Persecution (9781609458744) (8 page)

Anything could be said of Leo Pontecorvo except that he was a demagogue. He had a way with students, but stayed within the so-called academic formalities. He deplored the promiscuity between teachers and students so disastrously encouraged by the revolution of '68. But, similarly, he found any magisterial excess anachronistic. If he had to question a girl student he called her “Miss.” With the boys, instead, he used the ironically paternalistic expression “dear boy.”

As far as the students' behavior during class, he was inflexible. For decades (even in the rebellious seventies) he had devoted the first class to dictating the list of things that were not tolerated. They were not allowed to arrive late. Not allowed to leave early. Not allowed to chew gum. Not allowed to have a snack. Not allowed to interrupt the lecture with questions and comments. Not allowed to address the professor with colloquial locutions like “Hi.” Not allowed to ask questions about the exams outside office hours. And so on . . . In exchange he undertook to be punctual, rigorous, sparkling.

There was nothing boring in Professor Pontecorvo's classes. Over the years he had learned the art of paring down technicalities and of stimulating the students' attention with cute anecdotes about hypochondriac mothers or tender stories about a sick child who, with tenacity and a fighting spirit, had given everyone a run for their money, starting with the doctor in charge.

That afternoon, in class, Professor Pontecorvo had been skillful enough to hide his distress. As he was driving to the university, in fact, the secretary of the clinic had reached him on the car phone with a rather unpleasant communication: a few minutes earlier the financial police had barged into the office with a warrant. Leo had answered her almost rudely, “Not now, Daniela! I'm on the way to class.”

“But, Professor . . . ”

“I told you I'm on the way to class. We'll talk afterward.”

Imagine his apprehension as he crossed the threshold of the classroom. Imagine how he must have felt while he took from his soft leather briefcase the pad with his notes. And—to put off for an instant the moment when he would have to begin the class—he poured some water in the glass and began to sip it nervously. To his great surprise, when he began to speak his voice did not betray either impatience or uncertainty. Smooth as silk. No one could have guessed his nervous condition. Or imagine that only a quarter of an hour earlier that fascinating teacher had been informed that the tax officials were about to give him the third degree.

A weekend at the beach with Rachel and the boys (the first of the season) had given the professor's face an outdoor color. Which, besides, seemed to go splendidly with the tan cotton suit, the blue button-down shirt, the regimental tie, and the rich leather Alden moccasins acquired in the tiny shop on Madison Avenue.

In other words, Professor Pontecorvo was at the height of efficiency and charm. He had even given some signs of exuberance in explaining how an excessive and sudden rise in the levels of alkaline phosphatase in the blood test of a child of eight or nine can already signal a diagnosis of rickets or some other bone deficiency.

Until he saw a student, a kid with an Afro and garish, to say the least, glasses, annoying a girl. The two were laughing in the third row. For a second the idea crossed his mind that they were laughing at him. For a second he was tempted by the idea of not intervening.

Nothing to be done: he lost patience.

“Would you like to share with us your private joke or would you prefer to take it outside?”

“I'm sorry . . . professor . . . it's my fault. I asked her a question.”

“It was of vital importance?”

“Well, I asked if she had a pencil and paper.”

“Ah, so you are telling us that you came to class without a pencil and without paper.”

“It's that . . . ”

“What is this for you, an outing in the country? Do you take this class for an amusement park? To me it seems a university classroom. And, as you do not seem to have realized, a class is in session.”

Leo could have stopped there. He could have considered himself satisfied. But something drove him to keep going. To play the role, so unsuited to him, of the petulant professor.

“Don't you think that a university classroom is a place where paper and pencil should be at home? Or perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps you have a completely different perception of this place. Maybe you're right? What do you others say? Maybe your colleague is right? Maybe this is a campground where we pitch our tents and tell jokes?”

It was the first time the students had seen Professor Pon­tecorvo indulge in that type of bitter, pedantic remark. Yes, they all knew that he insisted on certain things. But his reproaches always possessed the gift of lightness. Like the time he had reprimanded a girl who was chewing on something in front of him: “Are you full now? Are you refreshed? May I offer you something else? Coffee? A
digestif
? A cigar? A nap?” And they had all laughed (including the professor). Because Professor Pontecorvo's scoldings never crossed the line into humiliation and insult.

This time, however, he seemed eager to make trouble for that kid. His words were sharp and his voice was dripping with hostility. As if that terrible hair and the ridiculous glasses had aggravated his already strained susceptibility.

“So, will you answer me? How can you come to class without paper and pencil? What sort of behavior is that?”

And then Leo had said it. He couldn't contain himself. He had let slip the type of comment you should never let slip. Because it can always be turned against you. He waited a few seconds and then in a peremptory tone had said to the boy, “Aren't you ashamed of yourself?”

“And you, professor, aren't you ashamed of the billions of lire in taxpayer money you've stolen?”

This was the phrase the incessant memory of which had kept Leo awake for three straight nights. This was the epilogue of the incident that Leo had not had the courage to tell Rachel. No, he had said nothing to her, but he hadn't stopped thinking about it for a second. That little hippie bastard had put it out on the carpet in front of everyone. He had done in the classroom (or rather in the enchanted kingdom where for twenty years Leo had exercised his temporal power with great irony) what everyone would soon do in public: he had judged him summarily and, just as summarily, condemned him. That was why in the following days Leo could not help reviewing all the answers he could have given that provocateur, and hadn't.

Contrary to what usually happens when we think back over a missed chance to reply adequately to a provocation, to come up with a remark equal to the outrage that has been inflicted on us, in the end Leo was convinced that the behavior he had demonstrated under the circumstances was the best possible. He had been silent. He had pretended not to hear and not to be pained. He had pretended that his academic authority had not been forever crushed. He had taken up the thread of the subject where he had left off. Blood tests and all the rest . . .

What else could he have done?

 

But let's get back to Rachel and fear.

Rachel looked at her husband and spontaneously compared him to her father: Cesare Spizzichino would never have behaved like that. My father would have grabbed the bull by the horns. He would have been furious, my father. He would have made the lawyer's office quake with his yelling. My father would have stopped thinking about anything else and come up with a strategy to get himself out of the vortex.

But Leo in no way resembled the now deceased Cesare Spizzichino. And the irony is that Rachel had married him precisely because of that glaring dissimilarity. Although she loved her father very much, she was certain that there was only one thing more difficult than being Cesare Spizzichino, and that was to be related to him. An experience that meant you lived in a constant state of anxiety that an accident was about to happen. In fact that was how her father lived: waiting for (or invoking?) the blow that would crush him. There was nothing outside that he did not read as a promise of misfortune. The entire universe was scattered with evil portents. His stinginess, for example, derived from the fact that he was waiting for the Great Crisis (as he called it) that would change the face of the known world. In the same spirit in which certain messianic ecologists await the apocalypse that will annihilate the planet.

Was it possible that Rachel realized only now—observing the meekness with which Leo confronted the first true adversities of his existence of milk and honey—that all the fear her father had endured during the dangerous course of his life, and which he had chosen to confront boldly, was precisely what had allowed him to face with fury and strength the great sorrows that existence had exposed him to?

When Stella, his firstborn, Rachel's older sister, died in a grotesque accident (a bed, a blanket, and a murderous cigarette), Cesare Spizzichino had proved what sort of man he was. Before the burned body of his daughter he had cried like a slaughtered pig. He no longer slept. He never recovered emotionally. But, apart from those completely understandable reactions, as soon as the period of mourning ended he seized the reins of his life again, to watch over his surviving daughter with all his power. Yes, he had done it, even though Stella's death had provided him with the retrospectively incontrovertible proof that his fear was fully founded. And yet, just because he had spent his whole life studying the best way to absorb it, he had been able to react with courage and determination.

Fear produces contradictory behaviors: it can lead to an excessive reaction but also to an inadequate reaction. Rachel was discovering a very different way of being frightened. Her father used fear to protest; her husband, evidently, let it overpower him.

If only Leo hadn't hidden from himself that he was afraid . . . well, certainly now he would be reacting more forcefully and with a greater sense of responsibility. And instead there he was, busy denying to others and himself that he was terrified, and at the same time at the mercy of that terror. It was terror that drove him to surround himself with people he didn't need. He didn't want to be alone, like children who beg their mother to stay next to them at night while they sleep. Or like terminally ill people who somehow find the strength to get up and meet friends in a restaurant, convinced that there, in that convivial setting, death will not have the impudence to show up.

And Rachel, who saw all this, wished only to defend Leo both from the irresponsibility to which optimism had led him and from the grip of the fear that was paralyzing him.

 

And that's why the idea of that evening with the Albertazzis made her shudder and infuriated her. That's why Rachel was so worried. For weeks she had wanted to be alone with Leo, when he came home from the hospital or the university: to talk to him frankly, far from the indiscreet and judgmental gaze of any friend.

With the Albertazzis around Rachel knew that it would be up to her, not Leo, to parry the thrusts of Rita, that woman whose only interest in life had always been to demonstrate to herself and the world how pure she was and how everyone else was not.

“What do you bet that tonight that hyena Rita will not miss an opportunity to . . . ” Rachel had shouted sarcastically after realizing that the dinner with Flavio and Rita was inevitable, and giving in yet again to her husband's wishes.

“I'll bet what you like.”

On that bet the first round had ended. The second began the moment Flavio and Rita had left, after the usual canasta game of women-against-men, in which the men got the worst of it and they all (with the exception of Rachel the abstemious) tucked into the whiskey a little too much. And now the match between Leo and Rachel was set to establish which of them had won the bet.

Appearances solemnly pointed to Leo: he was the winner. No explicit allusion to his legal difficulties had been made either by Flavio or by the much more fearsome Rita. The impression was that the placid and affectionate Flavio had, for once at least, instilled in his wife a precautionary lesson, enjoining her to abstain from comments of any type. He must have told her to put aside ideas, indignation, and intolerance, not to mention her incorrigible passion for gossip, and appear understanding toward two dear friends who were going through a difficult period.

And she had followed the instructions.

At first there had been some tension. Above all in the way that Flavio had tried to avoid the type of question with which the two old friends generally started off. This time he had been careful not to begin with the classic “And so, professor, what news of the enemy?” “Enemy” was a generic word that for Flavio indicated any type of duty: work, university colleagues, the administration of Santa Cristina, the progress in school of Filippo and Samuel . . . in other words, everyday life. Maybe he was afraid that such a question might be taken the wrong way by a friend in trouble. It was obvious that Leo had problems at work. Pretending to ignore them was no less awkward than to take them for granted. So that Flavio for once was confined to answering the questions about his work that came from Leo. But he had done it with greater verbosity than usual.

Thank heaven at that moment, delivered direct from the kitchen, a silver tray full of hot tomato-and-mozzarella crostini, sprinkled with pepper and basil, had materialized in the living room, and Rita had fallen on it. Rita was one of those big eaters who never get fat and who, when you ask them how such a miracle is possible, give you an oracular answer like “It has to do with metabolism.” Someone more malicious might have hypothesized that her entire body was a lethal waste-disposal factory. All the fire she had in her body, all the resentment, all the anxiety . . . This was devouring her from the inside.

On the other hand Rita that evening seemed calmer than her husband, and in general more tranquil than usual. Rachel had been silent, no more or less than she usually was.