Persecution (9781609458744) (24 page)

Now he realizes that he doesn't even know if the apartments that Rachel bought are in his name. He remembers going several times in recent years to Emilio, a notary, also a childhood friend. And signing some papers while Emilio, as if he were in synagogue, recited some very boring litanies, written in an impossible style. He remembers typewritten sheets of ruled paper and he remembers above all the feeling of sleepiness that assailed him.

Evidently his terror of bureaucratic things manifests itself in a strange form of sloth and torpor, whose result is that now he doesn't know what he has signed. The transfer of all that he has to his wife and children (which until a few weeks ago would have been fine)? Or the acquisition of some new possession? Who knows? And who could he ask? Maybe he could call that ridiculous religionist Emilio and get an accounting of what he owns? What impression would that make? It's out of the question. He needs anything but Emilio's unctuous voice. But then how the hell can he get, without going to Rachel, seventy million in cash? There's no way. Who could he ask, on the other hand, except her?

He has a burst of anger. After all it's his money. He broke his back, he studied and worked tirelessly for all those years. The money belongs to him. And what's the use of making so much money if you can't count on it for serious matters of health or some legal mess?

The problem is that Leo hasn't spoken to Rachel since the hot July night when he fled from his family, abandoning them to their questions. She has done everything to avoid him, and he's not at all sorry about it. At least until he has found himself having to face practical questions. Those which up to now he happily delegated to her. And he has had to confront all his own incalculable ineptitude. Luckily he had the idea of going to Herrera. But without money Herrera doesn't exist. The way to grasp the new opportunity called Herrera is a big pile of cash. Without that, bye-bye opportunity called Herrera. Having to ask for it from the person who, of all of them, Leo imagines is the most enraged at him, would be like professing a genuine friendship with Camilla's father. Without that money the sole possibility he has of starting life again shatters.

Since this business began he hasn't gotten mad. But now it's as if all the violence accumulated toward the unprecedented series of charges that have reduced him to a pariah of society had decided to explode. He hates Rachel with his whole self. Her damned intransigence. The way she doesn't listen to you. That conviction, which seems to come from God, that she can distinguish what is right from what is wrong. Her moral sense is so fierce it makes her unjust. What use is her religion if not to inspire pity and understanding? How can she not feel pity for him? How can she not see what they are doing to him? Every day, her husband is mashed to a pulp, they've taken everything from him, even a reason to live, they've made him a clown. And all this though he has done nothing. Nothing.

Even she, his Rachel, believed Camilla's accusations. That damned little whore got him. That fucking psychopath who speaks to her parents in French, who writes raving-mad letters, who enjoys subjugating and torturing adults.

And that's why a bulldog like Herrera Del Monte is indispensable to him. Because only he, with his tenacity, his ability to debate, his shrewdness, will have the strength to destroy that absurd, tentacular edifice of lies. That's why he dreams that Herrera will seize the head of Camilla, that of her Viking father, that of the profiteering assistant and all the others, all those who are angry with him, and put them through a shredder. That's the cry of revenge of this poor count of Monte Cristo. That's Leo Pontecorvo's Biblical dream of revenge. Which will never come true if he can't get his hands on that money first.

Now here he is in the car, at two in the afternoon, the air conditioning on, the windows up, an atrocious heat outside, and he can't move: the mere idea of putting in gear his beautiful French-blue Jaguar and, after looking into the rearview mirror to make sure that no one is coming up behind him, leaving is more than he has the strength for. He's paralyzed. He's hot and cold. He's afraid. He's furious. He wants the money that belongs to him but he doesn't know where it is or how to get his hands on it.

And in a burst of extemporaneous sentimentality he says to himself that after all the money isn't for him. No, not for him but, rather, for something superior to him. That's what he'll say to Rachel the Intransigent, if only he can find the courage to ask her. “This money is not for me but for a higher mission. Justice. Truth. Things that you, my darling, should love as I do . . . ” These abstractions, conjoined with an affectionate appeal to his wife, make him cry.

And so a man of forty-eight, protected from the world like a fish in an aquarium, in a nice comfortable dignified vehicle—inside of which the air-conditioning blows like a polar wind—finds for the second time during this long day the courage and the cowardice to cry. Sobbing like a lunatic, he suddenly realizes that a child outside the window is enjoying the scene. So he tries to compose himself and, still overcome by sobs, waves and smiles tenderly at him. But a second later he regrets it. He remembers that he is not in a condition to be tender with anyone, especially an innocent.

Mechanically, and not without paranoia, he turns around to see if by some chance anyone saw him smile at a child. The jackals are everywhere. In ambush. At least he has learned that lesson. There is nothing you can do now, even in exemplary good faith, that someone, at some point, could not use speciously to destroy you, to confront you with a responsibility you don't have. That's what Leo Pontecorvo has learned from human sociability. Others exist to destroy you. We are born to be destroyed.

The more he thinks about the money he needs, the more tormented and enraged he becomes. No problem, I'll go home and tell her without hesitation: “I have to pay the lawyer. I need my money.” At that point she can't continue to ignore me. She'll have to give me an answer. If she says yes, well, good. If she refuses, I'll let her see what I'm capable of. Again this violently aggressive thought soothes him.

Turning onto the Cassia, two-thirds of the way home, Leo realizes in anguish what will happen if she really won't give it to him.

On the other hand she could well refuse him. Rachel isn't the same. Rachel stopped being Rachel no less than the world has stopped being the world. Or at least it seems that way to him. Rachel is now a ghost in his life. Or maybe he is a ghost in Rachel's life. It's the same thing. Well, not to give him that money, to refuse to help him, would be a perfect way for her to get revenge, but also to underline his irrelevance in her new life.

And if she said simply, “I'm not giving you anything. I forbid you to touch our money.” Or, still worse, if she continued her silence? What would he do then? Nothing. If he had any strength for reacting he would have deployed it a while ago. Exasperation has a paradoxically calming effect on him. He will withdraw into the cellar, where he has been sleeping for several weeks already. He will throw himself on the pullout bed. He will try to sleep and won't succeed. Oppressed by that apocalyptic heat. He won't show up at the Cicerone with the money. And so he will lose his last chance to get out of this mess.

Is this how Rachel will get her revenge? Is this the way? By not letting him get the best defense he can? She's like that. He knows her well. Her devotion can be absolute, but, once you disappoint her, she'll punish you forever. You can't win back her trust. Leo knows her intransigence. He admires it. He loves it, that intransigence. Maybe partly because, at least till now, he has never been the victim of it.

He recalls the completely crazy way in which, when Filippo was three and was having a tantrum because he wanted another cookie, of a kind he was very fond of, she had said to him, “All right, Fili, now I'll give you your cookie, but you have to promise Mamma that you won't ask for another one.” Filippo had given a little nod of assent. Sealing a pact that to the child in the circumstances evidently seemed reasonable. Yes, if she gave him another cookie he promised that he would stop whining. Except that Filippo, once he had eaten his cookie, started whining for another one.

Leo had been astonished by his wife's reaction, as she continued to say, “I don't like this, you promised! You promised you wouldn't make any more fuss. We made a deal and now you're going back on it. I'll give you another cookie, in fact, wait, I'll give you all of them, you can eat them all, eat them till you feel sick, but know that you are not a trustworthy person.”

You are not a trustworthy person? To a child of three who wants another cookie? The thing seemed so grotesque to Leo that he thought it right to intervene. “Sweetheart, aren't you overdoing it?”

“Now, Leo, don't get involved. We made a pact and he's breaking it.”

“Yes, I know, but calm down. He's your son, he's three years old, he doesn't even know what a pact is. At his age the word ‘trust' has no meaning. He reacts instinctively. He doesn't even understand that he promised something. And even if he understood he doesn't consider his promise so prohibitive. Don't give him the cookie if you think it will spoil his appetite but, please, don't give him your Biblical curses.”

This is the person he has to get money from? This is the person he has to be forgiven by? A woman who was incapable of understanding a three-year-old who didn't keep his word? Well, he's screwed. Rachel is sweet, she is the most willing and helpful person in the world, she is an extraordinarily altruistic woman. But if you slip up you're finished. If you put yourself outside her idea of morality (which has nothing to do with the vulgar puritanism of many other women of her milieu but is invested in the highest sphere of human virtues: loyalty, sacredness of one's word, and so on . . . ), well, if you go outside her idea of morality there's no escape. You can't expect any mercy.

 

After he's driven through the gate and parked the car in the driveway of his villa, Leo stays there for a bit, enjoying the air-conditioning and tormenting himself with the thought of what awaits him. Then he goes into the house. Hearing the sound of dishes coming from the kitchen he goes in and sees her there. Helping Telma do something. Telma sees him and starts, then whispers, “Hello, professor.” But not her. She doesn't turn, or even start. And so Leo, trying to give his voice a little authority and a crumb of authoritative detachment, says, “I need seventy million in cash for tomorrow. It's for the lawyer.” Still nothing. “Did you hear what I said?” Of course she heard. And just because she heard she didn't answer.

So, after a terrible night spent lying in front of the basement door that opens onto the stairway at the end of which is his marital bedroom, right next to the one where the boys sleep; after a night when he has conceived thoughts of suicide, homicide, flight, and who knows what else; after a night in which he has done nothing but think of the best way to try to reoccupy the domestic spaces that after all belong to him, unable, in reality, even to turn the knob to open the door that divides him from the upper part of his dwelling—after a night like that, he woke at midday on the pullout bed still dressed. Next to him he found a briefcase full of bills. He counts them as well as he can, noting that the figure corresponds more or less to what he needs.

He can still save himself.

 

Slowly, the Pontecorvo family's well managed little nest egg started to vanish under the enormous weight of the legal expenses and the lack of income. At intervals of seven days, Leo would leave a note on the kitchen table with the figure he needed written on it, and the next day punctually the same briefcase with the money was there waiting for him on the same table.

If Leo paid scrupulous attention to the punctual payment of the honorarium and the other orders imposed by his lawyer-mentor-parent, the same cannot be said for the prohibition on reading the papers. This was indeed strange. Because until that moment Leo had not read them, avoiding them had come naturally. He had guessed that to be uninformed was the only way open to him of preserving his sanity. But as soon as that natural self-protective impulse had been regulated and institutionalized by Herrera's authoritative and explicit prohibition, Leo, like a new Adam, couldn't keep himself away from the noxious seduction of the poisoned apple of the national press.

Every morning, after the usual sleepless night, at the first light of dawn he slunk out of his lair, by way of the garage, so as not to occupy the kingdom where his family lived and which was now forbidden to him; he went to a newsstand (one a little farther away from the one he had always gone to, a few kilometers to the east, just outside the neighborhood) and bought every sort of newspaper. Then he came home, and, with a mixture of pleasure and pain, paged through those sewers of newsprint. Although the press had less and less interest in him, although his
affaire
had slipped discreetly to the back pages of the dailies—from the national news to the local—nonetheless he never failed to find some little article.

Leo had got into the habit of reading everything carefully, not missing even a line. With the meticulous rigor with which he had once examined the test results and clinical files of his patients or with which he prepared the notes for his learned articles, he now underlined all the small journalistic inaccuracies. He was called “the forty-five-year-old Roman oncologist.” “The well-known cardiologist.” “The fearless Milanese oncologist.” Also Camilla's age fluctuated, according to the article. Between one newspaper and the next, that little bitch went from nine to fourteen in a flash.

Hunting down these imprecisions, which at first had exasperated him because of their injustice, their indecency, with practice had become a puzzle-like entertainment. Similarly underlining them, clipping them, putting the clippings in a box and then showing them to Herrera with satisfaction: as if the obsessive monitoring of the uninformed and malevolent press that would not let go of him could in some way be helpful to the work that his lawyer, in another office, was doing in a certainly more constructive way.