Persecution (9781609458744) (12 page)

“You've furnished the upstairs like a space ship. Let me at least exercise down here the practical spirit that you despise so much.” Lucky he had given in that time! Otherwise, now he wouldn't have had that makeshift bed at his disposal.

So, having transformed the couch into a bed, Leo lay down on it, certain he would collapse. But something had gone wrong. And the Calvary had begun: the search for impossible sleep.

All because he had made the mistake of turning off the light. In the darkness the space dilated in a frightening way: now the room was immense, like the cave of Polyphemus. His mother always told him—when he was a sleepless child—that damn story of Ulysses and Polyphemus. It seemed that she did it on purpose. (Leo had never been able to understand if that woman had loved him too much or too little.) But why just at that moment should he remember Polyphemus and his cave, when he hadn't thought of him for a thousand years? A cave the size of a giant, whose exit was barred by an equally giant mass. Children of the world, do you know of anything more terrifying?

In short, a second after turning off the light Leo had felt the pillow swelling under his head in a dismaying fashion. He had understood how it must feel to be a mere little fish in the immensity of the ocean. But just when, in order not to get lost in such an empty vastness, Leo, by a skillful manipulation of his fingers, had managed to reduce the size of the pillow, making it appropriate to the surrounding space—just then his breath was obstructed, as if the giant cave were rapidly growing smaller. A few seconds more and it would crush him.

So, increasingly short of oxygen, he got up, turned on the light, and started walking again. That was the secret: walk, get tired, like a child. And like a child keep the light on. Then throw yourself down on the bed again, waiting for the right moment.

Not to think. Not to think about himself. To forget for a few sumptuous moments who he was. Forget the story of which he was the incredulous protagonist. At times, in those two days of Calvary, the magic worked. Leo had been able to forget everything: why he was there, what had happened, what was at risk; and then Rachel, the boys, the TV news, colleagues, patients, the university, that damn girl, that damn girl, that damn girl . . . As if his organism refused to be constantly vigilant. As if his brain and body had called on the standard ration of oblivion and unconsciousness that allows us not to go mad.

But God only knows that Leo paid dearly for those instants of repose! The recurrences were frightening. Usually it was a concrete detail, placed on the horizon of his abstract mental landscape, that started up the torture machine again: who knows, Filippo's French fries, Samuel's labored breath, Rachel's muteness . . . Then, like the man who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease and, waking from a tranquil sleep, suddenly remembers the death sentence hanging over his head, Leo felt a wave of panic rushing over him all at once. An anomalous wave that didn't come from far away but from within. The nightmare was concentrated in a few square centimeters of his chest. His legs shook, his ears buzzed, his blood burned. Leo would have hit his head against the wall to empty it out again. But now it was impossible. You can't go back. Now Leo Pontecorvo is no longer a human being. Now Leo Pontecorvo is all his embarrassment. All his shame. All his terror.

So he began to blather, or maybe to pray: “They're going to tear me to pieces . . . They're going to tear me to pieces . . . They're going to tear me to pieces . . . ” Those words, a hundred times less powerful than their meaning, turned out to be a paradoxically effective exorcism.

Then, after two days of fighting, when he was sure that he would never make it—would never sleep again because insomnia was his punishment, his death sentence—Leo fell asleep.

Now he's been awake for several minutes. Dawn is making him wait.

He must have dreamed a river of tears. In the dream he was weeping continuously. So, as soon as he woke up, he touched his hands to his cheeks, observing that they were perfectly dry. Immediately afterward, his left hand hurried to seek a bit of warmth between his knees. While the other, following a course to the north, reached his skull, or rather the curly surface on which Leo's fingers had paused, in a pensive manner, for two nights and two days.

Now that same hand was fumbling with a skinny little dick, at an all-time low, aiming at the drain of the sink.

And so it happens, as his bladder empties, that (in one of those flashes which are so abundant in films and so rare in life), Anzère returns to Leo's mind. The light and snow of Anzère. Maybe because his brain, during those days of desperate interrogation, had always been more attracted by the opposites: the great and the small. Peace and terror. Sleep and wakefulness . . . And what could be a greater contrast, compared to the dense shadows in which he had wakened, than the brilliance of the days in the mountains? Was it possible that all that joyous shared light was implicated in this obscurity and this silence? Yes, in short, was it possible that to explain why he now finds himself here—in exile, terrified, peeing in the sink and determined never to look at himself in the mirror again—he has to interrogate something so lacking in pathos, so calm and relaxing, so starry and ineffable as the
last
vacation with his family in the Swiss snow?

 

To be more precise, the series of equivocal events that would conclude in the mountains had been set up, so to speak, by a state of tension. Nothing special. A small marital quarrel that had warmed their souls two weeks before leaving for Anzère.

Everything had begun with a seed planted by Samuel with his mother: that spoiled child wanted to take Camilla to Switzerland. Rachel had said she wouldn't even discuss it.

“Why not?”

What did he mean, “why not”? Did it have to be explained? Because he and Camilla were too young to go on vacation together. Because such a cohabitation would make Filippo and Papa uncomfortable, and this she could not allow. Rachel was surprised that Camilla's parents had agreed. And that they would lightheartedly deprive themselves of their daughter at Christmas.

“Her father said she could.”

“And I say no! We're not going to discuss it.”

“Then I'll ask Papa.”

He had asked him. To Leo the matter didn't appear so unseemly: he didn't mind at all if Samuel brought someone. And for the same reason that, on certain Saturdays in June, he loved it when his sons' friends invaded his house and stayed for dinner. To have a “full house”: this was one of Leo's favorite expressions. Above all if that fullness had to do with his children's friends. Not that he was present. He was careful not to go beyond two or three ritual phrases. But at the same time, in his heart, the idea that a dwelling so pointlessly vast was available for the entertainment of so many boys flooded him with an unspeakably sentimental warmth. And then there was the energy that Leo felt pouring out. The energy of adolescents. Something so radiant, fleeting, and smelly that even his youngest students had already lost it. And at the same time something so inescapable that it radiated even through the corridors of his hospital unit, full of small sick patients.

In short, the presence of Camilla in the mountains had the merit of proclaiming energy and fullness. And, further, Leo thought that if Camilla came his sons' attention would be focused on her. Maybe they would leave him alone. Maybe with Camilla around they wouldn't insist that he ski.

Leo had given his assent. Although aware that this would produce a breach in his married life.

 

The quarrels. Their exhausting and bellicose quarrels. The frequent clashes between Leo and Rachel, of which I've already given a taste, seemed to reproduce on a tiny scale and in a parodistic form the argument that, just in those years, was escalating within the tiny but valiant Roman Jewish community between two alternative conceptions of its own identity.

Beginning with the first fight, the oldest, which had set them against each other at the dawn of their married life, starting the day Rachel had found out she was pregnant: what name to give the child in her womb and, after him, the little brother or sister they would one day present him with. Leo thought the Biblical names that Jews, everywhere in the world, gave their children were pompous. He was for something normal, antiseptic, something like Fabrizio, Enrico, Lorenzo. Safe, sober, unencumbered. Something that would not immediately identify them (after all, for that there was already their surname). Something that would one day make them bold citizens of the twenty-first century. Rachel, on the other hand, as you would expect, wanted her sons to bear one of those pretentious Jewish names: David, Daniel, Saul . . . In certain spheres that woman lost all sense of humor. The solution to the problem, as you will have already deduced, was solomonic: to the firstborn a Greek name had been given, to the second a Biblical one. And so not even this had resolved the internal dispute. A kind of creeping dissent that always placed Leo and Rachel on opposite sides of the fence.

The enormous publicity that the Jews got following the shocking news of the deportations and extermination had gone to the head of the Jewish case in point known as “the Roman Jew,” throwing him into despair and making him cocky at the same time. The Roman Jew had discovered the existence, in distant lands, of Jews much more Jewish than him: strict and picturesque, tragic and brilliant, those Ashkenazi—with their brittle, magical, esoteric existence, always on the edge of disaster—appeared a thousand times more suited to (immeasurably more than the Roman Jew ever had) the task of being sacrificial victims and peaceful heroes of the revenge visited on the Jews by History.

That awakening to their own inferiority had provoked in the more religious families a spirit of rivalry that translated into the adoption of customs and prohibitions that had disappeared from the indigenous tradition centuries ago. All those alimentary shackles, all those turned-out lights on the evening of Shabat, all that fasting and prayer on the day of Yom Kippur, all those jackets torn in mourning were a postmodern quotation (literary and cinematographic) of a tribal Judaism that had little to do with the type that had been cultivated by the Roman Jews since the now distant time when the Emperor Titus had deported them to Rome. Forcing them to undergo in the following two millennia petty harassments in the heart of Christianity.

The fact is that the phenomenon of the radicalization of Roman Judaism had produced, by contrast, in the community's more secular and enlightened souls an impulse of mockery and impatience: a sarcastic spirit that Leo embodied perfectly, no less perfectly than Rachel played the role of the reborn Roman Jew.

This is the battlefield of the Pontecorvo spouses. She never stops finding new ways to make the life of the family less comfortable by unearthing traditions that basically have no more to do with her than the white tunic and sandals worn by Roman matrons in the time of Augustus. While he counts up all the secular Jews in the world who have been successful in cinema, literature, medicine, physics, and so on, forgetting that there is not even the hint of a Roman Jew in the group, and at the same time overestimating his own professional merits to the point of feeling himself part of the Jewish International of success.

And yet, although in essence the squabbles of Leo and Rachel always seemed to concern that alternative way of living Judaism, in reality this merely dissimulated the true reasons for their mutual aggressiveness: that is, the fact that they belonged to two different and in some measure antithetical social classes. In other words, the religious argument was the tin lid that tried to keep the caldron of class conflict from boiling over. About their relationship, in essence, there was not much else to know. The difference in social class, usually, explained much more than all the rest. It explained, for example, why Rachel's father had poisoned the life of his twenty-four-year-old daughter with endless prohibitions so that she, a step from a degree in Medicine, would stop going out, once and for all, with that fop of a professor.

Precisely the Leo Pontecorvo who, at the time still an unpaid assistant professor, had won her by initiating her into the other half of the universe, consisting of comforts and daily pleasures that that girl, who had lived under the strict rules imposed by her father and had been made romantic by a lot of Hollywood comedies, never imagined could be within reach. Their belonging to different worlds also explained why on the other side of the barricade the hostility was no less fierce: to the point where Leo's mother, using as a pretext the recent death of the husband of a dear friend of hers, showed up in mourning at the celebration in the temple of the much opposed marriage of her son to “the daughter of a tire salesman from the Ghetto.”

Rachel owed the epithet to the profession of her father—a typical representative of the category of “street Jews” so despised by the well-off Jews—who had begun his economic ascent in the years right after the war, when, with an equally entrepreneurial brother, he had acquired the equipment for repairing trailer-truck tires.