Persecution (9781609458744) (3 page)

“I'm coming, O.K., I'm putting old Ray to bed, then I'm coming,” he had said, pervaded by the sweetness that comes only from forgiving one who has just forgiven you.

This exchange of remarks occurred more or less three-quarters of an hour before zero hour. Neither Rachel nor Leo could know that it would be the last gesture of peacemaking between a man and a woman who many years before had challenged the authority of two such different families in order to be together. The Montagues and Capulets of their generation!

Ah yes, because Leo and Rachel had overcome obstacles and challenges of every sort to consummate their contested conjugal dream, which, over time, and with the acquisition of that fine house, the birth of the children, his success at work and her impeccable household management, had grown increasingly brilliant. Nor could they know that the quarrel that Rachel had just resolved would close forever (and beautifully?) their history of altercations and reconciliations (the secret archeology of every marriage). Even less could they imagine, as they headed toward the kitchen, pushing and shoving each other affectionately like two fellow-soldiers on leave, that what they were about to consume but would not finish consuming was their last meal together, and that the words that they were about to address to each other were the last of their shared life.

In a few minutes everything would fall apart. And although from that day on Rachel chose not to speak to anyone about what happened—burying the story of her marriage in the mental storeroom assigned to clearance and oblivion—very often, after her husband's death, in the dreamlike conversation in which she could never succeed in keeping at bay the protests of that distant phantom, she would ask herself if maybe everything had begun the evening before, during the dinner with the Albertazzis: if the first splatters of slimy mud from the tidal wave that was about to sweep everything away had not reached them then. And if the Albertazzis were not in some way implicated in the calamity.

It couldn't be coincidental if, from that day on, and even more after Leo's death, Rachel no longer answered Rita's phone calls or Flavio's pompous letters, full of self-serving offers of help and friendship when it was too late. It was as if Rachel needed to blame them for what had happened to her. Having borne on her shoulders for such a long time the duties and responsibilities of a marriage that functioned in fits and starts (like every happy marriage), Rachel, now that it had ended wretchedly, moved to the counterattack: identifying in that pair of her husband's friends—who were so emblematic, and whom basically she had always hated—if not exactly the guilty ones then the first, unwelcome witnesses of the grotesque event that had transformed her life as a diligent chatelaine, sweetly lodged in the beautiful villa in Olgiata, into a real battle for survival.

Two witnesses, precisely.

Rita, who at first had done her utmost to make her husband break definitively with the pervert Leo, but who then, after his death, set herself up as the most devoted and fiercest guardian of his memory.

And Flavio, who let himself be dominated by the natural disaster he had married.

Two witnesses to eliminate, along with all the evidence for the prosecution and all the motives of a crime that she no longer wanted anything to do with. And only many years later would she settle accounts with them (from certain things you can't escape). But that's another story.

 

Flavio Albertazzi had been Leo's deskmate for all five years of high school. And he had quickly learned that the best way of exorcising the sense of inferiority produced in him by the affluence that his classmates wallowed in was to throw his poverty in their faces without holding back. If at the time that strategy had got him out of more than one embarrassment, now that, thanks to determination, self-denial, and powerful intellectual capacities, he had won an important place in society, which made his bank account fat and his social redemption exemplary, it had become a rather unbearable habit. Such, at least, Rachel considered it, having been brought up on the idea that hiding one's situation (whatever its nature) is always better than flaunting it.

The first time Flavio had showed up in class he was in short pants, so Leo, wearing a blue suit with crease and cuffs, felt that he had the right to ask him, “Why do you still wear short pants?,” obtaining in response a sort of rhetorical question that had closed the subject for good: “Why don't you mind your own business?”

This exchange had taken place in the early fifties, and in the succeeding decades the two friends continued to recount it with great amusement. It produced in Rachel a series of questions about her husband: why was he so fond of a stupid anecdote that showed what an insufferable little snob he had been, and how his friend had so cleverly put him down? This, for Rachel, was only one of the many mysteries of that friendship of her husband's, which she, like many other wives of her generation, had learned to put up with.

Is it possible that Rachel saw what Leo didn't see? That in spite of all the time that had passed Flavio still treated him like a snotty little rich kid? There was something in her husband's ingenuousness that exasperated her. An exasperation sharpened by the fact that Leo, against all the evidence, saw himself as the shrewdest and most undeluded man in the universe. Whereas to his wife he seemed the most ingenuous.

It should be said that, for his part, Flavio had effortlessly let himself be seduced by his friend's social graces. The first time he set his large dusty shoes on the squeaking parquet of the Pontecorvo apartment he had wanted to believe that the fascination roused in him by his friend had nothing to do with the marble, the boiserie, the upholstery displayed in that dwelling but was provoked by the volumes collected in the bookshelves at the entrance. The conversational polish of which Leo gave precocious evidence, the eloquent language that Flavio so much envied, surely derived from that cultural bedrock, not from living in a world in which the functionality of a piece of furniture was obliged to find a polite compromise with two things as immoral as beauty and elegance.

After so many years Flavio still experienced as a personal victory the fact that his friend had decided to add to his medical profession a career as a scholar and academic that you would not have expected from that handsome, privileged, and indifferent youth.

“It's really incredible that you weren't spoiled by everything you had,” he would say, with satisfaction, “and at a time when no one had anything.” And Leo was pleased, with the satisfaction of someone who has never tried to be anything other than what, finally, he is.

For his part Leo had followed with equal gratification the route by which Flavio, the sixth and youngest son of a working-class family, had managed to acquire his own little place in the sun. He had been one of the first Italian graduates in information engineering (at the time it was called that), and was now the managing director of a leading-edge company that fine-tuned sophisticated programs for Olivetti.

Flavio, though he claimed to revere scientific progress no less fervently than Leo, nevertheless considered Italian society in those years to be in full
regression
. Affluence. Vulgarity. Lack of engagement. (TV, how he hated TV!) Those were the watchwords that Flavio used to excess and which provided the occasion for long, friendly disputes with Leo. Another thing that Flavio hated was the soccer championship that Italy had won a few years earlier in Spain, in which the Germans had been thrashed in a glorious final at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, in Madrid. Flavio assigned that sporting event a symbolic power as vast as it was harmful.

“It gave the people of this country the illusion that winning is the important thing. It developed in us a cult of competitiveness and victory. It made us all a little bit American. To see a president of the Republic, a Socialist, someone who took part in the resistance, who risked his life to defeat Nazism, raise that utterly garish gold Cup, the golden fleece . . . An undignified spectacle. It doesn't surprise me that the final in Madrid was one of the most watched events in the history of Italian television. As you see,
tout se tient
.”

So Leo, as much a soccer fan as a maniac about the modernization of the country, found himself passionately defending the heroes of Madrid and justifying TV. (How could he know that the latter would repay him so well?)

Flavio, unlike Leo, never raised his voice. He calmly wore you down, taking all the time he needed to complete arguments as rotund as his satisfied face. Faithful to Marxist principles, he was suspicious of everything and attacked his interlocutor with endless rhetorical questions.

But he, too, had a weak point.

Rita, his wife. Whom Flavio loved more than mathematics and more than those political ideas marked by what was in appearance pragmatism and in substance wishful thinking. A tall, curly-haired, angular woman, always on the edge of a nervous breakdown, whose brutal thinness contradicted a voracious gluttony. The slender cigarettes that she always had in her hand were aesthetically suited to her bony, tapering fingers. Sometimes, seeing her against the light, you would have said that it was a skeleton smoking. Other times, in the pitiless neon light of the Pontecorvos' kitchen, she might look like one of those madams painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.

For Rita, marrying Flavio had been a most successful slap in the face of her extremely wealthy parents. Although for years she had had no contact with her family—a dynasty that had turned a vast amount of land it owned on the edge of Rome into building lots and had made a lot of money—she nonetheless seemed to have inherited the arrogance of those speculators and their insupportable lack of tact. Her stinging arguments, unlike those of her husband, were sustained above all by the strength of her prejudices and the ferocity of her shattered nerves. The cunt, Leo sometimes thought. It's the cunt, the most capricious organ created by mother nature, that makes her speak.

Rita's indignation about inequality was a pretext for saying enormously unpleasant things in a strident, superior tone. For her there were no limits, maybe because to resist the family she came from she had had to lose control, or maybe because her family had taught her, by example, to have no boundaries. In her time she had studied literature, but without much direction. And she still boasted with impunity of how she had challenged a professor—a dusty, self-important academic—who inflicted on the students a class in Montale: a bourgeois, decadent, reactionary poet!

Rita recalled those exploits with bitter pleasure . . . the mark of a resentment that had in the end devoured her.

Rachel, less sociological-minded than the narrator of this tale, was sure that the great repressed grief agitating Rita's bony frame was the disappointment of not having had children.

“If she had had children,” she said sometimes to her husband, “she wouldn't always be repeating those disgusting little stories.”

Yes, children. Children, at least for Rachel, explained everything. This was the reason that, when the Albertazzis came to dinner at their house, Rachel kept Filippo and Samuel from even coming in to say hello, much less from being mentioned. She didn't want to inflict pain on Rita, or see her so-called friend exorcise her own sorrow by making hostile comments about Filippo's slight chubbiness or Samuel's effeminate passion for musicals. It was as if Rachel did her best to feel pity for that woman. Pity was the way she tried to keep at bay the irritation that Rita, in all of her manifestations, provoked. And the way in which she atoned for her unkind thoughts.

It had been difficult for Rachel to get used to these people, after Leo had isolated her from her upbringing. She remained traumatized by their cultural snobbery no less than by their political extremism. Rachel's father, Signor Spizzichino, was too busy getting ahead to cultivate political ideas. For him religion said nearly everything there was to know about what is right and what is not. And she had been brought up to believe that anyone who ran on about certain abstract ideas should be considered a fool. The word “Communist,” in the Spizzichino household, was only slightly more acceptable than the word “Fascist,” and only because the Communists, at least in Italy, hadn't persecuted the Jews (or, at least as far as the Spizzichinos knew, they hadn't), nor had they had the gall to ally themselves with Hitler.

If Rachel's distrust applied to all her husband's friends, it applied above all to Rita. There were too many self-serving inconsistencies in that woman not to irritate a simple and loyal being like Rachel. And she was often irritated with Leo, too, for his indulgence, his inability to be indignant in the face of certain obvious contradictions in the character and the behavior of his friend.

Rachel remembered the time Rita had made a scene in a restaurant because someone was allowed to bring his dog in. Rita, in those days, anyway, couldn't stand dogs. Or, rather, she was afraid of them. And so she had made a fuss: it was indecent, how could people, and what about respect, then? It had all been very unpleasant, including the no less violent reaction of the man with the dog.

Rachel couldn't bear situations of public embarrassment. She was a timid, reserved woman. If you wronged her, you couldn't expect a strident, or anyway explicit, retaliation. A restaurant manager had treated her discourteously? Well, he wouldn't see her in his restaurant anymore. And she couldn't forgive rudeness. To the point where, if her husband returned with her by mistake to a place that was on her black list, then, yes, she made a scene: but in order not to set foot in the place. This was her intransigence about certain things. This her memory.

Otherwise she was ready to accept any abuse by a waiter, a client, or the proprietor of a restaurant. She was serenely tolerant of delays or carelessness in service. Of any unjustifiably astronomical bill. Anything was better than reacting. Than arguing. Than putting another human being in the state of feeling himself a reprobate.