Persecution (9781609458744) (33 page)

The only thing certain now was that, at every “whore” uttered by Leo, the hatred of the investigator's assistant expanded. Every “whore” was a lash. This pleased him. As if he perceived the power that he finally had available. The power of leading her to exasperation. The power to disgust her and make her feel worse and worse. That advantage led Leo to insist on that epithet, to stick it in every two words, purposely:

“No, don't ask me to say it. I really can't utter the name of that little whore. I don't even remember it. I have in my mind only whore, whore, whore . . . ”

All just to see that woman suffer, that grownup Camilla!

It was then that the judge decided to speak, solemnly this time, pronouncing his words carefully and ostentatiously waving another piece of paper. And he did it with the satisfaction with which a professor of mathematics writes on the blackboard the exact solution of a difficult equation:

“The girl of twelve whom you call by such an unforgivably vulgar word, professor, might she be the same one who accuses you of attempted rape?”

So that was the charge. So that was why they had arrested him. So these were the words written on the piece of paper that Leo had in his pocket and which for five days he had not had the strength to read. Camilla had accused him of having done yet another thing that he had never done and had never dreamed of doing. Camilla, like the diligent and conscientious girl she was, had completed her masterpiece.

 

H
e sees it immediately, as he goes through the gate. It's on the inside of the wall surrounding the house (which has meanwhile been brightened by a mild, red autumn), still fresh, drawn during his absence, probably on a recent night, by some vandal. No one has had the decency to remove it: a graffito that reproduces in a childishly stylized way the figure of a man on a horse. A Marcus Aurelius drawn by an immature hand. Both the man and the animal have nooses around their necks.

Really? They want him dead? And not only him but also his imaginary mount? The horse in that wretched photo. Leo is tempted to point out to Herrera that he was right in the end. That photograph had its importance. But just as he is about to say it he realizes that it doesn't matter to him anymore. To persuade Herrera. To dissuade Herrera. To argue with Herrera. What's the point?

It wasn't easy for Herrera to get him out of jail. Not after the disastrous interrogation. Not after Leo's appalling outbursts. Not after they had to take him bodily back to his cell. Leo was confined there for twenty more days. So they told him: twenty days. Even though his own perception tells him that it could have been twenty minutes or twenty years. In any case, Herrera had managed it in the end. Finally he had done something right.

And, not content, Herrera came to get him. He gloriously, or vaingloriously (add a prefix and everything changes), appeared across from the prison in his Mercedes 500 the color of a hearse. Everything has to be big. Size is Herrera's weakness. There he is, in the driver's seat, in the huge interior of that sort of steamship on wheels. One of those ostentatious square cars that get old immediately and after a few years become the property of sophisticated gypsies and mediocre crooks.

And now there they are, next to each other, staring at the wall in silence.

“I'll call someone right away to get rid of it.”

“No, no, leave it. It doesn't matter.”

Meekness is becoming a sort of vice for Leo, but it can't keep him from violently slamming the door of that monumental car when he gets out and heads, alone, toward the entrance to the basement.

The singular thing is that the drawing has quickly turned into the sweetest element that his house is able to offer him. As was to be expected, in fact, Leo has not found a brass band waiting for him. Imagine. With what's happened. Prison, the new vile charges that hang over his head. If Leo needs human warmth it's just as well that he is content with the graffito of a hanged man.

And that's what he has done. He has grown fond of it, like a child with a stuffed animal that's lost its fur. More and more frequently he gets up on a stool and from there, from his study-prison, through the high little window, stares at his new friend.

 

Days pass, weeks. Leo is still getting thin, he keeps getting thinner, he grows a solemn beard: white, thick, hieratic, suitable for Moses. That beard is his response. A vanity tending to mysticism is the antidote to the inexorable and the inextricable that are poisoning him. The look adapts itself to the new tenor of life, the tenor of life to the new conception of the world. Even his way of dressing, ever since Herrera got him out of jail, has become more austere. He wears a sweat suit, of the type he would never have worn in good times. To signal an indomitable and rigorous path toward redemption.

Winter is at the gates. An army of dark clouds, swollen, spectral, has reached the Pontecorvo house after a triumphal march from the Urals, along the expanses of northern Europe and through the Alps and the Apennines: and now it is stationed there, on the horizon, ready to do battle. It has brought with it the first cold and extreme dampness. The pergola of Virginia creeper that until a few weeks before displayed dazzling red and orange foliage is completely bare by now, reduced to a knotty tangle of stems, like a petrified forest.

Leo, frightened by the falling temperature, knows he can't count on compassion from Rachel. She is, as usual, stinting on heat (she will stint at least until the middle of December). Then, driven by the boys' protests, she will be generous. So more and more often Leo, especially early in the morning or late in the afternoon, starts shivering. Down there the dampness is threatening. When he gets too cold he puts on over the sweat suit an old ski jacket that he dug out of a store room where Rachel keeps the old and now unwearable clothes (liberating terms such as “throw away” or “give away” do not belong to the genetic vocabulary or the emotional dictionary of the lady). The jacket smells a little too much of moth balls, but Leo doesn't mind. In the storeroom he also found a comical gray wool cap. Like the ones that athletes wear jogging, or with which fishermen protect their ears when they go out before dawn. It seems made just for covering the white receding hairline. Sometimes at night he falls asleep with the cap on and wakes up with it still on in the morning. Which gives him a strange euphoria, like an old salt.

Herrera didn't have to make too great an effort to persuade his increasingly laconic client not to appear in court. (Meanwhile the trial has begun.) Better not to show up, Herrera explained. It's more prudent for an individual's actions to be judged, rather than the flesh-and-blood individual . . . and blah . . . blah . . . blah. These old tunes no longer deceive Leo, the strategies are repugnant to him. Herrera has remained the windbag he always was, he had his chance to show what he was made of. He wasted it. Now he can say or do what he wants. He can explain or be silent. Leo isn't interested.

The only request he has made to his lawyer is to be informed in detail about every court session. Herrera calls every night and Leo has him recount everything: and meanwhile, with schoolboyish diligence, he takes notes. He always has with him a kind of note pad (another article provided by Rachel's storeroom-junk room), on which he very precisely records his lawyer's summaries. And while Herrera speaks, Leo imagines the courtroom where the trial is taking place, where these people argue about what he did and what he didn't do, about what he said and what he didn't say. Where is the trial taking place? In one of the many courtrooms at the Ministry of Justice. Leo pictures the horrid grandiose edifice, the useless swarming, the odor of cappuccino from the machines. A ferment worthy of an anthill. An immense anthill. Where everyone speaks loudly or in whispers. Never normally.

From the way Herrera describes it, the inside of the law courts is fake, like a set at Cinecittà. The paving is cobblestones, just like the ones that could be found on an ordinary Roman street in the sixteenth century. And the lamps are the ones typical of a Roman square. The square, exactly. The forum. The rhetoric of the forum. The place where the people gather. The place where the people debate. The place where, in the name of the people, judgments crucial to the life of the individual are made.

“All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of gender, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social condition.”

There you have Article 3 of our constitution. Splendid, inflex­ible, so well-intentioned. Leo imagines it reproduced in synthetic form in the gilded inscription on the woodwork that is placed between the empty seat of the contumacious defendant and the judges:

 

ALL ARE EQUAL BEFORE THE LAW
.

 

Which in general is true, but also depressingly irrelevant. Who gives a damn about the law? The law might even have the best intentions in the world. What counts is what people think of people. What people make of people.

And, on the subject of people, to listen to Herrera, the Pontecorvo
affaire
is attracting less and less attention. But Leo isn't interested in this. He wants to know everything that is said. Herrera for the most part satisfies him, giving him exhaustive summaries.

And he, as he listens, no longer gets angry about the slanders that, in his absence, rain down on him. He has become astonishingly habituated to lies and, in a strange paradox, averse to the truth. Here's a thing that really enrages him: when Leo scents the odor of truth, he shudders. Just a little is sufficient, all Herrera has to do is tell him that he presented to the court the receipt for a plane ticket showing that the defendant could not have been where his cleverest little accuser claims he was on that day, owing to the simple fact that he was present at an oncology conference in Anversa . . . All Herrera has to do is tell him that, after displaying the receipt, he threatened to call as witnesses thirty individuals ready to declare that Professor Pontecorvo (as Herrera insists on referring to him) was there, at the conference, at an international meeting with prominent colleagues, drinking Scotch and smoking Cuban cigars provided by generous pharmaceutical companies. The intrusion into the courtroom of a definite, incontrovertible date in his equivocal and unstable past is enough to make Leo feel dizzy. It's as if the truth brought back to him a self that he broke with a long time ago. So fuck the truth, let's concentrate on the lie.

 

Leo continues to eat at night. Some kind soul leaves the food ready in the oven, and he, like a thief in his own house, goes upstairs for provisions. The first time he found that single portion of food ready for him his appetite disappeared, put to flight by the emotion provoked by a gratuitous gesture of kindness that he doesn't think he deserves, and whose anonymous maker he will never know. But as the days pass that, too, becomes a habit, and the emotion vanishes. Every night, a little before midnight, he enters the kitchen, opens the oven door, takes what has been left for him, and goes back down into his cave.

Reluctantly eating that warm food Leo thinks of death, and makes an effort to do so by mixing the old materialism of a man of science with the comforting pantheism of certain men who, before they die, convert to some abstruse Oriental philosophy.

I will merely crumble, he says to himself. Yes, nothing will happen to me but this: crumbling. Which means I will not vanish, but in fact the cells that make up my body will go joyfully out into everything. Floating like pollen. What a marvel! And through a sort of instinct full of affection they'll stay around. I'm here, Rachel, my adored sweetheart, my love, I won't abandon you. The ashes I am about to be transformed into will watch over you, over our boys . . . The atoms of my body as it decomposes will always be here with you. They will accompany you. They will caress you.

Usually it's this macabre form of sentimentality that leads him to put down the fork and pick up the pen. And write. These days, he does nothing else. Especially at night, like the poets of yore. It's typical of individuals of his social class to write when things go badly. Never does a man at the peak of success start writing in order to exalt his satisfied life. Take a week at Bora Bora with deep-sea fishing! Write? Are you kidding—they only remember it when things take an ugly turn. Writing is a business for the unlucky. Writing is to put things in order. So that all this emptiness takes shape in a purpose. Now that his case has gone stale, and everyone is forgetting about him, he doesn't need a lawyer to rehabilitate him. He doesn't need a public rehabilitation. And since, given the behavior of his family, he can't even hope for a private rehabilitation, then it's worth trying to write.

After all, it might be the last chance he has to reestablish the truth.

But Leo is no longer interested in the truth.

And that's why, instead of sitting down at the desk and energetically dashing off a memoir full of hatred and anger, spelling out everything; instead of using the pen like a club, which he would have the right to do; instead of putting his rhetorical skill in the service of a battle against falsehood and in favor of decency; instead of writing how a herd of hospital bureaucrats got him involved in shady deals; instead of writing about how an assistant he had helped first swindled him by extorting money from him by deceit and then charged him with loan-sharking; instead of writing how a little flirt trapped him, and how the father of that flirt demonically manipulated the letters so as to make him appear a pervert in the eyes of the world; instead of writing how an entire media-justice system distorted his story to make it into a kind of emblem of the corruption of the whole country; instead of writing how his wife, whom he loved, respected, and never betrayed, to whom he gave all the well-being that a woman can expect from a husband, condemned him without appeal to a life as a reject; instead of writing how his sons have eliminated him from the face of the earth . . . Yes, in short, instead of writing what he should have had the right and the duty to write, Leo began to reflect on Leibniz.

Yes, our little moron began to philosophize, reheating old notions he had learned during high school. Of all the things that his experience could have taught him, the only one that Leo feels he has learned is that men are monads “without doors or windows.”

And . . . yes, maybe it's true, monads, as Leibniz says, have neither doors nor windows. But the cellar in which he has trapped himself, well . . . that at least has one door (even if it is increasingly impassable), and also a row of windows, although they are small, set high up, and through them one can enjoy a very partial view of the world outside.

Those two little windows, those two portholes, constitute the only bond with what, in spite of everything, Leo continues to love most: Rachel, Filippo, and his Semi. Too bad that the only thing the two peepholes allow him to see are the feet and legs of the beloved persons. The most glorious moments of his long, methodical days are those when he sees the legs of his sons and his wife walk on the driveway toward the car. It's seven in the morning. Leo, after a nearly sleepless night, sits at the window to watch those beloved legs and feet going along the driveway, swaying and dragging, in sun and rain. They climb into Rachel's S.U.V. And finally Leo sees the gray Land Cruiser maneuver on the porphyry paving in front of the garden and go through the gate. That is a moment of great euphoria for him. It has an emotional tone completely opposite to the one that assails him when the same Land Cruiser returns at the end of the day and the legs and feet of Filippo and Samuel, much more dynamic than in the morning, jump out of the car and run to the door. Or they stop a moment to kick a ball while Rachel warns good-humoredly, “It's time to do your homework. Wasn't tennis enough? Don't you ever have enough?” And they shout, “Five minutes.”