Persecution (9781609458744) (6 page)

“What I said. That for weeks all you've done is invite whoever to dinner. It almost seems as if you didn't want to be alone with me and the boys. As if we weren't enough for you.”

“And why would I do that?”

“I have no idea. Maybe I'm simply making the observation of a wife who feels neglected . . . Come on, I'm joking. I know you adore having people over. And I like to make you happy. I know that in summer you like to eat outside, white wine, sliced peaches . . . and within the limits of the possible I do my best . . . ”

“Please don't start in with the shopping list of things you do for me. What's the matter? Get to the point. Why are our dearest friends, whom we haven't seen for ages, today not right? Why don't you want them here?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You know perfectly well. And you know that the heat has nothing to do with it, any more than the
khaver
'
s
menstrual cycle.”

“Don't be vulgar, please. That I can't bear. Anyway, if you want to know what I really think . . . well, the truth is, I think the reason you want to have people for dinner every night is to demonstrate to the world that our recent troubles haven't affected you at all . . . And it's the same reason that, during these dinners, all you do is talk, laugh, joke about it. You've also started to drink more than necessary, and you've never done that. The message is: ‘Look, Professor Pontecorvo is fine. He's the same as usual. He's indestructible.' ”

“So the
khaver's
menstrual period is merely a pretext invented by a responsible wife to protect her desperate alcoholic husband from himself. A husband who, as I see it, she is somewhat ashamed of.”

“Don't be dramatic.”

“You're the one who's making up fantastic stories in order not to tell me what you think, and then I'm the dramatist?”

“And if I said that I'm not just thinking of you, I'm also thinking of myself? Tonight I feel like anything but having dinner with that woman who will gloat about what's happening to us.”

“ ‘That woman'? ‘Gloat'? So is that what you think of her? Some woman who gloats? I'm amazed that you've agreed to be friends with such a bitch for all these years.”

“It wouldn't be a novelty for someone who celebrates her father's three-year jail sentence. Think what a marvelous party she'd have if they gave him life, poor man.”

“Apart from the fact that there exists no more inappropriate word for Rita's father than ‘poor man,' I assure you that you are mistaken. Rita loves me, Rita loves us. Not to mention Flavio. He's the only friend I totally trust. One who would do anything he could for me. It would be insulting to him if at a moment like this I excluded him.”

“Ah, and this is your biggest worry? The offensiveness of excluding a friend?”

“I didn't say
only
for that. I said
also
for that. And then just let Rita try . . . ”

“And if she does?”

“I'll make her shape up, God damn it . . . but it won't happen. Flavio and Rita know me too well not to know that there's no basis for any of the things I've been accused of.”

“So that's it . . . ”

“That's what?”

“If you really think that, if you're so sure you're right—and I am, too, dearest, I swear—why do I have the impression that you aren't doing everything necessary?”

“
NECESSARY FOR WHAT
?”

“No, listen, if you're going to start shouting let's end the discussion.”

“O.K., I'm calm. I won't raise my voice again. Tell me, explain: I haven't done what's necessary for what?”

“You're not taking this seriously, my love. It's the same old story. If you're in this situation it's partly because you've had too much faith in others. And now it strikes me that you haven't learned your lesson. That you continue to put too much trust in others. Which is admirable. It makes you a wonderful man. But it's also dangerous and not practical. You put too much faith in your neighbor. Too much faith in truth. I've told you a thousand times. You're the most optimistic man I know. Your kindness, your good faith are admirable . . . ”

“And how do you think the honest man you're describing, that type of good-hearted idiot, could have accomplished all he has accomplished in life?”

“Leo, dearest, what does that have to do with it? I know you have no equal in your work. I understood it from the way you taught when I met you. Passion, intuition, expertise. You unfolded for us the mysteries of human physiology so magically. My friends were all in love with you. I still have a hard time believing that I was chosen by the young, incredibly handsome, unapproachable Professor Pontecorvo . . . And something tells me you chose me just because I was the one who had the least hope. But that doesn't mean you're just as good at managing everything else . . . I really get the impression that for some reason you are underestimating this situation. And that you've left me out of the whole business. Why don't you let me in? Why don't you let me help? What's the matter this time? I've always taken care of you, full time, why this time no? Why did you keep me from going to the lawyer the other day? You don't know how it pains me to be excluded. Not to know.”

“Listen, whatever you may think, I'm neither stupid nor naïve nor irresponsible. The lawyer for Santa Cristina is an excellent lawyer. And he has reassured me in every way.”

“That's just what I'm saying! How can you not understand that your interests are in conflict with the hospital's? And that if necessary they'll not only get rid of you but do it so as to pin all the responsibility on you?”

“You see how you are? Same thing. You get so angry at Rita. But now who's being mean, now who's nasty-minded and suspicious? And then what do you know about it? I have the entire hospital on my side. A stack of parents of former patients who have come forward to testify on my behalf. I have the president of the faculty who has publicly defended me, in more than one newspaper . . . not to mention the college of docents, and even the rector . . . It's not my fault if all this keeps me calm. Or if it's a moment when I want my friends around . . . ”

Yes, that was him, her Leo, the least malicious man she had ever met. What a strange talent, to have so much faith in others! But was it only a talent? Or also an extremely grave defect? Something to guard against? Her husband's magnanimity (some would have given it a different name, much more trivial). The disadvantage of not knowing what defeat is. Of not having lived as a loser. Exaggerated faith in the benevolence of destiny.

Well, she had been brought up in terror. The reason she had so disliked Rita the first times she met her was that she seemed the extreme version of herself, transported, besides, into higher-class locales. All that distrust, all that circumspection, all that fear. They were things that Rachel knew. Things that had been inculcated from the cradle. To the point where at times she wondered if among the many reasons she loved her husband so intensely was the fact that he seemed a sort of delightful, bracing antidote to all that fear she had grown up in.

It was as if her husband, who by profession joined battle daily with the irrational, perverse, and usually evil whims of the human body, when it came to grabbing the reins of his own life, gave in to a sort of philanthropic idealism. How was it possible? Had his work taught him nothing? Is there a harsher lesson than the one imparted by a ward where children fight against death? Dirty beds, vomit, blood, all that childish pain and adult despair . . . But evidently this had taught him nothing. Evidently this was not for him proof of anything. Evidently all this had not made him wiser or injected him with the cynicism that aided the majority of his colleagues.

You would say that of the two of them it was he who loved to play the part of the plain man without God: always full of words that to Rachel were pompous and empty of meaning, words like “Laicism,” “enlightenment,” “agnosticism.” And yet, if you looked closely, he was the true religious one in the family. Of the two of them, only he truly believed in a kind of Higher Order, for the most part benign, capable of setting everything right.

“Ultimately, in the end the Nazis lost. The Nazis always lose,” he pointed out to her every so often when she told him there were more anti-Semites around than he thought. (And Rachel couldn't help wondering: Really? Did the Nazis lose? But how? Aren't we the ones who lost?)

And now, with respect to the horrible things that had been written about him and the crimes attributed to him, it was as if Leo were content with the certainty that he hadn't committed them. Or at least not deliberately. In his view this was sufficient. Because in the end the truth would emerge without impediments.

More and more often his wife wondered if this unconditional trust in the world had to do with a life that had functioned too well: a fairy tale of dreams realized and promises kept. Ultimately, if there's something that's always in danger it's perfection.

The Pontecorvos were the only Jews she knew who, while Hitler's thugs and their stupid German shepherds were hunting Jews throughout Europe, stayed in Switzerland, in safety, in warmth, without dying of fear like all the others, like Rachel's mother and father. Leo was three at the time. And from that lucky Swiss start in life things had continued to go well. A charmed childhood and adolescence, protected by an idolizing mother and consecrated by a dazzling path of studies that guaranteed him a marvelous career in the family profession, and carried him to a level until then never reached by any Pontecorvo. If you took the Pontecorvos as a sample, life—with its kind and painless passage from one generation to the next—seemed an inexorable ascent toward well-being and happiness.

Was it this? This endless winning that had damaged him? Was it this effortless progress, this resemblance to Gladstone Gander, Donald Duck's cousin, that had made him so weak in the face of adversity? Was it the idea, in essence so virtuous, that in life if you only do things well you'll achieve the best that was now paralyzing him? Was this how her husband, after abolishing from his life the very idea of the unpredictable, reacted to the unimaginably malicious?

On that subject, Rachel would always tell Filippo and Samuel a story that seemed to her emblematic of both Leo's character and her own.

On their honeymoon they had toured Scandinavia by car. Rachel recalled those days with emotion. She was just twenty-five, it was the first time she had set foot outside Italy. And that she was doing so with her twenty-nine-year-old husband, whom she was in love with, whom
all
the women noticed because of his height, his Mediterranean attractiveness, and a certain professorial absent-mindedness . . . well, suddenly that girl's life resembled those stylish Cary Grant movies she was mad about. Finally, even for her, romance had arrived. Now it was her turn. There had been moments, during the honeymoon, when she had felt like Maria Callas, whose vicissitudes she never tired of following in the glossy women's magazines. Leo was so at ease in his unconscious role of Aristotle Onassis—not as rich, of course, but a thousand times thinner—who, faithful to the megalomaniac exhibitionism of his family, had arranged the trip so that everything happened as in a fairy tale: from the dilapidated splendor of the hotels to the tickets for the Stockholm Opera, from the mini-cruise in the fjords to evening clothes that she had found waiting for her in the Second Empire
bergère
in the suite in the Grand Hotel in Oslo. How marvelous!

And yet Rachel recalled that she hadn't completely enjoyed the scene arranged for her by her husband. The idea that Leo had thrown away all that money on things that Rachel had been brought up to consider vain, if not in fact immoral, had spoiled the party for her. She was sure of it: somehow, in the end, all that wastefulness would be punished by a higher authority. And the prophecy had been fulfilled on the way back, when, arriving at the hotel in Monte Carlo, the newlyweds found themselves without a cent.

In those days there were no credit cards, and to send money abroad took time and an endless series of precautions. Leo therefore decided to send a telegram with a request for help to his mother, who was vacationing in Castiglione della Pescaia at the house of her brother, the fatuous Uncle Enea.

When Rachel, alarmed, exclaimed, “Does it really seem right to call your mother? Ask her, like that, all alone, to come and pay the bill? She doesn't even have a license!,” Leo hadn't shown the least sign of anxiety.

“You don't know Uncle Enea. He'll offer to drive her. He would never miss a chance for a hand or two of chemin de fer.”

Thus, returning to the hotel half an hour later with a copy of the telegram in hand, Leo had said to Rachel, “You see, there was nothing to worry about.” And she had looked at him as if he were mad. How was there nothing to worry about? A telegram, that was all he had. The copy of a telegram dictated by him, not a telegram in response. So to speak, a hope. The note in a bottle of the shipwrecked sailor. Who knows how many unexpected events might intervene between that sent telegram and the arrival of the saviors. They might not receive it. They might receive it late. They might have an accident on the journey to Monte Carlo. They might . . . But there was also something else, which Rachel, in the toned-down version of the story intended for her sons, was careful not to confess: it's that she didn't love the idea that it was Leo's mother who was rescuing them—that woman who had opposed her from the start, without pretenses. Rachel felt she couldn't bear her mother-in-law's air of triumph, just as she couldn't tolerate the blame that she would certainly express for her not having dutifully watched over the hedonistic impulses of her wastrel son.

Just as Rachel was grappling with the thought of the imminent arrival of her mother-in-law, no less tormenting than her possible refusal, she had heard herself asked, “What do you say we order dinner in the room, since I don't feel like going out?”