Persecution (9781609458744) Read online

  So Leo, as much a soccer fan as a maniac about the modernization of the country, found himself passionately defending the heroes of Madrid and justifying TV. (How could he know that the latter would repay him so well?)

  Flavio, unlike Leo, never raised his voice. He calmly wore you down, taking all the time he needed to complete arguments as rotund as his satisfied face. Faithful to Marxist principles, he was suspicious of everything and attacked his interlocutor with endless rhetorical questions.

  But he, too, had a weak point.

  Rita, his wife. Whom Flavio loved more than mathematics and more than those political ideas marked by what was in appearance pragmatism and in substance wishful thinking. A tall, curly-haired, angular woman, always on the edge of a nervous breakdown, whose brutal thinness contradicted a voracious gluttony. The slender cigarettes that she always had in her hand were aesthetically suited to her bony, tapering fingers. Sometimes, seeing her against the light, you would have said that it was a skeleton smoking. Other times, in the pitiless neon light of the Pontecorvos’ kitchen, she might look like one of those madams painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.

  For Rita, marrying Flavio had been a most successful slap in the face of her extremely wealthy parents. Although for years she had had no contact with her family—a dynasty that had turned a vast amount of land it owned on the edge of Rome into building lots and had made a lot of money—she nonetheless seemed to have inherited the arrogance of those speculators and their insupportable lack of tact. Her stinging arguments, unlike those of her husband, were sustained above all by the strength of her prejudices and the ferocity of her shattered nerves. The cunt, Leo sometimes thought. It’s the cunt, the most capricious organ created by mother nature, that makes her speak.

  Rita’s indignation about inequality was a pretext for saying enormously unpleasant things in a strident, superior tone. For her there were no limits, maybe because to resist the family she came from she had had to lose control, or maybe because her family had taught her, by example, to have no boundaries. In her time she had studied literature, but without much direction. And she still boasted with impunity of how she had challenged a professor—a dusty, self-important academic—who inflicted on the students a class in Montale: a bourgeois, decadent, reactionary poet!

  Rita recalled those exploits with bitter pleasure . . . the mark of a resentment that had in the end devoured her.

  Rachel, less sociological-minded than the narrator of this tale, was sure that the great repressed grief agitating Rita’s bony frame was the disappointment of not having had children.

  “If she had had children,” she said sometimes to her husband, “she wouldn’t always be repeating those disgusting little stories.”

  Yes, children. Children, at least for Rachel, explained everything. This was the reason that, when the Albertazzis came to dinner at their house, Rachel kept Filippo and Samuel from even coming in to say hello, much less from being mentioned. She didn’t want to inflict pain on Rita, or see her so-called friend exorcise her own sorrow by making hostile comments about Filippo’s slight chubbiness or Samuel’s effeminate passion for musicals. It was as if Rachel did her best to feel pity for that woman. Pity was the way she tried to keep at bay the irritation that Rita, in all of her manifestations, provoked. And the way in which she atoned for her unkind thoughts.

  It had been difficult for Rachel to get used to these people, after Leo had isolated her from her upbringing. She remained traumatized by their cultural snobbery no less than by their political extremism. Rachel’s father, Signor Spizzichino, was too busy getting ahead to cultivate political ideas. For him religion said nearly everything there was to know about what is right and what is not. And she had been brought up to believe that anyone who ran on about certain abstract ideas should be considered a fool. The word “Communist,” in the Spizzichino household, was only slightly more acceptable than the word “Fascist,” and only because the Communists, at least in Italy, hadn’t persecuted the Jews (or, at least as far as the Spizzichinos knew, they hadn’t), nor had they had the gall to ally themselves with Hitler.

  If Rachel’s distrust applied to all her husband’s friends, it applied above all to Rita. There were too many self-serving inconsistencies in that woman not to irritate a simple and loyal being like Rachel. And she was often irritated with Leo, too, for his indulgence, his inability to be indignant in the face of certain obvious contradictions in the character and the behavior of his friend.

  Rachel remembered the time Rita had made a scene in a restaurant because someone was allowed to bring his dog in. Rita, in those days, anyway, couldn’t stand dogs. Or, rather, she was afraid of them. And so she had made a fuss: it was indecent, how could people, and what about respect, then? It had all been very unpleasant, including the no less violent reaction of the man with the dog.

  Rachel couldn’t bear situations of public embarrassment. She was a timid, reserved woman. If you wronged her, you couldn’t expect a strident, or anyway explicit, retaliation. A restaurant manager had treated her discourteously? Well, he wouldn’t see her in his restaurant anymore. And she couldn’t forgive rudeness. To the point where, if her husband returned with her by mistake to a place that was on her black list, then, yes, she made a scene: but in order not to set foot in the place. This was her intransigence about certain things. This her memory.

  Otherwise she was ready to accept any abuse by a waiter, a client, or the proprietor of a restaurant. She was serenely tolerant of delays or carelessness in service. Of any unjustifiably astronomical bill. Anything was better than reacting. Than arguing. Than putting another human being in the state of feeling himself a reprobate.

  She had a stinging memory of her father, who, after finishing a meal in a restaurant, would sit there, with his shopkeeper’s glasses, analyzing the bill, item by item. Not to mention the times when, finding some error, he called over the owner and, with ill grace, pointed it out. From then on Rachel had vowed to herself: never again. Never again will I be present at those scenes. Never feel that mortification. Never again will I be humiliated and never again will I humiliate.

  A vow that she had been able to keep until Rita entered her life. A kind of troublemaker. Someone who loved to argue. Who adored calling attention to the inadequacies of her neighbor. Just like that time with the man and the dog.

  “Does it seem possible?” she had said in a loud voice. “Does it seem to you possible that someone is so rude that he brings a dog into a restaurant? What sort of upbringing is that? I cannot understand what goes through people’s minds . . . Is no one going say anything to him?” And, not satisfied, she added, a few seconds later—carefully raising her voice by some decibels—“I would advise everyone here not to set foot in this restaurant ever again!”

  The problem was that that time Rita had met her match (there are a lot of them out there), and he had responded angrily: “Instead of making a scene, couldn’t you ask me politely to take my dog out?”

  “Am I talking to you? I don’t think so. I was talking to my friends. But since you have spoken to me, then let me tell you that you are rude. A real boor. Worse than almost anyone I’ve ever met.” In order not to let things degenerate further Flavio and Leo had intervened.

  In all this there would basically have been nothing different from the usual.

  Except that fate willed that some years after that episode in the restaurant, Rita (now condemned by life not to have children) had received as a gift from her sister an English sheepdog puppy. After her initial bewilderment, and, especially, after a few days of being forced to live with the tender young pup, she had become attached to that creature with all her heart. Her old fear of animals in general and dogs in particular was immediately left behind. From that day on, she and Giorgia (that was the dog’s name) were inseparable. Rita was much more preoccupied with Giorgia’s food, Giorgia’s well-being, Giorgia’s health than Rachel was about her boys. The morbidity of her affection led her to take the dog wherever she went. She
didn’t trust leaving her alone, so she brought her even to restaurants.

  Usually people were more understanding of her than she was of them, but once a woman who was allergic had had a waiter ask Rita if she could take Giorgia outside. They were at the club in Olgiata, having dinner in the clubhouse. It was pouring rain. At the request to take Giorgia out, and at the sight of the storm, Rita lost control. And in a dramatic tone of voice she began to intone: “I wonder how people can be so cruel. As for certain people, I would make them stay out in the rain. Ah, the cruelty of people.”

  Giorgia had already been outside for several minutes, wearily curled up under the restaurant’s awning, with her gaze turned to her mistress, who was eating on the other side of the glass, while the mistress wouldn’t stop commenting in a loud voice on the arrogance with which the woman had insisted that her Giorgia—the most exceptional being, the best, the sweetest (“the cleanest in this filthy restaurant”) she had ever known—be expelled, “like a Jew.”

  “How can that woman always act like that?” Rachel had burst out that night while Leo, with some vanity, was undressing in front of the mirror in the little dressing room opposite the bedroom. “Until two years ago she couldn’t imagine that someone could even conceive of bringing a dog to a restaurant. You remember the scene she made? Now, instead, people who won’t let dogs in are cruel. Only because now the dog that has to stay outside is hers. But does it seem to you consistent?”

  “Certainly no one makes you as angry as Rita,” her temperate husband had commented.

  “Yes, her shamelessness makes me angry. Her arrogance. Her failure to remember. The capacity to adapt to any situation at her own convenience. Her way of systematically denying the truth. Her insistence on being always right . . . And that business of the Jews. How can she dare compare the tragedy of the Jews to the most spoiled dog in the galaxy?”

  Leo knew that Rachel was right. He had known Rita for so many years! And he knew that she belonged to that rather large portion of humanity that molds its principles to its own conveniences, that lacks the moral force that pushes people like Rachel to do the exact opposite. You had been a pain in the ass to the entire world over the fact that dogs should not be brought to a restaurant? Well, this should have acted as a deterrent to bringing your dog, should you someday have one, to a restaurant for the rest of your life.

  But your name wasn’t Rita Albertazzi. If that was your name, you did only and exactly what seemed to you easiest at that precise instant. And, convinced that you could boast of a kind of universal credit with the world, you felt you were authorized to judge anyone who placed himself in your way as an enemy, to insult, to push aside, to destroy.

  And, speaking of convictions, the more Rita emphasized her own, bestowing on them the sanction of inviolability, the less respect she showed for those of others.

  Among all the people (whether Catholic or secular) whom Leo had compelled his wife to be friendly with, and who regarded their Judaism with a feeling somewhere between curiosity, irony, and suspicion, Rita was the one most inclined to allow herself, on the Jewish question, to express value judgments.

  One day she called Rachel to ask if she and Leo were free for Tuesday evening. She had invited to dinner some people who would love to meet Leo. In those years he had earned a small reputation that Rita was not at all insensitive to, being attracted by any form of celebrity, even the most obscure. Although she lived under the illusion of having rid herself of every attitude impressed in her by her so volubly hated family, in reality she had inherited both the pleasure in and the talent for gathering at her house those whom she called, emphatically, “serious people.” It’s irrelevant that the relationships of her detested parents were based on economic convenience, and hers, instead, on political, artistic, and intellectual prestige.

  She attached particular importance to that evening. There was a name director. An eminent editorial writer. And in particular the Hungarian ambassador (“a magnificent person, polyglot, a cultivated and tormented Communist, not like our pissants”: so she had described him, with the pomposity she always used in discussing “serious people”). In short: Rita wanted to introduce Leo to these personalities and these personalities to Leo. Ever since he had started writing a column in the Corriere entitled “Prevention Is the Best Medicine,” Leo had been a star among the imaginary sick people of the country.

  Rita always called Rachel when she made these invitations. And Rachel had the impression that she was being treated like a sort of press office, whose only function is to throw a wrench in the works of those who wish to become famous. Rachel knew that Rita was at the top of the list of people who, on the subject of the marriage between her and Leo, wondered how a man like that had come to marry a woman like that. If, for example, Leo had showed up at that dinner without Rachel, Rita would not even have noticed, but if the opposite had happened . . . well, if the opposite happened Rita would have had to restrain herself from kicking Rachel out of the house. She would have felt like a head of state who, having invited to his country another head of state, goes to the airport to welcome him and sees descending the steps of the plane only an obscure private secretary.

  “Unfortunately Tuesday we can’t,” Rachel had said that time.

  “And why not?” Rita had asked, in the voice of a woman who is about to drown in a lake and begs you to help her and you refuse because you’re playing cards.

  “It’s Yom Kippur.”

  “So what?”

  “So we can’t go out, we can’t eat, we can’t do anything, in other words.”

  “Yes, but, sorry . . . the invitation is for the evening.”

  “I know. But Yom Kippur lasts a whole day. For twenty-six hours.”

  Rachel didn’t even know why she was giving so many explanations. Her religion was not something she liked to talk about. Her husband did. Leo always had his mouth full of big fancy words like “the people of the Book,” “the marriage between the chosen people and the French Revolution.” If only her husband had respected Mosaic law with the conviction with which he spouted off about the importance of Jewish culture, he would have been the most pious man in the world. But Rachel preferred to refrain from talking about it. If there was a lesson she had learned from her family, that her father had instilled in her, it is that certain things are not talked about. Above all with those who don’t belong to the “milieu” (this was the euphemistic expression by which Rachel’s father referred to the Jews). But this time, who knows why (certainly because of the effect that woman had on her), Rachel was explaining more than necessary and this made her irritated with herself. And she was about to be punished for the excess of explanations she had provided.

  “Come on, what sort of nonsense is that? For once! It’s important. I don’t think your Yom Kippur will interest the ambassador. He comes from a Communist country, where they’ve abolished certain types of nonsense.”

  “But it’s of interest to us.”

  “To you? You must mean of interest to you. Your husband finds such superstitions laughable. At least leave him the right to live his life as he pleases.”

  “I don’t oblige him to do anything.”

  You see? That woman always forced you to be on the defensive. Her inappropriately inquisitive manner pushed you to give explanations that you didn’t want to give and shouldn’t have to.

  “Doesn’t it seem to you crazy, anachronistic, tribal?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This business of Yom Kippur . . . Surely it’s time to dispose of certain . . . ”

  “Listen, Rita . . . ” This time her voice trembled. Knowing that she was one of those people who are very slow to get angry but whose anger when they do lose patience takes a strident and inappropriate form, Rachel was doing her utmost not to explode. And yet she felt, just from the trembling in her own voice, that she was at her limit. But even before she could say to Rita what she had wanted to say to her for a long time—and that is that she must not
dare to enter into her and Leo’s decisions, that she must not allow herself to speak in that contemptuous way about something as fundamental to her as Yom Kippur, that she had to stop being so meddlesome and inappropriate, that she had to stop treating her like a troglodyte—lo and behold, the other, with the intuition typical of women used to total freedom of expression but capable of understanding from the tone of their interlocutor when they have gone too far, backed off. (Like all really arrogant people, Rita was a coward.) Naturally she didn’t ask her pardon, but she began to apologize in a way that was even more annoying:

  “O.K., don’t come. I understand. If for you and Leo it’s important . . . But let me say that I’m sorry for you. This was a great opportunity for your husband. I won’t tell you that I organized the dinner for him, but practically. You know, it’s not enough to have a reputation as a great doctor. It’s not enough to have in the papers certain columns that are just a bit, at least for my taste, too popular. You have to make connections”—Rita would never have used the word “relationships,” or, still less, “friendships.” “I think the Hungarian ambassador would have offered him new possibilities. Like doing a round of conferences in Budapest. A big thing. Something that could change a man’s career.”

  Here is Rita’s repertoire at its best: rousing in you a sense of guilt. Loading you with her sufferings and her failures. Embarrassing you for your presumed inadequacy. Trying to persuade you (what impudence!) that she’s doing you a favor at the moment when you should be doing her one. Putting on the guise of a disinterested benefactor just at the moment when her opportunism is hitting a new record.

  And then Rachel couldn’t bear all that flaunted distrust. Rita’s suspiciousness was wearing. Although Rachel came from a world in which a general distrust of one’s neighbor was the rule, she couldn’t understand how a woman of Rita’s background could be so constantly on her guard. Rita lived in terror that someone wanted to cheat her. Like the time Rachel had gone shopping with her one afternoon: in January, when the sales were on. A nightmare. Not once had Rita left a shop without one of her nasty remarks. “I remember,” she had said to a saleswoman, “that these shoes, without a discount, were the exact same price last month.”