Persecution (9781609458744) (43 page)

Filippo was absorbed in reading a guide to London and his brother had begun to bother him. In an irritating manner that seemed a way of both settling his fear about Filippo's delay and celebrating the happiness of his return.

Then another odd thing.

“Can I smell your stomach?” Semi asked Filippo. And Leo wondered if he had heard right. Filippo, as if he were answering the most natural and usual of questions: “If you get me some ice for my Coke I'll let you smell my arm for five seconds, faggot.”

And now? What was this nonsense, Leo wondered. His sons sniffed each other? Why? It seemed to him somewhat strange, bestial, or worse: something for homosexuals. Something he didn't like at all and yet accounted for their relationship, which also might be called physically unhealthy. Otherwise, why would Samuel have reacted so violently to a few minutes' delay on the part of his brother? And why were they so attached to one another? And above all: why in the world did they sniff each other? How could one blackmail the other with his own body odor?

Now that Leo saw his sons in action, without Rachel, without the proverbial sarcasm she employed with the boys, without her capacity to play things down, they seemed to him truly strange. And it irritated him quite a lot. No, he didn't like the strangeness of his sons. Come to think of it, he didn't like strangeness in general. In any of its forms. He had always been afraid of it. Originality is a good thing, of course, provided that it doesn't pass the danger point, provided that it doesn't spill over into eccentricity. Leo had always calibrated his own behavior on the level of a norm that aspired to exuberance and even excellence, yes, but shunned bizarreness. There is something so reassuring about conformity! There is something so natural in being simply what everyone wants to be and what everyone expects you to be. What need is there to provoke your neighbor? Why be strange, except to cover up some defect? Except to hide some ridiculous flaw?

Sometimes, during the years when Filippo was showing the first signs of his troubles, the petty notion had crossed his mind that it was a high price that genetics asked of him for mixing his blood with that of a woman from another milieu.

So now, after all that time, the words that his mother had addressed to him when he told her he wanted to marry Rachel returned to his mind: “You'll see!” Yes, she had said that.
You'll see!
A kind of curse, which Leo had thought about later, when his older son had had problems, and he thought of it again now, confronted by his sons' bizarre behavior. Is that what his mother meant when she told him he would find out? You, my son, who so detest strangeness, are committing yourself to it. And for this you will be buried by strangeness, surrounded by it day and night.

Leo was startled by the silvery sound of Semi's laughter; he was on the bed writhing under his brother, who had started tickling him. Leo's repugnance toward that scene became so profound and unbearable that, contrary to his usual habits, he raised his voice belligerently: “Stop, God damn it! I'm not amused.”

Right afterward he felt a little mortified. Leo didn't like to scold his sons. He didn't like to scold anyone. He found the effect produced by his own high voice unpleasant and was the victim of a deep-rooted guilt complex.

That was why for the rest of the evening, having taken them to the musical at the Queen's Theatre, and then to eat at the Bombay Brasserie, Leo, besides trying to expel from his mind the sight of his sons engaged in those strange activities, had done his best to win back their good will. He observed with pleasure the rapture with which Semi had enjoyed
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, not for an instant taking his eyes off Olivia Newton-John in the role of Lorelei Lee—in Leo's time played by Marilyn Monroe. He missed not a single word, a single note, a single step of those actors, singers, and dancers. Ecstatic. Tapping his foot in time with the music. At the end of the show he was the first to jump to his feet and the last to stop clapping, the palms of his hands red and his eyes sparkling. On the way to the restaurant he wouldn't stop humming “Bye Bye Baby”, a truly irritating melody from the musical, and—with his head lowered to read and reread the list of songs on the cassette that he had made his father buy him—had been in danger of walking into a light pole.

If Filippo's reaction to the musical was much cooler than his brother's, his enthusiasm for tandoori chicken was not— it was so overwhelming that he ordered an extra portion, after polishing off of the first with a dozen solid forkfuls.

In short, everything seemed to have returned to normal. Leo had gone back to being the conscientious and brilliant parent who never shouts and they two privileged boys, on the threshold of adolescence, enjoying the advantages placed at their disposal by an adored and munificent father.

But at bedtime the atmosphere was again spoiled.

The older of his sons still had the habit of going to sleep every night with the headphones of his Walkman over his ears, listening to the same anachronistic music and running through his nighttime ritual. It was something he couldn't do without. For that reason Leo, after turning out the light and saying goodnight, had said nothing when he heard that bothersome sound, which meant that Filippo was beating his head against the pillow.

He began to get annoyed only when he realized that Samuel, driven by an incomprehensible spirit of imitation, was following him. There they were, his sons, who, instead of sleeping, were butting their heads in unison, making the bed squeak like two bloody fags going at it. One does it because he can't do without it. The other because of an insane instinct for imitation. And Leo couldn't really decide which was worse, all he knew was that he couldn't stand it. But he also knew that he had to control himself. He had no wish to reproach them again. So, in order not to hear it, first he put his hands on his ears. Then he put his head under the pillow, then he took refuge in the bathroom. Then he went back to bed. Until he realized that what irritated him was not the noise produced by his sons but what that noise implied. It wasn't enough not to hear them: he wanted them to stop being strange. This was what drove him to intervene. He turned on the lamp. He got up. And he shouted: “Will you stop it, God damn it! Anyone would think you were insane!”

While it couldn't have been so hard for Samuel to stop doing what he didn't do naturally, for Filippo it must have been torture. And yet, from then to the end of the vacation, not even once had he done it again. He lay there motionless. Surely he struggled to fall asleep. Without a doubt he was overwhelmed by his anxieties.

But he wasn't the only one who had a terrible night: Leo was tortured by a sense of guilt. All the things that psychologists, tutors, teachers, professors, speech therapists had told him not to do ever since Filippo was born he had done that night. He had prevented him from expressing himself. He had humiliated him. He had emphasized his strangeness. He had given it a name. And he had let him know how much he was repulsed by it.

But now it was too late to recover. If that first evening Leo had been so bothered by the fact that Filippo indulged in his grotesque rituals, on the following nights he was tormented by the idea that his son was doing everything possible not to give in to them. He would have liked to say to Filippo “Come, sweetie, it's not important. Start again where you broke off.” But how could he? It would only make matters worse.

And so the weekend that Leo would have liked his boys to archive in the box of “memorable memories” was catalogued instead under large or small “missed opportunities.” The rest of the little vacation was besieged by the dark sky of ill humor. Filippo's sleepless nights could be seen in his face, just like the mute rancor that took the form of a respectful demeanor and an ostentatious lack of enthusiasm. Maybe it was all that he had suffered, maybe his character, but that boy knew how to be hard and obstinate! O.K.—he seemed to say to his father—I will not act like a clown at night but during the day you will have beside you a statue of salt. And God knew that Leo was bitterly learning his lesson.

 

Since then many things had happened: Anzère, the first charges, Camilla's torture, the scandalous public disgrace, the definitive break with his family, prison, the trial, that cockroach-like seclusion . . . Was it possible that only now did Leo think back to those days, to how he hadn't been able to seduce his sons as he would have liked, to how he had done everything wrong? Possible that only now he thought back to the irritation produced in him by the spectacle of their pathological behavior? Seeing them sniff each other, beat their heads against the pillows to fall asleep, how difficult it was to make them happy and how easy it was to upset them.

It must have been Filippo's accident that provoked the memory of London and all that it meant. Now that he saw his sons there, a few dozen meters from him, in the midst of yet another crisis, yet another trauma: the older with that leg dangling and the younger frightened by his brother's pain, not to mention, surely, full of guilt for having caused it.

The burning memory of those days in London—and of his indecisiveness then—was urging him to action. Finally some action, after so many months of ineptitude. He was ready, in short: about to go out. To go and save them. He had an absolute desire to. But, just as he was about to take the first step (the most difficult), Rachel emerged. The moment she knelt down, bending over Filippo's leg with the knowledge of one who has a degree in medicine, Leo finally saw her face. He realized that, between one thing and another, it was almost a year since he had seen her face. She appeared beautiful, just like his boys.

No, he would not spoil all that beauty (a mother rescuing her son) with the ugliness that he represented. No, he wouldn't do it. The last opportunity offered by the Heavenly Father to try to rejoin his family was destroyed in a few seconds. With Rachel lifting up Filippo, who was whimpering with pain, and Samuel asking with an insistence not unknown to Leo, “Right, Mamma, everything's all right?”

 

This was the last drawing to arrive. Exactly like all the others, it was slipped under the door. Imperceptibly.

By now we know Leo well enough to imagine how the sight of a drawing like this would upset and infuriate him. Whoever had conceived and executed it—after conceiving and executing all the others—had really screwed up. Dragging into that perverse game those whom Leo would have wished to leave out: it was the first time they had dared to depict his family. How to interpret that sudden involvement? A prelude to further developments? A change of perspective and ambition? A warning? An intimidation? Tired of killing him, were they now raising the stakes, threatening what Leo loved most?

Yes, what he loved most. Although at this point Leo had the right not to, it was nevertheless impossible for him not to love Rachel, Fili, and Semi, to damnation if necessary. Leo Pon­tecorvo wasn't a resentful or vengeful man. This particular nuance of his character leads me to say that, confronted by this drawing, he would react badly. Maybe he would be furious. Maybe he would even find the strength to leave his cover and take possession of his life. On the other hand I can only make hypotheses: through a concatenation of circumstances, in fact, the sight of this drawing was spared him; our recluse could not evaluate it with the care with which he had evaluated all the others.

Although I have been careful up to here to distribute these drawings in an illustrative way throughout the narrative, it has to be said that, with the sole exception of the last, the others reached Leo in no order and with no respect for chronology. The one of the panty liner abandoned in the bathroom in the mountains was the first, delivered a few days after he came out of prison. Followed, at a distance of a few weeks, by the one that showed him fleeing on the stairs, all out of breath. But this is not, I realize, the most disconcerting fact of the matter. What had begun to undermine Leo's faith in the sharpness of his own mental faculties was the impression that he had unknowingly posed as a model for an invisible cartoonist.

Was something or someone spying on him? Something or someone keeping an eye on him? A silent witness of the climactic moments in the course of his human degeneration, of his social decapitation? A presence that wished to make him understand that it was the only thing in his life now that would never fail?

From the start, the drawings and their mysterious maker had frightened Leo the way all things that don't make sense are frightening. But, with the passing of weeks and months, he had ended up accepting serenely the idea of that presence around him. Sometimes he had even tried to consult it. Other times he had had the temptation to strike a pose for it. Even though Leo immediately understood that drawing him in a pose did not interest it. The only subject that interested it was his model in a state of anxiety. There was no drawing that could not have been titled “Embarrassment.”