Persecution (9781609458744) (21 page)

And at that point he would have had to explain to Rachel that it was precisely that meek and conciliating attitude which had provided Camilla with the evidence demonstrating the existence between them of something that in reality had never existed. Expressions like: “It has to stop here”; “What's been has been”; “We have to return to our lives” sounded like an implicit admission that there had been something between them.

Well, Leo would have had to explain to Rachel that he had used that tone and had had recourse to such expressions just to satisfy her. Because he was afraid of her. Because he had seen how furious Camilla got whenever he denied that there had been something between them. Maybe—he had thought irresponsibly—if I indulge her a little, if I explain that I'm sorry, it will be easier to get her to stop bothering me. But, naturally, allowing her to extort the concession that there had been a kind of semi-relationship between them had simply confirmed to future readers of those letters that he had had a passionate love affair with a twelve-year-old, who was, besides, the girlfriend (in the way you become attached at that age) of his younger son.

The trouble is that when he realized what was happening it was already too late. That is to say that the “too late” had arrived very quickly. That girl already had the dozen letters that could trap him. Letters in which he asked her to cut off a relationship. But in which he did not dare to remind the recipient that that “relationship” had existed only in her psychopathic little head. There, and, now, on the page as well.

 

As in those fatal diseases that go into remission, simulating improvement, just before killing you, Leo had occasion to nourish an unreasonable hope, which deluded him that the situation was resolving itself.

It came out of terrible months. For the first time, on the professional front as well things were not functioning as they should. The tax authorities, through avenging angels dressed in gray, were doing an audit on the Anima Mundi, the private clinic where Leo had his pediatric office. And this had filled him with an anxiety that by now, knowing him, you will be able to imagine.

On the other side, the family idyll in which he had always found relief from his professional troubles seemed a distant memory. There was almost no evening when his torturer wasn't at dinner. That little whore had insinuated herself into their family so deviously. She was always following Rachel. It seemed that, having overcome Rachel's distrust, she had really managed to win her over. Leo knew how much Rachel had wanted a girl. There, now she had her girl.

Every night Leo hoped that there would not be a letter waiting for him. Every night he was disappointed. Now he didn't even read them. He opened them, was gripped by the nausea that madness and lying bring, skimmed a few lines, and then hid them in the drawer in his study. He locked them there and good night.

He had stopped answering her: his last, desperate move to free himself from that situation. Maybe, no longer finding replies, Camilla would get tired. Considering the number of letters he received in the days following his resolution not to reply, one might say that the only result of that punitive measure had been to infuriate her. The frequency of the letters was in itself a threat: for some time Leo had been reading only the first three lines before hiding them in the drawer in his study. Three lines were now sufficient for him to understand the general tone. And that unreasonable number of letters appeared definitely threatening.

Until the last letter arrived. So it proclaimed on the envelope:
Last Letter
. Only for that reason had Leo read it to the end. At first he had looked at it with real fear. What did it mean that it was the last letter? Had she got the message: there was nothing more to do? The madness had to stop here? Or otherwise, after that letter, she would carry out an extreme act intended to destroy the lives of them all? Leo had fiddled with envelope for several hours. Finally, at three in the morning, in the bathroom, trembling and bathed in sweat, he had opened it.

And here was yet another delirious, senseless, grotesquely romantic letter, in which Camilla, after expressing a tortured farewell, made a last request, which at first appeared to him reasonable.

The girl wished to have her letters back. Then she would disappear, along with her grief. She would leave Samuel and would vanish from their lives. She would relieve that family, which had given her so much, from the weight of her presence. The only condition she imposed was that: to have back the concrete symbol of her love and suffering. Those letters.

The thing appeared extraordinarily reasonable to him. On the fifth consecutive rereading of Camilla's last letter (last! Get it? Thank heaven), he felt he was, after so long, a free man. Free to reappropriate his life and make of it what he wanted without having to take account of that little madwoman. He read the last four words (written in French, naturally)—
Adieu, mon ange adoré
—and he couldn't help laughing. The indulgence of the triumphant.

Thus—impelled by the usual insane ingenuousness, by irreproachable candor—Leo gave back to his tormentor the only evidence of his condition as a victim of blackmail and persecution. And he had given it back without thinking that a responsible man, before restoring those letters, would at least have had the wit to photocopy them. Without thinking (in spite of the fact that the elements of the thought were all within reach, like one of those elementary puzzles for children), I was saying, without thinking that his correspondence with Camilla could one day reappear in his life, with a power of plausibility in inverse proportion to the real unfolding of the facts. Without thinking of the possibility that she (or her easily manipulated father) would deliver it to the authorities and the newspapers, in a speciously mutilated version: from that substantial file they would be able to leave out (“to protect the identity and the feelings of a criminally corrupted minor,” the noted journalist of the noted weekly who was covering the noted “Pontecorvo affair” would certainly write) all Camilla's letters, and all those in which Leo sought to free himself from the grip of that obsession.

At that point, after such purposeful mutilation, there would survive of the original correspondence only the disgusting pet phrases “my little one,” and “dear girl,” with which poor Professor Pontecorvo had tried to flatter his persecutor.

Phrases that, removed from the original context, made a really nasty impression.

 

But these are only hypotheses made (if retroactively) by the narrator of this story. Leo doesn't know anything.

Hidden in his bunker for almost three days now, like a Mafioso, locked up in the secrets of his own castle like a deposed monarch, he doesn't know, nor can he know, what is happening outside or what is about to happen (of course, he doesn't even know what's happening on the floor above). He doesn't know because no one comes to call him, or to get him. He has only the vague information given by the TV news. He has only that gratuitous and generic bomb. He can't know anything else. He doesn't want to know anything else.

He imagines that outside the walls of his catacomb is the inferno. That for him, now, the world is a hostile place. He imagines that the man accused of tax fraud, private interest in official acts, embezzlement, loan sharking will, in the light of what is announced as a new, horrible accusation, appear even more obscene.

What remains to him—while his eyes are wounded by the bloody light of sunset, and the specter of another sleepless night materializes—is the ninety square meters of the cellar. In the end, carelessness, fear, neurosis, irresponsibility have been punished. Leo should be angry. Shout his innocence to the universe.

But he's paralyzed. He wasn't brought up to resentment. He's not equipped for that type of aggressiveness, he's unfit for war. He's like those center forwards who score goals by the handful in easy games but, catapulted into difficult matches, into more violent battles, disappear into the cocoon of their own timidity. He is the classic type who succumbs.

This drives him on to lofty thoughts. He seems to understand what he always said he couldn't understand: the submissive attitude of so many of his co-religionists who, several decades ago, let themselves be loaded onto freight cars without blinking. Let themselves be carried to distant, frozen lands, to be murdered like mice. Yes, there isn't much left for him now except to be murdered. Without forgetting, however, that the three people who were closest to him, by whom he always felt protected, and whom he, in his way, loved more than anything, overwhelming them with kindness and offering them the comfort of a life of opportunity, are now his worst enemies.

 

 

B
ut, darling, I thought Rabbi Perugia taught you that a twelve-year-old cunt isn't kosher.”

An inappropriate remark addressed to a man devastated by anxiety and insomnia, his blood vessels saturated with drugs he has self-prescribed, and Leo has to repress a gesture of contempt, not to mention a desire to turn on his heels and leave. He doesn't do it because he can't do it: he's the one who asked for this appointment. He's the one who needs it.

And he doesn't run because (although he won't admit it immediately) that phrase carries a whiff of old times, and, after an instant's restraint, he can only give in to its bracing effect. He feels a burning heat rise up inside to free his guts, which for days have been clamped in a steel vise. A beginning of gastric release that fills him with an unhoped-for peace, and is followed by an immediate awareness: it's been days since he has put anything in his mouth, since he closed his eyes, since his body has been ill. And in that same instant Leo realizes how important and wonderful it is for a man to be able to eat, sleep, defecate with ease.

A twelve-year-old cunt isn't kosher?

Just the sort of creative cynicism (and in essence tender and tough) into whose secrets Herrera Del Monte initiated him, when they were the worst-matched pair of friends in the little gang enrolled in Rabbi Perugia's bar-mitzvah preparation course, in the early fifties.

Not coincidentally is it Herrera Del Monte who comes out with such a vulgarity. Leo went to see him in his office. Importantly spread out over two adjacent apartments on the top floor of a pink stuccoed building, on the most glorious stretch of Via Veneto—the Fellinian strip of sidewalk that divides the Café de Paris from Harry's Bar.

Finally, after a short wait, Leo was led into the dark cave where Herrera, his childhood friend, spends most of his days, from eight in the morning till ten at night, with the sole purpose of getting men whose power is equal only to the degree of their corruption and despicableness out of trouble.

And there he was, behind the enormous glass desk, neurotically neat and sparkling, after thirty-five years exactly like the stocky kid whose almost dwarf-like stature had been the distinguishing mark of the perfect martyr to the proverbial meanness of twelve-year-olds: the mirror image of the successful boy, at that time cheerfully embodied by the radiant and long-limbed Leo.

The long-ago years of early adolescence, when physical appearance is all. When the world, in its beginnings, still seems divided between gods and pariahs. When social hierarchies are decided by the sweetness of a pair of eyes and the gracefulness of high cheekbones rather than by any moral credential or intellectual merit. The age when appearance says of you everything that others want to know. And of course the relationship between him and Herrera was based on that treacherous aesthetic opposition: the attractiveness of the one who asks nothing better than to be reflected in the ugliness of the other.

Girls found his ugliness revolting, because it was accompanied by the mad hygienic neglect that (who knows why) many boys not favored by nature indulge in (as if to give artistic perfection to their own repulsiveness). But, in spite of everything, Herrera had Leo. Herrera, like those who are poor in spirit but fervently religious, rejoiced in Leo, obtaining in exchange from his idolized friend the kindly, disdainful benevolence that is granted to followers. This at least was how it looked from the outside. From the inside things worked differently. Leo admired the dwarf's ability to be sarcastic about anything. To illuminate the dark side of existence. From the height of his physical attractiveness, Leo was able to intuit that the iconoclastic spirit he so admired in his friend was the effect of a life spent continually parrying the blows that his physical repugnance provoked.

Blows that fell on a being who was extremely gifted intellectually, with a sensibility, so to speak, sharpened by a mother as fierce and intelligent as her son.

If from a mother you seek protection and hypocrisy, then beware of one like Maria Del Monte. She hid nothing from her son. Rather, she never stopped reminding him that everything would be more difficult for him than for anyone else. So she had risked destroying Herrera's life. By hiding nothing from him. Developing in him the tragic sense of his own inadequacy. Cultivating in her only son, whom she pretended not to be proud of at all, the preventive disappointment that in fact Herrera set up as a bulwark in confronting any adversity. Here's how, by means of a Spartan upbringing, Signora Del Monte had made a real hardass of her son.

Leo loved to hear his friend talk about his mother. Because he managed to do it in the irreverent and at the same time sorrowful way in which Leo would have liked to speak of his.

“Mine is the only case of Oedipus unrequited,” Herrera said. “I love that woman to die for, and she, well, forget it . . . ”

“In what sense?” Leo asked.

“You know why she called me Herrera?”

“Why?”

“Not certainly because she loves soccer or Balzac. That is, my mother doesn't give a fuck about soccer or Balzac. She did it in honor of my speech defect, my bloody French ‘r's. She gave me the first name that popped into her head with at least three ‘r's in it. The bitch obviously wanted her son to find even the pronunciation of his own name to be an embarrassing experience.”

“Come on! How could she know that you'd have the French ‘r'?”

“Statistical calculation. Genetic probability. Darwin and all that other nonsense. My father has it, my grandfather had it. In other words, it was likely that I would, too . . . And then, do you believe it? My little witch has divining skills,” Herrera added, with unusual tenderness. “And now here it is, Herrera Del Monte, a name worthy of an enemy of Zorro!”

And he'd conclude with a sentence like “If that woman loved me a quarter as much as I love her . . . well, it would be enough for me!”

Leo knew that Signora Del Monte didn't hate her son at all. The punishments and nastiness that objectively she inflicted on him derived from a perverse (and very Jewish) conception of pedagogy that could be summed up in a simple phrase: “Stay calm, my boy, there is no injustice that the world will one day inflict on you that your mammina hasn't already.”

You, too, can see how the comment on the presumed passion of Leo for the twelve-year-old cunt is perfectly in line with the spirit of the long-ago days when Herrera taught him that if there's one thing that doesn't deserve to be respected, well, it's your personal tragedy. And yet the same comment is completely indifferent to the professional delicacy that an important lawyer should use toward those who show up in his office as future clients.

And Leo wonders if that irreverence, which has opened an unexpected crack in his already fissured spirit, is part of a shrewd strategy, the product of careful reflection. Perhaps Herrera, with keen intuition, has understood that his old friend, at least in this area, doesn't need a professional consultation, or even some phrase suitable for the occasion, much less the self-serving sympathy that some might have shown him at every turn in recent weeks. And he has probably also cornered the market in reproaches and insults.

And maybe, considering the inferno that the life of his onetime hero must have lately become, Herrera wanted to submerge him in the moral atmosphere of the past. Drag him far away, to a world where to be Leo Pontecorvo was a good thing. To a time when Leo was decidedly at his ease in the role of himself. When Leo was a happy kid, hugely entertained by the nihilistic remarks of his unhappy friend. Evidently Herrera hasn't lost the gift. Which consists in pleasing Leo by means that are not at all pleasant. In fact, he has really refined that talent, making it a vital tool of his profession. The art of reading inside you. Of understanding what you need even before you understand it. And serving it to you with coarse arrogance.

Suddenly Leo is glad he came to see Herrera. After so many wrong things, here's one right. He hesitated far too long before turning to his old friend. He had been thinking about it for weeks. Even before he was hit by cyclone Camilla. Becoming more and more convinced of what Rachel had explained from the start: being a client of the same law firm that represented the hospital was suicidal. And now, although the girl's defamatory slander has not yet produced any reaction, Leo is sure that something is about to happen. Soon the prosecutor's office will be in touch. The thing is too gross for something not to happen. And this time he has to be prepared. He needs a specialist in dirt: someone tough, fierce, implacable. And it so happens that Herrera Del Monte is one of the most established and controversial criminal lawyers in the city. A real courtroom shark, whom Leo's more enlightened friends, the snooty type, despise apocalyptically. As if he were a kind of sewer capable of receiving, disinfecting, recycling, and putting back in circulation all the feces in the country.

 

Several times in the thirty-five years that have now passed since his bar mitzvah, Leo has chanced to run into his friend's public exploits. Once, in the dentist's waiting room, he was distractedly leafing through one of those glossy women's magazines when suddenly he found himself facing, in the centerfold, a very grainy photograph that showed his friend at the beach.

Herrera looked furious. A hairy whitish gnome with an adorable potbelly. His hair was the same: uncombed and almost too black (like the artificial hair of a toupee). The photographer had caught him spreading lotion on a television starlet who at the moment was the desired prey of the paparazzi, and who that summer was consorting with, according to the caption, the “famous Roman criminal lawyer.” Yes, Herrera seemed really furious. One hand was busy spreading the lotion and the other inveighing against those goddam busybodies. And Leo couldn't help laughing. God only knew how well he was acquainted with the fury of that silly dwarf. His bursts of anger. It seemed to him that he could hear Herrera's voice at the moment of the click: harsh, croaking, trembling with anger. Maybe—Leo had thought with the good will of another era—the anger had to do with the squalor in which he felt implicated. The dwarf and the chorus girl. Beauty and the Beast. Herrera had too much good taste and self-awareness not to know that that scene on the beach was repulsive. The fact is that, although Herrera had pursued, as a sort of intellectual vocation and a protest against the Heavenly Father, all that seemed to him eccentric and original, evidently he couldn't resist the banality of lusting after those big blond ibexes. Six-foot-tall giraffes who should have compensated for his shortness, but instead only emphasized it grotesquely.

In the dentist's waiting room Leo had thought back to how his friendship with Herrera Del Monte had been destroyed by one of those Valkyries. The reason that the memory of their break was still so vivid in Leo, after many years, was a result of the mortifying astonishment with which he had seen a decades-long alliance crumble because of a little business that hardly deserved mention, but instead . . .

No, Leo hadn't forgotten that September Sunday. How could he forget? It must have been in the mid-fifties. They had just enrolled in the university. As on all Sundays when Lazio was playing at home, Leo had showed up at the Del Montes' elegant apartment, at 15 Piazza Barberini, on the seat of his metallic-gray Vespa, and waited for his friend to come down. Leo's outfit was the usual: the same good-luck jeans and the same good-luck blue sweater that he had been wearing since the day when, years before, his friend Herrera had initiated him, in his own particular fashion, into the absurd torments of the soccer fan.

Herrera had come out of the entrance without his usual quickness and bounce. It was the first Sunday of the championship. Mid-September. The two friends had been anticipating it since the start of summer, and Leo would have expected greater enthusiasm. Instead Herrera seemed upset. Leo also noticed that his own tan made Herrera look, if possible, even more like a fairy-tale character than usual. His dumpling-shaped red nose gave him a striking resemblance to Grumpy, one of the seven dwarves. A Grumpy who, at least on that day, seemed to have no wish to grumble. On the trip to the stadium, he had kept to himself. He had let himself be driven without opening his mouth.

Herrera's behavior once they reached their usual place in the stands was no less indecipherable. He was silent. He was gloomy. And the match on the program that day—Lazio-Naples—should have kindled his competitive ardor. Herrera hated the Neapolitans. To tell the truth he also hated the Florentines. Not to mention the Milanese and the Juventists. If you thought about it, Herrera hated them all. And he had taught his friend to do likewise, explaining to him that sports fandom is, above all, a matter of hatreds. That's why Leo would have expected the usual behavior: a range of gratuitous insults addressed to the opposing players but also to those on his own team, the usual stream of floridly scurrilous remarks, veins swollen and arms waving. Instead nothing. He had sat through that sad match without opening his mouth. Only on the way home on the Vespa had he let out:

“I think I'm in love.”

Herrera Del Monte in love? But come on, does that make any sense? Leo had never known him to gush over anyone. For a long time Leo had doubted that his friend was even interested. He changed his mind when Herrera gave him some photographs of bare-breasted women:

“I'm entrusting them to you, my friend: it's the best that life has given me.”

Herrera the wanker. Herrera the self-ironic masturbator. This made sense. Herrera the misogynist. This was in the order of things. Not Herrera in love. Not Herrera tight-lipped and sappy, saying things like “I think I'm in love.”

So that Leo couldn't find the right thing to say, as if the other had just confessed he had a fatal illness.

“My mother has naturally blessed her.”

“What?”