Persecution (9781609458744) Read online

  It seems, Leo, that you have violated the only taboo that people can’t forgive. A twelve-year-old, good God. Having sex with a twelve-year-old. Seducing the girlfriend of your son. It’s not at all a matter of sex. You know very well, no one today is ruined because of a fuck. In fact, if anything a fuck is often at the origin of great fortunes. The trouble is the age of the supposedly deflowered one. Right there is the difference.

  At this point every one of your qualities as a sober and civilized man will, in the light of the crime they are sticking you with, be considered a sin or an aggravating cause. Every good thing you’ve ever done will from now on be considered the bizarre behavior of a pervert. Because no one on the outside will seriously question the plausibility of the charge. Rather, they will choose to believe this story precisely by virtue of its implausibility. That’s how things function in our world. And just because people ask nothing better than to believe the worst, everything bad that is said about an individual (especially if he has had some lucky throws of the dice in the Monopoly of life) is immediately taken as true. That’s how gossip turns homicidal. And the capillaries of the social organism swell almost to the point of bursting.

  On the other hand, how could you ask the world to accept the fact that none of the three stricken people who are with you in the kitchen at this moment will ever learn to forgive you?

  Samuel’s labored breathing. A syncopated panting that has the slightly terrifying effect on Leo that turbulence causes in the passenger with a fear of flying. Leo thinks of the poisoned meatball he has served this boy. An entire nation that, starting tomorrow, will be gossiping about how your father fucked your girl. The kind of thing you don’t recover from.

  The suspension in which the kitchen hangs in those long seconds is broken by the burbling of the coffeepot, anxious to announce to those present that the coffee is ready, down to the last drop, and if no one decides to turn it off it will be unable to contain itself and will explode.

  “Mamma, why don’t you turn off the stove? Hey, Mamma, why don’t you turn it off? Shouldn’t we turn it off, Mamma?”

  It’s the voice of Filippo. Repulsively whiny. More childish than the person it belongs to. Leo would only like Rachel to make him be quiet. And it’s what Rachel does, getting up like an automaton and turning the knob of the burner. Rachel. Holy God, Rachel. It’s then that Leo remembers. It’s then that he tries to imagine what is whirling around in her head. And it’s at this very instant that the airplane plunges down.

  Leo feels that he hates her as he has never hated anything else. He blames her for everything: for being there, and for not being there enough, for doing nothing but also for doing everything, for being silent, for breathing, for having set out such an appetizing dinner, for having turned on the TV to that particular channel, for the vice she has of watching ten news shows a day, for not getting up and answering the telephone, for having produced two sons whose presence now is so unbearable to him, for not making Filippo be quiet, for not rushing to help the catatonic Samuel . . .

  It was she who instilled in the boys’ minds the idea that he is a great man. How can this revered god declare his own fragility? How can he do the only thing he wants to do: break down in sobs? How can he justify himself by resorting to banal excuses, presenting himself in the incongruous guise of the victim of a gigantic mistake?

  Because it is a mistake, isn’t it? Leo no longer knows. At this moment he is confused. But yes, a mere glance at the letters in question—that he wrote and sent to Camilla (it’s true, he can’t deny it)—would reveal that they are the opposite of what they seem. No, my little one, your papa did not fuck your girl. If anything it was she who screwed your daddy!

  Just as a mere glance at the accusations would be enough to observe that they are not the product of dishonesty but result from a mixture of foolishness and irresponsibility. This, at least, Rachel must know. She’s aware of her husband’s negligence. She’s been complaining about it for a lifetime, often with tenderness, even. And yet she has done it in such a way that Filippo and Samuel could not begin to imagine it. You see? It’s her fault. All Rachel’s fault.

  What is Leo doing? What he knows how to do best: blame others. Shift responsibility. In essence it’s the same technique (revised and corrected) that, many years before, he adopted to defend himself against his mother’s scolding.

  When Signora Pontecorvo annoyed him, little Leo, in response, was offended. He put on a competing scowl. Until finally his mother, worn out by the blackmailing behavior of her little bear cub, gave in. Melting in a smile of reconciliation: “Come on, sweetheart, it’s nothing. What do you say we make peace?”

  Only then did our strategist give proof of his magnanimity by accepting his mother’s apologies. Well, Leo managed to make this scenario a classic of his married life as well.

  There must have been many who wondered how a man of the charm and background of Leo Pontecorvo could have married that common little Jewess. Whose reserve might be taken for apathy, and whose desire for invisibility might be confused with insipidness. Someone will ask how that fine, slender figure of a man, romantic as a Slavic pianist (unruly hair and tapering fingers), doctor and professor whom the white jacket suits, as a tuxedo does certain orchestra conductors, could have married the tiny and, at most, pretty Rachel Spizzichino.

  From the outside their relationship is so unbalanced . . . their memories (their lives!) speak such different languages. Leo’s languish in the solemn spaces of an apartment with high coffered ceilings, filled with heavy inlaid furniture, like mausoleums, and equipped with electrical appliances that no one could afford in those days.

  As for Rachel, although a quarter century has passed, the bedroom where she spent the first twenty-five years of her life, studying hard, with the window facing on a narrow alley in the old Ghetto, continues to give off (even in memory) the odor of boiled, refried greens intolerable to her (and even more so in memory).

  And yet what divided them then is precisely what unites them today. Because this is the secret of successful marriages, of couples who are happy in spite of everything: they never cease to be charmed by what is exotic in the other.

  And then who would have suspected that between them things are not as they seem? That Leo is so afraid of his wife’s opinion, and, at the same time, so dependent on her, on both practical and psychological levels, that he had reproduced with her the bond that for so many years ruled his relations with a hypochondriac and overprotective mother? No one on the outside could believe that this new Signora Pontecorvo plays a role in Leo’s life not too dissimilar from the one played in her time by the old Signora Pontecorvo. That the new Signora Pontecorvo inherited from the old Signora Pontecorvo (who in fact was hostile to her, hostile as only certain Jewish mothers-in-law know how to be) a type of relationship based on the blackmail practiced by a talented and capriciously fragile boy?

  Thus, when Rachel is angry at her husband, he doesn’t know what to do except get angry back, with a sulky expression that from year to year grows only a little more ridiculous, until she, irritated by Leo’s stubborn pout, which can last indefinitely, even for weeks, puts an end to the quarrel with a remark, a caress, a deliciously diplomatic gesture like offering him a bar of white chocolate, which he loves. In short: the wife gives proof of strength by showing herself yielding, while the husband betrays weakness by remaining faithful to his sulk, leaving her to initiate (only a child could consider it humiliating) a reconciliation.

  The crisis set off by the television, besides, was only the latest—though it would turn out to be irremediable and definitive—in a series that had punctuated the past weeks. Ever since Leo, thanks to that fine collection of accusations, had begun to suffer from insomnia and Rachel to watch over him and reassure him like a little mamma. So their life had started to change.

  Just that evening, shortly before turning on the TV, Rachel had ended a quarrel begun the night before, after Flavio and Rita Albertazzi—old friends—had left th
e Pontecorvo house.

  It wasn’t the first time that something officially pleasant like a dinner with the Albertazzis had presented Rachel and Leo with the pretext for a quarrel. But this time the subject of the argument seemed so painful, and had left in the air such a sense of bitterness and hostility, that Rachel had felt the need to bury the hatchet before she normally would.

  “I’ve put something on to warm up in the kitchen. Why don’t you come and eat?” So she had said going down to the basement study, where her husband had spent the Sunday listening to old Ray Charles records. Leo had put some time into lining his study-refuge with all those records. The jewel of the collection was, in fact, an assortment of Ray Charles LPs (including the rarest and hardest to find), toward which Leo felt a mystic gratitude. If only because it was a voice that had always been able to comfort him when he felt depressed or when things didn’t go right.

  “I don’t feel like it, I’m not hungry,” Leo had answered, lowering the volume of the stereo a couple of notches.

  And then that little woman, counting on a sensuality you would not have attributed to her, embraced him tenderly, warmly from behind, and began to laugh and tease him.

  “Come on, Pontecorvo, don’t be like that, Semi is already there, Filippo is on his way . . . ”

  At intimate moments she called him by his last name, the way classmates do in school. Or otherwise “professor,” a reminder of when he had been her teacher at the university. Yes, in other words, delightfully affectionate ways that for that sentimental fool were irresistible, no less than the nickname Little Bear Cub, which his mother used to call him.

  “I’m coming, O.K., I’m putting old Ray to bed, then I’m coming,” he had said, pervaded by the sweetness that comes only from forgiving one who has just forgiven you.

  This exchange of remarks occurred more or less three-quarters of an hour before zero hour. Neither Rachel nor Leo could know that it would be the last gesture of peacemaking between a man and a woman who many years before had challenged the authority of two such different families in order to be together. The Montagues and Capulets of their generation!

  Ah yes, because Leo and Rachel had overcome obstacles and challenges of every sort to consummate their contested conjugal dream, which, over time, and with the acquisition of that fine house, the birth of the children, his success at work and her impeccable household management, had grown increasingly brilliant. Nor could they know that the quarrel that Rachel had just resolved would close forever (and beautifully?) their history of altercations and reconciliations (the secret archeology of every marriage). Even less could they imagine, as they headed toward the kitchen, pushing and shoving each other affectionately like two fellow-soldiers on leave, that what they were about to consume but would not finish consuming was their last meal together, and that the words that they were about to address to each other were the last of their shared life.

  In a few minutes everything would fall apart. And although from that day on Rachel chose not to speak to anyone about what happened—burying the story of her marriage in the mental storeroom assigned to clearance and oblivion—very often, after her husband’s death, in the dreamlike conversation in which she could never succeed in keeping at bay the protests of that distant phantom, she would ask herself if maybe everything had begun the evening before, during the dinner with the Albertazzis: if the first splatters of slimy mud from the tidal wave that was about to sweep everything away had not reached them then. And if the Albertazzis were not in some way implicated in the calamity.

  It couldn’t be coincidental if, from that day on, and even more after Leo’s death, Rachel no longer answered Rita’s phone calls or Flavio’s pompous letters, full of self-serving offers of help and friendship when it was too late. It was as if Rachel needed to blame them for what had happened to her. Having borne on her shoulders for such a long time the duties and responsibilities of a marriage that functioned in fits and starts (like every happy marriage), Rachel, now that it had ended wretchedly, moved to the counterattack: identifying in that pair of her husband’s friends—who were so emblematic, and whom basically she had always hated—if not exactly the guilty ones then the first, unwelcome witnesses of the grotesque event that had transformed her life as a diligent chatelaine, sweetly lodged in the beautiful villa in Olgiata, into a real battle for survival.

  Two witnesses, precisely.

  Rita, who at first had done her utmost to make her husband break definitively with the pervert Leo, but who then, after his death, set herself up as the most devoted and fiercest guardian of his memory.

  And Flavio, who let himself be dominated by the natural disaster he had married.

  Two witnesses to eliminate, along with all the evidence for the prosecution and all the motives of a crime that she no longer wanted anything to do with. And only many years later would she settle accounts with them (from certain things you can’t escape). But that’s another story.

  Flavio Albertazzi had been Leo’s deskmate for all five years of high school. And he had quickly learned that the best way of exorcising the sense of inferiority produced in him by the affluence that his classmates wallowed in was to throw his poverty in their faces without holding back. If at the time that strategy had got him out of more than one embarrassment, now that, thanks to determination, self-denial, and powerful intellectual capacities, he had won an important place in society, which made his bank account fat and his social redemption exemplary, it had become a rather unbearable habit. Such, at least, Rachel considered it, having been brought up on the idea that hiding one’s situation (whatever its nature) is always better than flaunting it.

  The first time Flavio had showed up in class he was in short pants, so Leo, wearing a blue suit with crease and cuffs, felt that he had the right to ask him, “Why do you still wear short pants?,” obtaining in response a sort of rhetorical question that had closed the subject for good: “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

  This exchange had taken place in the early fifties, and in the succeeding decades the two friends continued to recount it with great amusement. It produced in Rachel a series of questions about her husband: why was he so fond of a stupid anecdote that showed what an insufferable little snob he had been, and how his friend had so cleverly put him down? This, for Rachel, was only one of the many mysteries of that friendship of her husband’s, which she, like many other wives of her generation, had learned to put up with.

  Is it possible that Rachel saw what Leo didn’t see? That in spite of all the time that had passed Flavio still treated him like a snotty little rich kid? There was something in her husband’s ingenuousness that exasperated her. An exasperation sharpened by the fact that Leo, against all the evidence, saw himself as the shrewdest and most undeluded man in the universe. Whereas to his wife he seemed the most ingenuous.

  It should be said that, for his part, Flavio had effortlessly let himself be seduced by his friend’s social graces. The first time he set his large dusty shoes on the squeaking parquet of the Pontecorvo apartment he had wanted to believe that the fascination roused in him by his friend had nothing to do with the marble, the boiserie, the upholstery displayed in that dwelling but was provoked by the volumes collected in the bookshelves at the entrance. The conversational polish of which Leo gave precocious evidence, the eloquent language that Flavio so much envied, surely derived from that cultural bedrock, not from living in a world in which the functionality of a piece of furniture was obliged to find a polite compromise with two things as immoral as beauty and elegance.

  After so many years Flavio still experienced as a personal victory the fact that his friend had decided to add to his medical profession a career as a scholar and academic that you would not have expected from that handsome, privileged, and indifferent youth.

  “It’s really incredible that you weren’t spoiled by everything you had,” he would say, with satisfaction, “and at a time when no one had anything.” And Leo was pleased, with the satisfaction of
someone who has never tried to be anything other than what, finally, he is.

  For his part Leo had followed with equal gratification the route by which Flavio, the sixth and youngest son of a working-class family, had managed to acquire his own little place in the sun. He had been one of the first Italian graduates in information engineering (at the time it was called that), and was now the managing director of a leading-edge company that fine-tuned sophisticated programs for Olivetti.

  Flavio, though he claimed to revere scientific progress no less fervently than Leo, nevertheless considered Italian society in those years to be in full regression. Affluence. Vulgarity. Lack of engagement. (TV, how he hated TV!) Those were the watchwords that Flavio used to excess and which provided the occasion for long, friendly disputes with Leo. Another thing that Flavio hated was the soccer championship that Italy had won a few years earlier in Spain, in which the Germans had been thrashed in a glorious final at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, in Madrid. Flavio assigned that sporting event a symbolic power as vast as it was harmful.

  “It gave the people of this country the illusion that winning is the important thing. It developed in us a cult of competitiveness and victory. It made us all a little bit American. To see a president of the Republic, a Socialist, someone who took part in the resistance, who risked his life to defeat Nazism, raise that utterly garish gold Cup, the golden fleece . . . An undignified spectacle. It doesn’t surprise me that the final in Madrid was one of the most watched events in the history of Italian television. As you see, tout se tient.”