Persecution (9781609458744) (44 page)

Even though that presence might not be so mendacious and so derisory as he had naturally been led to believe. Maybe it was the only resource that remained to him. When the drawing that showed his mother and father's visit to the prison arrived, Leo had really reached the point of wondering—a little touched and a little anguished—if one of his parents was the cartoonist in the shadows.

Many times Leo wondered if he did not owe to that presence the evening meal that kept him alive. And, on the other hand, it was impossible not to wonder if it had been the one to trigger the alarm that had tortured him for a whole night. Was it that alarm? Was it calling for some attention? And what about the graffito of the hanged man on the wall that had greeted his return from jail? Could that, too, though the style was definitely different, be attributed to the same hand?

In any case, just as that last drawing was sliding silently under the door, Leo's nostrils, still possessed by a tormented half-sleep, had been tickled by the overwhelming smell of coffee.

And it was as if something inside him had exploded in a flash of incongruous welcome. Maybe because it was a long time since the fragrance of coffee had visited him. Probably because Rachel and the boys had been on vacation, as if it were any ordinary August. And now, at the end of that ordinary August, they had reappeared: returning to occupy the domestic spaces with a carelessness that bordered on impudence, without worrying about slamming the car door, calling Telma in a loud voice, walking or even running over the head of the reclusive and undesirable tenant, weakened (this they could not know, but, if nothing else, they might have imagined it) by weeks of a tropical heat that in the city had claimed a lot of victims.

In short, if the darkness had restored silence, the light of dawn had brought back the smell of coffee. Causing Leo's organism to rejoice in well-being. A delight that not even opening his eyes to the same anguishing ceiling could dissipate. Rather, in order not to let that small morning gift escape, Leo had closed them again, and, clutching the pillow with the passion of a teenager in love, went back to sleep.

The smell of coffee speaks to you so affectionately of your whole life. For years it heralded the end of nocturnal hostilities, the return of Mamma into your life after hours of insomnia. At that hour of the morning, perhaps because of her déshabillé or her lack of makeup, the angular wrinkled beauty of your mother had something Lebanese about it. That was your mother, the mother you loved, the mother who on June mornings, when you came into the kitchen, was already sitting at the table, in the middle of which sat enthroned, like an idol of antiquity, a large blackened coffeepot, resistant, having survived the siege of flames for years. From it, from that statue with its incomparable shape, from that masterpiece of Italian design, came the biting yet soft odor of the morning: life that opens up and starts hurrying along again. A streaming sensation, kindled by the drink that at the time was forbidden. And that the years would transform into the fuel needed for your every activity.

Getting up at an ungodly hour to be present at the anatomy lessons that Professor Antinori held at six in the morning.

“This is the time when medical examiners work. This is the hour of the pathologist. The hour when vampires and werewolves go to bed and we get going!” that madman said, sticking his hands into the thoracic cavity of Mickey. This was the name the third-year students gave the corpses they diligently dissected, as if it were always the same one. An old cadaver, the legend went, available to the institutes of pathology and forensic medicine from time immemorial. Dear old Mickey had a long history. It was said that he was one of the numerous legacies of the last war. Whatever had happened, now it was the property of that sadistic son of a bitch Professor Antinori, whose preferred sport seemed to consist in shocking the first-year students by confronting them with that viscous, repulsive mystery of life and death called Mickey. It seemed to have been an Italian-American student who saddled it with the affectionate nickname Mickey. Because it resembled an uncle of his in Queens. Uncle Mickey.

Now you recall the taste you had in your mouth before entering the kingdom of Antinori and Uncle Mickey. Coffee. From the university bar, in the entrance hall with its solemn Fascist architecture, almost completely empty at that hour of the morning. A dirty, oily coffee, with an aftertaste of shit, but effective precisely by virtue of its distastefulness.

Completely unlike the delicious coffee that characterized your married life. One of the demands of the young, fascinating, faithful husband had to do with the quality of the coffee. On that Rachel was not to skimp. The most precious Arabicas, the finest roasting. And especially the freshness. You had to buy it every week if you wanted it always fresh and fragrant.

That coffee, so aromatic, speaks to you of Sundays: yes, Sundays, when you don't go to work. You're in bed and you hear from a distance the squawking of the boys. Rachel is running their bath. And they can only give vent to childish protests. Filippo is five, Semi three. Rachel puts them in the tub together. It's the only day of the week when you let someone enter your bathroom. That imperial bath, which you had made in your image and likeness when the villa was built: white majolica, smell of lavender, large towels of rust-colored linen, and the tub in the middle, immense and round as if it belonged to a Roman proconsul. It's there, in that little pool, that Rachel sticks Filippo and Semi for their Sunday ablutions. They always make a fuss about getting in, but, once they're in, it's almost impossible to get them out. They wallow about in your tub while you wallow in a soft, savory half-sleep.

But now that odor pierces you, that odor gives you a charge. Rachel is approaching with the coffee tray. You feel your temples jolt, a slight shock between the shoulder blades, and your warm mouth flooded with saliva. It's like a Pavlovian reflex. The drug arrives: aromatic caffeine diluted in water. Here, too, the scene is repeated every time in a delightfully unchangeable way. Rachel arrives with the tray, accompanied by a frowning Filippo, his skin pink from the steam of the hot water he has just emerged from, in his blue junior-size terrycloth bathrobe.

 

“Leo, Semi wanted to come with us to bring you your coffee. But we can't find him. He must have disappeared . . . ”

Rachel's words, always the same. Naturally Semi is right behind her. Perfectly visible: the only one who thinks he can't be seen. All that ingenuousness is a prerogative of his three years. That's why you stay in the game. With the scant breath you have in your throat you start calling his name as if you were really worried: “Semi, Semi, where are you? Where has that child gotten to?”

But he doesn't answer, even though you hear him laughing with joy. “Filippo, have you seen Semi?” Filippo gives you a complicit smile, as if to say, “You and I know where he is, but he likes to think he can't be seen, let's let him think . . . ” And now Semi, overcoming the obstacle represented by his mother's legs, hurls himself onto the bed, still wet. And Filippo jumps up after him.

“Don't get Papa wet. Come, let him have his coffee in peace.”

Your sons are in your bed, they don't dare embrace you or even touch you, they're exploding with energy, they're soaking Rachel's part of the bed. The room is still bathed in a blue-tinted yellow half-light. Rachel places the tray on the night table, lights the lamp. You know, she can't stand darkness. If it was up to her the house would always be lighted.

“No, sweetheart, please, the lamp, no. Open the blinds if you want, but not the lamp.”

Finally the coffee. The children have climbed off the bed and gone around it, now they're at the night table. They quarrel over who puts the single spoonful of sugar you need. The quarrel is too noisy for your taste, you're about to lose patience. Thank heaven Rachel intervenes. “So: Filippo puts the sugar in and you, Semi, stir. All right?”

All right. That's what they do. Until Rachel speaks again.

“Come, Semi, that's fine. Don't stir it too much or it will get cold.”

You have the cup in one hand and with the other you hold the saucer. You're about to bring the drink to your lips. Fili and Semi have again occupied Rachel's part of the bed and they are scuffling. Rachel with a gentle shove of her hip has let you know that she wants to sit next to you. You move enough so that she has room. Now the coffee, really. It's not very good. It's a little cold, a burned taste on the palate.

But it's your life. Like this bed. It's your life, your whole life.

Suddenly Leo discovers, without even giving it a name, what intensity nostalgia can reach. An infinite and primordial whiff of vitality. Leo wants everything, desires everything. He would like his children to be small again, even smaller. The scene changes: now it's not Sunday morning, now it's Friday night, it's very late, it's winter. The light has vanished, outside a storm is raging. The light from the lightning that pierces the large windows of the villa has transformed it into the set of some second-rate horror film. You're in bed and you know it's only a matter of time. Here they are, in fact. One behind the other, Filippo and Semi do their best to hide their fear. Without even asking they get into the bed, between you and Rachel. They are sweetly and irresistibly annoying. They fall asleep again almost immediately. And after a few minutes there they are, languid, gilded, their breath regular . . .

All of that is gone forever. To utter, if internally, in a semiconscious state, that forbidden word, “forever,” fills him with agitation. Something that has the taste of happiness and also of despair. Something he dares not give a name to. The strange sensation is that the big bed he is imagining—his marital bed, the one that from a spatial point of view is just a floor away from him, and from the temporal seems to him set in a different geological era—is widening.

On the bed now are not only his little sons but himself, too, as a child. Spoiled, coddled, beloved child of the forties. All his mother does is take care of him. She never leaves him when it's night. She watches over him, waiting until her Leo is asleep. That bed now is enormous. It holds his whole family, his whole history, his whole tragedy. Generations and generations of Pontecorvos. Leo's eyes are shining, he feels so congested he can hardly breathe. He would like to go upstairs to his sons and Rachel, ask them to make peace, to find understanding. He would like to shout at them, “This is happiness. You can't give happiness a slap in the face. Happiness is everything. I know. Now I know, I've learned. Too late, but I know it.”

Now he also understands what that presence is that has obsessed him for days. That presence that never deserts him. It's God. Because there has to be a God. The last infernal year of his life is God. The abandonment in which he has lived. The progressive neglect. The crimes they have charged him with. The betrayal. Camilla. All this has a name. The name is God. All the terrible, frightening things that have happened sanction the hypothesis of God.

The coffee, the smell of coffee, is God.

See how Leo, who has never managed to be alone, who has always lived under a protector, see how he can't die alone. He doesn't have the guts. God is with him just as his mother was always with him, and as Rachel was. Now that the two women of his life have left him alone, to rot there, he needs something else. He can't believe that men can live in such silence. That men can live without being constantly thought of and cared for. This solitude is inconceivable. So it is that God slips into the cellar of the Pontecorvo house, with all his quiet porcelain light. God is a Great Mamma. God is a Great Wife.

And so it is that Leo dreams of dying. And while he dreams of dying he is pervaded by the smell of coffee. Wrapped up in the covers on a big imaginary bed. The most garish of shrouds. Too bad that none of that can neutralize the painful embarrassment, which, to judge from its density, not even that dream of death and peace will totally dissipate. Too bad that not even in his dream has Leo learned the most important lesson: that there exists no lesson to learn.

 

A sound not unlike that of a distant alarm clock slipped into a stormy half-sleep that, for reasons of narrative coherence, our dream transforms into the sound of a bell or of dogs barking in response.

Immediately after he opened his eyes the sound became clearer and, so to speak, more imminent. It was the telephone. His private number. As far as Leo knew, it could be the tenth ring. Standing up, he felt an intense nausea: as if he had just gotten off a roller coaster. He stumbled to the desk. Incredu­lous that someone could still be looking for him, that someone could still be interested in speaking to him, he lifted the receiver and asked, “Who is it?,” warily and in a voice that to his ears sounded grim, as if it were coming from beyond the tomb.

“Professor Pontecorvo, it's me! Luca. Little Luca. Luchino.”

“Luchino?”

“Professor, don't tell me you don't remember? Luca, Luchino, I call you every year. Same day. The twenty-eighth of August. The day when . . . ”

“Ah, yes, Luchino.”

Ah, yes, Luchino. Luchino what? Luchino, enough. That Luchino. Who for years now, every August 28th, wherever he was, had telephoned Leo Pontecorvo to repeat his gratitude. Luchino was animated by the best intentions. He thought he was being polite by calling every year and extremely conscientious and frank in doing it at the same time. He thought it pleased Leo. Or maybe not: as with all persistent individuals the only pleasure that interested him was his own. And if there was something that made him happy it was to pick up the phone, every August 28th, at exactly eight-thirty, and call the doctor who had saved his life.

An osteosarcoma, if Leo remembered correctly, the most lethal kind, which had attacked Luchino's right leg, when he was barely older than fifteen. Leo's diagnosis was implacable: maybe we'll save the boy, certainly not the leg. At that time people were pretty blunt. At that time the surgeons blissfully amputated everything that came within reach.