Persecution (9781609458744) (20 page)

 

That may be why, having worked up his courage and taken the letter out of the envelope, and having carefully unfolded it, he found himself so disappointed by such a note:

 

Monsieur Pontecorvo,
Je tiens à vous remercier de m'avoir invitée chez vous avec mon Samuel.
L'amabilité de votre famille rend très agréable notre séjour.
Cordialement à vous,

Camilla
2

 

You didn't have to speak perfect French to know that the language used by Camilla in her little note would have been more suited to a business communication than to a private message. A bureaucratic French, and so doubly inadequate. Such that the whole thing appeared a pointless, pleonastic formality. Not that Leo had expected a real confession. But at least a thank-you for the way he had taken care of those two rude sons of his. Not to mention the energy and style with which he had saved her life.

But then why put a letter like that, with no content, no revelation, in with his underwear and socks? Why announce it with a blood-stained panty liner? What the hell did all this mean?

Finally the idea crossed Leo's mind that it simply meant nothing. The girl was just a little odd and very mixed up. He was the idiot, to have been swamped by all these useless reflections. What could you expect from someone who spoke to her parents in French but that she would write pointless letters in French? Evidently for her it was a pattern. She took refuge in French whenever she was embarrassed. She had done it that day with her parents, she did it now with him. After he had seen her in such a bad way, so fragile, spluttering . . .

It was that mixture of disappointment, worry, and frankly a certain relief that led him into the living room, after he got dressed. There was nothing in Camilla's behavior signaling that something had changed. She was there, as usual dressed in pale clothes, lying on the sofa in front of the fire. The heels of her bare feet dangling off the sofa were slightly flushed by exposure to a fire that had stopped crackling. She raised her head from her book and rested her large eyes on him for a few instants, but immediately immersed them again in her reading. She had brought with her the whole garish company of Little Princes, young Buddhas, Jonathan Seagulls who poison the literary taste of thousands of adolescent readers. That literary trash occupied a royal place on the table next to the sofa.

She didn't seem disturbed to find him there. Much less showed signs of a general conversation. Which meant that she didn't expect a response? Or that it was enough for her to have brought twenty minutes of confusion into the life of an adult? What was it, a joke? Did she want to test him, make fun of him? Everything was possible. And maybe none of what was about to happen would have happened if he had not decided in turn to play.

When Leo wonders why he did it, why he chose to get on that merry-go-round, he can't find an adequate answer: only a contradictory catalogue of nebulous retrospective explanations. He acted out of boredom. Or maybe out of disappointment that in Camilla's first letter there was no sign of what for a few seconds he had been certain of finding there. As a challenge. A challenge fed by the fact that she hadn't pressed the accelerator as she should have.

Was it that tiny disappointment that reawakened the libertine instinct kept at bay for decades with hordes of young women at his feet? The fact is that that girl, who wasn't all there, had somehow succeeded in getting what no one before her had ever got.

But Leo knows very well that wondering how she succeeded is no less idle than wondering why people get cancer. In nature everything obeys the perverse logic of madness. It's not only the cells of your prostate or your colon that suddenly go mad, without warning. You, too, go mad.

And yet before diving into the fire, the cautious Leo had again put fate to the test. On the morning of the fifth day, he had put a letter of response, no less brief and no less pointless than the one written by Camilla, into the same drawer of the same dresser, full of underwear and socks, before going to the ski slopes with the boys.

A game. Nothing but a game. A small prank in response to a prank: let's see if she's so clever and enterprising she can sneak into my room a second time, and so smart she can guess where I hid the letter. Leo had enjoyed thinking about this. Except that all morning he was in a state of anxiety that Rachel might intercept that letter. And then, yes, he would certainly be in trouble! How would he justify it? How to explain to his wife that he had hidden among the underwear a letter addressed to his son's girlfriend? Well, some things are simply unjustifiable.

All right, there is nothing in that letter. But the sole fact of writing it, the sole fact of having conceived of writing it, and then having hidden it . . . well, that already makes you a sick and irrational man.

That's how Leo was transforming the fifth day's skiing into a nightmare. A real pity, given all that splendid fresh, swishing snow under his skis, the magnificent sun, the sky enameled with a fierce cobalt. It wasn't like him not to enjoy the omelette and the roast potatoes. His only racking desire was to go home and see what had happened to that letter. To check if it was still there. I swear that if I find it there, that disgusting letter, I'll burn it, along with this whole ridiculous business I've let myself be dragged into.

He nearly broke a leg going down the valley in a crouch, imitating the boys, forgetting that a man of his build can reach really dangerous speeds. And all because he was bursting to find out as soon as possible if someone, whether Rachel or Camilla, had found the letter, or if it was still there.

Not to mention speeding in the car over the icy asphalt, on his feet only his wet socks, since, in the urgency of the moment, he hadn't even put on his soft after-ski shoes.

Then, having parked in front of the chalet, he affected composure. He took his sneakers out of the trunk, put them on, and with his heart in his throat went into the house.

Finding it silent and in disarray had really given him a shock. Where had the two of them gone? It was the first time they hadn't been there. Where had they run off to? And why was the house still a mess? Leo hurried to his room. He opened the drawer. The envelope wasn't there. Someone had taken it.

 

The door that opened and the demeanor of the two women (a woman and a girl who, to judge from their slender build and the look of friendly complicity that animated them, might be taken for mother and daughter, or anyway aunt and niece) put an end to the two most frightening hours of his life. He had only to look at them—bright, tired, happy—to understand that, whichever of the two had found the letter, he had nothing to worry about. And yet he had been in such a state of anxious prostration that he couldn't help attacking them heatedly:

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“Are you crazy? What kind of talk is that? Forgive him, Camilla, my husband never expresses himself like that unless he's really angry. We just have to find out why he's so angry.”

“I'm not angry. I was just worried. I come home, I don't find you. Everything is a mess. After what happened to Camilla last night. I was thinking the worst.”

“You're right, sweetheart. It's that Camilla suddenly wanted to go out this morning. She seemed so happy. She asked if I'd go for a walk. And you know she never asks for anything. So we took the bus to Crans and did a little shopping, like two real ladies. That's all. By the way, do you like these?” And she took out of a bag two wool turtlenecks, one blue, the other rust-colored: “This is for Fili and this for Semi.”

It was as if in half a day of shopping all the distrust that Rachel felt for Camilla had dissipated. Now look at them, they seem like the best friends in the world. That complicity lasted for the whole afternoon. This time, Camilla helped Rachel make dinner. And Leo, as he piled logs on the hearth to light the fire, heard them laughing like two schoolgirls. But what had happened to the letter? For a second he wondered if by chance Rachel, knowing him so well, had contributed to a scene that at that moment seemed to Leo more a joke. But no. Rachel didn't make jokes like that. On the other hand Leo regretted that Camilla had seen him so beside himself. That a man of his age and position had let himself go like that: that was really undignified. He felt ridiculous. This was something that had been happening more and more often lately. And he didn't like it.

All right, it's time to put an end to this sordid business. That little sociopath sent me a ridiculous letter, I thanked her, adhering to her code (ridiculous) of behavior. Enough now. The matter ends here. My friend, you've simply found a way of torturing yourself a little with your paranoias. This, too, is classic. Now let's retake possession of our life. At this point she certainly won't respond.

 

Dear Leo,

You don't know how angry it makes me to see you so sad with your wife. I thought my father was the saddest man in the world. But knowing you I've seen that there's something worse. So I want to save you. Save you from the revolting mess you live in. It's hard to tell you what I feel. But it's the most special feeling I've ever felt since the beginning of my life. I love you. And now I love you more because I know you love me. I've known it for a long time. That day in the mountains I couldn't believe that you answered me. But when I saw your letter I said to myself, “He loves you.” And then I understood that I had to help you at all costs. Now, at the age of twelve (almost thirteen), I understand what I have to do in my life. I have to help you get out of that marriage.

With all my heart,

 

Camilla

 

“I have to help you get out of that marriage”?

And God only knows how she would manage it! Yes, Camilla would succeed in the greatest, most useful, and destructive of undertakings: removing Leo Pontecorvo from the marriage he had always wanted to be in; and she would succeed in the ridiculous and paradoxical form that seemed to her most congenial. With those mawkishly and threateningly ungrammatical letters. By which Leo's life was invaded in the weeks following their return from the mountains, as if by an avalanche. Those increasingly long letters, increasingly passionate and increasingly resentful that awaited him every day in the dressing room, in the underwear drawer (the young lady was not then so original as she thought was), and that unfailingly shook him with nausea. Like the example I gave a few lines above: the fifteenth letter in all and the eighth after the return from Anzère.

Months of words, months of emphatic phrases, months of limping syntax and shallow vocabulary, in which Camilla gave wonderful proof of how her brain had cut off every relation with the universe. Of how the dear old concept called “actual facts” in her hands was inverted to the point of losing all meaning.

It was then, in close contact with that verbose epistolary garbage, that Leo became conscious of the intolerable isolation in which he was floundering, in which we all flounder. It was then that he discovered that his absolute solitude was dictated by the impossibility of revealing to anyone the grotesque comedy of which he was the reluctant not to mention clandestine co-protagonist. He was already in a situation in which he was unable to tell anyone that he had lost control, that something unbelievable was happening to him and he could do nothing about it. There existed no confidant, no psychotherapist, no rabbi to whom he could explain such a story.

The most loved and protective person in his life—that is, Rachel, the woman who had perfectly replaced his mother—was also the last being in the world he could tell. If he had, he would have had to explain too many inexplicable things. Above all, why he hadn't told her everything when that first letter arrived? And then what had induced him to answer it and to continue to do so the next times, when the whole business was taking an increasingly monstrous turn? He would have had to explain to her how a child had managed to checkmate a man like him. And how a man like him had let himself be conned by a child. How he could have let himself be intimidated and terrorized in that way. He would have had to explain why under close analysis the denials that he continued to present to Camilla would appear on the page so affected and irresolute. He would have had to say to his wife that the reason he had not taken that grotesque little redhead aside and said to her, “Listen, honey, you've been a pain in the ass. Don't you dare put your crazy letters in with my underwear ever again, and now get out of my house forever, out of my life and my family's life” was his lack of courage, of far-sightedness, of virility, of moral strength, of initiative, of trust in his neighbor, and on and on. And that it was precisely the lack of these qualities, qualities that a man of his age and his background should have possessed, which had led him to respond, point by point, to Camilla's letters with messages in which he very gently ordered her (rather, entreated her) to stop.