Persecution (9781609458744) (4 page)

She had a stinging memory of her father, who, after finishing a meal in a restaurant, would sit there, with his shopkeeper's glasses, analyzing the bill, item by item. Not to mention the times when, finding some error, he called over the owner and, with ill grace, pointed it out. From then on Rachel had vowed to herself: never again. Never again will I be present at those scenes. Never feel that mortification. Never again will I be humiliated and never again will I humiliate.

A vow that she had been able to keep until Rita entered her life. A kind of troublemaker. Someone who loved to argue. Who adored calling attention to the inadequacies of her neighbor. Just like that time with the man and the dog.

“Does it seem possible?” she had said in a loud voice. “Does it seem to you possible that someone is so rude that he brings a dog into a restaurant? What sort of upbringing is that? I cannot understand what goes through people's minds . . . Is no one going say anything to him?” And, not satisfied, she added, a few seconds later—carefully raising her voice by some decibels—“I would advise everyone here not to set foot in this restaurant ever again!”

The problem was that that time Rita had met her match (there are a lot of them out there), and he had responded angrily: “Instead of making a scene, couldn't you ask me politely to take my dog out?”

“Am I talking to you? I don't think so. I was talking to my friends. But since you have spoken to me, then let me tell you that you are rude. A real boor. Worse than almost anyone I've ever met.” In order not to let things degenerate further Flavio and Leo had intervened.

In all this there would basically have been nothing different from the usual.

Except that fate willed that some years after that episode in the restaurant, Rita (now condemned by life not to have children) had received as a gift from her sister an English sheepdog puppy. After her initial bewilderment, and, especially, after a few days of being forced to live with the tender young pup, she had become attached to that creature with all her heart. Her old fear of animals in general and dogs in particular was immediately left behind. From that day on, she and Giorgia (that was the dog's name) were inseparable. Rita was much more preoccupied with Giorgia's food, Giorgia's well-being, Giorgia's health than Rachel was about her boys. The morbidity of her affection led her to take the dog wherever she went. She didn't trust leaving her alone, so she brought her even to restaurants.

Usually people were more understanding of her than she was of them, but once a woman who was allergic had had a waiter ask Rita if she could take Giorgia outside. They were at the club in Olgiata, having dinner in the clubhouse. It was pouring rain. At the request to take Giorgia out, and at the sight of the storm, Rita lost control. And in a dramatic tone of voice she began to intone: “I wonder how people can be so cruel. As for certain people, I would make them stay out in the rain. Ah, the cruelty of people.”

Giorgia had already been outside for several minutes, wearily curled up under the restaurant's awning, with her gaze turned to her mistress, who was eating on the other side of the glass, while the mistress wouldn't stop commenting in a loud voice on the arrogance with which the woman had insisted that her Giorgia—the most exceptional being, the best, the sweetest (“the cleanest in this filthy restaurant”) she had ever known—be expelled, “like a Jew.”

“How can that woman always act like that?” Rachel had burst out that night while Leo, with some vanity, was undressing in front of the mirror in the little dressing room opposite the bedroom. “Until two years ago she couldn't imagine that someone could even conceive of bringing a dog to a restaurant. You remember the scene she made? Now, instead, people who won't let dogs in are cruel. Only because now the dog that has to stay outside is hers. But does it seem to you consistent?”

“Certainly no one makes you as angry as Rita,” her temperate husband had commented.

“Yes, her shamelessness makes me angry. Her arrogance. Her failure to remember. The capacity to adapt to any situation at her own convenience. Her way of systematically denying the truth. Her insistence on being always right . . . And that business of the Jews. How can she dare compare the tragedy of the Jews to the most spoiled dog in the galaxy?”

Leo knew that Rachel was right. He had known Rita for so many years! And he knew that she belonged to that rather large portion of humanity that molds its principles to its own conveniences, that lacks the moral force that pushes people like Rachel to do the exact opposite. You had been a pain in the ass to the entire world over the fact that dogs should not be brought to a restaurant? Well, this should have acted as a deterrent to bringing your dog, should you someday have one, to a restaurant for the rest of your life.

But your name wasn't Rita Albertazzi. If that was your name, you did only and exactly what seemed to you easiest at that precise instant. And, convinced that you could boast of a kind of universal credit with the world, you felt you were authorized to judge anyone who placed himself in your way as an enemy, to insult, to push aside, to destroy.

 

And, speaking of convictions, the more Rita emphasized her own, bestowing on them the sanction of inviolability, the less respect she showed for those of others.

Among all the people (whether Catholic or secular) whom Leo had compelled his wife to be friendly with, and who regarded their Judaism with a feeling somewhere between curiosity, irony, and suspicion, Rita was the one most inclined to allow herself, on the Jewish question, to express value judgments.

One day she called Rachel to ask if she and Leo were free for Tuesday evening. She had invited to dinner some people who would love to meet Leo. In those years he had earned a small reputation that Rita was not at all insensitive to, being attracted by any form of celebrity, even the most obscure. Although she lived under the illusion of having rid herself of every attitude impressed in her by her so volubly hated family, in reality she had inherited both the pleasure in and the talent for gathering at her house those whom she called, emphatically, “serious people.” It's irrelevant that the relationships of her detested parents were based on economic convenience, and hers, instead, on political, artistic, and intellectual prestige.

She attached particular importance to that evening. There was a name director. An eminent editorial writer. And in particular the Hungarian ambassador (“a magnificent person, polyglot, a cultivated and tormented Communist, not like our pissants”: so she had described him, with the pomposity she always used in discussing “serious people”). In short: Rita wanted to introduce Leo to these personalities and these personalities to Leo. Ever since he had started writing a column in the
Corriere
entitled “Prevention Is the Best Medicine,” Leo had been a star among the imaginary sick people of the country.

Rita always called Rachel when she made these invitations. And Rachel had the impression that she was being treated like a sort of press office, whose only function is to throw a wrench in the works of those who wish to become famous. Rachel knew that Rita was at the top of the list of people who, on the subject of the marriage between her and Leo, wondered how a man like that had come to marry a woman like that. If, for example, Leo had showed up at that dinner without Rachel, Rita would not even have noticed, but if the opposite had happened . . . well, if the opposite happened Rita would have had to restrain herself from kicking Rachel out of the house. She would have felt like a head of state who, having invited to his country another head of state, goes to the airport to welcome him and sees descending the steps of the plane only an obscure private secretary.

“Unfortunately Tuesday we can't,” Rachel had said that time.

“And why not?” Rita had asked, in the voice of a woman who is about to drown in a lake and begs you to help her and you refuse because you're playing cards.

“It's Yom Kippur.”

“So what?”

“So we can't go out, we can't eat, we can't do anything, in other words.”

“Yes, but, sorry . . . the invitation is for the evening.”

“I know. But Yom Kippur lasts a whole day. For twenty-six hours.”

Rachel didn't even know why she was giving so many explanations. Her religion was not something she liked to talk about. Her husband did. Leo always had his mouth full of big fancy words like “the people of the Book,” “the marriage between the chosen people and the French Revolution.” If only her husband had respected Mosaic law with the conviction with which he spouted off about the importance of Jewish culture, he would have been the most pious man in the world. But Rachel preferred to refrain from talking about it. If there was a lesson she had learned from her family, that her father had instilled in her, it is that certain things are not talked about. Above all with those who don't belong to the “milieu” (this was the euphemistic expression by which Rachel's father referred to the Jews). But this time, who knows why (certainly because of the effect that woman had on her), Rachel was
explaining
more than necessary and this made her irritated with herself. And she was about to be punished for the excess of explanations she had provided.

“Come on, what sort of nonsense is that? For once! It's important. I don't think your Yom Kippur will interest the ambassador. He comes from a Communist country, where they've abolished certain types of nonsense.”

“But it's of interest to us.”

“To you? You must mean of interest to
you
. Your husband finds such superstitions laughable. At least leave him the right to live his life as he pleases.”

“I don't oblige him to do anything.”

You see? That woman always forced you to be on the defensive. Her inappropriately inquisitive manner pushed you to give explanations that you didn't want to give and shouldn't have to.

“Doesn't it seem to you crazy, anachronistic, tribal?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This business of Yom Kippur . . . Surely it's time to dispose of certain . . . ”

“Listen, Rita . . . ” This time her voice trembled. Knowing that she was one of those people who are very slow to get angry but whose anger when they do lose patience takes a strident and inappropriate form, Rachel was doing her utmost not to explode. And yet she felt, just from the trembling in her own voice, that she was at her limit. But even before she could say to Rita what she had wanted to say to her for a long time—and that is that she must not dare to enter into her and Leo's decisions, that she must not allow herself to speak in that contemptuous way about something as fundamental to her as Yom Kippur, that she had to stop being so meddlesome and inappropriate, that she had to stop treating her like a troglodyte—lo and behold, the other, with the intuition typical of women used to total freedom of expression but capable of understanding from the tone of their interlocutor when they have gone too far, backed off. (Like all really arrogant people, Rita was a coward.) Naturally she didn't ask her pardon, but she began to apologize in a way that was even more annoying:

“O.K., don't come. I understand. If for you and Leo it's important . . . But let me say that I'm sorry for you. This was a great opportunity for your husband. I won't tell you that I organized the dinner for him, but practically. You know, it's not enough to have a reputation as a great doctor. It's not enough to have in the papers
certain
columns that are just a bit, at least for my taste, too popular. You have to make connections”—Rita would never have used the word “relationships,” or, still less, “friendships.” “I think the Hungarian ambassador would have offered him new possibilities. Like doing a round of conferences in Budapest. A big thing. Something that could change a man's career.”

Here is Rita's repertoire at its best: rousing in you a sense of guilt. Loading you with her sufferings and her failures. Embarrassing you for your presumed inadequacy. Trying to persuade you (what impudence!) that she's doing you a favor at the moment when you should be doing her one. Putting on the guise of a disinterested benefactor just at the moment when her opportunism is hitting a new record.

And then Rachel couldn't bear all that flaunted distrust. Rita's suspiciousness was wearing. Although Rachel came from a world in which a general distrust of one's neighbor was the rule, she couldn't understand how a woman of Rita's background could be so constantly on her guard. Rita lived in terror that someone wanted to cheat her. Like the time Rachel had gone shopping with her one afternoon: in January, when the sales were on. A nightmare. Not once had Rita left a shop without one of her nasty remarks. “I remember,” she had said to a saleswoman, “that these shoes, without a discount, were the exact same price last month.”

“It's a matter of principle,” she had said, in self-defense, observing Rachel's dismay and irritation after yet another of these conversations. “I can't bear it when people try to put one over on me.”

The fact is that she started from the assumption that the country in which she happened to be born and the city in which she lived were the emblem of all that is dirty and crooked. To the point where she could say that matters of principle were for her a sort of standard with which to defend herself from all the violence she had felt besieged by from birth.

This distrust of one's neighbor seemed to Rachel in permanent conflict with the note of sentimentality that warmed Rita's voice when, during her political rants, she talked about “the people.” As if the word “people” did not include the abnormal number of people despised and reviled by her, as if those waiters and those shoe salesmen whom she accused of baseness and iniquity did not belong to the “people.” For her the “people” were a kind of metaphysical abstraction to idolize, and not something for which there existed an earthly equivalent, which was very often smelly and untrustworthy.