Persecution (9781609458744) (38 page)

Painfully Leo remembered the day Filippo turned four. Rachel, spurred by the speech therapist (“You have to surround him with an atmosphere of affectionate sociability”), had organized a party in the garden. Filippo had been born in May: in that season the garden offered a shining, lush spectacle of colors and scents, especially welcoming to children's parties. Leo had wanted to be present, driven in part by curiosity to see how Filippo managed with his contemporaries.

The truth is that Leo wasn't happy about that birthday. For him it represented the final confirmation of his son's oddness. Everyone had been constantly telling him that up to four it's normal not to speak. That up to four there's no need to worry about it. There, now Filippo was four and he still hadn't opened his mouth. All right, in the meantime he had learned to say “mamma” and “Papa.” But Leo wasn't satisfied. And finally he felt he had the right to be worried. He had the right to shout his worry from the rooftops. Too bad that that opportunity, generously offered by fate, gave him no relief.

That wretched birthday party. What anxiety!

It was the first time that Leo had seen him in action. Ever since Filippo had started going to the nursery at the American school, Leo had always managed to invent an excuse to give Rachel, and himself, in order to miss the numerous recreational activities in which his son was involved. He hadn't been at the traditional afternoon Halloween party (many years before that holiday became popular in Italy), thus sparing himself the sight of a goggling zombie who sat in a corner eyeing sweets of every sort. Nor had he wanted to go to the school Christmas pageant, in which his son had played (to listen to Rachel, “with masterly skill”) a motionless tulip, who, in spite of the script, when the scene changed to winter, had refused to wither along with the others, producing great mirth in the audience and in his mother yet another embarrassment veined with tenderness.

And Leo had not attended any of those children's parties precisely in order not to be exposed to what on that birthday he couldn't escape: that is, the spectacle of his son's horribly precocious maladjustment. His son who couldn't fit in even when the entire world was mobilized to honor him. His dissonance, his oddness.

It had been truly unpleasant to observe how Fili, even in the presence of so many companions, appeared detached, closed off in a permanent private game. Always clinging to those wretched comic books. Blasted Donald Duck, blasted Huey, Dewey, and Louie! What do they have that we don't? Why, my little one, are you always with them, why not come out here with us, who love you so much?

Suddenly the mothers of the other children, perceiving the unease aroused by the bizarre behavior of the birthday boy, had grabbed their children and led them over to Filippo.

“Come, won't you play with him?” one said. And Leo felt deeply pained. In that woman's voice was an insulting note of pity. After some insistence three children gathered around Filippo. The mothers returned to their chat. Leo observed how confidently the three talked, and how they tried in some way to involve Filippo. But he refused. He stayed on his own. Until one of the children impatiently addressed to the others a phrase that Leo would never forget: “Leave him alone, he doesn't understand anything. Filippo is stupid.”

Little bastard! The cruelty of children. The frankness of children. It had been such a blow to Leo. To the heart of “affectionate social relations.” No, there was nothing affectionate about social relations. Social relations are cruel. And he, Leo, knows it well.

 

When you have a very small child (particularly if this child is the first) you tend to magnify any problem he has, imagining that, just like the problems of adults, it's doomed not to be resolved . . . And you are scarcely aware that, while you're torturing yourself with the doubt that your son will ever speak—because if he hasn't learned to do it up to now he probably never will, because it's evidently something too complicated for him—suddenly, almost overnight, he begins to speak with utter naturalness. But then on the horizon a new problem appears, which to you, poor fearful father, doesn't seem any less insoluble than the previous one. So it was with Filippo.

In the end Rachel had been right: after a while Filippo began to speak. At first he struggled, distorting his words in a sweet, funny way. Saying “I don't lighe” instead of “I don't like.” Getting confused about some verb persons: you might say to him, “Am I wrong or did my Filippo eat a little too much today?” and he, all polite and offended, would answer, “I'm wrong, I'm wrong!” Later his language became impressively correct.

But with the arrival of words, which were increasingly clear and precise, and before Filippo revealed his helplessness with the alphabet, another odd thing had manifested itself, which disturbed Leo and Rachel in a way that was different, perhaps, but no less pointed.

They noticed that, in order to fall asleep, Filippo had got in the habit of beating his head violently against the pillow. And he usually did it in time to music. This had started when Rachel bought a brightly colored child's portable record player, made just for 45s, which were all the rage in those years. And Leo had inaugurated the machine by inserting an old single by Ricky Nelson, one of those hard-to-find records that the same American aunt every so often sent Leo, her Italian nephew, when he was a boy.

The record was from 1957. At that time Ricky Nelson was a teen idol. And that single, titled “Be-Bop Baby” (what audacious alliteration!), had for several weeks been at the top of the charts in the United States. Which had inspired the diligent Aunt Adriana to get it and send it to her nephew. It was a catchy tune, typical of the time. Leo had always liked it. Maybe because it was connected to some memory stored in that romantic jewel box that was his youth. He certainly hadn't the slightest suspicion that he would come to find that song intolerable because of the hundreds of times his son forced him to listen to it. For Filippo it was the only song that existed. You were in trouble if you made him listen to another one. Even from the same era. Even with the same chords. Even by the same singer. Then he became furious. He wanted only “Be-Bop Baby.” And nothing else. Here was his new obsession. The new method he'd come up with for keeping out everything else.

Well, all right, it's true, Leo said to himself, children are like that: obsessive and conservative. Stubborn reactionaries in miniature. But Filippo's obsession with that record seemed pathological. Just like the way he beat his head against the pillow for several hours in a row, stopping just to start the record again. Where did he get so much energy? And what was the sense of expending so much energy for nothing?

Filippo and Semi's nanny was called Carmen. She was a simple, proud Cape Verdian, whom the boys adored and whom Rachel, at least at the time (before Carmen gave signs of instability), trusted entirely. Carmen was the first to give a name to that bizarre behavior. As she said good night, a moment after turning off the light in “her” boys' room, she exhorted Filippo, “Don't
work
too hard.” And then she warned his little brother, who was in the lower of the bunk beds, “And you, Semi, don't copy him.”

Work
. This was how Carmen had described Filippo's mania for beating his head against the pillow. And in fact some evenings, when Leo and Rachel came home from a dinner out, and, passing the boys' room before going to bed, heard that eerie squeaking sound, felt an odd tenderness for their little worker. Rachel thought of those factory assembly lines that operate all night. And Leo of Charlie Chaplin's
Mod­ern Times
.

Once Leo had hypothesized, “Maybe it's a kind of Jewish atavism.”

“In what sense?”

“Well, like the Hasidim at the Wailing Wall. Maybe at last we have a great rabbi in the family.”

“Don't be a fool. The speech therapist says it might be a mild form of autism. She says it's not so alarming, but it could also explain his difficulties in relating to the world . . . ”

Did there always have to be something? Was it possible that that blessed child every so often had to come out with a new peculiarity? Possible that all those doctors, groping in the dark, always felt a need to give a name to his peculiarities?

When Leo, after a nighttime call, came home at dawn, he liked to go and see the children sleeping. Entering their room he was invaded by the poignant odor of cookies just taken out of the oven. He was very careful not to wake them. He sat first on the lower bunk, where Samuel slept like a little angel, caressed his hand, pulled up the blanket. Then he rose and repeated the same gesture with Filippo. But merely touching him set in motion that infernal machine. See how Filippo, without even waking up, began to butt the pillow with his head. This always produced a certain anguish in Leo, inducing him to leave the room immediately, as if he didn't want to face another demonstration that his son wasn't completely normal. But mixed with that worry there was also a lot of pride. For the character and the determination that Filippo put into things. For his wisdom and his patience. Attributes that were far from childish.

One thing that struck Leo was his son's endurance. His extraordinary compunction in accepting everything his parents forced him to do. Never once did he complain. He showed such stoicism. As if by being subjected to those treatments he had developed a passive acceptance of his own imperfection. All that effort to learn to speak. All that effort to learn to write. All that effort to try to go to sleep without rhythmically hitting the pillow with his head because it upsets Mamma and Papa so much. All that effort, in short. For what?

Maybe they were too apprehensive. Maybe it would have been better to let Filippo give in to his harmless weaknesses. But what could Leo do if, in certain things, both he and Rachel had an interventionist spirit? And if Filippo's compliance made things even easier? He wasn't the type of child to whom you have to keep saying: we're doing it for your own good. Something in his brain must have led him to believe that the life of a child was a continuous, persistent process meant to correct you. He must have been sure that he was a creature full of factory defects.

But was it really so normal and so necessary to spend childhood afternoons with his mother in some waiting room, to then be greeted by yet another specialist? Was it really indispensable to subject him to all this? Or maybe little Fili was paying the price of having been born into a horribly perfectionist era, and of being the child of two doctors with a weakness for straightening what was crooked? Two tidy bourgeois parents incapable of accepting that their child expressed himself in a different way from the dreariest average and the most ordinary excellence?

Leo at times wondered if he himself wasn't a little too submissive to Rachel's will. He knew how proud she was of her son's stoicism. That was the way she was brought up. To consider personal sacrifice a kind of demonstration of humanity: people sacrifice themselves without a fuss. And certainly the fact that Filippo never complained must have been in her eyes truly admirable. Often at night Rachel would tell Leo about how impeccably the child had behaved at the speech therapist's or the psychologist's.

“He's so good, he sits there, without saying a word. Every so often he smiles at me. He pages through his comic books so politely. He looks at the other children in the waiting room with amazement. And he seems to be asking, ‘What's wrong with these people that they complain so much?' Our Filippo's a little grownup.”

“Where did you take him to eat?” Leo asked, to change the subject, because he knew that the pact agreed to by mother and son was the following: if he was a good boy when she took him out of school at noon to see one of his doctors, in exchange they would have lunch in a place of his choosing. Filippo loved to eat. He had a big appetite. And fiercely childish tastes: sandwiches, French fries, Coca-Cola, steamed milk, chocolate cupcakes, cream puffs . . .

“We went to the Hungaria. He ate an entire hamburger and all the French fries. Then we went to the doctor. And on the way there he read me the newspaper. Or at least he tried to. Every so often he utters strange words, which don't exist, but then if you think for a moment you realize that it's an ordinary word where he's mangled a syllable and changed a vowel . . . ”

These accounts, which Leo asked for almost every evening—not for the pleasure of hearing them but each time in the hope (inevitably frustrated) that Rachel would say to him, “Everything's fine, Filippo is finally reading with the composure, the style, and the diction of Vittorio Gassman”—had a terrible effect on him. Sometimes they made him furious, other times they made him feel insanely affectionate. Certainly they never left him indifferent. That his son should spend most of the afternoons of the only childhood he would get being tormented by doctors filled him with indignation and made him reconsider the whole interventionist choice that he and Rachel had made.

The compliance Rachel told him about, the greediness with which Filippo ate the hamburger, the blunders and frequent and ridiculous mistakes he made reading the newspaper irritated him. Surely, surely he should have had greater understanding. Didn't he treat gravely ill children? But the point is that without him those children wouldn't survive. Very often they didn't survive anyway. Filippo, on the other hand, without his speech therapists and his psychologists would manage very well, no question.

And then the children Leo treated were not his sons. Over time he had learned to tolerate the fact that his work consisted of seeing innocent beings suffer. It was also for that reason—in fact, for that very reason—that he couldn't bear to have a child suffering at home. No, he really didn't like Filippo's stoicism, as much as he didn't like Rachel's perseverance. Paradoxically he would have preferred from both some lessening of discipline. Indeed, laxity would have seemed to him a completely natural reaction.