Persecution (9781609458744) (26 page)

Seriously, Herrera, the extremely intelligent Herrera, didn't understand? And yet to him it seemed so obvious. Or maybe he absolutely understood. Maybe he understood and wanted to make him appear crazy. But of course: he's not my friend, he's not my ally. He was the one who broke off with me at the time. He was the one who at a certain point in our life decided he didn't welcome my presence. It was my height, my look, my attractiveness, my self-assurance that irritated him. Made things difficult for him. Humiliated him. This guy has hated me since we were kids. How could I rely on him? How could I put my life, or what remains of it, in his hands, if what at the time for me was friendship was merely hostility for him? What for me was affection was for him envy. He's drawn me into his trap by deceit. He's bleeding me dry. And now he has awarded himself a front-row seat so he can enjoy the spectacle of my destruction. He was just waiting to see me reduced to this to enjoy his revenge completely.

And why? Because of an unfortunate remark that I let slip out when I was half drunk in front of that Valeria, or whatever her name was. If only he had explained what he felt. If only he had told me what he had inside. But not him. He was proud. He didn't ever want to expose himself. Only at the end, when the situation had become untenable, then he kicked me out of his life. Like that, without warning, with a ferocity and a premeditation that left me breathless. Has he been lying in wait for me since then? Never underestimate the blasted rancorousness of a dwarf! Why should I be surprised? He has always been like that: eloquent and ambiguous. And now the moment has arrived to make me pay the bill. This nasty flea-bitten lawyer, whose stomach hair is longer than he is, pretends to help me, to be with me, while he is ditching me.

 

Until suddenly Leo had an illumination.

“You remember the question you asked Rabbi Perugia about Jewish iconoclasm? And you remember his answer?”

This sentence came out of his mouth before he even knew why.

“Now, what does Jewish iconoclasm have to do with it?”

“Come on, don't look at me like that, don't treat me like a madman, I'm perfectly lucid. You remember or not? Of course you remember, but you don't want to give me the satisfaction. And to think that every time you argued with the rabbi I looked at you with such admiration. Maybe it didn't show, but I was ecstatic. Your argumentativeness, your love for anything that wasn't obvious, your ability to challenge those anachronistic superstitions . . . ”

“All right, all right. Thank you. I agree, it was amusing to make fun of that ninny, and attack his granite convictions, but I can't understand what it has to do with that photograph and everything else that's happening . . . And I don't remember anything I asked the rabbi or any of his answers.”

But by that point Leo had lost the desire to explain to his friend. Or to remind Herrera what the callow Herrera had said to Rabbi Perugia so many years earlier, and above all what Rabbi Perugia had answered. That exchange between a stammering young rabbi and a thirteen-year-old gnome suddenly appeared to Leo so profound—such a definitive prophecy!—that to tell it would seem like a pointless violation.

Leo was in a trance now, placidly saturated with that memory: the long, boring lessons given by Rabbi Perugia to the meager group of preadolescents on Sunday mornings in the basement of the Tempio Maggiore. He remembered everything. The soccer games that preceded those exhausting immersions in religion, and in which Herrera gave evidence of all his bitter combativeness. The dusty neorealist air you breathed during those games—those battles!—in which the local, working-class Jews used their only encounters with Jews from middle-class families to thrash them. But also the dancing parties that followed the lesson and that usually took place at the Pontecorvo house. Gay little parties that Herrera stayed away from, out of timidity or pride or in order not to spoil them by his presence.

How was it possible that Herrera didn't remember the morning, thirty-five years earlier, when, a few weeks before their bar mitzvah, he, Herrera, had asked Rabbi Perugia why God had refused to allow Jews the comfort of images? Why had that capricious bearded entity, with whom Herrera seemed to have a score to settle, forbidden his people to make a portrait of him? The Catholics are always painting their beautiful Jesus, glowing and trim, and we are not even granted a little holy picture. Why? Why?

A question typical of the boy Herrera. His typical idle curiosity of those years. The quibbling, the intellectual exhibitionism that were to make up for the physical disagreeableness. And at the same time a challenge with which he wanted to destroy everything around him. Which provoked in the other kids (especially the girls) distrust and incomprehension. And which went so well with the distrust that his body aroused in everyone.

Why was that horrible dwarf so interested in these things? How could it be important to know why God did not want to have his portrait done, if in a few hours everyone would be in the living room of the Pontecorvo apartment dancing to records that had just arrived from America? How could a boy of thirteen prefer those pompous questions to Glenn Miller, Cole Porter, Bing Crosby? Why, if none of them—dragged out of bed on Sunday morning for what they considered a supplemental ration of school, reserved for Jewish boys—gave a damn what the rabbi was saying about God and his whims, was Herrera so interested? Why did that ugly, timid child show such pugnacious energy only in soccer games and when he was argumentatively challenging Rabbi Perugia?

The curious thing is that, if Herrera's verbose insistence was incomprehensible to his companions, it pleased the rabbi, who, in fact, said to him, “With that head you should be a rabbi!” To be answered by that extremely precocious thirteen-year-old: “But, I'm afraid that you, Rebbe, have too much faith in the Law of Moses to be a lawyer.”

Have too much faith? Come on, that's not the way thirteen-year-olds talk. And yet that's how Herrera talked. Like a novel.

Well, that time the captious eloquence that Herrera in the years to come would put in the service of his clients and make fruitful for his bank account, and now uninterested in persuading rabbis of the eternal Father's inconsistencies, was fixed on the question of images. Why didn't God want a portrait of himself? Herrera didn't understand it. And who knows why Leo—although at the time he belonged to the category of sleepy slackers who, during the lessons, did nothing but stare at the clock, in the hope that the torture would end as soon as possible—realized that he remembered both the rabbi's first answer, definitely ironic, “Well, maybe the Poor Old Man isn't as vain as they say he is,” and the second, extremely serious: “Or maybe the Lord wants to teach us that the truth is everything that images don't express.”

In recalling this second answer, Leo felt another shiver. A sense of elation. As if those words would explain how things stood. The reason for everything. He was happy that the rabbi had checkmated his best student, and that now that same student, who had become a famous lawyer, could be checkmated again, by the same phrase. Yes, dear old rabbi, tell this conceited man how it works. Tell him the only reasonable thing about my present situation:
the truth is everything that images don't say
.

And so, thirty-five years later, Leo decided to repeat that sentence to the person who had triggered it: “Do you remember, Herrera? The truth is everything that images don't say? Do you remember, Herrera? Please, tell me you remember.”

“Leo, calm down, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm afraid you're raving mad.”

“But really, come on, what an extraordinary answer! I understand it only now! Now that I'm confronted by that photograph, I understand it. I understand how photographs lie. It's photographs that are the problem, you see? Those bastards use the photographs to destroy your life. Like that night when they broke the story on the TV news. Behind the anchorman there was a photograph of me. When I heard him talking about me, I looked up at the TV, incredulous. And I saw myself there, next to that guy. It was me but it wasn't me. That photograph showed me but said nothing about me. Photo­graphs are the problem. They're what ruin everything. It's because of certain photographs that later your wife won't ever speak to you again, that your sons don't want to ever see you again, that you hide in the cellar like a madman, like a thief. And it's because of photographs like that that I'm ashamed. Tell me you understand. Tell me you see what they've done to me. What they're doing to me.”

“Yes, I see, Leo. I see it very well. Now calm down. Sit here and calm down. You'll see, we'll make them pay. They'll take it all back.”

“No! You see you don't understand. I just want you to say that this photograph produces the same feeling of terror in you, too, that it produces in me. Mystification, distortion, deception. Those are their weapons.”

And although Leo had the tone of a fanatic, although part of his perception of reality was by now almost completely compromised, you couldn't deny that that photograph was at least so stupidly grandiose as to border on a lie. What was more fallacious than the photograph that Rachel kept, ironically, in a frame set on a small table near the entrance (who had taken it from its spot and given it to those hyenas?), far from indiscreet eyes, and put there to remind him of what he would never again do? The photograph captured him in an impeccable riding outfit, mounted, reins firmly in hand, on a bay with a light-brown coat and black mane, shins, and tail.

There did not exist a photograph, among the thousands taken of him in half a century of life, that more poorly represented a man who had chosen good taste and self-irony as codes of survival. But who would explain to the distracted consumers of newspapers and television news that the horseman in that picture, if not exactly innocent, was guilty in a much more debatable way than that picture seemed to suggest?

Rachel had taken it the previous spring at the riding school in Olgiata, when, after years of inactivity, he had decided, on the advice of a nutritionist colleague, to take riding lessons and, yielding to the vanity of the beginner who believes he can hide his ignorance behind correctness of equipment, had acquired form-fitting cream-colored pants, shiny brown leather boots, and a ridiculous checked jacket. Anyone who knew how to ride would have seen in Leo's posture the signs of inexperience: heels up, back bent, cautious rigidity. But how many equestrian champions are there around? A handful of snobs and riders who probably don't read the newspapers and don't watch TV because the fresh air is better.

That photograph was destined to produce the completely opposite feeling: something that led people to be suspicious of such unexpected self-confidence, a suspicion that easily degenerated into anger and aggression. A person who today agrees to be photographed decked out like Beau Brummell, a person who has lost the sense of the ridiculous to the extent that he'll pose for the lens like an equestrian statue—from such a person you would expect certain nasty pathological crimes. Only a big shit in jodhpurs can, unlike many contemporaries of his background, face the crisis of middle age not by buying a custom car and fucking his wife's aerobics instructor but by embarking on the road of no return that leads to corruption, loan-sharking, pedophilia . . .

And no one gives a damn that the photograph doesn't represent you. Indeed, that photo is the spectacular denial of everything you've tried like mad to be. Because that photograph is stronger than your life. It's truer than you. More definitive than any sentence, more persuasive than any witness for the prosecution, more circumstantial than any expert evidence or testimony. That photograph is you as others believe they know you. That's why it's so vibrant. So potent. So cruel. Why it says to the world what the world wants to hear: that nothing goes better with depravity than vanity.

 

Four men in uniform violated the peace of his basement office early on a late-September morning. And they did so with seemliness and discretion. Knocking and waiting, before entering, for a sign of life. Although Leo, whose sleep by now was extraordinarily light, heard the cars parking in front of the house, the voices of the policemen as they approached, the front gate buzzer, and then the front doorbell and the indiscreet shuffling above his head, he started when someone knocked at the door.

Who could it be? Who would dare knock at the wicked hermit's door? Rachel? One of the boys? Telma? Maybe the plumber? Maybe his toilet wasn't the only one where the water pressure had decreased? Maybe it had happened in the whole house. And maybe the diligent Rachel, who, in a certain restricted form, was still taking care of him, was sending the plumber to fix the problem down there, too . . .

Whoever it was, Leo preferred not to answer. He pretended it was nothing. Unable to restrain the emotional upset that the idea of an intrusion caused, of whatever nature it was. For a moment he even entertained the impulse to hide behind the flowered sofa that for some time now had functioned as a bed. In essence it could be anyone. Nothing would have surprised him. Not even a gang of boys with sticks arriving to beat him. Or Camilla's father, who had finally come to a decision . . . But it wasn't fear for his own safety that kept him from answering; if anything it was a sudden modesty. Embarrassment at hearing the sound of his own voice. It's true: when he went to Herrera's office he talked, he talked excessively. But when he went home, to his bunker, the mere idea of uttering a word seemed to him sacrilege.

After another volley of increasingly harsh blows the four policemen, having grown impatient, entered.

The sight reassured Leo. And yet he remained silent, melodramatically offering them his wrists so that they could handcuff him. But one of the four, a kid (he couldn't have been more than a few years older than Filippo), said, “Professor, there's no need.”