Persecution (9781609458744) (16 page)

“All right, but mightn't it be time to split them up a little? Separate schools, separate vacations . . . ”

“Why are you so eager to do something so cruel? Something that will happen soon enough naturally?”

This bitter statement of Rachel's—reinforced by the chilling thought of the sister she had lost so many years earlier?—led Leo to extricate himself with a pedantic remark.

“Because I don't want to be the father of the Goncourt brothers.”

Of course, it wasn't that Leo knew so much about the Goncourt brothers. He was the virtuous product of those classical studies which even in his day were invariably referred to in the past tense and thanks to which you had unfailingly, and of necessity, become aware of the existence of the Goncourt brothers. And which, without insisting on the actual reading of any of their books, required you to know that they were nineteenth-century writers, kept a kind of four-handed diary, and fucked the same girl.

But evidently that allusion to two French writers (although unknown to her) had made such an impression on Camilla that she couldn't stop smiling with happiness, like one who, after a long search, has found her soul mate. A joy so solid that it gave her the courage to formulate her first question:

“Why the Goncourt brothers?”

“You don't know who the Goncourt brothers are?”

“No, but from the name I'd say they're French.”

“To be precise, they
were
French.”

Seeing the girl's questioning gaze, Leo felt he had to explain: “They've been dead for some time.”

But when the Goncourts died did not seem to interest Camilla any more than it interested her to know what the hell they had done to live. It was something else that had caught her attention, as was clear from her next question (she was making progress):

“Semi told me that you lived in Paris for years.”

Leo was pleased that Camilla had used the formal “you.” Every so often on the ward he dealt with children, for the most part from modest backgrounds, who used the informal
tu
. This not only irritated him but, worse, put him in a difficult position and saddened him. But here was a well-brought-up child. Her parents, however crude, had taught her that with an old man like him you use the formal pronoun. And, on the other hand, at her elegant French school Camilla must have acquired the transalpine taste for formalities. You're in trouble if you don't call the professors Monsieur and Madame. Trouble if you don't address them with a stilted
vous
.

“
For years
? That's what Samuel told you? That I lived for years in Paris? That megalomaniac boy! A year only. I lived in Paris for a year.”

“A long time ago?”

“More or less a million years ago. You remember the Punic Wars? You remember Hannibal? Well, more or less then.”

At that remark she had again laughed, and this time, it seemed to Leo, like someone who is about to let go. And he nearly caught himself thinking: how lovely to make a woman laugh! And how lovely to see a woman let go! But just as he was about to say it, an imaginary hand grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and a no less imaginary voice shouted at him: do you see women in this living room? No? So what woman are you raving about?

But then why, if Camilla was only a child, was he so eagerly acting the man of the world?

What had he said? “You remember the Punic Wars? You remember Hannibal?” and she had laughed. She had laughed because the Punic Wars, unlike the Goncourts, were familiar to her, probably she had just studied them. Evidently her happiness depended on having got the allusion and understood the joke of such a sophisticated man, one who had lived in Paris for a whole year in the time of Hannibal.

“What's it like to live in Paris?”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Never. Though maybe next year my school is organizing . . . And then maybe . . . And Papa has promised me that . . . ”

“I envy you. It's wonderful not to know Paris yet.”

There we are again. He had fallen for it again. He had again begun to play a part. For a second, listening to himself speak, he felt like the protagonist of one of those forties comedies that Rachel and Samuel liked so much, where a slender Fred Astaire or a sullen Humphrey Bogart, usually a millionaire in crisis, charms—thanks to his mature fascination, veined with skepticism—a sweet young girl with a funny smile and a raw beauty, who, although she's just come from an orphanage, has aristocratic manners and refined speech. But neither Fred nor Humphrey, thought Professor Pontecorvo, regaining possession of his faculties, could have been forgiven for a pompous remark like “It's wonderful not to know Paris yet.”

“Do you go there often?”

“Every so often I have to. For my work it's indispensable. But if I can I avoid it.”

“Why do you avoid it?”

Yes, why? Leo realized that now he was speaking the truth. It was true, he never went back to Paris willingly. Who knows why. Still that story? Still regrets? Come on! All things considered, the balance, on the scale of his fifty years of life, was more than a surplus. Everything in him indicated happiness and prosperity. There was not a comma of his life that he would change.

And so why the covert sadness? What does sadness have to do with it? What does it mean? I wouldn't want it to be of no value: the self-indulgent melancholy that pushes us all to cultivate mawkish, inapt regrets. The road not taken and all that romantic nonsense.

In any case, and in any way he wished to put it, one thing remained true: Leo did not go to Paris willingly. To Milan, yes, to London, too, not to mention New York and Vancouver. To Paris no.

“Is it because of a girl?”

That was the voice of Camilla. It was the voice of Camilla calling him back to reality and tearing him away from his interior wanderings. The strange fact is that she did it with a question that had nothing to do with reality. With a totally inappropriate question.

“What girl? What girl are you talking about?”

Leo immediately regretted the irritated tone of his voice. He hoped she hadn't noticed his sudden apprehension.

“Semi told me. He says you had a girl in Paris.”

“Ah! So says Semi. And what else does he say?”

“That if you had chosen that girl he wouldn't be born now, so he's happy that you didn't choose her. And so it makes me happy, too.”

Gisèle? Is she talking about Gisèle? Did Semi talk to his girlfriend about Gisèle? Leo felt confused. How was it possible that a twelve-year-old child was talking to him about Gisèle? Leo looked around. There was nothing that at that moment did not speak in the tender and familiar language of the usual. He was in the same chalet that he and Rachel had rented for more than ten years. Ever since Filippo had had his first skiing lesson, and had learned to climb up the school slope and come down in a snowplow. The air was full of smoke because the fire was sputtering. Outside the window the snow was still falling, with the insidious grace of a symphony. Where had Gisèle come from? Because, as far as he knew, no one had any idea about Gisèle, he had never even talked about her to Rachel.

Or maybe he had? Maybe he had talked about her soon after they met, who knows? It was possible. Telling her about Paris he had let slip the name of Gisèle and she had done the rest: guessing what Gisèle meant to him, or, rather, had meant. The road not taken and all that romantic nonsense. Yes, but what did Gisèle
really
mean to him? Absolutely nothing. A good lay. A good lay but too brief. When his body held up. When his dick held up. That's what Gisèle was for him. And so why thinking back did he feel that sense of childish bewilderment? Was a slightly less surging virility enough to make a man of middle age disastrously sentimental?

Then Leo wondered if the story of Gisèle might be one of those which Rachel often told the boys. The stories that sent Filippo into raptures. Like the time at the hotel in Monte Carlo when he had eaten and she hadn't. Suddenly Leo felt angry at Rachel. Her lack of tact. Her capacity to take apart anything. Her talent for recycling and manipulating pieces of Leo's life to entertain the children. And to think it was she who always accused him of indecency! Sometimes Rachel talked to her children about their father as if he weren't there. Sometimes it seemed to him that Rachel was increasingly similar to that mother-in-law she had so fervently hated.

Or maybe Gisèle had nothing to do with it. Maybe Camilla, that strange girl, was inventing. Improvising. That's all. From the little that Leo knew her, it was a more than legitimate hypothesis. Camilla hadn't said a name. She had talked about a “girl.” She had not said “Gisèle.” That there was a girl, that at that time there had been one, was so normal and likely that for a mind drawn to certain Parisian romanticisms it must not have been so difficult to imagine it. She had imagined it, that's all. No panic.

“What do you say, shall we have some tea?” Leo then asked, to get out of the little emotional impasse in which he had gone hunting.

“What a good idea . . . tea . . . yes, I'd like some tea,” she had said enthusiastically.

This time, too, Camilla's reaction was surprising. Why did Leo have the impression that whatever he said was interpreted by that girl the wrong way? Why such enthusiasm for a cup of tea? It was afternoon. It was snowing. It was as cold as the gallows. Tea was very appropriate. And so why all this enthusiasm?

In the kitchen Leo managed to calm down. He put the water on to boil. He got two teabags from the package of Twinings Earl Grey. He cut the lemon slices and poured some milk in a little pitcher. His only fear was that Camilla would appear. Who knows, to give him a hand. Thank heaven she didn't. She confined herself to turning on the stereo and starting “Last Christmas” again.

Returning to the living room Leo found her standing near the fire, now nearly out. She was trying to rekindle it in the frantic way typical of someone who has never dealt with a fireplace.

“Leave it, leave it . . . ” he said. And, after putting the tray down on the low table covered with Filippo's comic books, he went over. Gently but with extreme propriety he took the wrought-iron implement from her. It seemed to him that Camilla, before letting go, resisted a few seconds too long.

And why did she stick to his side? Why didn't she go sit on the sofa? Now really she was up close to him, leaning over the fire with a piece of paper in her hand.

“No, no—no paper! It burns instantly and it's useless.” Leo felt one of her little hands graze his side, as if she had been tempted to lean on him as she got up. While this laborious operation was completed Leo felt threatened by the sharp, bitter odor of a sulking girl: the diluted, feminine version of the stink emitted by the rooms of adolescent boys. And yet again he felt in the air the extremely unpleasant impression of lust. An impression. Which, now that the fire had flared up again and Leo had sat down, didn't disappear. The question was: who was lusting for whom? Not him. But on the other hand there was nothing in that girl that expressed either an explicit or even implicit wish to provoke him. But if she wasn't provoking him, then why had he started to think of what until that moment had never entered the anteroom of his brain?

It was as if Leo had suddenly realized not only that before him was a girl but that she was his Samuel's girl. And that if she was there now, in the living room where for years the Pontecorvos had perpetuated their blameless family idylls, she owed it to him. Precisely, to Leo. It was he, the irresponsible father, who had allowed his barely adolescent son to take his girlfriend on vacation with him. As if he were an adult. Only now did Leo understand what Rachel had tried in vain to explain to him weeks earlier: the presence of Camilla was not appropriate. And that if it happened it would be unpleasant. And that it wasn't a question of morality, of puritanism, of prudery, and all those fancy words with which Leo had demolished his wife's objections. It was simply a question of good sense.

That was Samuel's girlfriend. His Samuel, the happier and less complicated of his sons, the child for whom everything came with extreme ease. For that very reason it wasn't so odd that already, at twelve, Semi had a girlfriend. Precocity had always been one of the two characteristics (the other was eclecticism) that made his parents so proud of him. The only surprising thing is that the gifted little man had such an irresponsible father.

Yes, this was Samuel's girlfriend. Which means that, although in an embryonic form, the two must have had some physical contact. This banal observation made an impression on our professor. And, all right, he was a doctor, and a children's doctor. Certain things he was aware of and he knew. He remembered the time when a nurse had burst into his small office at the Santa Cristina clinic and breathlessly told him she had just caught two kids in the bathroom, in a position that was to say the least intimate . . . But why use euphemisms? They were fucking. Those two little leukemia patients were fucking. “Like adults,” the nurse explained, and he had wondered if there were others.

Leo recalled that he had stubbornly defended—first to the nurse, and then to Loredana, his psychologist friend—the right of those two poor kids to enjoy themselves a little, given the terrible reception that life had reserved for them. He recalled with how much insistence, and with what eloquence, he had defended the rights of nature.

Too bad that now it was not a matter of any two kids. Too bad that now, if he thought of his Semi with Camilla, something seemed wrong to our luminary.

Suddenly he felt so uneasy. His own thoughts embarrassed him. He had to turn away from her, afraid that his eyes were focused on details of that small body, sprinkled with freckles, that had welcomed the caresses of Samuel and who knows what other.

There is no lust without intimidation. This is a hard natural law. If lust is explicitly aggressive, invading, brutal, then it's not lust. And perhaps this explains why Leo felt so confused. On the edge of something he didn't know or refused to recognize.