Persecution (9781609458744) (9 page)

Only for a moment during the meal, in a silence marked by the clang of silverware on plates and roast beef chewed by teeth, had it seemed that the specter of what was happening to Leo was there, in the center of the table, marble and mocking. But by the time they got to dessert (the usual
torta caprese
), the atmosphere had relaxed slightly, and Leo and Rita (who never stopped pouring cream on her cake) had begun to discuss politics: the subject that at that moment seemed to them most neutral.

It was the summer of 1986. A year earlier the great battle over yet another referendum that unleashed the fratricidal struggle between the Communists of the opposition and the Socialists of the government had ended. The latter had emerged strengthened by the referendum's defeat. Although the subject in itself was not among the most exciting, Rita had demonstrated a peculiar stubbornness in declaring that, with the referendum voted down, the workers had suffered one of the most outrageous humiliations ever inflicted by a “historically fascist” country “like ours.” Her fierce hyperboles started the contentiousness, and it reached a peak of intensity when the argument fatally brushed the figure of Bettino Craxi—at that time (fifteen years before he died in his Tunisian exile) the flourishing head of the Socialist government, with his arrogant South American charisma and Kuwaiti life style—who, with his capacity to attract so much love and so much hatred, so much veneration and so much contempt, had become, in the families of many of his fellow-citizens, a kind of watershed that could cause divisions between peaceful individuals who until that moment had respected one another, making them the bitterest enemies.

The homicidal hatred that Rita felt for Craxi was no less grotesquely frenzied than Leo's veneration.

“The fact that my father, that piece of shit, has him in his house every other day,” Rita thundered at a certain point, “is indisputable proof of what sort of man he is. Fifty years ago my grandparents, with the same deference, welcomed Benito Mussolini. What can I do if my family is the seismograph of this country? If everything that is arrogant, everything that is fascist, everything that is authoritarian sooner or later ends up at my family's dinner table?”

“Nonsense, Rita. The same thing. The same argument. How long have we known each other? Twenty years? Thirty? You know, ever since I've known you you've hated
everything
that's innovative, you've fought against
everything
that tries to be healthily open-minded.”

“It doesn't seem to me that you've ever found open-mindedness to be a healthy idea. Or maybe you've changed your mind recently?”

There's the comment, placed in a rhetorical interrogative form, and for that reason heavily tinged with sarcasm, whose interpretation Leo and Rachel, after their friends had left, began to fight about.

Rachel was enraged, convinced not only that her husband was responsible for Rita's nasty comment but that in a certain sense he deserved it.

“How could you even think of starting in on that subject?” she asked him.

“Why shouldn't I? Because it allowed that woman to say some stupid things?”

“Well, you should have been more cautious. You should have gone slowly. The way you defend Craxi, who has never done a thing for you . . . ”

His love of Craxi. It was another of those disinterested emotions that Rachel couldn't bear in her husband. Plenty of people in their circle had taken advantage professionally, in the way of patronage, of certain political loyalties. Not Leo. For him the name Bettino Craxi was pure, melodious music. A poetry of intelligence and freedom. Which led him to expose himself publicly, especially on social occasions, by always taking his side. With a passion that, in an environment full of extremely refined Communists from good families, must have been incomprehensible to the point of being misunderstood.

How could Leo not see that among his friends there was not one capable of believing that an intelligent man could love with such disinterested enthusiasm a political personage whom they considered a pig, a criminal, a pervert? If Rachel (the little Jesuit, worshipper of discretion and hypocrisy) had always detested the way in which her husband laid himself bare before all those hostile people, of whom Rita represented a sort of epitome, it was much more difficult to tolerate now that—with the charge hanging over him of having received an academic benefit from a friendship with Craxi (a friendship that in reality he couldn't boast of)—Leo presented Rita with such a dialectic advantage. Why not be silent at least this once? Why always stick your neck out to your opponent's guillotine?

“And meanwhile you got yourself called a fascist.”

“You always see more in words than they say.”

“Did you see how she looked at you?”

“In order not to admit that you lost the bet you come out with simple impressions. You were so anxious that it would happen that you saw it happen. But I assure you that Rita behaved in her usual fashion.”

“And that same old story with Mitterrand?”

“What?”

“Was it really necessary? Couldn't you do without it?”

“I didn't start it. It was Rita who dragged in Mitterrand and all that squalid gossip . . . I hate gossip!”

“And you immediately took the bait.”

“She seemed more eager than usual to deplore the dishonesty and depravity of the Socialists in power.”

“Yes. And who knows why!”

“Why? Do you want to know why? I'll tell you why. Because ‘deplore' is her favorite verb. The one that's the most moving for her. Because Rita's life would be much more gray and colorless if she didn't have someone or something to deplore . . . ”

“And you're a hundred percent sure that this time the objects of her deploring were only the Socialists in power? That her principal polemical objects were Craxi and Mitterrand?”

“And who if not?”

“Well, for example the most disinterested defender of their cause.”

François Mitterrand. Another of Leo's passions. Another Socialist who had broken the bank. And, if possible, in a more grandiose manner than Craxi. In the French way: Napoleon, de Gaulle, in short, that sort of thing, you know the French . . . Besides, Mitterrand's extremely efficient grandeur was one of Leo's favorite subjects, especially recently. Ever since, just a few months earlier, he had taken part in a conference organized by the Insitut Gustave Roussy—one of the most avant-garde cancer centers in the world, where, among other things, Leo had at one time studied. A convention of luminaries hosted by the Cité des Sciences, or, rather, one of the great works inaugurated by Mitterrand during his term. At the gala dinner Leo had been introduced to Monsieur le Président, and had been able to show off, for a good two minutes, his very fluent French. From that moment his love for Mitterrand had taken the unvarying form of idolatry.

The trouble is that Signora Pontecorvo disapproved of her husband's love of all things foreign, no less than she disapproved of his idolatry. She found both too ingenuous for a man of his caliber and, at the same time, annoyingly partisan. Sometimes it seemed to Rachel that Leo went around the world with the sole purpose of noting, upon his return, how poorly his own country functioned. Rome, to hear Leo, was the worst place on the planet. He never came back from one of his trips without making a list of all the things in England or Germany that worked better. He uttered statements like “Landing at Fiumicino, after a week abroad, is always a trauma.” An attitude that Rachel, in whose breast beat a soberly chauvinist heart, couldn't bear. Besides, in such circumstances, there was no subject of Leo's that did not sound tendentiously dishonest to his wife's ears. An ingenuous tendentiousness, true, but for that very reason more pathetic.

Like the time, oh yes, on that wretched trip to New York, when he had succeeded in dragging her along (usually she resisted his invitations, if only so she could then complain about never going anywhere). Rachel had been horrified one morning when, right after breakfast, Leo, as they left the lobby of the Sheraton and stood on Seventh Avenue, in the middle of summer, at rush hour, in a staggering din, had whispered, “I adore this fragrance!” There. That time, faced with such gall, she couldn't contain herself.

“What fragrance? What fragrance are you raving about? It stinks—can't you tell? A terrible stink. There's no place in the world that stinks like this.”

“No, it's the fragrance of Manhattan. You just don't have the poetry to understand it.”

“I may not be poetic, but this is the odor of garbage. And in Rome we have plenty of garbage. What is it that isn't right about our garbage?”

That was how Rachel had expressed herself that day in New York. Intolerant of the fact that her husband was so poetic in evaluating the stink of New York. And so prosaic about the Roman version.

Rachel, furthermore, had a problem with Paris. She felt for Leo's Parisian period that sort of tender and yet burning retrospective jealousy that wives who feel inadequate harbor for the life led by their husbands before marriage. From the way Leo talked about his time at the Roussy she could deduce that he had had a wonderful time. Not that he had ever told her in detail what he'd been up to during his Paris year. There wasn't that sort of intimacy between them. But Rachel felt that behind his reticence lodged a lot of indecent memories, for which her husband felt nostalgia.

And she wasn't wrong.

It's that in Paris, in 1963—the year when Leo had lived (God, if that is the appropriate word!) there—everybody was fucking. And Leo had been unable to resist all that promiscuity. Besides, apart from sex, he hadn't economized in any way. Which shouldn't be surprising. At least if you give due weight to the fact that little Leo had spent the first years of his life in Switzerland, toddling in short pants through the meadows of the Alpine village where his parents had sensibly gone into hiding in 1941. And that once he returned home his life in the postwar years had been more prosperous and comfortable than that allotted by fate to the majority of his fellow-citizens. And might have been even more comfortable if it hadn't been for the unbearable attitude of his parents.

They wouldn't leave him alone. They gave him no respite. They never let up. They were always on him. Did they perhaps mean to offer him, in an invasive form, all the protection that the Jewish parents of their generation—at least in Europe—had not been able to guarantee to their indiscriminately massacred offspring? Is that it? A kind of symbolic compensation? Or is it simply the overprotective syndrome of the parents of an only son?

Bah! In any case it explains the hypochondria of the father, the renowned, taciturn pediatrician who was constantly examining him, listening to his heart and lungs, administering pointless treatments (once he had practically sent him to his creator with a boiling chamomile enema). Similarly, it explains the suffocating attentions of his mother. But, above all, it explains why Leo escapes at the first possible opportunity. And, having earned his degree in Medicine and just enrolled in the specialty of Pediatrics, he accepts without hesitation a proposal from his mentor, Professor Meyer, to go to Paris to gain experience at the Institut Gustave Roussy. And why once in Paris he doesn't miss a thing.

He is assigned to a team studying, in the laboratory and in the field, neuroblastoma, the very particular type of cancer that afflicts only children, on which Leo did his brilliant thesis (“worthy of publication,” of course).

In those days Paris deserved overtime! It could be said that Leo didn't sleep for all of 1963. As if a savage enthusiasm had allowed him to pare his sleeping hours down to the indispensable. All the novelties that surrounded him required dedication, because at that time Paris, in spite of its run-down appearance, in spite of the fact that everything was crumbling, insisted on declaring itself brand-new. In the morning you glanced at the papers and saw a continuous self-celebration: there was the new cinema and the new novel and the new morality and the new politics . . . Not too mention cool, alcoholic jazz, like the Martinis with ice that Leo gulped down in dark cellars on the Left Bank that smelled of cork, mold, and toilets.

It should be specified that, unlike the
vie de bohème
led by most of the young who gathered in Paris in that decade, Leo's was, to say the least, gilded. Thanks to Dr. Pontecorvo senior, in fact, the wallet of our young scion away from home was always equal to the situation. No poverty, therefore. No asceticism. No painful search for truth in misery. If anything a lot of amusement, and not at all cheap.

Which had not kept him from having his moments of poetry. At times—especially on Saturdays, when he could afford to prolong his carousing until dawn—on the way home (if the fifteen-square-meter studio in the Rue Jussieu could be called that), Leo, a touch high, had the impression that Paris was speaking to him. After an explosive night at the Caveau de la Huchette, the froglike cheeks of Dizzy Gillespie remained in his mind's eye, swelling improbably, allowing that great man of bop to blow into his trumpet like an angel on Judgment Day. He had just seen him perform, and was incredulous. But do you realize, my boy? The great Dizzy playing for you and a few others of the chosen? And then the smell of Paris at dawn—the butter of brioches just out of the oven and the sweetish damp of the river—encouraged epiphanic thoughts.

And, as for smells, there was one that Leo had not so easily freed himself from and which he was careful not to speak about to his wife. The one that, when he woke, he sought in the burning hollow between the neck and cheek of Gisèle Bessolet, the nineteen-year-old concubine who had begun to sleep at his house, on the wave of inertia that always seemed to be pushing her in the wrong direction. That is, if “sleep” is the right word.

There's no denying, that girl in bed really had nerve! At least that was the judgment expressed by a basically inexperienced fellow like Leo.