Persecution (9781609458744) (46 page)

In short, was he making fun of him or was he speaking seriously? Leo didn't know what to hope. One thing was sure: whether Luchino knew and was making fun of him, or didn't know and was speaking seriously, there was nothing to be happy about. Luchino was depriving Leo of the satisfaction of considering his own story interesting. A crazy story, certainly, but at least emblematic, paradigmatic. The kind of story everyone knew about and no one would forget, a new Dreyfus affair, a new Tortora case. And instead Leo's story, or rather the absurd succession of events that had transformed his life into an unlivable nightmare, was to be considered, at most, a lively slice of life that concerned an individual in whom no one, apart from the people involved, felt any interest.

A news item: that is, the most insignificant thing in the universe. One of those experiences that plenty of people encounter. There was nothing tragic in his story. Nothing epic in his suffering. That's why, if Luchino carried out his project very likely, no one would oppose it. Because Leo's civic unworthiness wasn't famous enough to provoke contempt in anyone. Holy Christ, even the thing on account of which he lived as a recluse, on account of which he had now been fasting for days, and which was now killing him had no importance.

There: the perpetuation of his earthly memory would be entrusted not, certainly, to the posthumous devotion of his offspring but to a flea-bitten prize named in memory of a Signor No One. This really was dramatic. Maybe the most dramatic of all the things that had happened to him. And Leo felt it with such a precise intensity that all he could do, after looking for a few seconds at his wrist and observing that it was as thin and fragile as that of a skeleton, was to hang up on Luchino. And let the telephone ring uninterruptedly for the next two hours, while the rumbling countermelody of an electrical storm—the prelude to a tempest that every living thing outside seemed to invoke—sounded its final useless rounds.

 

It was Telma who, some years later, recounted to me—in bits and pieces, and not, to tell the truth, without Filipino reticence—what had driven her, that morning at the end of August, to open the forbidden door to the cellar. To violate the kingdom of Professor Pontecorvo.

“It was the water,” she told me, “all that water.” Probably the result of the summer storm that—heralded all afternoon the day before by violent thunder and lightning—had, around eight in the evening, noisily broken the siege of at least two months of suffocating heat.

There was nothing to be surprised about, really. The drain in the cellar had always caused problems. Especially in November, when it was always raining, the water would sometimes overflow onto the cellar floor. Ever since the Pontecor­vos had lived there, ever since the house was built, that floor had been redone or repaired at least a dozen times.

And there, that was why Telma, opening the door of the kitchen that led to the cellar stairs, as she did almost every morning, and seeing all that food floating on a lake a couple of centimeters deep that had formed on the floor of the little hallway in front of the study door, was neither surprised nor particularly disturbed.

That also explains why, faithful to her domestic thoroughness, she had gone down with a bucket and a rag and cleaned up that disgusting mush.

But above all that explains why, after putting the rag back in the bucket and seeing more dirty water flowing sneakily in from under the door, she had finally asked herself why for several days she hadn't heard any noise coming from the secret room.

Telma told me that she was frightened, and she began to knock. First cautiously, then more and more vigorously. Finally she decided to embellish the dry, rhythmic pounding on the door with muted calls: “Sir . . . sir . . . ” Nothing. And then: “Professor . . . professor . . . ” Of course not: silence and a lake-like smell were all that came from inside.

She didn't feel she could try to enter. She didn't dare. If you think about it, there was nothing to prevent her. She hadn't received orders about it. In all that time no one had said to her, “Telma, you cannot go there”; the signora had never been that explicit about it. Even if that meant nothing, since Signora Rachel never told you to do things. She expected you to do them. That woman must possess a kind of telepathic power, or, so to speak, it was you who, to understand her, must have had it. Telepathy was the tool through which the signora was able to communicate to all the elements of the family (including Telma) what needed to be done and what didn't. And if there was an order that, since the summer before and through the course of the year, although it had never been given, appeared perfectly intelligible to everyone, it was that you weren't to go in there. The cellar was off-limits, enemy territory.

Telma liked to feel that she was one of the family. Although she hadn't worked for the Pontecorvos a very long time, and although she had replaced Carmen (the boys' famous nanny, whom, for some reason, no one ever mentioned), she had been welcomed to that house so naturally. And it wasn't something to take for granted, thought Telma, for a woman—a long way from girlhood—who had been catapulted into Italy without being able to utter a word of Italian and only a few in English; a woman of thirty-seven, not beautiful, too short, neurotically shy, born and brought up in a depressed town in the interior, a hundred kilometers from Manila, which owed its fame and its economy to the exorbitant density of chickens per square kilometer. A town where the women broke their backs in the farmyards and the men got drunk and smoked without stopping. The smell was terrible: the one that Telma had grown up with and so obediently got accustomed to.

How dreadful that smell was she had understood only by comparing it retrospectively with the intoxicating smell by which she was greeted on her arrival in Olgiata. A place that had the fragrance of paradise in every season of the year. In summer star jasmine, dust, chlorine, and newly cut grass. In the autumn, a damp aroma of moss and mushrooms was mixed with the crisp odor of dry leaves; in winter, the toasted odor of the blasting furnaces and lighted fireplaces took over. And in spring, well, in spring, it was hard to figure out but so easy to be saturated: jasmine, heliotrope, lavender . . . It was a lovely place to live, to wake in the morning and go to bed in the evening, even if it was far away from everything.

Especially from the square at the other end of the city where, every Sunday, before Mass, a good part of the Filipino population gathered. Poor woman, it took her almost an hour and a quarter, on three buses, to reach that place of meeting. On the other hand, in exchanging opinions with all those fellow-countrymen, companions in work and misfortune, Telma understood how much, all in all, she liked working for the Pontecorvos. It was in talking to her friends and colleagues that Telma understood how deeply fortunate she was.

Of course, the Pontecorvos had plenty of flaws. They were strange, demanding, and they were Jews. She had never even supposed that individuals existed in the world who didn't believe in Christ, who didn't celebrate Christmas or Easter (or at least not the right one). And it wasn't without surprise that every year, during the days of religious observance, Telma helped Rachel prepare the house in the proper manner and cook those special dishes, which were not always appetizing. And yet even that business, Judaism, wasn't a big problem in the Pontecorvo household. Telma had a friend who worked for a family where the wife, a fervent Jew, had forbidden her to hang a crucifix in her own room. Now, never, ever would Signora Rachel take the liberty of such arrogance.

The Pontecorvos were never rude, they never had hysterical crises, they never displayed any excess. They didn't accuse you unjustly of sins you hadn't committed. Which was a stroke of luck. There were crazy people around. Especially the bored ladies, they were really unpredictable. Telma had been told about certain enterprises carried out by those ladies and especially by their children. Scenes, bullying insults . . . But not the Pontecorvo boys. They were polite, almost affectionate. Signora Rachel, that orchestra conductor, had brought them up well. She wouldn't let the boys play ball in the hot hours of early afternoon when Telma went to lie down. She reproached them if they gave her an order brusquely and without adding “thank you” or “please.”

Lord, Signora Rachel. Telma adored that woman. At one time she had lent Telma money, a good sum, to send to the Philippines, because the roof of the house where her four good-for-nothing brothers lived had literally been ripped off by a typhoon. Not to mention the time when Jasmine, Telma's reckless young cousin, had been caught stealing from her boss's wallet. Well: not only had Rachel persuaded Jasmine's employer not to press charges, restoring to her, from her own pocket, the stolen money down to the last cent, but she had even let Jasmine move to the Pontecorvo house for a while.

No, Signora Rachel did not in any way resemble the other ladies who every so often visited the Pontecorvo house, or those Telma's friends and cousins worked for. Rachel was not a do-nothing, someone who woke up at ten in the morning with a headache and in a bad mood. When Telma got up she would find her already in the kitchen, sipping her coffee from a glass. She organized. She made a note of the things to do during the day. Rachel would say things like: “I think that today, too, I'll be wearing a taxi-driver's cap.” Sibylline phrases whose meaning Telma struggled to guess at. So that she confined herself to smiling, wary of responding or commenting. Finally she relieved the signora from the task of the moment: a plate she was washing, a glass she was drying, a coffeepot she was refilling. Telma replaced her and the signora let her.

The comment on the taxi-driver's cap perhaps alluded to Rachel's day, which would be devoted entirely to ferrying people around the city. She had to take her children to school, pick them up, she had to take them to swimming, to tennis, to the dentist, to the eye doctor; there was the shopping at the market, there was the insurance, the bank, the notary. There were the shoes to take to the shoemaker. She had to go visit the old aunt afflicted by senile dementia, who always took Rachel for a thief and covered her with frightful insults. But, above all, that long pilgrimage through the city was in the service of a husband who, when he came home from work in the evening, had to be surrounded with pleasures. For example, when the professor returned to Rome from a journey, Rachel instructed Telma to make broth and boiled meat, so that he would be refreshed. The professor, further, wanted the sheets and towels to be changed almost every day. The professor, who didn't seem at all a severe man, was quite obsessive about food. At night he wanted to eat well. And if by chance that day the dried meat or the goose salami wasn't flavorful enough, or the tomatoes weren't tasty enough, or if the pasta was burned . . . well, he wouldn't let you know.

That's why in the past year the life of the signora had seemed to Telma so uncentered. Something terrible had happened to that family. Something everyone talked about. Something that Telma preferred to postpone knowing, not picking up the provocations of her informed friends. Something that had revolutionized in an unpredictable way the entire running of the household. One day, the professor had gone and hidden in the cellar. And Telma hadn't understood if he had done it of his own volition, spontaneously, or if he had been forced to. She remembered the time when an epidemic of meningitis had broken out in her town and suddenly the old people and children had disappeared from the streets, all confined to their houses.

A couple of times the police had arrived and searched everything, and Telma had been very frightened. One morning, straightening up the signora's room, Telma realized that the professor's clothes had disappeared. And not only the clothes: every banal reference to his existence had vanished. What had happened? What had the professor done? Telma had trouble believing that that man, so handsome and so kind, who, for some reason, always addressed her in English, that man who dripped authority from all his pores, that man who had a way of life so simple and so elegant, had done something so terrible. Even though Telma was used to minding her own business, even though her Italian wasn't sophisticated enough to allow her to understand all the nuances of the conversations at the table between the mother and children, in spite of all this, by degrees, serving or clearing, she had understood that the professor had been banished not only from the life of his family but also from their conversation. And this had frightened her to death.

And that's why now, as the water continued to flow from under the door, Telma didn't know what to do. She was undecided whether to go in, to call the signora, or, as she had done at other times, ignore it. Not deal with it.

Finally she made up her mind. She went to look for someone. The living room had a desolately bare look. At the beginning of summer, every year, it was orphaned of the carpets and curtains that adorned it during the other seasons. It was only a few days until September. After the monstrous storm of the day before, so similar to the ones that raged in her country, the air was refreshed. There were no longer many mosquitoes. Soon the house would be invaded by flies, but for now it was free of insects. And not only of insects. There was no one.

Telma glanced into the garden. The kitchen. The dining room. Then she plucked up courage and went into the sleeping area of the house, where the signora's room was, and the children's, and the guest room. If not for the wind that had scattered pages of the newspaper everywhere, the signora's room would have had, as usual, a marmoreal neatness.

Not the same could be said of the adjacent room, belonging to Filippo and Samuel. Telma had opened the door of their room, after knocking for a long time. She was always afraid of finding them naked. When she finally made up her mind to open the door, she was assailed by the usual odor and the usual mess. Filippo and Semi had just returned from a study vacation in England. The signora that year hadn't gone to the sea, she had moved for a few weeks to the house of the old aunt to take care of her. In any case Signora Rachel had arranged it so that her sons wouldn't lose the habit of the study vacation. They had returned the day before, as usual thinner and overexcited. Their suitcases were there, on the floor, carelessly unpacked, full of dirty T-shirts, unmatched socks, shapeless sneakers. There were three wet towels and a bathrobe thrown on a chair. A pile of records presumably bought in England. The condition of the bathroom was no less disastrous. It almost seemed as if the boys had decided that it was better to have a bath outside the tub rather than in it.