Persecution (9781609458744) (39 page)

Besides, Leo knew that if he hadn't been six feet tall, if he hadn't been the stylish man he was, if he hadn't over the years won such an eminent place in society, if he hadn't had the duty to keep up a certain comportment in front of his wife, probably, listening to Rachel's accounts of the daily activities of his son, composed of docility and resignation and such endless difficulties, he would have broken down in tears.

Dear God, his Fili sometimes seemed so defenseless, so incapable of fighting back against even the smallest obstacle!

 

One morning, in the house at the seaside in the Maremma where the Pontecorvos spent a month every summer, Rachel found Filippo on the bed in the maid's room, where the nanny—on vacation at the time—usually slept.

Rachel found him there, motionless, still wearing his sneakers, T-shirt, and soccer shorts, and exuding the salty, goat-like smell of someone who hasn't washed after sports. Rachel was astonished not only at finding him there but at the fact that he was so extremely happy to see her. Filippo was about to cry. The night before, Leo and Rachel, coming back from dinner at the house of friends, hadn't realized that Filippo wasn't sleeping in the room with Semi. Now Filippo explained to her that, returning from a soccer game on the beach, he had lain down for a moment on that bed, Carmen's bed. He had fallen asleep. Waking up a few hours later in absolute, terrible pitch-darkness.

“But, sweetheart, you couldn't go into the bedroom with your brother?”

“I thought I had gone blind.”

“What do you mean, blind? Why blind?”

“Because it was all dark. I kept my eyes open all night to see if there was any light. But no.”

“The shutters are closed. We're in the middle of the lagoon. It's normal that night is darker than in Rome. But couldn't you turn on the light?”

“Yes, I thought of that. I kept my hand on the switch all night.”

“And why didn't you push it?”

“Because if the light didn't go on, then I really was blind.”

“But look at you, my little silly.”

Again the image of his son courting the light switch for an entire night, unable to make up his mind to push it, out of fear that he had gone blind, produced in Leo a feeling less cheerful than the one roused in his wife. Here was another demonstration of his fear and his inability to react. Poor Filippo, it must have been a real nightmare to think for all that time that he was blind. Why hadn't he called them? Why hadn't he shouted to summon them? Simple—because their arrival could have confirmed his blindness, just like pushing the light switch. Better to wait in anguish for the arrival of dawn! All that fear, what did it mean? What value did it have? What obstacles would it lead to? And, above all, was this the message that he and Rachel had given their son? The subliminal message that said, My boy, you are a defective child. A child who is coming apart, destined to fall ill and break into pieces.

“But do you know, sweetheart, how difficult it is to become blind?” Leo had explained later. “Do you know why many people, even if they want to, don't kill themselves?”

“What?”

“Because, in spite of what you think, dying is difficult. Getting sick is difficult. Our body is a structure that is marvelously designed to resist and adapt. Above all at your age.”

And, after uttering these sensible words, Leo wondered if they were appropriate for a child of eight.

It also occurred to Leo to wonder what it could mean for a child like that to have a younger brother who seemed his exact opposite. Who had learned to speak precociously, who slept profoundly and quietly, who wrote and read effortlessly, whose preferred activity seemed to be to excel in school, in sports, and in pleasing others. What did it mean for such a complicated older brother to have a younger brother who enjoyed the birthday parties organized for him by his parents? A lighthearted child, whom life had spared the torture of speech therapists, psychologists, neurologists? Semi was the child everyone would like to have: cheerful, easygoing, funny. Maybe less handsome than Filippo: his looks were marred by a slight distortion of his features. But those imperceptible imperfections were what made him, if possible, even more likable.

It would be natural for them to hate each other. It would be natural for them to fight. When Semi was born someone always kept an eye on him. Rachel was afraid that Filippo, who had already shown signs of strangeness, might be violent toward his brother. Everything conspired to make the two competitive and envious.

Not at all. They were the closest, most solidly allied brothers that Leo had ever seen (and he knew something about children). In the morning they went to school together. In the afternoon they came home together. The older had infected the younger with his love for comic books, while the younger had introduced the older to collecting soccer jerseys. Over the years (and every year a little more) the two had elaborated a coded language all their own, which excluded others, it's true, but also made their fraternal solidarity something mystical, enigmatic.

And by now one could not be without the other. There was something unhealthy that made Leo uneasy but that Rachel was able to reduce to a reasonable and modest dimension. In the end life would separate them, making them autonomous, in a spirit of emancipation no less inevitable (and in a certain sense no less sad) than that which would one day drive both Filippo and Samuel to leave their parents. And to form, if fate offered them the chance, new nuclear families totally independent of the original one. Isn't this the great tragedy of life?

 

Some two years before finding himself at yet another moral crossroads—to emerge from his cave and go to the aid of his son who was writhing on the grass with a broken ankle or stand frozen at the window?—Leo had asked Rachel, along with the boys, to come with him to an oncology conference that was to be held in London in early December. His speech was scheduled for the Thursday evening, he had explained to Rachel, to lure her. Which meant that they would have a long weekend to enjoy themselves in a city where he—he loved to boast—knew “every puddle.” Like all bourgeois families, the Pontecorvos were devoutly Anglophile. Like all bourgeois families (except English ones, I suppose) the Pontecorvos had a ridiculously conventional idea of the British world: rough as tweed, tough as Dunhill tobacco, soft as the whiskers of an admiral of the Royal Navy, and elegant as an aphorism of George Bernard Shaw . . .

For this reason Leo was particularly happy about his now ten-year friendship with Professor Alfred Hathaway, a smooth-spoken, genial oncologist who worked in a large hospital complex in the western part London. Every year Alfred organized, on behalf of the Royal Holloway University, a conference at which Leo always played the role of protagonist. Leo considered his colleague, Professor Hathaway, a kind of fellow-soldier in the great civil war that in those years pediatric oncology was waging to set up common strategies and protocols.

That year, with Christmas approaching, well . . . wouldn't it be magnificent to go with the boys? They could do the stupid things that tourists like, and the fashionable ones of frequent visitors. They would go shopping and eat strange, fatty things.

Everything was set when Rachel, because of a sudden flu, defaulted.

“Now what?”

“Now here I am in my funeral shroud.”

“Come on, don't be stupid, what shall we do?”

“My plan for the weekend is to stay in bed, envying to death all the scones you'll be eating in spite of me!”

“How can I manage without you? Thursday I'm at the conference all day. At night I'll have to go to dinner with Alfred and the other participants. I can't take the boys with me. And then it would be so wonderful if you were there, too.”

“You always complain that you don't see them enough. That you can never be together. That they're growing up before your eyes . . . Here, you have your chance. And it wouldn't be bad for me to have a few days without them around. And they're so eager to go. Samuel is all excited, I don't know which pair of pants or shoes I heard him babbling about the other day on the telephone. Filippo is happy because he'll be able to buy
Secret Love
or whatever the heck it's called.”

It was typical of Rachel to mangle the names of books, films, comics. This habit played an important role in an iconoclastic strategy that was typical of Roman dialect and opposed by the philological rigor of her husband, who knew very little Roman. In the specific case the comic book that Rachel alluded to, and that Filippo had tormented her with in recent days, was
Secret Wars
, by Jim Shooter, a publishing event from Marvel. It had come out that year in England and the United States and fabulous tales were told about it (the Italian edition wouldn't appear until long after Leo's departure from this world).

“After all,” Rachel resumed, “for several summers already we've sent them out on their own! Of course they can stay for one day in a comfortable London hotel and take a nice walk around the neighborhood. Don't worry.”

“Sweetheart, you don't know how sorry I am that you . . . ” Leo had commented complainingly.

 

A few weeks before this conversation took place, Leo and Rachel, discussing the trip, had come to the subject of the airplane tickets. Filippo had flown once, with his father, on the short leg from Rome to Milan. Samuel had never flown: another reason for excitement.

Leo's ticket, bought by the conference, was in business class: as Alitalia, following other airline companies, now designated what at one time had been called, in a much more classist way, first class. But, apart from the designation, things were not so changed: green seats that were a little larger than those in economy class, better service and meals, prettier hostesses, and a price at least four times as high. Leo would have liked to take the whole family with him in business class. And Rachel naturally was opposed, indignant.

“It seems unnecessary.”

“But really, doesn't it seem ridiculous to fly in different classes? You want us to play the great lord and his servants?”

“I don't want my sons, getting on an airplane for the first time, to do it like snobs. It seems revolting. Unseemly. Impolite.”

“What nonsense! The same old story. Why do you never surprise me?”

“I could say the same to you.”

“But for once let's do something all together. After all it's the
first
time Semi's been on an airplane. I'd like to share the experience with him.”

“You can always do that.”

“Yes, but after takeoff.”

“Never mind. It means that your son will take off without you and will eat with plastic utensils.”

“But takeoff is the moment most . . . ”

He wasn't allowed to say “most” what.

“I'm not going to talk about it. If you buy first-class tickets you'll have to go to London without me.”

“It's not first, it's business.”

“Whatever it's called.”

“All right. It means that I'll ask the secretary for the conference to get me an economy class ticket . . . ”

“No, really, what does that have to do with it? They're paying for you. You're going for work. You have to arrive fresh and rested. You deserve some extra comfort. It's another matter. But to spend all that money for two and a half hours of flight seems to me contrary to every . . . ”

Rachel was unable say to “every” what. Notion of logic? Morality? Sense of appropriateness? We'll never know.

One thing was certain: while Rachel had had the best of it on the question of tickets, and thus no longer had any reason not to go, it was the flu, in the end, that decided for her.

So Leo found himself at the airport, standing in line to check in, with his sons a little sulky because of their mother's absence and this problem of the airplane seats to resolve.

“If you promise me not to tell Mamma we'll make a last attempt.”

“Signor Pontecorvo,” the woman at the check-in counter said, “there is only one seat free in business class.”

“So?”

“So I can only do the upgrade for one of your sons. Otherwise . . . ”

Leo looked at the boys. Let them decide. Filippo, with a gesture habitual to him, had shrugged his shoulders as if to say: let him go, what do I care . . . While the face of Semi, who was so crazy about luxury, had lit up.

The only thing that Filippo asked for was a window seat. It wasn't hard to satisfy him. And now there he was, over his ears the headphones of a Sony walkman—a gadget obsolete today but avant-garde in those days, which Leo had bought some time ago in Hong Kong—his forehead resting on the windowpane, his gaze kept by only a sliver of wing from being lost in the immensity.

Semi, twenty seats forward, had no such contemplative attitude. Like a real parvenu, Leo thought fondly, he did not refuse a single option made available by Alitalia to VIP customers. Beginning with the glass of champagne offered by a pretty young hostess, which Semi accepted with a slight, polite nod.

Leo, winking at the girl in uniform and taking the glass from his son's hands, had said, “Champagne isn't strong enough for him, give him some Scotch. On the rocks, of course.” And so the hostess, taking the hint, had brought a glass of Fanta, with three ice cubes.

Then Semi had taken such pleasure in the takeoff, his body contracting in a spasm of excitement and fear just at the heroic instant when the wheels left the runway. The December morning sky had a pitiless clarity. Leo, resting his chin on the shoulder of his son, whose face was turned to the west, had watched the line between sea and land sharpen. The fantastic patchwork created by yellow, beige, green, brown squares gave the earth a kind of pointillist shimmer. The slender white stripes of two boats fearlessly entering the open sea made him think of two wriggling spermatozoa in search of an opportunity. At that point Leo returned to his work. He took his notes out of his briefcase. He needed to concentrate.