Persecution (9781609458744) (32 page)

“Professor, you are not the one to decide whom I should or should not arrest. Besides, I have other things to show you.”

“What is it this time? You want me to listen to a choir of angel voices? Or the latest record from the Mickey Mouse Club?”

Leo continued to be sarcastic, and Herrera didn't intervene. Herrera was in a daze, as if he found himself in a nightmare. Drowning in something over which he was unable to exercise any control.

“I don't think, professor, that you are in a situation to make jokes,” the judge said, in a glacial tone.

After a further pause, he took some photographs out of another envelope, and laid them out on the table in front of Leo.

“You took these?”

Leo picked one up with an attitude that expressed even more disappointment and sarcasm. Then the others.

“Yes, I took them. And?”

They were pictures from Samuel's birthday . . . the year before. To be more precise, they were the pictures that Rachel had compelled him to take and which, if it had been up to him, he never would have taken. What is criminal about that? What is illegal about giving in to the wishes of a nagging wife? How many wives and husbands like that are there in the world? Leo, at first glance, didn't understand. He didn't understand what the judge was driving at. Those photos meant nothing. Except that his wife was obsessed with souvenirs. Rachel was that way: she wanted a photograph for every occasion that she in some way considered an event. Her horror at the inexorable passing of things, her petit-bourgeois idolatry impelled her to collect testimony for everything. Impelled her to accumulate useless mementos and never throw anything away. If one of her sons simply put on a jacket and tie for a party she would ask Leo to do a photographic feature on the embarrassed dandy. If the Pontecorvos got dressed up to go to the opera or the bar mitzvah of the son of a friend, Telma or some other unfortunate would be summoned to immortalize that stylish moment. Leo didn't even dare to think what that woman would do when one of her children got a diploma, graduated, married, or, who knows, became a government minister!

Until Leo, leafing through the small pile of photographs that the investigator had put in his hand, realized that the author of those snapshots had lingered in an at least suspicious way on the girlfriend of the birthday boy. Then he understood. There was the point. There was the trap. The snare set for him. The final piece of evidence. Perhaps Leo should have explained to the investigator that it was the birthday boy who insisted that his father-photographer devote himself in particular to his girlfriend. What was indecent about that?

Nothing. Really nothing.

But the terrible fact of this whole business is that—although by now Leo had been sitting on the chair across from the investigator and next to the stupefied Herrera for several minutes—no specific charged had yet been made against him. Nor had he been questioned regarding his presumed crimes. Only insinuations. Only a crazy collection of evidence gathered by a herd of incompetent bureaucrats too hung up on psychology to be considered respectable people. In short, what were they accusing him of? Leo was certain that they must have more significant evidence. If they didn't, surely they wouldn't have dragged him here. No, they would never, ever allow themselves to destroy the life of a human being without having in hand something other than those meaningless and overinterpreted relics. Leo was sure there was something else. There couldn't not be something else. And so why this torture? Why this infinite prologue? Why not get immediately to the point? Why not let the shoe drop? Where was the ace up their sleeve? That was what Leo couldn't understand, that was what goaded his sarcasm and his indignation.

Basically, if you thought about it, the only question that up to now they had addressed to him—all right, no one had put it in explicit terms, but it was so—was somewhat sinister and metaphysical, and sounded something like this: why are you Leo Pontecorvo?

This is what the investigator would have liked Leo to explain. This is what the investigator had been asking him for quite a while, beating around the bush, cravenly. It was as if he were angry with him just because he was who he was. And certainly it was difficult to exonerate himself from a crime like that. The crime of being Leo Pontecorvo. The crime of having lived up to that point as Leo Pontecorvo and, if necessary, of preparing to die as Leo Pontecorvo. How does one exonerate oneself from a crime like that? The rest—all that stuff they kept putting in front of him—was pure pretext, an incidental digression, an idle waste of time.

For a moment Leo felt tired. For a moment he lacked the will to explain. For a moment it all seemed to him so empty, so formless, so distorted. He wondered if it was true that, in the eyes of the world, so much evidence of his perversion existed or if, much more simply, there was no individual whose personal story could not be so speciously manipulated.

“Professor,” the investigator said suddenly, “do you know Donatella Giannini?”

Donatella Giannini. Of course he knew Donatella Giannini. That woman's name transported him for a moment into a tidy, aseptic, efficient place, totally different from the one where he was now. Donatella Giannini. She was one of the nurses at Santa Cristina. One of the best. One of the most industrious and cooperative, one of the most exacting, the most resourceful. A point of reference for the ward: adored by the patients, by the parents of the patients, by the doctors, by her nurse colleagues, and by her aides. By all, in short. A sweet and charismatic head nurse, who was dedicated to her work with passion and modesty.

“Do you know what Donatella Giannini told us?” the investigator asked, pulling out of yet another envelope yet another piece of paper.

“How could I know, sir?”

“She told us that, in your ward, you encouraged sexual promiscuity between sick children.”

“But that's not true . . . it's not like that . . . Donatella couldn't have said anything of the kind . . . Unless she's referring to that business . . . something that happened some years ago . . . but I said so to speak . . . Two kids were found together by Donatella . . . she came to tell me . . . she was upset . . . and I said only that . . . but not in that sense . . . not the way you understand it . . . Donatella couldn't have told you . . . It's true, there was a disagreement, we argued about what happened. I said some things, but like this, so to speak . . . in an abstract way. A challenge.”

At the word “challenge” Herrera interrupted, energetically: “That's enough now, Leo. Now be quiet . . . Your Honor, enough of this. My client avails himself of his right not to respond . . . enough of this. Really.”

“No, it's not enough, Herrera. You don't understand. You don't understand what they're doing to me. You don't understand how terrible what they're doing to me is. It's all so absurd. You don't understand and you don't say a thing. I gave you a lot of money so that you would say something. I made you rich so that you would defend me. But you sit there in a stupor. You say nothing.”

“Leo, I said that's enough.”

“I'm telling you that you don't understand! No one can understand. If you're not in it up to your neck, if you're not drowning in it, you can't understand it. What these people are talking about amounts to ridiculous trifles. Underlined books, exhibition catalogues, records. And you pretend it's nothing. That woman looks at me as if I were Mengele. And that other one writes . . . and I . . . It's the absurdity that's the most terrible thing. It's the paltriness of the invention that is most odious.”

“Please, come on, stop it . . . Your Honor, let's stop here.”

“No, I'm not going to stop here!” Leo said, getting up.

“Professor, I must ask you to stay seated. And to lower the tone of your voice.”

Leo heard someone behind him open the door and enter. A guard who had become alarmed?

“No, I'm not stopping,” he repeated in a lower voice, sitting down again. “What's going on? All our strategies? All our conversations? And now you say nothing? You just sit there, completely silent? You always have advice for me. You always have something to reproach me for. You always know what to do. Except this time. This time you don't know . . . ”

“Please, Leo . . . come on, really, let's end here.”

“We're not ending a damn thing. Do you understand that we're not ending a damn thing? It's been months since I spoke. Months that I've been listening like a bad child being punished. Months that I've trusted everything that's said to me, that I've been pretending that everything that's happening to me makes sense. And that I, in some way, deserved it. For quite some time I've let myself be treated by you with sarcasm, I've let these people torture me. And I can't take it anymore. I can't bear it. My days are hellish. You don't know. You don't know what happens in here. You should to carry out an investigation into what happens in here . . . But you, Herrera, whose side are you on? Will you tell us whose side you're on?”

“Leo, if you go on I'll be forced to abandon the brief . . . ”

This time it was Herrera who rose, producing a much less threatening effect on the onlookers.

“Is that your only worry? Abandoning the brief? Not getting mixed up with me, with what's happening to me? You're afraid of being dragged into my hell? Well, you can set your mind at rest. It concerns only me . . . Do what you like. But at least I want to tell you what I think.”

“Not now, not here, what do I have to say to you? Listen, Your Honor, it's better if . . . ”

“I told you, Herrera. I tried to explain it to you. They trick you with the photos. They put some photos in front of you and think they've understood everything about you. They think they know everything about your personality. For them those photographs are the truth. If only one could live without leaving a trace! And if only all of you knew how irrelevant the traces I've left are. If only I could explain to you what it means to be checkmated by a twelve-year-old girl . . . ”

“What do you mean, professor, by ‘checkmated'?”

Speciousness, nothing but speciousness. Here we are again. It's crazy, the ambiguity of words. The destructive power of that ambiguity. The more you justify yourself, the deeper you sink. The more you explain, the murkier it becomes. You can never get out of this situation, maybe Herrera is right: the best thing is to be silent. But I can't be silent anymore. I never had such a desperate desire to express myself.

“ ‘To be checkmated,' Dottore, means ‘to be checkmated.' I don't know how else to explain it to you. To feel threatened, blackmailed, at the mercy of something enormous, frightening, and uncontrollable . . . ”

“Are you speaking of your drives, professor? Is that what you're talking about?”

“No, I'm not talking about my drives. I don't think I have uncontrollable drives. I don't think I've ever had them. No more than any human being endowed with objectivity and common sense. I'm speaking of the fierce, odious, foolish behavior of a little twelve-year-old whore, who, God knows why, decided to destroy my life. To annihilate everything I created, everything I love. Like that, in a deliberate, satanic way . . . ”

Leo felt short of breath and he had a desire to weep. But he also felt that he had finally taken the right path. He was telling the truth. Isn't this what respectable people do? Tell the truth.

“And who might the ‘little whore' be, professor? Who is it that you call a ‘little whore'?”

“Leo, please, stop it! Leo, I beg you, don't answer . . . ”

“You know very well, sir, who the little whore is. I can't even bring myself to name her. I will tell you more. I am terrified by the idea of naming her. Here I am, a large, tall man. I'm almost six feet tall and I can't utter the name of that little whore.”

Leo, although his mouth was dry, his back soaked, and his heart racing, was still lucid enough to realize that every time he uttered the word “little whore” (and God knows in what a liberating tone he uttered it), the meager body of the investigator's young assistant trembled, as if it had been shaken by an electric shock. Leo felt the eyes of that girl—yes, girl, she couldn't have been much over thirty—fixed on him with indignation and disbelief. Because the word “whore” disturbed her? She was the assistant of a judge. She must have seen and heard much worse. Leo suspected she was one of those frustrated feminists so detested by Rachel. Those unhinged paranoiacs who interpret even the most conciliating male gesture as an intolerable aggression. One of those girls with no sense of humor who feel on their own bony shoulders the weight of all the centuries of abuses suffered by women.

What did that girl think of him? It wasn't so hard to understand: he was the atavistic enemy to be beaten. The ironic fact is that outside there were starting to be a lot of people who considered him the atavistic-enemy-to-be-beaten. Which was truly incredible, if you took account of the sort of life he had led, if you took account of his good nature, his very rare talent for
not
hating anyone. There, maybe that was the reason that so many people hated him. They hated him because he was incapable of hating and those who don't hate can't defend themselves. His insufficiency of hatred was unforgivable. Yes, maybe that explained a lot of things.

So Leo, seeing the assistant tremble at every “whore,” wondered if maybe Camilla was destined to become a woman like that. And if all that she had done was the apprenticeship for becoming that type of woman. A woman who hates. It was the first time he had thought realistically about the motive that had impelled Camilla to do what she had done. In the past months he had been so preoccupied with defending himself from the attack launched against him by that psychopath of a girl that he had never wondered what was going through her head all that time. What had armed her. Love? Hatred? Meanness? Revenge?