Persecution (9781609458744) (11 page)

 

So it was that all Leo Pontecorvo could do—instead of asking his wife and sons to consider what was happening in its complexity, instead of reassuring them with generic formulas like calm down, everything will work out, mistakes are made just to be put right, instead of displaying the Olympian serenity that at least two of them until a few moments before had considered his outstanding quality, instead of barricading himself behind his proverbial optimism—all he could do was get up, open the kitchen door leading to the narrow stairs to the cellar, hesitate a moment, like a suicide before throwing himself into the void, and run down, into the part of the house appointed for his relaxation, to hide, to hole up, away from the people who at that moment he feared most in the world. More than the judges, the newspapers, public opinion, the father and mother of Camilla, more than all those who couldn't wait to flay him. He fled like a thief caught red-handed.

And although he persisted in repeating to himself that that flight was useful in sparing Rachel and the boys the obscene spectacle of his nervous collapse, the truth is that, at the most crucial moment of his life, he had chosen the behavior that most suited him, that most resembled him: cowardice. To flee meant to remain utterly faithful to the child whom Leo—in spite of his respectable age, his gratifying professional and academic triumphs, the money earned, the style of life guaranteed to himself and his loved ones—in half a century of life had never, for an instant, ceased to be.

Here he is, Leo Pontecorvo, still the spoiled child of his mamma.

 

 

S
even months before fleeing (literally) from the kitchen, from his family, and from his responsibilities, Leo had fled, in a much more innocuously figurative way, from the urban routine, taking the family, as he did every year, to Anzère, a picturesque village in the shelter of the Swiss Alps.

That was where, for almost two weeks every year at Christ­mas, the Pontecorvos relocated. They rented an isolated chalet looking north, like all things beautiful and frozen, and forgot that in the world there existed alternatives to that exuberance of white and silence and sweetness.

Although Leo was relatively young, he had already been for some years what is called an eminent physician. And so his figure had begun to emit the aura of ashen authority radiated by tall, hunched lecturers who, before they speak, fumble in their inside jacket pocket in search of lost eyeglasses.

Thanks to the small photograph accompanying the health column in the
Corriere
and some occasional television appearances, he had discovered the pleasure of being recognized in a restaurant or on a train: he didn't dislike being a star to beautiful middle-aged hypochondriacs with rigid hairdos and affected smiles. And yet that celebrity hadn't given him a swelled head. Rather, if anything, one could say that Leo's charisma was made more compelling by the habit (or, if you prefer, the quirk) of not being conceited. Yes, Professor Pontecorvo was one of those luminaries who have worked out a very sophisticated method of being conceited by not being conceited.

A diversified career (in which oncology was the planet around which sparkling satellites orbited) had made him a more than well-off man. He often liked to boast to younger colleagues, with a mixture of cynicism and affectation, that his university salary (he had had the professorship for quite a while by now) served him at most as pocket money.

And perhaps he could have spared himself certain remarks in a world where only those over eighty were forgiven their wealth, or, rather, those with the good taste to be unable to enjoy all those good things anymore.

Anyway, in spite of that prosperity, in spite of such inappropriate remarks, and thanks to Rachel (a girl with her feet on the ground), the Pontecorvos did not like to show off their wealth. Except for Samuel, who precociously manifested a rapt passion for all that was, or at least seemed, expensive, the others had not been excessively infected by the hedonistic religion followed in those years by many families in their circle.

Just to be clear, they would never have gone on vacation to “the right places for the right people” (as a television ad very much in vogue then on the newborn commercial television had it), where Samuel would have happily joined his schoolmates. No Cortina, no St. Moritz or places like that. Certain ostentations were not admitted into the court of the Pontecorvo parents. Someone might object that to go every year to a pleasant and unknown village like Anzère could be considered an intensified form of snobbishness. But that had no importance for the Pontecorvos, who considered themselves at once above and below certain things. What counted was the fact that over the years they had established some sacred habits that made the stay in Anzère inadvertently easy.

Rachel began her day in the snow early. Sipping “in blessed peace” an entire pot of coffee (she brought it from Italy, like an immigrant) as every so often she glanced at the valley, which had the shape of an amphitheater whose sides were sharp peaks, uniformly snow-covered and at that hour, when the weather was clear, lacquered with pink and pearl-gray. Even the boys liked to get up early but for reasons different from their mother's: they wanted to get to the trails (who knows why!) before anyone else. They seemed to feel an exclusive satisfaction in observing that their father's sedan (it, too, had been loaded onto the train) dominated, in solitary splendor, the icy parking lot below the lifts. Besides, it was only the first contest won in a morning consecrated to competition.

Leo wasn't mad about skiing and in fact, with the cold, and the weariness that had accumulated during the year, would have taken his time in the morning. But he didn't want to disappoint Filippo and Samuel. It was as if for his sons there were nothing more sensational than to play a sport with him. You should have seen how those boys strutted when Leo, at the start of every summer, granted them the season's first, and last, three minutes of “passes and shots at the goal.” There, in the yard at home, until his smoke-encrusted lungs and the piercing protests of his spleen enjoined him to throw in the towel, Leo watched his boys showing off for him with the fervor of a halfback on the junior team ready to hurl himself at every ball to impress the varsity coach. There they were, his boys: hyperactive, enthusiastic, full of energy and health, looking at him with such disappointment when he quit!

On the ski trails the atmosphere was the same. Ardor, adrenaline, competitive spirit. Filippo mocked his brother's fear of jumps. Semi, on the other hand, couldn't bear that Filippo, although he had been skiing for much longer, wasn't careful to keep his skis joined. And meanwhile, in the midst of these disputes, the father struggled on. The trouble was that, while Filippo and Samuel were at the age when one doesn't know the meaning of the word “fatigue,” to the extent that they could ski for nine hours straight, for Leo the best part was the silence as he rode up in the lift. He let his head sink back, took off his gloves, poked his poles at the snowdrifts encountered along the way. He lighted a cigar. He inhaled, exhaled intensely the aphrodisiac cocktail of thick smoke and thin air. He felt the muscles of his legs go numb from a sudden blast of cold, and, when the ascent got steeper, returned to himself and was nearly in danger of falling.

Keeping up with the competitive impulses of his sons became more complicated every year. Until a few years ago he had been the one to instruct, wait, goad, but for a while now the roles had been reversed. In the meantime, it seemed, his style had become obsolete. And Filippo and Samuel kept pointing it out to him with impatient reproaches: “Come on, Papa . . . ”; “Let's go, we'll never get there like that!”

Luckily his authority was still intact enough to allow him to impose a pit stop, at lunchtime, in the lodge, a cabin of dark wood shingles clinging nimbly to the icy slope, a dozen meters from the chairlift for one of the more accessible trails. Inside, it was more spacious than it appeared from the outside, and was welcoming even at the peak time of Christmas weekend, when it was crowded with skiers who, in their boots and silver uniforms, looked like participants in a conference of robots, astronauts, or medieval knights in armor. Thus, while the boys had a coke and a sandwich, he allowed himself a bacon-and-mushroom omelette, with roast potatoes and a couple of glasses. All accompanied by the usual comment: “Remem­ber, not a word to the old lady,”, alluding to the meal just eaten, which wasn't properly kosher.

The waltz of alcohol in his veins allowed him to enjoy the last postprandial descent. In the afternoon he didn't ski. The boys didn't even make an attempt to ask him.

Then for the professor the day in the mountains took a definitely more congenial turn. At home a long sit on the throne awaited him, followed by a scalding shower that lasted at least ten minutes, using up the hot water. (“Consuming the glacier,” Rachel mocked him, always amazed by her husband's excessive use of the planet's natural resources.)

“Why don't we have a nice cup of coffee?” It was the standard phrase with which Leo addressed Rachel as soon as he came out of the bath, perfumed with cologne and talcum powder and with a cigar in his mouth. Both Leo and Rachel knew that what was wrong with that question was the use of the first person plural. That ecumenical grammatical choice was hypocritical and fraudulent: the coffee, which only he needed, would be made by her. The climb of the contemporary woman in pursuit of parity was in an intermediate phase. For now the wife continued to make the coffee, but at least she was asked politely, and, above all, in conditions that let a little uneasiness seep into the husband. At this rate the wives of Filippo and Semi—if those two confirmed bachelors should get married—would compel their docile spouses to make the coffee, and more than likely they wouldn't bat an eye.

After the coffee and a nap on the couch in front of the fire, Leo went to the village with Rachel. While she did some shopping, he, with a cosmopolitan attitude that the fluency of his English did not, unfortunately, match, bought the British and American papers. And sitting, freezing, on a bench he read them with enormous effort, dreaming of a dictionary.

As they headed home, the mountains on the horizon vanished behind a curtain of shadows, and the village lighted up. The windows of the shops on the main street began to sparkle. The precious goods, delicately arranged among red ribbons, wooden boxes, gilded balls, pinecones, branches of fir, asked nothing better than to be taken out for some air, be adopted, and, if possible, visit other countries. And luckily for them the right sucker was in town.

“Don't tell me that's the latest Nikon . . . ” “Not bad, that pashmina! The salmon-colored one, a really fine cashmere”; “And those Blues Brothers Persols? Am I wrong or has Semi been driving us crazy about needing new sunglasses?”

Who, in those times, didn't dream of brand-new sunglasses? Who didn't dream of giving gifts? Now that the world was more or less peaceful, now that it offered so many opportunities, giving gifts was the best way of showing the people you loved that the worst was over and how important they were to you. A gift-giving euphoria that Leo was defenseless against. What could he do if those windows decorated for the holiday made him wish to remind his wife how indispensable to him she was, his children how satisfied he was with them, and himself how much he loved himself?

So began the usual pantomime. His insistence, her refusal. His certainties, her uncertainties. A pantomime whose result was taken for granted: in the end he would get his hands on the salmon-colored pashmina and the Nikon. And that was right. He needed nothing else. There was nothing else that interested him more at that juncture than to photograph with his new Nikon his wife wearing the equally new salmon-colored pashmina. He knew that to fulfill that dream he would have to confront—and rout—the trite objections of the beneficiary of such generosity. Which in fact were swift in arriving: “Leo, don't you think it's a little too expensive? And a bit gaudy? You're really sure it's my style?”

Coming out of the shop carrying the packages, he was all triumph while she hunched her shoulders and lowered her eyes, as if she feared that the God of Israel might track her down even there—in that frozen corner of paradise—determined to punish her for her vanity and her idolatry.

Returning to the chalet, while the boys had showers and Rachel took out the food she had just bought and put it on the plates (cooking was not her strong point), Leo finished reading the newspapers by the fire, transfigured by the milky fog of his cigar. Or he showed the boys, in their bathrobes, the latest purchases. Or he fiddled with the new Nikon while Samuel, thanks to his twenty-ten vision, read him the instructions. All this as he waited, still triumphant, to sit down at the table. Fresh bread, cheese, red wine, and a dessert that oozed Austro-Hungarian nostalgia. And finally beddy-bye.

Yes: all this, every year, for years, stupendously immutable.

 

Was it possible that everything had begun there? In such a pure and innocuous context? That the great misunderstanding that, seven months later, he would not find the moral force to explain to his family had begun to deposit its sediment right
there
?

For several minutes now Leo had been torturing himself with a lot of questions. Ever since, with enormous effort, he had managed to drag himself to the bathroom in the cellar. Now he is standing. In front of the mirror. He pees in the sink the way adolescents and drunks do. In his mouth the taste of a rotten cherry.

The idea of being able to give adequate answers to the useless interrogation he is inflicting on himself is no more reasonable than the hope of lifting his head to ask the mirror what has become of him in the meantime. Probably his face would reveal the killing effort he has lavished on trying to go to sleep. Two nights and two days. Or if you prefer forty-eight hours. That's what it took to break the siege of insomnia.

Which means that, after that utterly unrestorative sleep, the exile in the study-cellar is about to complete two and a half days. The two and a half longest, most stationary, most sleepless days of his life. The most interesting and the most banal. The most meaningful and the most useless. The most incontrovertible and the most mysterious . . . in other words, the “most,” in every sense.

Leo, in any case, is still lucid enough to understand that his insomnia was not solely the result of the anguish for all that had happened and for all that was about to happen. There had also been an inconvenient technicality: in moments of crisis, it was impossible for him to relax in a place where Rachel was not within reach. To place his fingers on his wife's hip, slide down to her thigh, to play with those soft and familiar surfaces was the only tranquilizer that Leo had abused in all those years of marriage. But it seems that Rachel (not to mention her hip and her thighs) was unavailable this time.

For a few minutes after his flight from the kitchen, Leo had expected her. Embarrassed, terrified, incapable of believing that he could meet her eyes, but he had expected her. She is about to come down. We'll quarrel. We'll shout. We'll lash out at each other. Maybe we'll hit each other. But at the end she'll offer me a chance to explain. And things will settle down . . . Of this Leo became increasingly less certain as the hours passed. With the thickening of the shadows around him and the anguish within.

Then he had had a dizzy spell. He had felt his limbs stiffen. Was that tiredness? He remembered the discussion he had had with his wife, in the presence of a brawny furniture seller, at the time of the renovation of the cellar: Rachel who wants to buy a horrid little sofabed, Leo who has vowed eternal love to a useless, extremely expensive blood-red leather Chesterfield.