Persecution (9781609458744) (10 page)

It should be emphasized, at this point, that the sensation of having finally understood, at the age of twenty-five, the meaning of the word “freedom” (the word that his parents played around with, overcome by emotion, when they celebrated the fact that, some years earlier, the Allied troops had screwed the Germans but which they tended to forget whenever the autonomous space to leave to their son was being considered), as I was saying, that whole crackling sensation of having discovered freedom just in time would not have had the aspect of rebirth if the cunt hadn't been involved.

If in a technical sense, in fact, it can't be declared that Leo lost his virginity in Paris, certainly it can be stated in an emotional sense. Let's say that the oppressive family he came from and the puritanical Rome of the fifties had joined forces to clip the wings of his promising masculinity.

Gisèle had helped to resolve the problem. And she was only the last in the list of his saviors. After Leo had been in Paris for a while he stopped being amazed at the fact that none of the girls he picked up in a bar, a park, at the home of a colleague, in the hospital—practically anywhere—refused at the end of the evening to follow him to his alcove. The first palpitations of a subversive sexuality? The first signs of the great depravity that would infect youths in the years to come? The female orgasm that finally returns, after who knows how many centuries of mortification, to the center of the world stage? Call it what you like. Our Leo called it life. Life as it should be. Life that lives forever.

During the day the work in the hospital, in the labyrinth of corridors where you lived in a constant neon half-light: difficult, dirty, killing, foul-smelling work but in a certain sense also exciting. In the evening music and pussy. Do you know of anything better?

The months in Paris, Gisèle, sex, jazz, research, experiments, the oncology department so ahead of its time . . . That had been his hour of air. Which, like all hours of air, turned out to be surprisingly brief and mockingly insufficient.

When Leo's father died, his mother had a pretext for recalling him home. And after the shiva, the week of mourning when the relatives of the dead man had to remain shut up in the house, Leo had not had the courage to leave again. He hadn't had the courage to abandon his mother. He had felt on his shoulders the responsibility of his father's pediatric office. No, he hadn't given up oncology, but he had to say farewell to Gisèle, to the city where he had been free, to the hospital environment where what he wanted to do in life was done in the best possible way.

Then, thank heaven, Rachel arrived. Small, voluptuous, and of a modest background (she had something of Gisèle!). And in time his work, too, had taken an interesting turn. Together with his mentor, Professor Meyer, and a handful of other intrepid colleagues, Leo had helped lay the groundwork for what would one day be the Italian Pediatric Hematology Oncology Association, and the first protocols in treating leukemia had been worked out . . . Then, with extraordinary precocity, had come the professorship, the hospital job, and the offer from the Anima Mundi clinic to house within its luxurious walls the pediatric office that Leo had inherited from his father. And meanwhile Rachel discovered that she was pregnant.

But just when everything seemed settled, the Parisian siren had sounded again: this time under the seductive appearance of a job offer that it was almost impossible to refuse. Not only did they want him again at Roussy, the hospital, in the suburb of Villejuif, where Leo had worked hard and passionately, but they were willing to offer him an appointment with responsibilities and a lot of money. He was the man they were looking for. The first choice.

Unfortunately this time not only the old Signora Pontecorvo objected but also the young Signora Pontecorvo. Daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, allies for once, did all they could to hinder him. Rachel didn't feel she could leave her widower father. She knew that, after losing his wife and a daughter, he considered the marriage of his second-born a kind of betrayal. All he needed was for her to go to Paris. Leo's mother, too, couldn't bear for her son to go back to live, probably forever, in France. The torrential force of these concerted protests had done the rest: driving Leo, with death in his heart, to give up that advantageous opportunity. Which had represented for him, and not only on the professional level, something more than a simple regret or a missed opportunity.

 

The recent Paris conference, the chat with Mitterrand, the visit to his colleagues at the Roussy, the nostalgic tartare devoured at the brasserie in the Rue Jussieu (“The same as it was then!”)—everything had offered Leo the pretext for a thrilling nostalgia. For days he had done nothing but talk about it. Provoking in his wife a resurgence of the old jealousy of a girl of the people who sees her Prince Charming fleeing to places that are closed off to her.

But for once, hearing her husband gushing at the table, in front of the treacherous Albertazzis, about the Cité des Sciences, the steak tartare, and the other Parisian nonsense, and with all that apologetic enthusiasm in defense of Craxi, Mitterrand, the Socialists in power, Rachel had forgotten her jealousy. Concentrated as she was on her own rage and her own incredulity. Why did her husband again miss an opportunity to be quiet? Why did he open himself to slander? Why didn't he protect himself? Why couldn't he behave with some reserve? Why didn't he change the subject? Why did he offer so many details about those splendid days in Paris? In the marvelous Paris of Mitterrand? Why did he get so worked up about Mitterrand? Why did he defend him from Rita's specious attacks? Why at the moment when he ought to shut up, hide, retrench, was he instead blathering, demonstrating, exaggerating? What blasted suicidal program was this?

It's true, technically the bet had been won by Leo: neither Flavio nor Rita had in any way alluded to his legal troubles. But how could her husband not realize that, in reality, they had talked of nothing else for the whole dinner? How was it possible that he didn't understand that, in defending Craxi and Mitterrand with such passion, he had done nothing but accuse himself?

That was why Rachel was so furious now. Why she was pressing him so angrily:

“Did you really have to get so worked up?”

“I have no wish to hide. I've done nothing that I need to hide for. Let Rita think what she wants, but I'm not going to start being circumspect just because people like her believe certain things about me . . . ”

“What I would have expected, at least tonight, was a little discretion.”

“Discretion. That's your favorite word. The one you've devoted your life to. You and your working-class mentality. Don't be noticed. Hide like a sewer rat. Don't attract attention. Don't ever say what you think, people might hit you. For me it's different.”

“No, it's not that! It's that . . . ”

“Then what is it? Can you tell me how I should behave?”

Contrition. Prudence. Loyalty. That was the answer. That was what Rachel would have liked to reply to her husband. What she had been taught by that expert in adversity Cesare Spizzichino. But the only thing Rachel managed to say was:

“And shame? You don't feel any shame?”

“For what, God damn it? Tell me for what!”

For all this! For all that's happening to us! Rachel would have liked to say but yet again was unable to say anything.

“I don't know about you, but I have nothing to be ashamed of,” Leo had retorted, full of rage. And for the first and last time in his life, he nearly hit her with all the strength he had in his body.

 

But now that the nation had been informed that a child had been molested, and, in addition, a child sentimentally connected (what an inadequate expression to describe the bond between two kids!) to your son . . . Well, now, yes, my old friend, you have something enormous to be ashamed of. Something so big that no one in this kitchen can breathe. Now that someone has found the strength to turn off the TV and the fire under the blackened coffeepot, and everything is sunk in an unpleasant silence, now ask yourself if the usual technique of acting offended by them, like a boy, can work. And you answer no, this time it won't work. It's gone much too far for a thing like that to work. That's a good system for times of peace but not for the war that awaits you. This time not one of the people you love most has sweet-smelling olive branches in store for you. This time your old, well-tested sulk will be completely ineffective. This time, assuming you don't want to spend the rest of your days in solitude, surrounded by a thick hostility, it will be up to you to apologize, it will be up to you to start off on the rough road of détente. It will be up to you to win them back.

Those ridiculous letters, those meaningless letters, those letters that the little psychopath blackmailed you with and is now using in this indecent way. Why didn't you talk to Rachel before? Why didn't you talk to the boys in time, when you could have? Why this time, too, were you immobilized, waiting for everything to some crashing down? I know, now you'd like to tell them that everything happened the way things happen in most people's lives: through a concatenation of ambiguous and uncontrollable events. And life is playing an ugly trick on you. That you risk being destroyed by what seemed to you, incapable as you were of assessing the consequences, the behavior of a strange child. And that if there is anyone who was lured, lusted after, deceived in this nasty business . . . well, that person has your name and your appearance, which, since the Paris days, you've always been too proud of, and which now, in the light of everything that's happening, seem to you repulsive. And yet you also know that the reason you didn't tell them before is the conviction that they wouldn't have believed you.

But if you were afraid they wouldn't believe you then, how can you think that they'll believe you now? Now that the bubble has burst. Now that it's completely obvious that you're trying to defend yourself by inventing alternative truths. How can you ask Rachel, Filippo, and Samuel, at this point, not to be satisfied with lazy appearances but to choose to believe your so improbable truths, if you didn't trust their capacity to understand when things were much less compromised? And if you can't hope to be believed by the only three people who would have an interest in believing you, how can you hope that the rest of the world will listen to you and trust you? How can you ask indulgence from the indifferent, the hostile, all those who stood outside there like hawks, waiting for that great man Professor Pontecorvo to make a false move?

Here it is, the false move. There's nothing left for them to do but tear you to pieces, get their revenge for all the success you've had, all the happiness you've won for yourself.

You feel the shudder of fear now? Do you finally understand that you need to fear for your safety? Do you feel the whole world preparing to do you in? It's a thought so enormous (the entire world, I mean) that you feel your equilibrium failing.

Outside are a lot of people who hate. The curious fact is that to hate you they don't have to know if you're innocent or guilty. They hate you and that's it.

They'll use this story to satisfy their Pantagruelesque resentment and to indulge their indignation. To gossip incredibly. This is what comes easiest to people who hate. Destroy you with the small arms of gossip. Make you pass for a pathetic pervert. For a parasite who too long pretended to be beneficial but has finally been unmasked. Then they'll move to the heavy artillery. They'll use that girl. That precocious little whore. They'll use her to strike at you. They won't show her publicly. They'll do it in a way so that she acts in absentia. They'll hide her, using her only to destroy you. She'll be guaranteed the maximum invisibility and privacy, while you will be marked by the greatest exposure possible. That's how they'll destroy everything you've constructed. They'll say you're a thief. Dishonest. Dissolute. And they'll do it to cleanse their own conscience, which is just as dirty as yours. This is the favorite sport of people who hate. Using the scalp of a powerful man who has been disgraced to cleanse the conscience of everyone else.

And what objections can you raise? None. How can you defend yourself from what seems incontrovertible? From letters written to a minor, from money lent, money stolen, and all the rest? The imbalance between you and the girl. That says it all. It's the most lethal weapon they have at their disposal. Your social power compared with the fragility of a twelve-year-old. That her power lies in her greater weakness? Yes, that's how things work outside these comfortable walls, stocked with carpets and bourgeois decorum, which you naïvely believed would protect you until the grave.

But the grave is getting closer. It presses you from so close that you already have the stink of a corpse.

A list of excuses sordidly similar to the ones any serial rapist might put forward. Is this the ace up your sleeve? You're afraid it is. Your explanations—so true and irrefutable for you—are precisely those which others are not willing to listen to. Everything that people wish to hear can be unearthed in the recesses of the painful, depraved correspondence of which you were one of the two incautious authors.

And that exchange of letters tells a story completely different from the one you would like to tell, and from the one you are sure you lived. The only
true
story—that is, the one everyone will believe—speaks of the moral corruption of a twelve-year-old girl by a fifty-year-old man at the peak of success (and already charged with a series of intolerable crimes). A twelve-year-old girl who has barely begun to menstruate. And who, among other things, was your son's girlfriend. Something that really turns the stomach.

And maybe the moment has arrived to realize that there is nothing to do, that anything will be useless. That you have your back to the wall. Trapped as you would never have imagined you could be. More and more certain that to proclaim your innocence, to explain to your family that it was
she
—she, Camilla—and not you, who started, carried on, and above all persevered obstinately, almost to the point of torture, will be in vain. That by now nothing will save you from the sentence that, in the inexperienced and innocent little minds of your sons and in the much more sensible one of your wife, has certainly already been imposed and carried out. The only thing that remains to you is this desire to weep. A childish, uncontrollable desire to start whining, to flood the organism with tears and never stop. But this at least you can spare them.