Persecution (9781609458744) (45 page)

Leo was wrong. The optimist Leo had committed the sin of pessimism. After exhaustive treatment, afer an extraordinarily conservative surgery performed by Professor Ricciardi, Luchino had emerged from the nightmare. Of course, he limped slightly, and was condemned to use a cane for the rest of his life—which had forced him to forget the idea of being a hundred-meter specialist—but anyway alive and kicking, recovered.

Luchino since then had not ceased to call every twenty-eighth of August: that was the day he had been released from Professor Pontecorvo's unit.

Not that Leo remembered it. Luchino took care of remembering it. He wished to show his Savior (as he liked to call him) how eternal his gratitude was and how happy he was to still be here. Among us. Ah, and, by the way, he wanted the Savior to know that since then his life had been wonderful. That he had learned to enjoy even the most insignificant moment. That he would so much like him to meet his two children. Also because in a certain sense those children were also yours. How his? Whose? Yours, professor. Yours, the Savior's. Luchino was bringing up the two kids in the cult of the Savior. “You know what they call you, professor? Uncle Savior. With respect, of course. With the greatest respect. Do you mind if they call you Uncle Savior?”

That obscene display of sentimentality, seasoned with revolting banalities, had been renewed every August 28th, at more or less eight-thirty in the morning, for almost fifteen years now, and, besides producing in Leo an annoyance that bordered on repugnance, put to an increasingly harder test his patience and the foundations on which rested the edifice of the impeccable upbringing he had had. Such that his treatment of Luchino—a cold compound of impatience and aversion—at every new recurrence became testier. But his rudeness, far from discouraging Luchino, seemed to have the effect of making him more irksome and insistent. Every year the same old story. Every year the same invitation repeated in almost the same words:

“Why don't you come see us, Professor? With your missus, of course. At our house. In the country. A small house. Very small. Nothing much. Nothing luxurious. But a happy house, full of honest folk. It's cool here, not like in the city, where you're still dying of heat. We have good wine, the real thing. My wife is an extraordinary cook. And she would so much like to meet you. Not to speak of my children. For my children, professor, you are God.”

Leo, rather awkward in his refusals, always had trouble declining, inventing clumsy excuses. Unable to conceal the irritation that the mellifluous voice of Luchino provoked in him. It's that he was so antipathetic. His collection of pedestrian clichés and his bucolic little family were intolerable. The affectation of modesty. The rhetoric about simple things. The country culture. Holy God, Leo would have liked to shout. He hung up the phone every time breathless with anger. And every time he had to absorb Rachel's mockery, as she, naturally, had taken Luchino under her protective wing.

“You made it! You managed to say no yet again. What did you think up this time?”

“Forget it. This year he was more insistent than usual, he is refining his techniques of persuasion. He must have taken classes in rhetoric. Very likely by correspondence course.”

“Yes, certainly, by correspondence course. Because he can't afford regular studies. Because he can't go and study at the Sorbonne, like our professor.”

“What do you mean by that? I didn't study at the Sorbonne.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. It's your weak point. Anything that even seems pathetic disgusts you. You with your grand democratic airs, you fill your mouth with words like ‘tolerance,' ‘liberalism,' but you never stop being the same old snob. You're the son of your mother. A class snob. The only difference is that she at least didn't give a damn about hiding it.”

“You're wrong. You're being unfair. I don't feel any perfunctory hatred, any class hatred toward anyone, least of all that slimy worm.”

“Slimy worm? And that's not class prejudice?”

“No, it's not class prejudice. It's a judgment based on the merits, on the comparative study of at least a dozen conversations with that man. He's an impossible man. Not to mention his parents.”

Luchino's parents, that is. Worthy of him: a concentrate of rudeness and invasiveness. Leo certainly hadn't forgotten their “little flowers for Padre Pio.” How could he? All they did was talk about them.

“Just think,” Luchino's mother had said to him once, “since our son has been sick my husband hasn't drunk a drop of wine. Not even at dinner. A little flower for Padre Pio.”

How could all this not disgust our diehard scientist? Hardly class prejudice. Leo detested that type of person. No less than he detested saints and saintly offerings. Leo would have bet his entire fortune on the fact that Luchino's parents were anti-Semitic. They had all the requirements. That obsessive recourse to religion. The obscene devotion to certain solid superstitions. Such an opportunistic religious fervor. Was this really their idea of God? Is this really how they wished to bargain with him? By not drinking wine? Lord of Heaven, I swear to you, I'll give up my glass and in exchange you'll be merciful. Is that what they thought? If Leo had been God he would have happily responded, “I don't give a damn about your alcohol. Kill yourself with alcohol. Why should it matter to me?”

Unfortunately, God wasn't the only beneficiary of the offerings of Luchino's parents. There were also gifts from nature that they brought every day to the doctor of their only son to ingratiate themselves: sausages, milk and cheese, mushrooms, eggs, bottles of cheap wine. They had transformed his unit into a market, by God. Once, although politely, he had reproached them. This is not how to behave in a hospital. It makes no sense to show up in a place like this with so many provisions! For a while Leo had the illusion that they had assimilated his little lesson. At least until he began to receive all those good things at home. How the hell had they gotten his address? How could they have the nerve?

In recent years Rachel had intercepted those phone calls. It was characteristic of her to relieve Leo from the more irritating responsibilities. At the beginning of every year, when she did her so-called “change of datebook” (an important rite for her), one of the first appointments she entered was the one for Luchino and the momentous twenty-eighth of August. A pointless scruple: there was no need to consult the date book to know that when, at eight-thirty in the morning on the fateful day, she answered the telephone, on the line was Luchino. And who else if not? Rachel treated him with much more patience and politeness than her husband had ever managed. She let Luchino talk, vent all his enthusiasm in celebrating Leo's greatness. Then Rachel answered a few specific questions about the life of the Savior. And finally she asked Luchino how his children were—the boy and the girl—of whom naturally she remembered the names and ages. And, after declining the
nth
invitation on her husband's account (unfortunately he was away at a conference abroad or called to an emergency at the hospital), she got rid of the irritant with great style.

 

“Luchino? How did you get this number?” The only question Leo managed to articulate: the clumsy, convoluted tongue and palate of a Frenchman who has to express himself in English.

“Your missus gave it to me.” Yes, Luchino was the type who used antiquated expressions like “your missus.” But certainly it wasn't that obsolete lexical choice that punched Leo in the chest, so that it was all he could do not to retch.

“Yes, professor, two minutes ago.”

Leo thus had proof that Rachel had returned. And that the aroma of coffee that had triggered his grandiose metaphysical delirium wasn't (that, at least) a dream.

“Two minutes ago,” Luchino had said. Which meant that at least until two minutes earlier (what had happened after that Leo couldn't know) he had been present in Rachel's mind. Until a few minutes ago his wife had still had knowledge of the fact that Leo not only existed somewhere in the universe but that he was on the floor below, reachable by a single flight of stairs or by a phone call on his private line. A few moments earlier Rachel had spoken of him to Luchino. And probably she did it naturally. As if nothing had changed since the last time he spoke to Luchino. Then Leo tried to imagine his wife, enveloped in the casual summer bathrobe, a gift from him, just coming out of the shower, the taste of coffee still in her mouth, answering the telephone that stood on the night table in her room (in their room) on the floor above. Leo did his best to imagine that banal scene. But he couldn't. It's incredible how sometimes certain things that are completely natural can seem extraordinarily inconceivable.

Leo's incredulity wasn't much different from that of an adolescent who, while he's hanging around in the long corridor outside the classrooms during recess, is suddenly greeted by the school beauty, who, besides smiling at him, even has the sublime courtesy to remember his Christian name. That adolescent, at the height of joy and bewilderment, can't stop repeating: so she knows who I am, so she knows I exist, so I'm not a phantom to her.

That is, the same sort of astonished observations with which Leo was now wrestling.

“You don't know, Professor, what a great pleasure it is to talk to you. It's a long time since we've talked. Every year you're busy. Luckily this time I've reached you. Luckily you're back from the holidays, you're not at a conference, you haven't gone out, you weren't kept at the hospital because of an emergency . . . ”

Leo wondered if by any chance Luchino was speaking with sarcasm. In which case it would have been a regrettable treachery. If Luchino knew what Leo was going through, what he had gone through in the past year (and how could he not know? who out there didn't know?), then that sarcasm was indeed unbearable: unctuous, gratuitous spite.

“This time you won't escape me, Professor.”

“No, this time I'm here, Luchino.” Leo's voice expressed a heavy resignation.

“This time in particular I'm pleased that you answered. And do you know why I'm pleased?”

“No, Luchino, I don't.”

“Because I have a proposal for you. Something I want to ask you. Something for which if you, Professor, would honor us with your presence it would be a marvelous gift.”

“What are you talking about, Luchino?”

“A magnificent idea, Professor. And also extremely original.”

“Which is?”

“A prize, Professor.”

“A prize?”

“Yes, a prize.”

“What sort of prize?”

“A prize for arts and sciences.”

“A prize for arts and sciences?”

“Yes, a prize for arts and sciences, Professor. And you know what we would like to call it?”

“When you use the plural, Luchino, to whom do you refer?”

“To me, to my family, to the citizens of the small town where I live. We still have to talk to the mayor, but it's a formality. We're sure he'll be enthusiastic . . . In short, Professor, do you know who we would like to name this prize for?”

“No, Luchino, I don't have the slightest idea. But I can guess. Garibaldi? Padre Pio? Mother Teresa of Calcutta?”

“No, Professor. But for a human being who is in no way inferior to the three you have just named.”

“And that is?”

“You, Professor. ‘Leo Pontecorvo Prize for Arts and Sciences.'”

This was the infamous absolute limit. Leo had only to determine if Luchino was touching the height of spiteful subtlety or, more banally, the apex of obtuseness. The fate of this phone call seemed to be playing with that dichotomy, and to Leo appeared no less surreal than anything else that had happened to him in recent times. For a moment he even wondered if Luchino's phone call was not the clever product of his own paranoia. The umpteenth trick played on him by the presence, which at that point would have crossed the line. For a second he saw himself from the outside: talking on the telephone with a nonexistent being created by an increasingly fervent persecutory imagination. Maybe this was the last act. The last act of persecution. Because after the tragic there is always the grotesque. After drama, there remains only parody.

“You must understand, professor, that at this point your presence is indispensable. This time you can't say no, you can't retreat. I've thought up a good way to invite you here. We've had the idea of putting up a committee of jurors, and we'd like you to preside over it. A respectable committee made up of judges, journalists, but also men of science like you, Professor. Not to mention that any advice you wish to give us would be welcome. Any.”

Yes, perhaps it was all a joke. A committee made up of judges, journalists, and scientists? That couldn't be anything but a joke, a joke designed by a man who had never given evidence of that sort of subtlety.

Or no. Or it wasn't a joke. Maybe Luchino didn't watch the news on TV. Maybe he hadn't watched it during the time when it was running wild with the Pontecorvo affair. And maybe Luchino didn't even read the newspapers. Why should he? He already knew everything he needed to know. Why find out what was happening in the world if the only piece of the universe that interested him was right there, within the radius of his gaze? No, maybe Luchino knew nothing. And maybe his fellow-citizens also knew nothing. It could be that one of them, months ago, had heard something about some pervert doctor, but, in the meantime, he had forgotten the name of the protagonist of the ugly story. So that when Luchino, such an enterprising neighbor, an enthusiast, a true volcano of ideas, had decided to give luster to their lousy little town with a fine prize, and had thought of naming it for the doctor he talked about continuously, his savior, certainly it didn't even cross that fellow's mind that the identity of the eminent professor idolized by Luchino could be the same as that of the pervert doctor.