Persecution (9781609458744) (36 page)

In the end Leo—like the night when the burglar alarm began to screech—allowed prudence, allowed cowardice to have the upper hand: the disappointment he would feel if the letter wasn't there would have been much more intense than that aroused by the pain of not being able to get there. Yet again his cowardice seemed to be extraordinarily protective.

Or at least it had been until that Thursday. If things in the life of his family hadn't changed, then Thursday was the propitious day. In the afternoon Telma went out, Rachel took the boys to tennis lessons, and usually, then, she went to the hairdresser. Which meant at least three hours to carry out his mission.

So, at four-thirty on a late-spring afternoon Leo goes upstairs. He violates the boundary that months ago he ordered himself not to cross: the threshold that divides the kitchen from the rest of the house. Finding himself in the place that for so long constituted the ordinary background of his daily life does not rouse in him the overwhelming emotion he imagined. Rather, there is something irritatingly sad about such a display of unchangeability. And then he feels affronted by all that cleanliness. Don't these people know that they live above the lair of a cockroach? Don't these people know who the cockroach is? It's incredible how families immediately get used to their own hypocrisy. How little it takes
to become
that hypocrisy. Everything around him demonstrates that, after the July night when all hell broke loose, everything has gone back to moving on its proper path. Leo doesn't feel nervous. He is so disappointed that he's no longer afraid. If someone comes in? Come on in. I'm a grown man, I'll know how to face it.

Finally he's in his bedroom. He merely has to open the door to recognize the bluish half-light that Rachel wants that room to have. And this time the emotion is strong. There is something soft and relaxing in that space. Maybe the regal orange leather armchairs near the window, or maybe the two Art Deco lamps bought on the Rue de Seine, in Paris, on the way back from their honeymoon, or maybe the cotton bedspread with its candy-colored pattern, the strips of rosewood parquet . . . who knows what.. but it all lends the room a welcoming sweetness that Leo didn't remember. And it's as if just then he felt on his shoulders the accumulated weight of all the insomnia of that year of life-not-life. He would like to lift up the covers and slip inside. He would like to fall asleep in his bed and never wake up. He is so overcome by emotion that he has almost forgotten the reason he's there: the letter, the trial, Camilla, all that garbage . . .

To distract himself, and at the same time to revive the diminishing sense of exultant surprise, he goes into the walk-in closet. But this time the surprise is of an opposite nature. If earlier Leo was offended by everything in the house that hasn't changed, now the moment has come to be offended by all that has. The small room that functions as a closet, with two large mirrors that challenge each other from opposite walls, has been emptied of every trace of his earthly presence. What happened to his pinstriped suits, his tweeds, his shoes, scarves, jackets, hats, gloves? There is nothing anymore. This is the walk-in closet of a lady, a divorcée, a widow. Leo feels a ridiculous hatred for Rachel. For her common housemaid's diligence. For her damn moral fiber. For her obstinacy. For her mania about hygiene . . . Because it's hygiene that drove her to eliminate every trace of her husband from that closet. Where his clothes used to be, now—hanging on the brass rail that runs from one end of the room to the other—are only Rachel's jackets, coats, pants, skirts, which, seen in a row like that, look like a herd of well-dressed ladies lined up at the post office.

The sight of his many wives—which the game of mirrors comically replicates—makes him dizzy. So he sits down on a low chest of drawers. Next to so much disappointment he feels a strange, and decidedly inappropriate, happiness stirring. Something that has to do above all with the senses. And meanwhile he breathes very cautiously. He absolutely doesn't want to get used to the odor he has rediscovered. The odor of his wife. The odor of a suddenly cut-off intimacy that, if you think about it, would soon have been entering its twentieth year. To keep it alive Leo holds his breath for a few seconds, and then sticks his nose in the sleeve of an old raincoat of Rachel's. He is desperate. And, just as when he was desperate as a boy, he feels an untimely desire to masturbate. How long since he's ejaculated? Too long. His sexuality, his masculine brutality have been trampled on by the many humiliations he's endured. The persistence of embarrassment has been his bromide.

And now he finds himself desiring Rachel in a new, unthinkable way, even more passionate than when, in the early days, she, like a good Jewish girl, wouldn't give in to him. No, Leo has never desired Rachel with such exhausting passion. Not even at the beginning of their relationship, when she refused him in the car and our young professor's pants swelled with contained vehemence. Not even then.

Leo feels that, just like a child, he would come in an instant. He has only to yield to the impulse, take it out, touch it a little. He is so excited and so desperate. His mind does nothing but select and isolate delicious moments in the long list of conjugal couplings. There is nothing more terrifying than nostalgia for conjugal sex. There is no perversion more lethal than to masturbate while thinking of your wife. Leo is thinking about this. And then of the first times with Rachel. The beauty of the first times. The barriers they had overcome in the course of years. When he deflowered her a few days before their marriage. The first time she took him in her mouth. The first time he convinced her to let him come in her face. The first time he licked her. The first time he took her from behind. Yes, all the first times condensed into a single image, a sole instant, trapped in the fibers of that useless raincoat. All that explosive material is there, in his mind, in his body. It took nothing to set it off. And to keep it alive very little is needed: he has only to press the sleeve of the raincoat against his nose with greater force and breathe in more violently.

But now another thought gets in the way. Something that resembles jealousy. How has Rachel been behaving in these months? Other men? A steady relationship? Everything that's happened to Leo in recent times proves that there is really nothing that can't happen. That the unthinkable is around the corner, waiting for you, with a smile.

The jealousy that starts to torment him is what makes him capitulate. In the end Leo can't resist: he pulls out his penis, which demonstrates an adolescent reactivity. And he starts masturbating, as every man knows how to do. As every man learns to do at thirteen and never forgets. Nothing odd about it. Men are made like that. You're always ready to jack off, at the most inconceivable moments and in the least appropriate places. Ever since the beginning, when your body discovers the glory of those stickily mysterious spasms and asks nothing more than to make them happen again and again and again . . . ever since it has been natural to take that solitary gymnastic syncopation for an exorcism. The last depraved resource of your nerves to keep from giving in.

It's the same for Jews who, when they leave a cemetery after the annual visit to their dead spouse, feel the obligation and the need to eat something. Life is reclaiming its rights. Life requires respect and dedication. But it's also the only way that's left to vent frustration and confront disaster. A bad grade at school? Your girl has cheated on you just because that guy had his butt in a Porsche Carrera? You're upset by the idea of a new Ice Age or the inexorable desertification of the planet? Have no fear, my boy. Run to the bathroom and masturbate. Jack off. Let go. Ardently, violently. It's the best way to get through it. A sacred gesture, blessing and cursing at the same time. A feral, ancestral instinct like that of the dog who pees on the roots of a tree. It so happens that this time Leo's tree is his former conjugal boudoir, orphaned by his dazzling collection of clothes and saturated with the tormenting odor of Penelope.

But, just as he's about to come, he's distracted by something, a noise behind him. Is someone observing him? He turns his head suddenly but sees no one. Another noise. Faint as fabric sliding on a floor. Panic. Has someone seen him. Has someone seen him jerking off on his wife's raincoat? Was it Telma? Or one of the boys? Was it Rachel herself? Was it a ghost? Was it no one? Embarrassment once again disengages his virility. Leo, after composing himself as well as he can, runs away to bury himself again.

I will never go out again. I swear. Yes, that was the last time.

 

Then summer erupted: a month early with respect to the calendar, as sometimes happens in Rome. The days of Leo Pontecorvo were attended by two contrasting feelings: a renewed and meditative fatalism and the sensation that someone was keeping on eye on him twenty-four hours out of twenty-four. A shadow. A sprite. Something supernatural. This impression had been with him ever since he had had to abandon his plan to masturbate on the raincoat of his wife. The excitement had disappeared, but not the presence that had made him flee.

He no longer had much desire to eat. For several days he hadn't even gone to the kitchen to get the food he needed. On the fifth day of not eating, he found the tray with the food outside his door. And from that day on that's how it was. He was glad the tray was there, and he wondered if the presence he felt around him had put it there or a family member who preferred to remain anonymous. They wanted him alive. Evidently that thing didn't want him to die, didn't want him to waste away. Evidently that thing needed Leo to endure, to live. But nevertheless every day he ate a little less. He was discovering the pleasure of not eating.

Then true summer arrived. And it was giving the best of itself in the perfumed warmth that arrived form the garden. The boys had just finished school, and one of Leo's greatest pleasures was to look out through the window to watch their legs playing ball in the garden. He recognized both Filippo's and Samuel's. It was so poignant to recognize them. To witness the miracle of obsessively repeated moves, which Leo never tired of. He felt a pang of grief when the game ended and the teams of four against four, which his sons and their friends formed every morning, broke up, to agree to meet there at the same time the next morning.

Samuel played defense. His vehemence as a defender, the passion with which he stuck to his opponent and kept on him were in contrast with his temperamental and capricious character. Although in life up to then he had been successful in everything he did, Samuel never gave the impression that he could become deeply involved in something. The price you pay if life functions too well for you. If it hadn't been for that nice gift that Leo and Camilla had given him the year before, his life would have grazed perfection. At least as far as his father knew.

He often wondered what was hidden in the little heads of his sons. What did they feel? What did they want? Who were they? The distance between people who love each other is a mystery no less profound than the oceanic abysses. What fine phrases did our prisoner conceive. Samuel, his Semi, so it seemed to Leo, was born under a good star. That's why it was amazing that he put so much grit into playing soccer: it wasn't what you'd expect from someone for whom things have always gone well. Filippo's style of play didn't in any way represent his life, really, either. Filippo was regal and charismatic when he played. But his life wasn't that way. In life he had always given a bad account of himself, from the start, I would say.

 

An incident during one of those games tested Leo's nerves yet again. Likewise his courage and his cowardice. There had been an incident. Filippo tackled by Semi. They never played on the same team. Semi couldn't bear Filippo's reprimands, any more than Filippo could bear his brother's lack of style and his excessive fervor. That's why there was a general opinion among that tribe of adolescent soccer players of Olgiata that the Pontecorvo brothers should always play against each other. And it was precisely Semi's impulsiveness, so irritating to Filippo, that provoked the disaster. Semi had slid into his brother's ankle. And, to judge from the way Filippo was now writhing and from his whimpering yelps, it seemed likely that he had broken it. The sharp wail that seems to mix crying with laughter, horror and disbelief, emitted by athletes, especially young ones, when they are faced with the outrageous impotence of a broken bone. Leo saw very clearly, from what for once turned out to be a privileged position, his son's foot dangling. Likewise he saw his other son, desperate, unable to stop calling, “Mamma, Mamma! Hurry up . . . hurry . . . ”

Leo, no less desperate than his sons but if possible still more frustrated, found a way even at that moment to conceive a self-flagellating thought: observing that not even then did Samuel call him. Not even in an emergency. For a moment the mad idea that he was dead crossed his mind: maybe he was dead and he was the only one who didn't know it. Maybe death was just this. Persisting in believing you're alive while all those around you have accepted your nonexistence. Maybe the presence he felt around him was merely the trace left by his life that had now passed. Maybe he himself was nothing but a trace. The trace of a trace.