Persecution (9781609458744) (35 page)

His name was Alessandro, and he was nine. He was a lively child, one of those who laugh at everything. One of those who teach you a lesson with that mixture of good humor and toughness. One of the bold ones, who like to talk to you about what is happening to them and what might happen to them with a lucidity that you wouldn't expect even from a brave adult. One who had a way with the nurses, a really bright nine-year-old.

He had a blood disease, but not among the most devastating. And maybe one of the reasons that Leo became fond of him was precisely the possible remission of the illness. And he seemed to have been right: Alessandro got better. His illness was beating a retreat. Leo agreed to discharge the child from his ward with some satisfaction. Feeling like a God the Father.

But a few months later Alessandro's parents brought him to the emergency room. They had been at the seaside, on the beach, when blood began to gush from his nose and his parents couldn't stanch it. Then a sudden weakness. Delirium. A fever so high his brain is about to fry. Leo gets a phone call. He is also at the seaside for the weekend. He has to go to the hospital immediately. Alessandro's parents need him. Alessandro needs him.

Leo certainly didn't have to wait for the tests to know that it was serious. A recurrence. Extremely violent, pitiless, like all recurrences. And unexpected. This time the treatments had no effect. Things deteriorated quickly. Why? the young doctor asked himself. Simple, because things deteriorate. Because no case resembles another. Because no patient resembles the one in the next bed. Because each adventure is its own adventure. Because to seek comfort in statistics is a scientific perversion that a doctor endowed with common sense and experience should never give in to. A knowledgeable doctor should know his enemy. A knowledgeable doctor should know that his enemy is that capricious and unknowable thing called the human body. And he should know that nothing is more fragile than a fledgling human body. People say that the psyche is unknowable, is a mystery, but, if there is one thing that's unknowable and mysterious, it's the body.

And then, a few weeks later, after he had told the parents that their son was no more—those same parents to whom he had said, only a few months earlier, that Alessandro was out of danger, that he needed to be watched but was out of danger, that he would have a life different from that of other children, under the threat of the treacherous disease, but anyway he would have a life—Leo had taken off his white coat, returned to his car, driven to his house at the seaside, with its view over a beautiful lagoon, and there had found waiting for him a young wife who was nursing their newborn second child and scolding his rowdy older brother. A scene that celebrated the triumph of life.

A scene so sweet-smelling and so stinking. And he had felt guilty. He had felt dirty. For a second he had been tempted by the moralistic shortcut of not accepting the joy of his house, the joy of his life. But then he had understood that he was wrong: his work was his work, his life was his life. The two things often met. They lived together on a very fine thread, suspended a thousand meters above the ground, under which the abyss opened. But if one didn't want to go mad one had to keep them apart.

There, the same was true of the courtroom. It resembled his unit. The battle was inexorable. Strangers spoke with pompous gravity of things that wouldn't change the course of
their
life. And this time the only life in play was his: he was the terminally ill person in this circumstance. He the child whose life was in danger. Everything around him was scenery.

And now he understood those sick people who stop fighting, who seem to have found an inner peace. Who no longer have the strength to complain. Whose only impatience concerns the treatments whose object they are, and which have no use except to sharpen the agony and cruelly postpone the time of nothingness. What he was going through in court was nothing other than therapeutic persistence, there came a point when he was unable to bear it any longer and had pulled the plug.

That's why he stayed home, in his hole. Placidly resigned.

At least until that day.

 

That day when he was captured by a ridiculous hope, triggered, paradoxically, by yet another piece of bad news. A telephone call on his private number. Herrera. Camilla had asked the judge to be heard a second time, she had new revelations to make. It meant that they were ready for a final encounter: her parents or the psychiatrist would have her say painful and devastating things.

“Why are you talking about it?”

“I'm afraid they'll increase the charges. They might be fabricating more nonsense: I want you to be prepared. It might be something really terrible for you and your family. If that little lunatic should make revelations of a certain type, the spotlights of the press might go on again.”

“What type of revelations are you talking about?”

“Something even more serious.”

“What do you mean, more serious? What could be more serious than what they're accusing me of? What are they coming up with this time? An orgy? Cocaine? That she showed up with some luscious little friend from nursery school?”

“Leo, don't talk nonsense. Don't joke. And, for heaven's sake, not on the phone. I don't know what there is that's new. I know only what I told you. It's a rumor. But you have to prepare yourself. You have to remain cool.”

Leo had listened calmly to this further madness. The sarcasm with which he had received the news testified to his calm. After Herrera's reproach he had made no other comments. Except when Herrera said that he would come and see him, that they would talk about it. Then Leo confined himself to whispering that he didn't want him around.

But now, right after he hung up, an old rage possessed him. The only thing he could still feel was a sense of frustrated contempt. What else did they want to do to him, the little whore and that lout her father? All this was not enough? When would their hunger for revenge be satisfied?

Revenge. Might it not be time for him to take revenge? Leo was seized by a passion for revenge against that girl. It was just the gratuitousness of the folly and cruelty that continued to enrage him, even on the emotional Aventine to which he had withdrawn.

It should be said that there was nothing positive about Leo's rage. It was all devoted to negativity. The days were over when he took pleasure in imagining the rise to public rehabilitation. It was a long time since he had fantasized about the scene in which he descends the marble steps of the Palace of Justice, in a rain of roses, applause, and tears. It was an infinity of time since he had imagined the faces of Rachel and the boys bursting with pride for the redemption that had taken place. Hope had become, so to speak, so rarefied as to disappear. At the end of the tunnel there was no virtuous happy ending waiting for him. At the end of the tunnel there was only another tunnel. At the end of which there was yet another. And so on.

But now, now that his rage was rekindled, now hope, too, was rekindled: it reappeared in his eyes in a less noble but more exciting form. He wanted to see that girl shown up as a liar, annihilated. He wanted to see Herrera make fodder of her publicly. Only a bloody scene like that might give him some joy. In other words, it was bitterness that had rekindled the fire of hope. And it was the desire for revenge that kept it burning.

And to think that the hours preceding Herrera's phone call had slipped by in grotesquely comforting reflections on the most hygienic way of clearing out of this world in a hurry, if possible on tiptoe. Not exactly a specific thought, rather a pastime with which he had been amusing himself for several weeks. For a need like his there was a word: suicide. But it seemed to him so emphatic. So literary . . . he preferred to think of an instantaneous break.

If only I were like Camilla's father, one of those fascists with a gun . . . if only I lived on the top floor of one of those nice big apartment buildings . . . if only that time I had listened to what Luigi, the anesthesiologist, said about a lethal combination of drugs . . . if only I had the courage to hang myself . . .

It isn't that Leo had had enough of life. He liked life. He absolutely liked it. He still had dreams sometimes in which he miraculously wore again the clothes of the man he had been before this obscene business defiled his existence. Well, the good god of dreams is a witness of how much Leo, in the role of his former self, had enjoyed himself. The pleasures, the many innocent underrated pleasures of the civilized individual, of the blameless ordinary man. There was not a single instant of his new life in which Leo had committed the sin of disowning them. There was not a single instant when he had not celebrated them with fervent nostalgia. The Friday evenings when Rachel picked him up at the hospital: he was too tired to drive, and so he left the car in the parking lot. He took off his tie and got in Rachel's car; as usual she showed up a few minutes late. They barely arrived in time. They entered the theater breathless, almost always last, stumbling over the knees of their neighbors to get to a seat.

After the movie they always went to eat at the same place: in the world there was only Berninetta. Leo ordered a mug of ice-cold beer, a vegetarian fritto misto, an extra-large pizza margherita, and that inimitable sour-cherry tart (the secret is in the short-crust dough, Leo explained to his wife every time). Then it was time for the cigar and coffee, in that order, for goodness' sake. On the way home in the car, Leo napped. That's what I mean by the pleasures of life. Napping in the car beside your Rachel after a perfect evening and a week of killing work.

No, Leo did not belittle the power of those delights. He wasn't angry with life in general, but with the particular turn that his had taken lately. The suicidal thoughts he toyed with were nothing but the fetid dross of mental tiredness. His brain was exhausted by the most idle of thoughts: all that might still be if things had happened differently. The specific weight of that useless thought was really too demanding for a single brain. Leo didn't want to die. Leo wanted to turn off his brain, at least for a little while. He wanted to nap in the car beside Rachel in the hope that the journey home would last an entire year at least. But since that was no longer possible, then there remained only option B. The plan in reserve. An option and a plan that, just because he knew death so well and in his life had seen hundreds of cadavers, made him shudder with terror.

He was at the mercy of that horror when the telephone rang. And he had only to exchange a few remarks with Herrera to feel that horror diminishing. Replaced by a ferocious will to live: a vitality in the form of contempt for that crazy little bitch. And an ardent desire to kill her.

It then had occurred to him that perhaps, somewhere in the house, there might be a letter from Camilla, one of the most passionate and one of the most threatening. Leo hadn't read it all, to the end. But he was sure that right at the beginning that psychopath had written him that she felt the moment had come to give herself to the man she loved. That is, to him. Too bad that that letter had been written a couple of weeks after the presumed carnal violence they were accusing him of. (At least, so it seemed to him.) In short, that letter not only exculpated him from the most lurid accusation but at the same time revealed that girl's madness, her spiteful intentions . . . Hence it would make the entire structure of the accusation collapse. As if in a flash Leo remembered the evening when he had found that letter, in the usual place. He had started to read it. Maybe because of the irritation and the fear that the sexual offer roused in him he hadn't realized that Rachel was entering the room.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“Nothing, a circular from the Santa Cristina administration . . . ”

“They've started writing the circulars in a pen with fuchsia ink?”

“In fact it's just a draft that the director sent me to look at before he makes a clean copy and sends it out.” He had closed the subject without losing his courage.

And without paying too much attention, and without even finishing it, he had hidden the letter somewhere. Yes, but where? He had been sitting on the bed. So maybe he had hidden it in the nearest place, the drawer of the night table, inside a big folder stuffed with other papers. Yes, it must be there. And where if not. Crazy to remember it now. Might his foolishness, his messiness, have been advantageous for once? Yes, the letter must still be there. Undeniable proof of that girl's madness. The letter would demonstrate that if there was someone who had been violated, brutalized, well, it was him.

He was so pleased with the opportunity that life had suddenly presented to him, so anxious to recover that sinister evidence. So elated at the idea of revenge. But at the same time our poor cockroach was so frightened by the prospect of making a journey that would expose him to the risk of running into one of the three people in the world he least desired to encounter . . . For that reason he couldn't do anything but sit there, in a daze: his senses strained and his nerves an instant from breakdown. Over time his fear of finding himself face to face with Rachel, Filippo, and Samuel had become a superstition. Leo knew that the only domestic space allowed him—according to an agreement tacitly reached with his immovable jailers—was the kitchen. He was allowed to enter only at night, within an extremely restricted time, somewhere between eleven-thirty and one. Which was more than sufficient, since the stairway that went up from his study-prison led directly to the kitchen, which at that hour would be empty, clean, and tidy.

For that reason he was now there, near the stairs, undecided what to do, afflicted by palpitations and the sort of nausea produced by excitement about a dangerous mission. He wanted to ascertain as soon as possible if that letter was still there. So much time had passed. So many things could have changed. No one could guarantee, for example, that his bedroom still existed as he remembered it. There was even the possibility that since then Rachel had cleared everything out. That she had decided to get rid of everything belonging to her husband. Yes, this could not be excluded on the face of it.