Persecution (9781609458744) (17 page)

Was it that sense of shared intimacy, triggered by an allusion to two French writers (Camilla's France, or, rather, freedom, the imagined world against the experienced, the fantastic universe into which she withdrew in order to escape from the vulgar world of her parents), that impelled Camilla, on the fourth day, to write to him? Or was it the mounting sensation of promiscuity and violation that evidently Leo was not the only one, in that room, to perceive?

It's what Leo is now asking himself and can't answer.

Not bad for only the third day in the mountains, he thinks, with the crumb of irony that remains to him. But was it really like that? Or is this a classic retrospective distortion? What do they call it? Hindsight? Maybe Leo simply needs to remember the third day like that. He needs to dramatize it. To give it depth through pathos. Just because if he didn't remember it like that all this would not make sense. Only by overinterpreting can Leo convince himself that things could not have gone otherwise. That he would not have been able to modify them in any way. That this is his story, period. And set his mind at rest.

Probably if things had gone differently that third day it would not have persisted so obstinately in memory. Nor would it have become such an obsessive object of study. And perhaps he now would not remember it with the sacredness that is conceded to milestones. Or really he would not remember it at all. In other words, if that first letter had never arrived, if Camilla, impelled by who knows what, had not written to him, Leo would not now, seven months later, be here analyzing the third day in such minute detail.

Besides, other things had happened on that unforgettable third day which could have led her to the insane gesture full of inappropriate initiative. The letter, I mean.

In the end Fili and Samuel, because the snow began falling more thickly, had in fact returned earlier than usual, to be precise five minutes after Rachel, who had likewise returned early. Seeing the Pontecorvo brothers enter, transformed by the circumstances into a pair of walking snowmen, Leo had felt a sudden relief.

The five minutes spent alone with his wife and that girl hadn't been a big deal.

Rachel was put out by the fact that Camilla, seeing her come in loaded down with packages, hadn't gone to meet her, but sat there with her nose in a book. Leo knew how annoyed Rachel was also by the fact that, since they'd been there, Camilla had never once offered to help, not even to set the table. If she had offered, she would certainly have been refused. But that Camilla had not even once made the gesture Rachel found intolerable.

It was one of the small rules of behavior that Rachel had learned in her modest family and from which she never deviated. In the place where she came from, work was the only, the unique, value. It was what gave dignity to people's lives. Thus, whenever a carpenter, for example, showed up in the early afternoon at the Pontecorvo house to put up a bookshelf and brought with him a son or an adolescent apprentice, Rachel would rush breathlessly into the boys' room, where, after lunch, they were camping out on the bed reading comics or watching TV, and order them, “Come on, get up, the carpenter and his helper are here.”

As if they, too, were supposed to help. It would be terrible if the carpenter or, especially, his helper were to see her sons lolling in dissolute idleness. How shameful! It was better if they appeared pointlessly active rather than busily playing. They should be on their feet, at least. If for no other reason than respect for that boy, their contemporary, who was working. It was for analogous reasons that when, just to give another example, the upholsterer came to take away two heavy divans to reupholster, Rachel, during the journey from the living room to the van parked in the driveway, made her muscles available to help (in reality hindering) the potbellied brute the upholsterer had brought with him to help out.

For Rachel Pontecorvo it was better to present an unrealistic idea of yourself as a worker or a pain in the neck than to give the impression of the idle chatelaine who watches others work. This was the work ethic inculcated in her by that Stakhanovite father from whom she had in no way succeeded in freeing herself. Inevitable, then, that Camilla's insolent immobility seriously annoyed her. But what could she do?

(All right, come on, Rachel, tell us what you don't like about this Camilla. What it is that oppresses you. Vent all your discontent. Don't go on hiding. Don't be a hypocrite. Don't go on elaborating practical reasons, or reasons of principle. Explain what is intolerable to you. Explain once and for all that if at first it was sweet, touching, even moving to see your little Samuel cooing like a dove in love, as time passed the thing began to worry you. And now, in spite of the pair's tender age, the whole business is assuming dangerous and unacceptable proportions. Explain to everyone why your inner sirens have been blaring madly for weeks. Admit, if you have the courage, what is wrong with that girl. And what will always be wrong. Confess that, in spite of the irresponsible tolerance of your husband, the fact that Camilla isn't Jewish is a problem. An insurmountable obstacle. For God's sake, spit it out, tell it all: you didn't bring two fine Jewish boys into the world to feed them to the first shiksa who comes along!)

Filippo and Semi's early return from the slopes helped to relieve the tension Leo felt, crushed between the two women (one a woman in miniature but it comes to the same thing), both in full temperamental turmoil.

By the mere act of re-entry, Filippo and Semi gave their mother the opportunity to do her female five minutes of venting. All the orders she hadn't dared address to Camilla she was now taking out on Filippo and Samuel. It was all do this and do that. And, in response, nothing but leave-us-alone and let-it-go, Mamma.

 

A few hours later, at the dinner table, the boys took care to finish exasperating their mother and again offered their father the chance to distinguish himself heroically in the eyes of Camilla.

 

Filippo and Semi were in the state of excitement that often drove them to a form of demented, exclusive camaraderie, inducing in others the suspicion that they weren't intelligent enough (or not stupid enough?), or in any case not competent enough, to participate in an esoteric conversation between initiates. It was a complicity that in a moment could become, for that very reason, irritating and unpleasant.

The truth is that their coded language was the most visible and least attractive aspect of the symbiosis between Filippo and Semi. It made use of an infinite series of materials, whose bibliography, if someone had really been interested in compiling it, would have been pointlessly tortuous: movies above all, but also phrases of Leo's or Rachel's transfigured by time and by the thousand occasions and most disparate contexts in which Filippo and Semi had repeated them; expressions typical of superheroes from cartoons or animated cartoons on TV; some grammatical howler produced by the uneducated assistant in the after-school program; an especially clever vulgarity formulated by a schoolmate or the judo teacher.

That was their papier-mâché world. A parallel universe consisting of an irrepressible and utterly private chatter, in which it was as easy for them to indulge as it was difficult, once inside, to abandon it. A game whose preferred victim was Rachel. Who, struggling to comprehend, asked her husband, “Do you know what they're saying? I can't understand them!”

“Forget it, they're just two idiots talking nonsense!”

Their mother's lack of comprehension only increased the boys' hilarity. Then Filippo would ask her, “How could a stupid woman like you have given birth to two rad guys like us?” And Semi appeared both proud of and amused by his brother's audacity.

Well, that evening Filippo and Semi were in top form, and especially obnoxious, and there was nothing the others could say that did not inspire them to some new, incomprehensible joke. In particular the doomed targets were Rachel and Camilla (with their father they didn't dare).

Leo had already observed how Semi's behavior toward his girlfriend changed in relation to his brother. In Filippo's absence, Semi behaved toward Camilla in the clumsy, cloying manner that he had demonstrated the night when, the preceding spring, he had introduced her to his parents, during that absurd dinner when Leo and Rachel had had to endure candlelight and so many other sickening things . . . But here, in Filippo's presence, Semi's behavior toward Camilla underwent a radical transformation. He became insolent. Sometimes, with real rudeness, he didn't answer the questions she asked him. Or he withdrew when she approached him. It was as if Semi wanted to prove to Filippo that, in spite of that girl's arrival in his life, nothing between them had changed. He was still on his older brother's side. And their fraternal bond would certainly not be called into question by despicably giving in to a love affair.

Another of the techniques used by Samuel to demonstrate to his brother the degree of his loyalty to the cause was to gang up on Camilla with him. Like that evening, when, after refusing to sit next to her at the table, he started looking at her derisively, which seemed to provoke in the girl, who was usually so enigmatic and indifferent, bursts of dejection. It was as if her childish eyes wouldn't stop asking, What did I do to you? Why are you treating me like this? Why are you a different person when your brother is around? What is it that I don't understand?

The sense of exclusion was transformed into a fairly pathetic attempt, not at all natural to her, to join the conversation. Leo had noticed how every so often Camilla tried to get Samuel's attention by inserting some completely banal comment. It was a suicidal strategy, to judge from Semi's behavior, as he became increasingly contemptuous. Suddenly, perhaps in a desperate attempt to be noticed, or maybe trying deliberately to make fun of him, she had said to Samuel, “You're all red, you got too much sun today!” Leo naturally thought back to the embarrassing tan of Camilla's parents. And he deduced that the remark hid a not too veiled reproach.

Semi gave no weight to that reproach, which provided him, instead, with the opportunity to make fun of her in a way that would certainly amuse his brother.

“Too much sun, too little sun. Too much water, too little water . . . ” Semi shouted triumphantly.

And Leo recognized a line from
Bianca
, a film of Nanni Moretti, which his sons had liked enormously and which had increased their vast repertory by a dozen more quotations.

Camilla was frozen by yet another joke at her expense, while Filippo laughed hysterically. Camilla's sad expression and the boys' boorish, inappropriate insistence on firing off their incomprehensible nonsense caused Rachel to ask her husband, with a light pressure on his hand, to intervene actively. Rachel knew how much the boys respected their father, just as she knew the physical charisma (bordering on fear) that Leo's slender figure exercised over Filippo and (especially) Samuel. Leo, no less irritated than Rachel, scarcely needed to be asked:

“Cut it out, God damn it!”

Then he waited for his sons to be quiet to lend greater strength to his scolding:

“Do you think it's polite to behave like this? Don't you hear how unfunny it is? Don't you find it pathetic that you are the only ones laughing at your jokes and allusions? Haven't you had enough of all this self-reference? I can assure you—and I would ask you to trust me—that you are not witty, you are not polite, you are simply irritating, to anyone looking at you and anyone listening. You're acting like idiots. Not to mention that you're repetitious and boring. Even Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Nanni Moretti jokes—all of which, for the record, I taught you to appreciate—repeated three hundred times become tiresome. Now stop it. Understand?”

And then, but in a tone that had moved on from intolerant to become definitely Biblical:

“But above all I forbid you to make fun of your mother, who refuses to understand you, because she is too intelligent and too sensible. And I order you not to exclude our guest from the conversation.”

The great savior. The hero of women! So he must have appeared to Camilla. He who arrived at the right moment to restore order and chivalry. His words had an extraordinary effect. Filippo and Semi giggled nervously. His lecture had silenced and mortified them. A sudden change that Camilla could observe more clearly right after dinner, when Filippo went out with his mother to the village to get a strudel and ice cream and Samuel returned to treating her with the usual sappy attention.

And now Leo recalls the sense of peace he felt that evening, after dinner, when he said good night to Samuel and Camilla, sprawled on the floor in front of the fire. He recalls his own voice saying, “Don't lie so close to the fire!” Just as he recalls Samuel's cries: “Papa, come, please come, Camilla's not breathing! Please, Papa, come here . . . ” That is the cry for help that Leo heard a few moments after going to his room and lying down on the bed to read. He recalls his sprint to the living room. And he found Samuel, terrified, bending over Camilla, her body contorted by retching and by her gasping attempts to cough, in search of the drop of air that her body needed more every second. Her bluish face, her hands, literally livid, at her throat.

And suddenly all the timidity that Leo had until then felt toward that girl, who inexplicably embarrassed him, disappeared. In the moments following the violent asthma attack (caused perhaps by the smoke from the fire or perhaps by nerv­ousness), Leo Pontecorvo, the great pediatric oncologist, used to managing much more complex emergencies, displayed an exemplary calm and sang-froid.

He opened the door of the closet where Rachel had placed the first-aid bag. He took the inhaler, the syringes, and the vials. He approached Camilla. He pushed Samuel aside with a gesture of his arm, and performed all the necessary actions. First he made her lean against the wall, then, almost violently, he stuck the inhaler in her mouth, flooding her with adrenalin, and finally, since that first intervention seemed to have resolved the problem only partially, he took the vial and the syringe and—with what manly efficacy!—injected into the girl's veins that diaphanous liquid.