conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a story about Marcello, Fascist, Lino entitled The Conformist.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Conformist (film): The film opens with Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in Paris finalizing preparations to assassinate his former college professor, Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio).\nIt frequently returns to the interior of a car driven by Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) as the two of them pursue the professor and his wife.\nThrough a series of flashbacks, we see him discussing with Italo, a blind friend, his plans to marry, his somewhat awkward attempts to join the Fascist secret police, and his visits to his morphine-addicted mother at the family's decaying villa and his unhinged father at an insane asylum.\nIn one of these flashbacks we see him as a boy during World War I, who finds himself isolated from society by his family's wealth.\nHe is socially humiliated by his schoolmates until he is rescued by chauffeur Lino (Pierre Clémenti).\nLino offers to show him a pistol and then makes sexual advances towards Marcello, which he partially responds to before grabbing the pistol and shooting wildly into the walls and into Lino, then flees from the scene of what he assumes is a murder.\nIn another flashback Marcello and his fiancee Giulia discuss the necessity of his going to confession in order for her parents to allow them to marry, even though he is an atheist.\nHe agrees, and in confession admits to the priest to having committed many sins, including his homosexual experience with Lino, the consequent murder, premarital sex, and his absence of guilt for these sins.\nMarcello admits he thinks little of his new wife but craves the normality that a traditional marriage with children will bring.\nThe priest is shocked — apparently more by Marcello's homosexuality than the murder — but quickly absolves Marcello once he hears that he is currently working for the Fascist secret police, called Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism (OVRA).\nNow married, Marcello finds himself ordered to assassinate his old acquaintance and teacher, Professor Quadri, an outspoken anti-Fascist intellectual now living in exile in France.\nUsing his marriage as a convenient cover he takes Giulia on their honeymoon to Paris where he can carry out the mission.\nWhile visiting Quadri he falls in love with Anna - the professor's young wife - and actively pursues her.\nAlthough it becomes clear that she and her husband are aware of Marcello's Fascist sympathies and the danger he presents to them, she seems to accept his advances, as well as forming a close attachment to Giulia toward whom she appears to make sexual advances as well, possibly for Marcello's benefit.\nGiulia and Anna dress extravagantly and go to a dance hall with their husbands where Marcello's commitment to the Fascists is tested by Quadri.\nManganiello is also at the dance hall, having been following Marcello for some time and being doubtful of his intentions.\nMarcello returns the gun that he has been given and secretly gives Manganiello the location of Quadri's country house where the couple plan to go the following day.\nEven though Marcello has warned Anna not to go to the country with her husband and has apparently persuaded her that she should leave her husband and stay with him she does make the car journey.\nOn a deserted woodland road Fascist agents conspire to stop Quadri's car with a false accident scene.\nWhen he attempts to help an apparently stricken driver he is attacked and stabbed to death by several men who appear from the woods.\nAnna sees her husband being murdered, and realising the danger to herself runs to a car that had been behind them for help.\nWhen Anna sees that the passenger in the rear of the car is Marcello, she begins to scream uncontrollably, then runs off into the woods.\nMarcello merely watches without emotion as she is pursued through the woods and finally shot to death.\nThe ending of the film takes place in 1943 during the fall of Benito Mussolini and the fascist dictatorship, Marcello now has a small child and is apparently settled in a conventional lifestyle.\nHe is called by Italo, his blind friend and former Fascist, and asked to meet on the streets.\nWhile walking with Italo, they overhear a conversation between two men and Marcello recognizes one of them as Lino, who attempted to seduce him when he was a boy.\nMarcello publicly denounces Lino as a homosexual, Fascist, and for participating in the murder of Professor Quadri and his wife.\nWhile in this frenzy, he also denounces his friend Italo.\nAs a partisan political crowd sweeps past, taking Italo with them, Marcello is left alone, remaining behind and separate from the passing crowd of the new movement, and having spurned his former friend.\nHe sits near a small fire and stares intently behind him at the young man Lino was previously talking to.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a story about Marcello, Marcello's, Giulia entitled The Conformist.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Conformist: In the prologue, the reader witnesses numerous formative events from a short period in Marcello's childhood.\nIn the first, Marcello coldly kills several lizards in the yard between his home and the home of his neighbor and friend, Roberto.\nHe tries to coax Roberto into offering approval of this behavior, and when Roberto doesn't comply, they fight and Roberto leaves.\nMarcello later obtains a slingshot and fires a few stones through the ivy that covers the fence around Roberto's family's house, only to find that he has killed their family cat instead of Roberto.\nMarcello is mortified not so much by his actions but by what he perceives as the abnormality of his sentiments.\nMarcello also witnesses a fight between his parents that is later revealed to mark the beginning of his father's decline into mental illness.\nMarcello's mother and housemaid discover that his father has vandalized a photograph of Marcello and his mother by poking holes through their eyes and drawing streaks of blood on their faces.\nHis father ultimately chases his mother around the house and attacks her in the bedroom, leaving Marcello torn between whether to rescue his mother or aid his father.\nIt is revealed that Marcello's father often physically abuses the boy.\nThe final section of the prologue covers Marcello's torment at the hands of his classmates, who use his somewhat effeminate appearance to question his gender.\nOne day, five classmates follow Marcello home from school and try to force him to wear a skirt, but their attack is interrupted by a chauffeur who happens on the scene and offers to drive Marcello home.\nEn route, the chauffeur appears to proposition Marcello, offering him a pistol in exchange for unspecified actions.\nThe chauffeur, who reveals himself to be a former priest de-frocked for indecent behavior, ultimately stops himself before initiating any actions with Marcello and begs the boy to ignore him if he tries to speak to him again.\nMarcello doesn't fully understand what is happening, and his desire for the pistol leads him to go with the chauffeur again a few days later.\nThis time, the chauffeur, named Lino, locks himself in the room with Marcello and tells the boy that he won't be able to escape the (still unspoken) abuse to come.\nDuring the struggle, Lino's gun comes loose and Marcello grabs it.\nWhen Lino tells Marcello to shoot him, he complies and flees out the window.\nPart I opens with Marcello, now a state employee of the Fascist government, looking through old newspaper clippings for information on the incident with Lino.\nHe ultimately finds an obituary that blames the death on an accident during the cleaning of the gun.\nWhile Marcello does not feel true remorse, he does seek some absolution for this incident throughout the novel.\nA colleague of Marcello's named Orlando asks Marcello to participate in a mission to Paris.\nA former professor of Marcello's, named Quadri, is now an anti-fascist agitator, and the Italian government would like to infiltrate his organization.\nMarcello is also due to be married shortly to a woman named Giulia, and offers to take his honeymoon in Paris so that his presence there would not be suspicious to Quadri.\nMarcello also takes confession, despite his apparent atheism, as a prelude to the Catholic wedding his wife expects.\nHe confesses to murdering Lino, and the priest indicates that he can seek absolution if he feels true remorse for his actions – an emotion that Marcello does not appear capable of feeling.\nThe section closes in the days leading up to Marcello's wedding, and we see his mother-in-law lavishing praise upon him, in stark contrast to his mother, who now lives alone in squalor.\nHis father has been in an asylum for six years and suffers from the delusion that he is one of Mussolini's top aides.\nOn the way to see his father, Marcello's mother gives him a wedding present but indicates that she won't be attending the ceremony.\nMarcello and his mother make their monthly visit to his father, who neither recognizes them nor even acknowledges their presence.\nPart II covers the honeymoon and the odd interpersonal relationships that unfold between Marcello, Giulia, Quadri, and Quadri's voluptuous young wife, Lina.\nEn route to Paris, Marcello makes a scheduled stop at a brothel in a small, unnamed town in France, where he is to meet Agent Orlando for further instructions.\nAt the brothel, Marcello is mistaken for a client, causing him some embarrassment before Orlando arrives to tell him that the new plan is to kill Quadri.\nMarcello needs simply to confirm Quadri's identity to Orlando to fulfill his duties.\nAs he is leaving, Marcello realizes he has forgotten his hat, but when he goes to retrieve it, he finds Orlando with his arm around a prostitute to whom Marcello feels a strange attraction.\nMarcello experiences the same feeling when he and Giulia head to Quadri's apartment, as Lina reminds him in some ways of that prostitute, and Marcello tells himself that he is in love with Lina despite her apparent dislike for him.\nLina allows Marcello to begin to seduce her, but always keeps him at arm's length, even telling him that she and Quadri are aware that he is a spy there in service of the Italian government.\nWhile Lina and Giulia head out shopping, Marcello is accosted by an old man who first mistakes him for a beggar, and then mistakes him for a homosexual or perhaps a prostitute, revisiting the humiliation of the incident with Lino on Marcello.\nWhen the old man refuses to take Marcello back to his hotel, Marcello pulls his gun and demands to be let out of the vehicle.\nMarcello's feelings for Lina intensify alongside a growing contempt for her when he sees her attempting to seduce Giulia and realizes that her interest in him is merely for show.\nLina's pursuit of Giulia leads to an argument in a nightclub where Giulia tells Lina that she is not a lesbian and has no interest in an affair.\nAt a dinner, Quadri asks Marcello to post a letter for him on his way back to Italy, as Quadri's activities are monitored and the letter might be intercepted otherwise.\nMarcello refuses, and Quadri takes this as a sign of solidarity, as Marcello could have taken the letter and turned it over to the authorities instead.\nHowever, Marcello does confirm Quadri's identity to Orlando, and on a trip to Savoy, Quadri – as well as Lina, who left with him in response to Giulia's rejection – is killed by Orlando and his men.\nThe epilogue briefly explores Marcello's conflicted responses to his role in the murders of Quadri and Lina, including his attempts to rationalize away his culpability.\nThe epilogue takes place years later, on the night that Mussolini falls from power.\nGiulia reveals that she has long suspected that Marcello was involved in the murders, but her sorrow is more for their own safety than for Marcello's victims or his duplicity.\nThe two go out for a drive and walk that evening, and while Giulia tries to convince Marcello to make love to her in a wooded area, a stranger arrives and calls to Marcello by name.\nMarcello is floored to see that it is Lino.\nMarcello shows real emotion for the first time in the story when he screams at Lino and blames him for ruining his life by taking his innocence.\nLino defends himself by arguing that the loss of innocence is inevitable and is merely a part of the human experience.\nThis speech leads Marcello to the beginning of acceptance of his own non-conformity.\nThe novel's closing passage has Marcello, Giulia, and their daughter driving to the mountains to evade possible reprisals for Marcello's role with the government.\nEn route, they drive into an air raid, and their car is strafed with bullets.\nGiulia and the daughter are killed in the first wave, and Marcello falls out of the car, wounded.\nRealizing his wife and daughter are dead, he waits for the second wave to return.\nThe novel ends with Marcello hearing the plane's approach.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: \nIn the first, Marcello coldly kills several lizards in the yard between his home and the home of his neighbor and friend, Roberto.\nHe tries to coax Roberto into offering approval of this behavior, and when Roberto doesn't comply, they fight and Roberto leaves.\nMarcello later obtains a slingshot and fires a few stones through the ivy that covers the fence around Roberto's family's house, only to find that he has killed their family cat instead of Roberto.\nMarcello is mortified not so much by his actions but by what he perceives as the abnormality of his sentiments.\nMarcello also witnesses a fight between his parents that is later revealed to mark the beginning of his father's decline into mental illness.\nMarcello's mother and housemaid discover that his father has vandalized a photograph of Marcello and his mother by poking holes through their eyes and drawing streaks of blood on their faces.\nHis father ultimately chases his mother around the house and attacks her in the bedroom, leaving Marcello torn between whether to rescue his mother or aid his father.\nIt is revealed that Marcello's father often physically abuses the boy.\nThe final section of the prologue covers Marcello's torment at the hands of his classmates, who use his somewhat effeminate appearance to question his gender.\nOne day, five classmates follow Marcello home from school and try to force him to wear a skirt, but their attack is interrupted by a chauffeur who happens on the scene and offers to drive Marcello home.\nEn route, the chauffeur appears to proposition Marcello, offering him a pistol in exchange for unspecified actions.\nThe chauffeur, who reveals himself to be a former priest de-frocked for indecent behavior, ultimately stops himself before initiating any actions with Marcello and begs the boy to ignore him if he tries to speak to him again.\nMarcello doesn't fully understand what is happening, and his desire for the pistol leads him to go with the chauffeur again a few days later.\nThis time, the chauffeur, named Lino, locks himself in the room with Marcello and tells the boy that he won't be able to escape the (still unspoken) abuse to come.\nDuring the struggle, Lino's gun comes loose and Marcello grabs it.\nWhen Lino tells Marcello to shoot him, he complies and flees out the window.\nPart I opens with Marcello, now a state employee of the Fascist government, looking through old newspaper clippings for information on the incident with Lino.\nHe ultimately finds an obituary that blames the death on an accident during the cleaning of the gun.\nWhile Marcello does not feel true remorse, he does seek some absolution for this incident throughout the novel.\nA colleague of Marcello's named Orlando asks Marcello to participate in a mission to Paris.\nA former professor of Marcello's, named Quadri, is now an anti-fascist agitator, and the Italian government would like to infiltrate his organization.\nMarcello is also due to be married shortly to a woman named Giulia, and offers to take his honeymoon in Paris so that his presence there would not be suspicious to Quadri.\nMarcello also takes confession, despite his apparent atheism, as a prelude to the Catholic wedding his wife expects.\nHe confesses to murdering Lino, and the priest indicates that he can seek absolution if he feels true remorse for his actions – an emotion that Marcello does not appear capable of feeling.\nThe section closes in the days leading up to Marcello's wedding, and we see his mother-in-law lavishing praise upon him, in stark contrast to his mother, who now lives alone in squalor.\nHis father has been in an asylum for six years and suffers from the delusion that he is one of Mussolini's top aides.\nOn the way to see his father, Marcello's mother gives him a wedding present but indicates that she won't be attending the ceremony.\nMarcello and his mother make their monthly visit to his father, who neither recognizes them nor even acknowledges their presence.\nPart II covers the honeymoon and the odd interpersonal relationships that unfold between Marcello, Giulia, Quadri, and Quadri's voluptuous young wife, Lina.\nEn route to Paris, Marcello makes a scheduled stop at a brothel in a small, unnamed town in France, where he is to meet Agent Orlando for further instructions.\nAt the brothel, Marcello is mistaken for a client, causing him some embarrassment before Orlando arrives to tell him that the new plan is to kill Quadri.\nMarcello needs simply to confirm Quadri's identity to Orlando to fulfill his duties.\nAs he is leaving, Marcello realizes he has forgotten his hat, but when he goes to retrieve it, he finds Orlando with his arm around a prostitute to whom Marcello feels a strange attraction.\nMarcello experiences the same feeling when he and Giulia head to Quadri's apartment, as Lina reminds him in some ways of that prostitute, and Marcello tells himself that he is in love with Lina despite her apparent dislike for him.\nLina allows Marcello to begin to seduce her, but always keeps him at arm's length, even telling him that she and Quadri are aware that he is a spy there in service of the Italian government.\nWhile Lina and Giulia head out shopping, Marcello is accosted by an old man who first mistakes him for a beggar, and then mistakes him for a homosexual or perhaps a prostitute, revisiting the humiliation of the incident with Lino on Marcello.\nWhen the old man refuses to take Marcello back to his hotel, Marcello pulls his gun and demands to be let out of the vehicle.\nMarcello's feelings for Lina intensify alongside a growing contempt for her when he sees her attempting to seduce Giulia and realizes that her interest in him is merely for show.\nLina's pursuit of Giulia leads to an argument in a nightclub where Giulia tells Lina that she is not a lesbian and has no interest in an affair.\nAt a dinner, Quadri asks Marcello to post a letter for him on his way back to Italy, as Quadri's activities are monitored and the letter might be intercepted otherwise.\nMarcello refuses, and Quadri takes this as a sign of solidarity, as Marcello could have taken the letter and turned it over to the authorities instead.\nHowever, Marcello does confirm Quadri's identity to Orlando, and on a trip to Savoy, Quadri – as well as Lina, who left with him in response to Giulia's rejection – is killed by Orlando and his men.\nThe epilogue briefly explores Marcello's conflicted responses to his role in the murders of Quadri and Lina, including his attempts to rationalize away his culpability.\nThe epilogue takes place years later, on the night that Mussolini falls from power.\nGiulia reveals that she has long suspected that Marcello was involved in the murders, but her sorrow is more for their own safety than for Marcello's victims or his duplicity.\nThe two go out for a drive and walk that evening, and while Giulia tries to convince Marcello to make love to her in a wooded area, a stranger arrives and calls to Marcello by name.\nMarcello is floored to see that it is Lino.\nMarcello shows real emotion for the first time in the story when he screams at Lino and blames him for ruining his life by taking his innocence.\nLino defends himself by arguing that the loss of innocence is inevitable and is merely a part of the human experience.\nThis speech leads Marcello to the beginning of acceptance of his own non-conformity.\nThe novel's closing passage has Marcello, Giulia, and their daughter driving to the mountains to evade possible reprisals for Marcello's role with the government.\nEn route, they drive into an air raid, and their car is strafed with bullets.\nGiulia and the daughter are killed in the first wave, and Marcello falls out of the car, wounded.\nRealizing his wife and daughter are dead, he waits for the second wave to return.\nThe novel ends with Marcello hearing the plane's approach.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Conformist
  Among all these objects, however, those that attracted him most, perhaps because they were forbidden him, were weapons. Not just the pretend weapons children play with — tin rifles, cap guns, wooden daggers — but real weapons, in which the idea of menace, danger, and death is not conveyed by the familiar shape alone, but is instead the whole reason for their existence. With a toy pistol one played at death without the slightest possibility of actually inflicting it, but with grownup pistols death was not only possible but imminent, like a temptation held in check by prudence alone. Marcello had held these real weapons in his hands a few times, a rifle for hunting in the country, the old pistol that his father had shown him in a drawer one day, and each time he had experienced a thrill of connection, as if his hand had finally found a natural extension in the grip of the gun.
  Marcello had many friends among the children of the neighborhood, and he soon realized that his taste for weapons had deeper and more obscure origins than their innocent military infatuations. When they played at soldiers they pretended to be pitiless and fierce, but in reality they pursued the game for love of playing, aping those cruel attitudes without any real participation. For him, instead, it was the opposite: it was cruelty and ferocity that sought an outlet in playing at soldiers and, when that was denied him, in other pastimes all attuned to his taste for destruction and death. At that time Marcello was cruel without remorse or shame, completely naturally, since cruelty provided him with the only pleasures he didn't consider insipid; and this cruelty was still childish enough so as not to awaken suspicions in himself or in others.
  He happened, for example, to go down to the garden in the heat of the day, toward the beginning of summer. It was a small but lush garden in which plants and trees flourished in wild disorder, abandoned years ago to their natural luxuriance. Marcello went down to the garden armed with a length of thin and flexible rush that he had torn from an old carpet beater in the attic; and for a while he wandered aimlessly through the playful shadows of the trees and the blazing rays of the sun, along the graveled pathways, observing the plants. He felt that his eyes were sparkling, that his whole body was opening him to a sensation of well-being that seemed to merge with the general vitality of the luxuriant, light-filled garden, and he was happy. But it was a cruel and aggressive happiness, almost yearning to measure itself in contrast to the unhappiness of others. When he saw, in the midst of a flower bed, a beautiful patch of daisies crowded with white and yellow blossoms, or a tulip, its red corolla upright on a green stem, or then again, a clump of lilies, with their tall, white, fleshy petals, Marcello would strike a single blow with his rush, making it whistle through the air like a sword. The rush sliced neatly through the flowers and leaves, which fell cleanly to earth beside the plant, leaving the stems upright and headless. Doing this, he felt a burst of vitality, the delicious satisfaction from venting an energy too long suppressed, but at the same a precise and inexplicable sentiment of power and justice. As if those plants had been guilty and he had punished them and had felt, too, that it was his right to punish them. But he was not altogether ignorant of the forbidden and blameworthy aspects of this pastime. Every once in a while, almost despite himself, he would turn a furtive glance toward the house, afraid that his mother from the living room window, or the cook from the window in the kitchen, might be observing him. And he realized that what he feared was not so much a scolding as the simple witness of acts that he himself perceived to be abnormal and mysteriously soaked in guilt.
  The passage from flowers and plants to animals was imperceptible, as it is in nature. Marcello would not have been able to say when he realized that the same pleasure he experienced when he broke the plants and beheaded the flowers revealed itself to be even more intense, more profound, when he inflicted the same violence on animals. Perhaps it was only chance that thrust him on this path, a blow from the rush that, instead of mangling a shrub, struck a lizard across the back as it dozed on a branch; or perhaps it was a mix of boredom and satiety that prompted him to seek out new targets on which to exercise his as yet unconcious cruelty. In any case, one silent afternoon when everyone in the house was sleeping, Marcello suddenly found himself, struck as if by a thunderbolt of remorse and shame, standing over a massacre of lizards. There were five or six lizards that he had managed, in various ways, to flush out onto the branches of trees or the stones of the garden wall, striking them dead with a single blow of the rush just at the moment in which, suspicious of his looming presence, they sought to escape toward some refuge. Just how he had arrived at this point he would not have been able to say, or rather, he preferred not to remember, but by now it was all over and nothing remained except the sun, blazing and impure, on the bloody corpses, filthy with dust, of the dead lizards. He was standing on the cement walkway on which the lizards lay, the rush gripped in his fist, and he still felt on his face and throughout his body the excitement that had invaded him during the slaughter, no longer pleasurably passionate as it had been then, but already colored by remorse and by shame. He was also aware that this time a particular turmoil, new to him and inexplicably physical, had been added to his usual feeling of cruelty and power; and in the midst of his shame and remorse, he experienced a confused sense of terror. As if he had discovered within himself a completely abnormal character, of which he ought to be ashamed, which he must keep secret so as to feel ashamed only before himself and not before others, and that, in consequence, would separate him forever from the society of his peers. There was no doubt, he was different from other boys of his age who, whether together or alone, did not devote themselves to pastimes such as this. What was more, he was different in a definitive way. Because the lizards were dead, there was no doubt about that, and this death and the cruel, crazed things he had done to inflict it were irreparable. He actually was those actions, as in the past he had been other actions, entirely innocent and normal.
  In this hope and distress, he waited impatiently for the twilight hour. He was just about to doze off when a long, warbling whistle reached him from the garden: it was the agreed-upon signal with which Roberto let him know he had arrived. Marcello got out of bed and, without turning on any lights, in the penumbra of sunset, walked out of his room, descended the stairs, and looked out onto the garden.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me two more paragraphs.. End with the sentence ' The carriage came to a halt and Marcello raised his eyes: at the end of a garden he could see a gray, three-story house with a black roof of slate tiles and mansard windows.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He walked down the broad, echoing staircase, crossed the threshold of the hotel, and stepped out onto the promenade. The sun, reflected from the sea in blades of sparkling light, dazzled him for a moment; he closed his eyes, and, as if called up from the darkness, the sharp odor of horse urine assailed his nostrils. He found the carriages behind the hotel in a strip of shade, three or four in a row with their drivers asleep on their boxes and the passenger seats draped in white covers. Marcello went up to the first carriage and climbed in, calling out the address, "Via dei Glicini." He saw the coachman launch a brief, meaningful look at him and then crack his whip over the horse without saying a word.
  The carriage rolled along the seashore for a good while and then entered a short street full of villas and gardens. At the end of the street the Ligurian hill rose skyward, luminous, covered in vineyards and dotted with silver olive trees, an occasional tall red house with green windows standing upright on its slopes. The street they were on led straight toward the foot of the hill; at a certain point the sidewalks and asphalt stopped, yielding to a kind of grassy path. The carriage came to a halt and Marcello raised his eyes: at the end of a garden he could see a gray, three-story house with a black roof of slate tiles and mansard windows.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Marcello looked and saw that a lot of people were running back and forth across the great razed field, waving their arms. At the same time, strange sight in the dazzling light of the summer sun, a sharp, red, almost smokeless tongue of flame licked up from one of the hangars. Then another flame burst upwards from the second roof, yet another from the third. The three fires joined and merged into one, which moved violently in all directions while clouds of black smoke drifted to earth, hiding the hangars and billowing outward. Meanwhile, all signs of life had vanished and the airfield was deserted once more.
  He speeded up; the arrow of the tachometer climbed to a hundred, a hundred and twenty kilometers. Now they were beneath the town; you could see the spiraling road, the sides of the houses, the castle. At the same time, Marcello heard the angry iron roar of the attacking airplane behind him. He could distinguish, in all the noise, the thick hail of bullets from a machine gun and understood that the plane was behind them and would soon be on top of them; the noise of its engine was in line with the road, as direct and inflexible as the road itself. Then the metallic roar was above them, deafening, just for a moment before receding into the distance.
  He felt a strong blow to the shoulder, like a punch, and then a deathly weariness. Desperate, he managed to gather his forces and stop and park the car on the edge of the road.
  The door opened and Marcello fell out. Then, dragging himself forward with his face and hands in the grass, he pulled his legs out of the car and lay on the ground near the ditch. But nobody spoke and nobody, though the door remained open, got out of the car. Just then he heard the roar of the airplane banking and turning again. He thought once more, "God, let them not be hit... they're innocent."
  And then, resigned, his mouth in the grass, he waited for the plane to return. The car with its open door was silent, and he had time to understand with a sharp sorrow that no one would get out. Finally the plane was on top of him, trailing after it, as it distanced itself in the burning sky, silence and the night.