Persecution (9781609458744) (2 page)

“A real earthly paradise, Mamma,” Leo insisted, pretending not to have heard his mother's remark.

And the more Leo talked the more he stumbled, and the more he stumbled the more scornful his mother's face grew, hardening into an expression of impatient disgust. An expression full of haughty distrust that said clearly, in block letters:

 

THERE IS NO PLACE IN THE WORLD

THAT CAN GUARANTEE PROTECTION,

NOT TO YOU OR ANYONE ELSE.

 

And if Leo—while the news anchor, having launched his dirty bomb into the tidy kitchen of the Pontecorvo household, began talking about the fires that were devastating the Mediterranean scrub in Sardinia—had had the lucidity to think back now on that discussion with his mother of twenty years earlier, well, maybe in retrospect he would have appreciated the tacit and irrefutable way in which that woman, who had been gone for some time now, had tried to put him on his guard. Only now would Leo—with one foot in the grave and the other stuck in an uncertain and threatening terrain—have been able to understand how right his mother had been: there is not a single corner of the universe where a human being, that self-important and ridiculous entity, can call himself safe.

For one thing, the telephone is implacable, and has no intention of stopping. There are a lot of people outside who want to talk to the Pontecorvos about what's happening to the Pontecorvos. Strange, since the only thing that those who are inside can agree on is the desire to cut off all communication with the outside, for eternity. But why—if everything contained in the broad luminous space defined by the large windows of the house, by the hedge that marks the Pontecorvos' property, by the boundary walls of the subdivision is where (and as) it should be—does the rest of the planet seem to have gone mad?

In reality, if there is one thing that has been going mad for a while, well, it's the life of the Pontecorvos. Ever since the hospital unit that Leo had set up was dragged into a scandal involving bribes, inflated bills, beds sold, patients (all young people at the end of their lives) steered into private clinics by deception and for fraudulent reasons, things have been getting steadily worse. Each time taking an unpredictably sinister and increasingly less decent turn. At a certain point there were even insinuations that the success of Leo's university career derived from his Craxian sympathies (or, to be precise, from Bettino Craxi's sympathy for him).
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Then it was the turn of an assistant, in due course removed from the university for negligence, who, out of spite, accused Leo of having lent him money at the usurious interest rate of twenty percent.

And yet all those serious charges, which are jeopardizing his career, seem so venial beside this latest infamy. Maybe because there's nothing worse than Leo playing Cyrano de Bergerac with a twelve-year-old. What disgusting letters! Full of “my little one” and “dear child”—expressions of the sort that adults use in addressing consensual partners of the same age, but which here, precisely because they are appropriate to the age and stature of the recipient, seem revolting. The extensive, unseemly excerpts from that dreadful correspondence, which will soon occupy the most high-minded pages of the most important daily papers.

It seems, Leo, that you have violated the only taboo that people can't forgive. A twelve-year-old, good God. Having sex with a twelve-year-old. Seducing the girlfriend of your son. It's not at all a matter of sex. You know very well, no one today is ruined because of a fuck. In fact, if anything a fuck is often at the origin of great fortunes. The trouble is the age of the supposedly deflowered one. Right there is the difference.

At this point every one of your qualities as a sober and civilized man will, in the light of the crime they are sticking you with, be considered a sin or an aggravating cause. Every good thing you've ever done will from now on be considered the bizarre behavior of a pervert. Because no one on the outside will seriously question the plausibility of the charge. Rather, they will choose to believe this story precisely by virtue of its implausibility. That's how things function in our world. And just because people ask nothing better than to believe the worst, everything bad that is said about an individual (especially if he has had some lucky throws of the dice in the Monopoly of life) is immediately taken as true. That's how gossip turns homicidal. And the capillaries of the social organism swell almost to the point of bursting.

On the other hand, how could you ask the world to accept the fact that none of the three stricken people who are with you in the kitchen at this moment will ever learn to forgive you?

Samuel's labored breathing. A syncopated panting that has the slightly terrifying effect on Leo that turbulence causes in the passenger with a fear of flying. Leo thinks of the poisoned meatball he has served this boy. An entire nation that, starting tomorrow, will be gossiping about how your father fucked your girl. The kind of thing you don't recover from.

The suspension in which the kitchen hangs in those long seconds is broken by the burbling of the coffeepot, anxious to announce to those present that the coffee is ready, down to the last drop, and if no one decides to turn it off it will be unable to contain itself and will explode.

“Mamma, why don't you turn off the stove? Hey, Mamma, why don't you turn it off? Shouldn't we turn it off, Mamma?”

It's the voice of Filippo. Repulsively whiny. More childish than the person it belongs to. Leo would only like Rachel to make him be quiet. And it's what Rachel does, getting up like an automaton and turning the knob of the burner. Rachel. Holy God, Rachel. It's then that Leo remembers. It's then that he tries to imagine what is whirling around in her head. And it's at this very instant that the airplane plunges down.

Leo feels that he hates her as he has never hated anything else. He blames her for everything: for being there, and for not being there enough, for doing nothing but also for doing everything, for being silent, for breathing, for having set out such an appetizing dinner, for having turned on the TV to that particular channel, for the vice she has of watching ten news shows a day, for not getting up and answering the telephone, for having produced two sons whose presence now is so unbearable to him, for not making Filippo be quiet, for not rushing to help the catatonic Samuel . . .

It was she who instilled in the boys' minds the idea that he is a great man. How can this revered god declare his own fragility? How can he do the only thing he wants to do: break down in sobs? How can he justify himself by resorting to banal excuses, presenting himself in the incongruous guise of the victim of a gigantic mistake?

Because it is a mistake, isn't it? Leo no longer knows. At this moment he is confused. But yes, a mere glance at the letters in question—that he wrote and sent to Camilla (it's true, he can't deny it)—would reveal that they are the opposite of what they seem. No, my little one, your papa did not fuck your girl. If anything it was she who screwed your daddy!

Just as a mere glance at the accusations would be enough to observe that they are not the product of dishonesty but result from a mixture of foolishness and irresponsibility. This, at least, Rachel must know. She's aware of her husband's negligence. She's been complaining about it for a lifetime, often with tenderness, even. And yet she has done it in such a way that Filippo and Samuel could not begin to imagine it. You see? It's her fault. All Rachel's fault.

 

What is Leo doing? What he knows how to do best: blame others. Shift responsibility. In essence it's the same technique (revised and corrected) that, many years before, he adopted to defend himself against his mother's scolding.

When Signora Pontecorvo annoyed him, little Leo, in response, was offended. He put on a competing scowl. Until finally his mother, worn out by the blackmailing behavior of her little bear cub, gave in. Melting in a smile of reconciliation: “Come on, sweetheart, it's nothing. What do you say we make peace?”

Only then did our strategist give proof of his magnanimity by accepting his mother's apologies. Well, Leo managed to make this scenario a classic of his married life as well.

There must have been many who wondered how a man of the charm and background of Leo Pontecorvo could have married that common little Jewess. Whose reserve might be taken for apathy, and whose desire for invisibility might be confused with insipidness. Someone will ask how that fine, slender figure of a man, romantic as a Slavic pianist (unruly hair and tapering fingers), doctor and professor whom the white jacket suits, as a tuxedo does certain orchestra conductors, could have married the tiny and, at most, pretty Rachel Spizzichino.

From the outside their relationship is so unbalanced . . . their memories (their lives!) speak such different languages. Leo's languish in the solemn spaces of an apartment with high coffered ceilings, filled with heavy inlaid furniture, like mausoleums, and equipped with electrical appliances that no one could afford in those days.

As for Rachel, although a quarter century has passed, the bedroom where she spent the first twenty-five years of her life, studying hard, with the window facing on a narrow alley in the old Ghetto, continues to give off (even in memory) the odor of boiled, refried greens intolerable to her (and even more so in memory).

And yet what divided them then is precisely what unites them today. Because this is the secret of successful marriages, of couples who are happy in spite of everything: they never cease to be charmed by what is exotic in the other.

And then who would have suspected that between them things are not as they seem? That Leo is so afraid of his wife's opinion, and, at the same time, so dependent on her, on both practical and psychological levels, that he had reproduced with her the bond that for so many years ruled his relations with a hypochondriac and overprotective mother? No one on the outside could believe that this new Signora Pontecorvo plays a role in Leo's life not too dissimilar from the one played in her time by the old Signora Pontecorvo. That the new Signora Pontecorvo inherited from the old Signora Pontecorvo (who in fact was hostile to her, hostile as only certain Jewish mothers-in-law know how to be) a type of relationship based on the blackmail practiced by a talented and capriciously fragile boy?

Thus, when Rachel is angry at her husband, he doesn't know what to do except get angry back, with a sulky expression that from year to year grows only a little more ridiculous, until she, irritated by Leo's stubborn pout, which can last indefinitely, even for weeks, puts an end to the quarrel with a remark, a caress, a deliciously diplomatic gesture like offering him a bar of white chocolate, which he loves. In short: the wife gives proof of strength by showing herself yielding, while the husband betrays weakness by remaining faithful to his sulk, leaving her to initiate (only a child could consider it humiliating) a reconciliation.

 

The crisis set off by the television, besides, was only the latest—though it would turn out to be irremediable and definitive—in a series that had punctuated the past weeks. Ever since Leo, thanks to that fine collection of accusations, had begun to suffer from insomnia and Rachel to watch over him and reassure him like a little mamma. So their life had started to change.

Just that evening, shortly before turning on the TV, Rachel had ended a quarrel begun the night before, after Flavio and Rita Albertazzi—old friends—had left the Pontecorvo house.

It wasn't the first time that something
officially
pleasant like a dinner with the Albertazzis had presented Rachel and Leo with the pretext for a quarrel. But this time the subject of the argument seemed so painful, and had left in the air such a sense of bitterness and hostility, that Rachel had felt the need to bury the hatchet before she normally would.

“I've put something on to warm up in the kitchen. Why don't you come and eat?” So she had said going down to the basement study, where her husband had spent the Sunday listening to old Ray Charles records. Leo had put some time into lining his study-refuge with all those records. The jewel of the collection was, in fact, an assortment of Ray Charles LPs (including the rarest and hardest to find), toward which Leo felt a mystic gratitude. If only because it was a voice that had always been able to comfort him when he felt depressed or when things didn't go right.

“I don't feel like it, I'm not hungry,” Leo had answered, lowering the volume of the stereo a couple of notches.

And then that little woman, counting on a sensuality you would not have attributed to her, embraced him tenderly, warmly from behind, and began to laugh and tease him.

“Come on, Pontecorvo, don't be like that, Semi is already there, Filippo is on his way . . . ”

At intimate moments she called him by his last name, the way classmates do in school. Or otherwise “professor,” a reminder of when he had been her teacher at the university. Yes, in other words, delightfully affectionate ways that for that sentimental fool were irresistible, no less than the nickname Little Bear Cub, which his mother used to call him.