed again. He had never experienced any particular feeling for his father, so that his hostility, justified or not, did not grieve him; but the cook’s words about the maleficent powers of witchcraft gave him something to think about. Not that he was superstitious and really believed that all it took to harm someone was to poke holes in the eyes of a photograph; but this madness of his father’s reawoke in him an apprehension that he imagined he had definitively put to rest. It was the terrified and powerless sense of having entered into the orbit of a disastrous destiny, which had obsessed him all summer, and which now, as if answering the call of an evil attraction when faced with that photograph stained with bloody tears, was rekindled in his soul and stronger than ever.
    What was disaster, he asked himself, what was it if not the black dot lost in the azure blue of the most serene skies that all of a sudden enlarges, becomes huge, becomes an awful, pitiless bird swooping down on its chosen one like a vulture on carrion? Or the trap that you have been warned against, that you can even see perfectly clearly, and in which, all the same, you can’t help putting your foot? Or even a curse of clumsiness, imprudence, and blindness insinuated into your gestures, your senses, your blood? This last definition, he felt, was the most appropriate one, since it traced the source of disaster to a lack of grace, and the lack of grace to an intimate, obscure, native, inscrutable fate, to which his father’s act, like a sign pointing to the entrance of a grim and fatal road, had recalled his attention. He knew that this fate required him to kill; but what frightened him most was not so much the thought of homicide as the sense of being predestined for it, whatever he might do. He was terrified, that is, by the idea that even hisawareness was ignorance — but ignorance of so particular a kind that no one would deem it such, least of all himself.
    But later, at school, with childish inconstancy, he suddenly forgot these premonitions. His desk-mate happened to be one of his tormentors, a boy by the name of Turchi, the oldest and most ignorant student in the class. He was the only one who, having taken a few boxing lessons, knew how fistfight professionally; his hard and angular face under crewcut hair, with its snub nose and thin lips, sunk down into an athlete’s sweatshirt, already seemed that of a professional boxer. Turchi understood nothing of Latin; but when the boys gathered in clusters on the streets outside of school, and he raised a gnarled hand to remove the last tiny vestige of a cigarette butt from his mouth and, wrinkling the many lines on his low forehead into a look of sufficient authority, declared: “What I say is, Colucci’s going to win the championship,” all the boys were struck dumb and full of respect. Turchi, who could on occasion demonstrate, by taking his nose between his fingers and dislocating it to one side, that he had a broken septum just like real boxers, was not only avid about boxing but also about football and any other popular and violent sport. He maintained a sarcastic attitude toward Marcello, almost sober in its brutality. It had