Persecution (9781609458744) (27 page)

Leo's surprise at seeing those kids in uniform had been no less intense than that of the police officers at finding themselves in the presence of a man completely different from what they had seen in the newspapers and on television.

The ruinous fall into the abyss of such an improbable destiny had taken the form of a somatic revolution: an involuntary loss of weight and the whitening of his stylishly cut hair had distorted his aspect. Then something must have happened to his coloring: the florid copper color of his complexion was blemished by gray-blue highlights, and the skin, especially on his hands, was marked by coffee-colored stains, of a type usually manifested at a more advanced age.

Which merely emphasized an even more revolutionary metamorphosis, that of character: presenting, during this morning blitz by officers with an arrest warrant, yet another public performance in which Leo gave proof of a striking timidity, as if he wished to demonstrate to those four incredulous cops and to himself that a few months had been enough to eliminate from his nature any trace of arrogance or pride.

More than two months had passed since he had last slept with Rachel and since he had seen the boys, except every so often by chance through the high, narrow windows of the cellar. Two months since he had left in the morning to go to Santa Cristina. Since he had received any phone calls except from Herrera, from some latecomer busybody, and an obscure, methodical, yet raving bearer of threats. He had relieved his family from the weight of an unwelcome presence, like the wary and diffident Gregor Samsa . . . Not surprising, therefore, that he was inclined to welcome any living being who knocked at his door, but at the same time also frightened.

Maybe because of the long isolation, the surprise, the headache, and the ferocious weariness that afflicted him, or maybe because meanwhile, after a month and a half, he was losing faith in Herrera's thaumaturgical powers, but there was Leo, exhibiting an incongruous hospitality toward the men who had come to arrest him, the men who stood there, with the handcuffs attached to their belts, ready to take him who knows where. This is my new family, Leo thinks, with emotion. And that's why he is so polite. Maybe he would have shown the same gratitude to anyone who came to free him from that domestic nightmare. In essence one confinement is the same as another!

Even to that guy who called up and threatened to kill him and then piss on his corpse he was in some way grateful. Yes, he was grateful even to that psychopath, who said things like “You enjoy yourself with little girls, right? You go out with them? But God sees these things and I see them, too. I see them, too. Professor, may you hope only that God finds you before I do . . . ” Anything, even the words of that maniac, was better than the silence by which he felt besieged, that absence of tender human contact (God, Rachel's smooth hip! Did it still exist somewhere?); anything was better than those crushing thoughts, as heavy as reinforced concrete, and those sudden revelations of consciousness, in which he took note of the inexorableness of what was happening.

The fact is that any of his acquaintances who had seen him in that situation, up against the boys in uniform, would have been goggle-eyed at that compliance, which was on the point of dissolving into emotion.

In other words, where had the well-concealed pride of Leo Pontecorvo gone? With which he had always kept his neighbor at bay, ever since the days when he was the top student in Professor Meyer's postgraduate course? And what was the source of the obsequiousness with which he prostrated himself before his jailers? Was two months of isolation and social unfitness enough to transform a great man into a timid, whimpering creature?

Believe me: much less would be enough!

The police, besides, showed themselves perhaps too accommodating. After sparing him the humiliation of the handcuffs, the boy, the most obviously inexperienced, defying protocol and the anger of his superior, had whispered, “Professor, you certainly won't remember, but you treated my brother's daughter,” in a tone indicating that the daughter of the young policeman's brother was in excellent health. She was on the list of former patients who had made it, some of whom came to see him every year, to demonstrate that if they were still there they owed it to him.

A very untimely confidence, the young policeman's, which led the higher-ranking one to intervene: “Excuse me, Professor, I don't want to make you hurry, but it might be best if you take some personal things. It's possible that tonight, anyway . . . yes, well,
you understand
. . . ”

What is there to understand, in the end?

The wall that separates your beautiful marital bedroom from the cell where at any moment they might throw you is much thinner than your presumption of social inviolability led you to believe. Is this what you're supposed to understand? Well, it doesn't take a genius.

Leo let them escort him out as if he didn't know the house where he had lived for so many years and which had cost him a lot of money. He was relieved to observe that on the journey from the cellar to the front door there was no one. Probably Rachel had arranged it in a way that no living soul would be present at his arrest. Sparing him a mortification or sparing herself and the boys. And things went smoothly. Coming out into the open air, Leo was greeted by a sparkling sunny late-September day. The apricot-colored light of the morning was like dawn in Jerusalem. On the horizon a solitary, polished front of white clouds had assumed the form of a shark with its mouth half closed, alert, ready to hurl itself on its prey.

 

Those September days. He had always loved them. When everything in the house started up again. He, worn out by August at the beach, returned to work. Rachel returned to being the unopposed mistress of the house. Filippo and Semi returned to school. There was something touching and reassuring in that inexorable
return
. In the morning, before he got in his car and rushed to the hospital, Leo took a short walk to the café just outside the northern entrance of the compound, which the boys called “the ditch.” He got coffee and newspapers for himself. And hot croissants for Rachel and Telma.

Those September days. It used to be the time of year when Rachel devoted at least one afternoon to getting the boys all their school supplies. She went to stationery stores and the big department stores to get binders, notebooks, pen and pencil sets, backpacks. It was a habit that Rachel particularly cherished, and which had also infected the boys. Semi, for the whole five years of elementary school (or, as he said at the time, “nementary”), before his consumer desires shifted to clothes, couldn't help asking his mother every year, “Will you buy me the set with the compass and magnifying glass?”

And she: “We'll see.”

And he: “We'll see means no.”

“We'll see means we'll see.”

Rachel had to restrain herself in order not to get the boys everything they wanted. Still vivid in her was the frustration at not having the same supplies as her schoolmates. For Rachel school was important. Unlike her husband, she had always loved it. She had been an exemplary student. For her school had been a gym, an alternative to the dreariness at home. Not for Leo. For Leo school had been above all an obstacle. Getting up at dawn was painful. He belonged to the fraternity of night owls who wake up at midday. If there was one thing he thanked heaven for it was that at a certain point school was over and no one could force him to get up at that insane hour. That sweet and caressing air must be the same as those mornings when his mother crept into his room, opened the blinds, placed the milky coffee on the night table, gently pulled his soft, sleep-warm feet out from under the covers, and put on his socks. An incomparably tender gesture which nevertheless was the prelude to a reluctant awakening.

As the agents escorted him out of the gate and opened the car door for him, Leo wondered if that year Rachel had found the strength to take the boys to buy new school supplies. Probably not. They were too old for such pastimes. And then how could what had happened not have had an impact on the family's daily behavior? Leo no longer knew what to hope. He didn't know if he preferred that the events had left a mark or that nothing had left a mark. His mark on his sons. This was truly a terrible subject. On which he was afraid to question himself. His sons were an atrocious mystery. They had always been. And certainly they would never stop being one.

Although he lived one floor away from them, Leo knew nothing about his family. He was wary of asking Herrera or anyone else, just as he was wary of even a minimal attempt to make peace with his wife. That time—the time for making peace—was over. She had always been the one to make the first move.

Getting into one of the two police cars, which smelled of apples and onion, Leo had felt his nerves release, as if they were taking him away from a nightmare.

 

The twenty square meters of damp, stale twilight where they threw him is definitely overcrowded. And not exactly with gentlemen of his type. The air reeks of urine, sweat, dripping pipes, rust, wet dog, and many other equally fragrant things.

Everything here says that it's an intermediate stop on the sinister journey to the unknown that he has been compelled to undertake. All this filth and all this excitement, all this take this one out and stick this other in, makes Leo think of the waiting area of an emergency room. Yes, evidently this is the place where the new arrivals are sent before . . . before what?

There must be a mistake. Leo remembers that Herrera told him that in prison they usually don't like to mix up people of different backgrounds. Or maybe not? Maybe he didn't say that at all. Maybe Leo dreamed it. He had placed one of his last hopes in class prejudice. What did you think, my boy? That they would put you in with some kleptomaniac member of the Lincean academy?3 With a depraved baroness? With Dr. Mengele or Silvio Pellico? What did you expect? That for big-shot professors of your lineage, for a man endowed with your good manners, there was a special area outfitted like the V.I.P. lounge of an airport? What do you say to a good cigar and an aged cognac?

Instead they had no compunctions. Why should they? Justice is blind (as is injustice). They put you in here: a small space crowded with shady-looking brutes, who, thank heaven, are minding their own business. With the single glance he felt able to cast around, he observed a great extravagance of T-shirts. The rest is what you might expect: several-day-old beards, tattoos, curly hair, some pierced earlobes from which the earrings had been confiscated. The aesthetics of crime. The banality of crime. When Leo entered he was greeted with a welcome from a dozen brown distracted eyes. The behavior of these thugs—from what Leo could understand (for hours now his buttocks have been sinking into a worn mattress thrown into the room, which is already so full of twin mattresses that it's almost impossible to walk without stepping on them)—savors more of indolence than of intimidation.

Why is Leo here? They haven't explained it to him. Nor has he had the courage to ask. Not even the young cop, the nicer one. Who, alas, disappeared before his colleagues. When the police officers handed him over to a prison guard, Leo was tempted to ask the latter why he was there. But looking at him he resisted. A flabby little man with the knot of his regulation tie loose and his beret cynically askew. His massive arms burned by the sun, but only up to where the short-sleeved shirt began, which allowed one to glimpse, from the biceps up, a disturbing whiteness. No, he wasn't the person to ask what was happening.

And so whom to ask? Leo's mind was about to explode with questions. And it's terrible to have so many questions, all those people around, and no one to ask.

Why did they come to get him today and not that day in July when everything started? What happened in the meantime? And why at dawn on Friday? Before the weekend. Entering the vast prison courtyard, bounded by massive walls, like ramparts, Leo shuddered, a small attack of claustrophobia. Not to mention that the atmosphere is more relaxed than someone like him might have imagined. Something discarded, forgotten, as if time there languished in an eternal swampy August. If you thought about it, it wasn't very different from the air one breathes on September Fridays in the hospital and the university. The days are still long and beautiful. Why not take advantage? People still want to go to the beach. Yes, the last seaside weekends. There's no harm in that. But then why drag him here on this particular day? Why not pick him up on Monday? Leo is dying to ask someone this question. Certainly his new fellow-tenants are much more knowledgeable than he is about such things. But he doesn't dare to interrogate them. Naturally—he doesn't even dare to look at them. The only thing he remembered to do is ask that sort of menacing guard (an instant before he threw him in there) to call his lawyer. At least this time he adhered to Herrera's directives.

“If they come to get you,” Herrera had urged him many times, “try to call me as soon as possible. Even at four in the morning if necessary. Since you know I can't sleep more than three or four hours a night. Of course, it's just a scruple. It seems to me highly unlikely that they'll arrest you now. As I was saying, if they wanted to do it they would have done it already. You're not a common criminal. You have a clean record. You're not going to repeat the crimes and there's no advantage for you in absconding . . . so . . . ”

So, Herrera's irreproachable logic has been routed by the indecency of the facts. In truth Herrera also told him that “preventive detention” (as he had called it) would have been justified only if they had acquired new, even more crushing evidence or if there had been a new crime, probably more serious than the earlier ones.

Is that it? Is a new crowd of accusations hanging over his head? Why not? With all the people who have recently felt compelled to accuse him of something, it's plausible that a new detractor has come forward.