Persecution (9781609458744) (37 page)

Of course not, he wasn't dead. They had simply forgotten him. For them, between him and that spider near the window that was doing gymnastics on its own spider web there was no difference. Yet again he was tempted by the idea of emerging. Going to help his son who had broken his ankle. Comfort the other, reassure him that it wasn't his fault. That he shouldn't take it like that. That these are things that happen. And while he thought of what to say to Samuel to console him it occurred to him that, to tell the truth, Filippo was especially prone to certain accidents. He was a subscriber to catastrophe. He always had been. If that day the Omnipotent had decided to sacrifice the bone of a boy playing ball in the yard of his house, well, you could bet that that bone would belong to Filippo Pontecorvo.

A difficult relation with the universe. A divorce from the creation. This was Filippo's distinguishing feature. Was it his fear of the universe that had made him such a wary and silent being?

When he was four or five the only thing that he enjoyed, and from which he never wanted to be parted, was the giant books that Rachel gave him for his birthday: those pure, biblical anthologies from Disney with egotistical titles like
I, Donald Duck, I, Mickey Mouse, I, Scrooge McDuck
. Filippo consumed those big books the way a rabbi consumes the Torah. It seemed that all there was to know about life could be revealed by the adventures of Scrooge in the Klondike. By Donald's lovable blunders. Or by the bold arrogance of Mickey Mouse in solving puzzles.

At first it was Rachel who was responsible for the evening reading from the enormous volumes. One story a night. That was the agreement. And Filippo looked at the pictures and listened to his mother as if the spell were constantly renewed, as if it were always a surprise. After a while Rachel could recite those books from memory. And yet it was still not enough for her son. So that from time to time, during the day, Filippo picked them up, with immense difficulty (they were almost as big as him), and began to patiently leaf through them, as if he were inspecting every minute detail of every picture. As if he were concentrated on the drop of sweat on Donald or never had enough of the “sgrunt!” of Scrooge McDuck. Every so often he laughed, and sometimes his face was sad.

At one point, the year before Filippo went to elementary school, Leo tried to teach his son to read. He wanted him to have a totally autonomous relationship with his sacred books. He wanted his son to read by himself those comic books that he knew by heart. And it wasn't because he was tired of reading to him, or because he wanted to relieve Rachel of that tedious task. No, he wanted him to read so that he could discover the electrifying pleasure of autonomy.

Leo had been dismayed not only by his astonishing incapacity to learn but also by the opposition he put up to an activity so prosaic. As if writing and reading were for Fili a defeat. As if they would destroy the spell cast almost automatically by those drawings. Yes, after a while Leo had had to surrender to the fact that the only exercise in comprehension performed by his older son was to take in the drawings, feed on the images. Filippo was like a prehistoric man, unskilled in writing but with a well-developed sensitivity to shapes.

His problem with writing and with the alphabet—of which Filippo gave evidence the following year, in first grade, when a more sophisticated teacher recognized the unmistakable signs of dyslexia—was only the latest skirmish in that great war against the world that had been, until then, his very short life.

It was the conscientious teacher at the American school (it was customary for the Roman bourgeoisie at that time to send their children to some foreign institution) who called Rachel to tell her that Filippo had problems with the alphabet. She wondered, among other things, if it was prudent, given the circumstances, to send him to an institution where his mother tongue wasn't spoken. Miss Dawson belonged to that category of robust New England ladies who, though they have a strong accent, speak a correct Italian, articulated with flawless syntax and provided with a rich lexicon.

“You know, it's already more difficult for him than for the others. At least eighty per cent of the children who attend this school are native speakers. It's normal that the remaining twenty per cent, to which Filippo belongs, should encounter some difficulties. But if you add to this handicap a problem with the alphabet, then . . . ”

“What do you mean?”

“That for Filippo there is no difference between a ‘p,' a ‘b,' and a ‘d.' And although I've tried to suggest it to him, there seems no way to make him understand. Anyway, it's not something that's so alarming in itself. It's a problem in which one can intervene. I know people of great talent and great success who have suffered from it . . . ”

Rachel had taken no comfort from the generic reassurances of Miss Dawson. And even less from her husband, whose only comment, when she reported the teacher's words, had been: “Well, come to think of it, the ‘p,' the ‘b,' and the ‘d' are rather similar. I always thought that Filippo wasn't the type to be splitting hairs.”

That was how it worked between Leo and Rachel: when she was worried he played the role of the blowhard, and vice versa. Leo still knew today how that remark, at the time, was more useful to him than to his wife. But what was wrong with that child? Why was there always something? Why was what came naturally to others perplexing to him?

On the other hand Leo had guessed before Miss Dawson that something was wrong, although, incapable of facing up to problems squarely, he had prevented the suspicion from reaching the level of consciousness. Distinguishing “b” from “d.” He had tried his best with a thousand examples to get his son to understand that they were two different things.

“The ‘b' looks like a man with a big stomach,” he had said. “whereas the ‘d' is a man with a large bottom.” And to be even clearer, he had pointed out to the child his own stomach and bottom. Although Filippo had laughed at this joke of his (children find both anatomy and scatology very funny), nonetheless he couldn't learn to recognize the difference between the two consonants. Evidently it was something too big for him. An undertaking.

The teacher had said she didn't know what to do anymore. Also, that incapacity made Filippo extremely aggressive toward his schoolmates, who, by that point in the year, had already learned the alphabet. And at the same time it caused him deep shame.

“The other day he hit a classmate,” Miss Dawson said to Rachel.

“Hit? What do you mean hit? Why?”

“I'm afraid the boy was making fun of him because of his trouble writing.” When Rachel told Leo, he remembered that Tuesday when he was taking Filippo to school and had asked him:

“Do you like playing with Francesca?” Francesca was the speech therapist.

“Yes,” Filippo had answered, “but I don't want to play with her in the morning anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because then I'm late for school.”

“Well, isn't that better? What do you care? You have an excuse. If only I'd had an excuse for coming an hour late at your age. If I had one now . . . ”

“But if I arrive late they say I'm sick.”

“Who says you're sick? Why do they say that? You're very healthy.”

“They say I'm sick because I arrive late. And also because I play with Francesca.”

Then Leo had thought that some shitty mothers must have said to their shitty children that the reason Filippo Pontecorvo came late on Tuesday and Wednesday was that he was sick. That he had problems with learning the alphabet. And then Leo was furious. Goddam mothers. Goddam children. Goddam humanity. And goddam also my little Filippo.

Because Leo knew, he remembered: dyslexia was only the latest alarm that Filippo had sent out. The first had been speech.

 

Leo and Rachel had had to wait four years before Filippo gave them the satisfaction of uttering a sentence with a meaning. If pressed, he would respond with little grunts and monosyllables. Initially, they had attributed to timidity and shyness the fact that, compared with other children, he was slow to speak. Filippo had been an exceedingly placid infant, one of those who don't cry much and sleep a lot. Which had allowed his parents to believe that that persistent silence was a new sign of his capacity for self-sufficiency. Filippo was silent simply because he had nothing to say. This Leo and Rachel told themselves in the early days. Not to exaggerate the thing was the right attitude: of responsible parents, modern parents. Filippo was a bit slower than necessary in expressing himself in words. No harm. For what he needed gestures were enough, words would come. Filippo was like that. One who took his time.

But after they had been telling themselves this little story for a while, Rachel and Leo had stopped believing it. Filippo was almost three and God alone knows how much his parents yearned for him to utter, even just once, those two momentous words: “Mamma” and “Papa.”

They were tired of being satisfied with the monosyllable “ta,” which in Filippo's extraordinarily primitive language seemed to indicate all the adults who had some authority: parents, grandparents, babysitter.

For Filippo they were all “ta.”

There was no way to make him say anything else. And they kept trying: “Sweetheart, say at least ta-ta, yes, say it twice, double it, ta-ta. That's all, it's already a big step forward.”

It was typical of Leo to give these articulate speeches to a child who didn't seem very inclined to conversation. That was also the way in which he followed the instructions imparted by Loredana, who, before giving him the phone number of a speech therapist, had said, “Talk a lot. Never get tired of talking to him. Hearing you speak is all Filippo needs. And you'll see that in the end he'll be unblocked.”

And so here's the diligent father entertaining his son with long, useless disquisitions. At those junctures Filippo looked at him in bewilderment. And if Leo persisted, exasperated, “Ta-ta, ta-ta, it's not hard,” then the angelic little face of his son became red. He would turn toward the wall in dismay and start rhythmically banging his head against it.

Filippo was ashamed.

He was perfectly aware of what was happening to him. Both of how he was different from other, talkative children and of the pain he caused his parents. And this made him ashamed. So when his father insisted too much on his talking, he would let out one of those terrifying, prehistoric deaf-mute cries. And beat his head against the wall.

Shame. That feeling demonstrated that his son was deeply sensitive. Life was too competitive for Filippo. Everything seemed to wound him.

And the rage that sometimes assailed him—the angry frustration he showed whenever he couldn't do things that others did naturally—was so in contrast with his angelic beauty. Who wasn't in love with his beauty? Fine blond hair, blue eyes, a rosy round face. He was the idol of supermarkets and restaurants. A pop star to the young women who stopped him everywhere he went, swooning over his beauty: “What a stupendous child,” “What a little angel,” “He's irresistible, I could eat him up with kisses.”

Wherever they brought him, in his stroller, with that regal face and the elegant, modest clothes in which he was sent out by his young well-to-do parents, people stopped to look at him, and sometimes they complimented Leo and Rachel, who quivered with pride. But from him nothing. Filippo didn't react to all the love, all the admiration, all the tenderness he was capable of arousing. He didn't indulge in the vanity that usually affects beautiful children. He was indifferent, impenetrable, wrapped up in himself, always absorbed in a sort of intense and exclusive feeling. That lack of response had the effect of rousing a further impulse of affection in the adults who looked at him with such admiration. The boy didn't see their flattery. He also had an inner beauty. If life were only freedom and self-sufficiency, Leo thought sometimes, Filippo would have a radiant future. But unfortunately beyond freedom and self-sufficiency there existed something else: society claimed its rights, the world wished to be taken into consideration. No one, not even such a beautiful a child, can afford not to respond to the infinite solicitations of the universe. That's why he would have to speak, just as one day he would have to learn to write.

And yet that spectacle of freedom and self-sufficiency was so thrilling. Almost all children are whiny in the car. They have no patience. After a while they become impatient, fidgety, unbearable. They protest, they kick, they demand attention with savage cries. Filippo did not fall into the category of little annoyers. In the car he took on a serious and contemplative air, even melancholy, you might have said. He looked out the window, brooding like a poet. You called his name, he gazed at you for a second without changing expression, then returned to the window. An attitude that Leo and Rachel found both charming and praiseworthy.

Basically Filippo had always been an independent sort.

 

Leo recalled how, coming out of the bathroom in the morning, he would find that little imp, with his blond bangs (“like a member of the Hitler Youth,” joked our proud father to his friends), crawling happily. At that time his favorite toy, which he refused to be separated from, was his father's underpants. He looked at them, he put them on his head, he cleaned the floors with them. He could play for hours with those underpants. There was no game that entertained him more than those underpants. Leo called to him. But Filippo gave the first signs of his timidity and his difficulty in communicating. The more you called him, the more absorbed he became in his private world, him and the underpants.

That was the way Leo was first confronted with his son's strangeness. Only then had he begun to pay morbid attention to other children the same age. And only then had he noticed how Filippo was simply different from everything that was normal. And this had filled his heart with shame. A shame that Leo was ashamed to feel. Which Rachel seemed to have countered not only with a fierce pride (all right: her son was odd, and so? what was so great about normality?) but also with a desire not to hide it, rather to display it.