The Conformist by Alberto Moravia

reached the cross street. The car was there, long, black, gleaming with all its old brasses and antique body. Marcello started to go round it, and right away the door opened and Lino looked out.
    “Marcello,” he said with desperate decision, “forget what I said to you Saturday.… You’ve gone beyond the call of duty … come on, get in, Marcello.”
    Marcello had halted near the hood of the car. He took a step backwards and said coldly, without looking at the man, “I’m not coming. But not because you told me not to come on Saturday.… It’s just because I really don’t want to.”
    “Why don’t you want to?”
    “Why should I? Why should I get in the car?”
    “To give me pleasure.…”
    “But I don’t want to give you pleasure.”
    “Why not? Do I disgust you?”
    “Yes,” said Marcello, lowering his eyes and playing with the handle of the car door. He knew he was making a worried, hostile, reluctant face and he no longer understood whether he was playacting or doing it in earnest. It was certainly a play, this thing he was enacting with Lino; but if it was a play, why was he experiencing such a strong and complicated feeling, this mix of vanity, loathing, humiliation, cruelty, and spite?
    He heard Lino laugh softly and affectionately and then ask: “Why do I disgust you?”
    This time he raised his eyes and gazed in the man’s face. It was true, Lino did disgust him, he thought, but he had never asked himself why. He looked at his face, almost ascetic in its thin severity, and realized then why he didn’t like Lino: it was because, he thought, it was a double face, in which fraud had found an exact physical expression. It seemed to him, looking at it, that herecognized this fraud above all in the mouth: thin, dry, disdainful, chaste at first sight; but then, if a smile opened and turned out the lips, shining, in the exposed and inflamed inner membranes, with the mysterious saliva of desire. He hesitated, gazing at Lino, who was smiling, waiting for his answer, and then he said sincerely, “You disgust me because you have a wet mouth.”
    Lino’s smile vanished, his face darkened. “What foolishness are you inventing now?” he asked, and then, regaining control immediately, he said with joking nonchalance,” Well, Signor Marcello, do you want to get into the car?”
    “I’ll get in,” said Marcello, making up his mind at last, “on one condition.”
    “What condition?”
    “That you really give me the pistol.”
    “That’s understood … come on, get in.”
    “No, you have to give it to me now, right away,” insisted Marcello obstinately.
    “But I don’t have it here, Marcello,” the man said sincerely, “I left it in my bedroom on Saturday. Let’s go to the house now and get it.”
    “Then I’m not coming,” Marcello said decisively, in a way that surprised even him. “Good-bye.”
    He took a step forward as if to go, and this time Lino lost patience.
    “Come on, don’t act like a child!” he exclaimed. Leaning out, he grabbed Marcello by one arm and dragged him onto the seat next to his own. “Now we’re going straight to the house,” he added, “and I promise you that you’ll have the pistol.”
    Marcello, who was glad, actually, to be constrained by violence to enter the car, did not protest, but only assumed a childishly sulky expression. Lino, without wasting a motion, closed the door and turned on the engine, and the car set off.
    For a long time neither of them spoke. Lino did not appear loquacious, perhaps, thought Marcello, because he was too happy to talk; for himself, he had nothing to say. Now Lino would give him the gun and then he would go back home and the next day he would take the pistol to school and show it to Turchi. His thoughtsdid not extend beyond these simple and pleasurable expectations. His only fear was that Lino might want to cheat him in some way. In that case, he thought, he would invent something spiteful to drive Lino to