The Conformist by Alberto Moravia Page A

field of politics but also in all others. Perhaps he had desired and still desired Franco’s victory for love of symmetry, like someone who is furnishing his house and takes care to collect furniture all of the same style and period. He seemed to read this symmetry in the events of the past few years, growing ever clearer and more important: first the advent of Fascism in Italy, then in Germany; then the war of Ethiopia, then the war in Spain. This progression pleased him, he wasn’t sure why, maybe because it was easy to recognize a more-than-human logic in it, a recognition that gave him a sense of security and infallibility. On the other hand, he thought, folding the newspaper back up and putting it in his pocket, it couldn’t be said that he was convinced of the justice of Franco’s cause for reasons of politics or propaganda. This conviction had come to him out of nowhere, as it seems to come to ordinary, uneducated people: from the air, that is, as when someones says an idea is in the air. He sided with Franco the way countless otherpeople did, common folk who knew little or nothing about Spain, uneducated people who barely read the headlines in the papers. For
simpatia
, he thought, giving a completely unconsidered, alogical, irrational sense to the Italian word. A
simpatia
that could be said only metaphorically to come from the air; there is flower pollen in the air, smoke from the houses, dust, light, not ideas. This
simpatia
, then, arose from deeper regions and demonstrated once more that his normality was neither superficial nor pieced together rationally and voluntarily with debatable motives and reasons, but linked to an instinctive and almost physiological condition, to a faith, that is, shared with millions of other people. He was one with the society he found himself living in, and with its people. He was not a loner, abnormal, crazy, but one of them: a brother, a citizen, a comrade; and this, after the long fear that Lino’s murder would divide him from the rest of humanity, was highly consoling.
    Franco or someone else, he thought; in the long run it mattered very little who, as long as there was a link, a bridge, a sign of connection and communion. But the fact that it was Franco and not someone else showed that, aside from being an indication of communion and solidarity, his emotional participation in the Spanish war was right, was real. What else could the truth be, in fact, if not that which was evident to everyone, believed by everyone, held irrefutable? Thus the chain was unbroken, all its links well soldered by his
simpatia
, felt before any reflection, to the knowledge that this feeling was shared by millions of other people in just the same way; from this knowledge to the conviction of being in the right; from the conviction of being in the right to action. Because, he thought, possession of the truth not only permitted action but demanded it. It was like a confirmation he must offer to himself and others of his own normality, which must be continually deepened, reaffirmed, and demonstrated lest it lose reality.
    By this time he had arrived. The main entrance to the ministry yawned wide on the other side of the street, beyond a double row of moving cars and buses. He waited for a moment and then struck out in the wake of a big black automobile that was headedright to the entrance. He went in behind the car, told the usher the name of the official with whom he wished to speak, and then sat down in the waiting room, almost glad to be waiting like the others, among the others. He did not feel rushed or impatient or intolerant of the order and etiquette of the ministry. On the contrary, its order and etiquette pleased him, seemed to him to be signs of a vaster and more generalized order and etiquette to which he gladly adapted. He felt entirely calm and cold; if anything — but this was not new to him, either — a little sad. It was a mysterious sorrow, which by this time he considered