Persecution (9781609458744) (5 page)

“Why does she always talk with such ecstasy about the people in general and so badly of all people in particular?” Rachel asked her husband, exasperated by the long dinners with the Albertazzis.

“Because she's a Communist,” he responded concisely.

In the end Rachel, because of her love for Leo and because of the modesty that led her to love what he loved and desire what he desired, had grown affectionate toward Rita and her pedantic consort. Driven more by tolerance than by regard, more by understanding than by sympathy, she had ended by considering that couple of her husband's friends one of the reassuring habits on which every bourgeois marriage can count. At a certain point, unable to find truly admirable qualities in them, she had become attached to their flaws.

Of course, she continued to control the desire to yawn whenever Flavio ventured into his love-of-humanity digressions, just as she persisted in finding Rita's scenes with restaurant managers and shoe salesmen insufferable, but she accepted these things with the patience with which she tolerated certain flaws in her husband, her children, life, the world. In time she had learned to avoid particular conversations, above all political: no, she would no longer be accused of being reactionary just because she said sensible things.

Whenever the Albertazzis came to dinner she had Telma (guardian at that time of the recipes of the Pontecorvo household) prepare a
torta caprese
, the flourless chocolate cake that Flavio was mad for, and
concia
, the traditional Roman Jewish zucchini dish, and the tomatoes with rice that Rita loved. Yet she prevented this same maid from appearing in the dining room, in order not to hear Rita say, “How can you let yourself be served like this, by another human being? How can you not ask her to sit down with you?” Rachel, knowing that she would never get used to phrases of this type, managed not to provoke them.

 

Just on the wave of all this, that Saturday, a few hours before the final crash, and maybe precisely because of a kind of foresightedness, Rachel had done her best to keep the Albertazzis from coming to dinner. Not that she was annoyed with them for any reason in particular. Yet she felt a certain embarrassment in having to face the subject of the legal documents that Leo had received, not to mention the newspaper articles that mentioned him. It couldn't be a coincidence if Rita had telephoned more than usual recently. It was clear that she wanted to interfere: the reason she kept her on the telephone for so long, even in silence—after receiving all the confidences she could, except what really interested her—was the hope that Rachel would break her oath of loyalty and vent. It was clear that Rita hoped her friend would give at least a little evidence of her anxiety, and complain a little if not actually cry. A satisfaction that Rachel was naturally very careful not to give her.

But that evening? Lord, that evening loomed as a nightmare. Would she be capable of suppressing her anguish in front of that hyena Rita? Would she keep from falling into a trap? Well, she herself yes, maybe. But Leo? You couldn't rely on him. Let's suppose even that Leo controlled himself and that Flavio (the trusted friend) respected his choice of reserve, how could you expect that Rita would manage to hold back? It was in her livid nature to let a troublesome comment slip out.

Rachel remembered an anecdote that Leo, not without amusement, had told her. Of how, many years before, Rita had invited to a restaurant a select group of friends to celebrate her father's first conviction. “They gave him three years, that son of a bitch,” she kept saying, as she got drunker and drunker. Laying it on thicker: “Maybe this country is beginning to understand something. Maybe this country is beginning to redeem itself!” Until, finally, she invited her friends to make a toast: “At last they're starting to realize what sort of criminal they're dealing with.”

“And why,” Rachel asked every time, “did you all go along with such a disgusting scene?”

“You know, my love, it was that atmosphere, those years. Parents were the enemy. The great oppressors. Apart from your family, which anachronistically loved its old people, and had a lot of pious old Jews you could respect, in the rest of the world it was considered a very serious sin to be old. Paris, Berkeley, Valle Giulia: we were preparing for that, I don't know if you understand . . . Rita had taken that bullshit literally. And of course her parents were easy to demonize.”

That story, so entertaining to Leo, had never amused Rachel. She might be a Jewish blockhead, from a family that “loved old people,” as Leo said, but she really couldn't understand how someone could celebrate because her father had gone to jail. It might be that Rachel adored her father and had done everything she could to make him happy, but the idea that a daughter who had, after all, been given so many opportunities by her parents could harbor mean and hateful feelings toward them, and display them so brazenly, seemed to her a pathology that she wanted nothing to do with.

That was why, given her record, and considering the avalanche of phone calls in the preceding days, the least she could expect that evening from someone who with her friends had toasted the imprisonment of her own father was that she would ask some impertinent question.

One of the things that Rachel had never got used to—having entered, by her marriage, a higher social milieu than the one she came from—was the nearly complete absence of reserve. These people had no boundaries, no sense of shame. There was nothing they didn't feel authorized to joke about. In the early years of her marriage she had swallowed the tale that such a lack of hypocrisy was a way of declaring one's freedom with respect to certain petty-bourgeois conventions in which she had been trapped by a traditional upbringing. She had gone so far as to ask herself if that tell-all, that don't-hide-anything, was not a refinement that her background didn't allow her to grasp. Very often she had looked at her husband with amazement as he lightheartedly revealed a family secret. Other times she had been openmouthed while he said to whoever he was talking to exactly what was going through his mind.

Until she had finally understood that all this was not for her. That she would not get used to such an attitude. Because she didn't like it. Serious things, by their nature, should be handled with tact and circumspection, not become the subject of yet another amusing little story to share with friends, or to spill in front of strangers, simply because no discretion will ever have the fascination of a witty confession. For Rachel it was better to have many secrets than to have none. On the other hand, that continual confusion between what was serious and what wasn't, that mixture of the sayable and the unsayable, had made these people lose any sense of priorities. Too often their taste for wit meant that they didn't take into account the susceptibilities of others.

Rachel recalled with irritation and regret the occasion when the man who was then her future husband had, without realizing it, humiliated his girlfriend's cousin. Leo and Rachel barely knew each other. He was the arrogant, irresistible assistant of Professor Meyer, and Rachel the lively, passionate student whom Leo, after giving her an exam and awarding her the highest mark, which she well deserved, had asked on a date. A relationship that was opposed, especially at the beginning, by Rachel's father, who, faithful to a practice already quite anachronistic at the time, had demanded that when his daughter and that “professor” went out Sara, Rachel's little cousin, should be present as a silent and embarrassed chaperone. As a result Leo found himself paying for dinner and a movie for his girlfriend and the cousin of his girlfriend. Once, out of either irritation at the situation or a pure taste for fun, Leo, after paying yet another bill at a seaside restaurant, near Fregene, had asked Sara: “Listen, I've noticed that you don't even make a move to pay. Are you just miserly or are you really poor?”

What the trembling and devastated Sara couldn't know was that in the playful vocabulary of the Pontecorvos the word “miserly” designated those persons, very numerous in their world, who, even though they could count on a large inheritance, lived at the edge of indigence out of pure stinginess. Not grasping this lexical shading, Sara began to cry. And for days Rachel wouldn't answer Leo's phone calls. And then asked him, sometime later, having granted the desired pardon, “How could you be so cruel? How can you humiliate someone that way?”

“It was only a joke. Christ, you people from the slums are so sensitive! What's this taking everything seriously? If you want I'll apologize, but I swear to you that insulting her was the last thing I intended.”

“You see? That's what I'm saying: you give no weight to words. And so in your view I'm someone from the slums?”

“Come on, sweetie, I was joking.”

“Will the day ever come when you stop joking?”

Now, twenty years later, that day had arrived. But Rachel wasn't sure that Leo realized it: she suspected that, over the years, what had at first appeared a simple inclination to playfulness had become a modus operandi that Leo and all his friends used to avoid serious problems, or to speciously minimize them.

There would have been nothing wrong with this if something really serious wasn't happening to him, and if, precisely because of that blowhard spirit, he didn't recognize it as such (or at least pretended not to recognize it).

In fact, although Rachel knew how upset her husband was, literally, by the notifications of crimal proceedings he had received, she knew him too well to be surprised at the fact that he talked about it lightheartedly. That was how he managed anguish in public and in private: by deliberately underestimating its causes. And, if necessary, joking about it. For this reason, although she was aware that at night Leo suffered from insomnia and during the day started at every noise, as if he were afraid of being attacked, Rachel had to pretend to believe her husband's clumsy performance, as he cheerfully professed to be indifferent and hopeful. God only knew how much she would have liked to shake him. Tell him that the situation was serious, yes, but not irreparable. He just had to act like a man, and stop being a wise guy.

Like the morning a few days before, when he had started off during breakfast making fun at Filippo's expense: who, his lips stained with chocolate milk, had asked if it was his father's turn to take him to school. And Leo, the day after receiving yet another notification from the court, had said, “So, little rascal, you feel like driving with a dangerous criminal?”

Well, probably at that point the boys knew, or imagined, especially Filippo. (A few days earlier he had asked Rachel a question. Evidently a classmate had said something to him.) Although Rachel from the beginning had been in favor of keeping them out of the whole revolting mess, it was impossible that they wouldn't hear about it. But what need was there for such remarks? What pleasure could there be in making two boys share his legal troubles, and doing so by means of jokes with excruciating hidden meanings (and not funny, besides) that, just because of the ambiguity, would upset them? But the truth is that, in spite of appearances and his stated intentions, Leo
wanted
to upset them, just as he wanted to upset her. And simply because, being upset himself and unable to admit it, he wished to unload all that anxiety on those closest to him. So when Filippo asked him, worried, “Why did you say that?,” he defended himself with one of those remarks that seem made to reassure you but which have the opposite effect: “Nothing, nothing, I'm joking. Everything's fine.”

Her husband's bad faith (which irritated her) manifested itself precisely through such performances. Someone who pretends to make light of things at the very moment when that type of behavior makes the situation unbearable. Just as he raises the limit of what's bearable another notch. He pretends to be detached while he's right in the middle. He pretends not to think about it but all he does is brood. He pretends not to be ashamed but he can't sleep at night because of his shame. He pretends not to be afraid and he's pissing in his pants.

 

In other words, given the circumstances, the only thing missing was Flavio and Rita. An evening with their most dangerous, most unpredictable friends. Which announced itself as pestilential. And Rachel didn't know whether to be more on her guard against Leo or against the two of them: she was sure, however, that someone would make a scene, and this she had to avoid. No, she wasn't ready for that sort of evening. And that was why, that very Saturday morning, when there was still time to cancel the whole thing, she had asked Leo if it wouldn't make sense to put it off. She would take care of it. He wouldn't have to do anything. She would call Rita to—

“Why would you do that?”

“Well, you know, mostly because I'm quite tired, I didn't sleep last night. Then because Telma doesn't feel well today. I don't really want to ask her to cook.”

“What's wrong? Fever? Usual sore throat? Want me to take a look at her?,” as if Telma were a broken appliance or a horse with tendinitis.

“No, no, she just doesn't feel well . . . female trouble . . . ”

“She's a grownup woman, she must be used to it. It's not something that's ever kept her from doing her job.”

“Well, this time . . . ”

“This time what?”

“She seems more tired than usual.”

“Did she say anything to you? Did she complain? Did she say she doesn't feel like cooking?”

“But use your head, do you think she would say something?”

“But you, with your extraordinary intuition . . . ”

“I understand certain things. She's exhausted. You know how she suffers in the heat. And then, excuse me, aren't you tired of having people to dinner almost every night? For weeks all you've been doing is inviting people over. If for once . . . ”

“And what do you mean by that?”