Persecution (9781609458744)

by Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)

  “And if she does?”

  “I’ll make her shape up, God damn it . . . but it won’t happen. Flavio and Rita know me too well not to know that there’s no basis for any of the things I’ve been accused of.”

  “So that’s it . . . ”

  “That’s what?”

  “If you really think that, if you’re so sure you’re right—and I am, too, dearest, I swear—why do I have the impression that you aren’t doing everything necessary?”

  “NECESSARY FOR WHAT?”

  “No, listen, if you’re going to start shouting let’s end the discussion.”

  “O.K., I’m calm. I won’t raise my voice again. Tell me, explain: I haven’t done what’s necessary for what?”

  “You’re not taking this seriously, my love. It’s the same old story. If you’re in this situation it’s partly because you’ve had too much faith in others. And now it strikes me that you haven’t learned your lesson. That you continue to put too much trust in others. Which is admirable. It makes you a wonderful man. But it’s also dangerous and not practical. You put too much faith in your neighbor. Too much faith in truth. I’ve told you a thousand times. You’re the most optimistic man I know. Your kindness, your good faith are admirable . . . ”

  “And how do you think the honest man you’re describing, that type of good-hearted idiot, could have accomplished all he has accomplished in life?”

  “Leo, dearest, what does that have to do with it? I know you have no equal in your work. I understood it from the way you taught when I met you. Passion, intuition, expertise. You unfolded for us the mysteries of human physiology so magically. My friends were all in love with you. I still have a hard time believing that I was chosen by the young, incredibly handsome, unapproachable Professor Pontecorvo . . . And something tells me you chose me just because I was the one who had the least hope. But that doesn’t mean you’re just as good at managing everything else . . . I really get the impression that for some reason you are underestimating this situation. And that you’ve left me out of the whole business. Why don’t you let me in? Why don’t you let me help? What’s the matter this time? I’ve always taken care of you, full time, why this time no? Why did you keep me from going to the lawyer the other day? You don’t know how it pains me to be excluded. Not to know.”

  “Listen, whatever you may think, I’m neither stupid nor naïve nor irresponsible. The lawyer for Santa Cristina is an excellent lawyer. And he has reassured me in every way.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying! How can you not understand that your interests are in conflict with the hospital’s? And that if necessary they’ll not only get rid of you but do it so as to pin all the responsibility on you?”

  “You see how you are? Same thing. You get so angry at Rita. But now who’s being mean, now who’s nasty-minded and suspicious? And then what do you know about it? I have the entire hospital on my side. A stack of parents of former patients who have come forward to testify on my behalf. I have the president of the faculty who has publicly defended me, in more than one newspaper . . . not to mention the college of docents, and even the rector . . . It’s not my fault if all this keeps me calm. Or if it’s a moment when I want my friends around . . . ”

  Yes, that was him, her Leo, the least malicious man she had ever met. What a strange talent, to have so much faith in others! But was it only a talent? Or also an extremely grave defect? Something to guard against? Her husband’s magnanimity (some would have given it a different name, much more trivial). The disadvantage of not knowing what defeat is. Of not having lived as a loser. Exaggerated faith in the benevolence of destiny.

  Well, she had been brought up in terror. The reason she had so disliked Rita the first times she met her was that she seemed the extreme version of herself, transported, besides, into higher-class locales. All that distrust, all that circumspection, all that fear. They were things that Rachel knew. Things that had been inculcated from the cradle. To the point where at times she wondered if among the many reasons she loved her husband so intensely was the fact that he seemed a sort of delightful, bracing antidote to all that fear she had grown up in.

  It was as if her husband, who by profession joined battle daily with the irrational, perverse, and usually evil whims of the human body, when it came to grabbing the reins of his own life, gave in to a sort of philanthropic idealism. How was it possible? Had his work taught him nothing? Is there a harsher lesson than the one imparted by a ward where children fight against death? Dirty beds, vomit, blood, all that childish pain and adult despair . . . But evidently this had taught him nothing. Evidently this was not for him proof of anything. Evidently all this had not made him wiser or injected him with the cynicism that aided the majority of his colleagues.

  You would say that of the two of them it was he who loved to play the part of the plain man without God: always full of words that to Rachel were pompous and empty of meaning, words like “Laicism,” “enlightenment,” “agnosticism.” And yet, if you looked closely, he was the true religious one in the family. Of the two of them, only he truly believed in a kind of Higher Order, for the most part benign, capable of setting everything right.

  “Ultimately, in the end the Nazis lost. The Nazis always lose,” he pointed out to her every so often when she told him there were more anti-Semites around than he thought. (And Rachel couldn’t help wondering: Really? Did the Nazis lose? But how? Aren’t we the ones who lost?)

  And now, with respect to the horrible things that had been written about him and the crimes attributed to him, it was as if Leo were content with the certainty that he hadn’t committed them. Or at least not deliberately. In his view this was sufficient. Because in the end the truth would emerge without impediments.

  More and more often his wife wondered if this unconditional trust in the world had to do with a life that had functioned too well: a fairy tale of dreams realized and promises kept. Ultimately, if there’s something that’s always in danger it’s perfection.

  The Pontecorvos were the only Jews she knew who, while Hitler’s thugs and their stupid German shepherds were hunting Jews throughout Europe, stayed in Switzerland, in safety, in warmth, without dying of fear like all the others, like Rachel’s mother and father. Leo was three at the time. And from that lucky Swiss start in life things had continued to go well. A charmed childhood and adolescence, protected by an idolizing mother and consecrated by a dazzling path of studies that guaranteed him a marvelous career in the family profession, and carried him to a level until then never reached by any Pontecorvo. If you took the Pontecorvos as a sample, life—with its kind and painless passage from one generation to the next—seemed an inexorable ascent toward well-being and happiness.

  Was it this? This endless winning that had damaged him? Was it this effortless progress, this resemblance to Gladstone Gander, Donald Duck’s cousin, that had made him so weak in the face of adversity? Was it the idea, in essence so virtuous, that in life if you only do things well you’ll achieve the best that was now paralyzing him? Was this how her husband, after abolishing from his life the very idea of the unpredictable, reacted to the unimaginably malicious?

  On that subject, Rachel would always tell Filippo and Samuel a story that seemed to her emblematic of both Leo’s character and her own.

  On their honeymoon they had toured Scandinavia by car. Rachel recalled those days with emotion. She was just twenty-five, it was the first time she had set foot outside Italy. And that she was doing so with her twenty-nine-year-old husband, whom she was in love with, whom all the women noticed because of his height, his Mediterranean attractiveness, and a certain professorial absent-mindedness . . . well, suddenly that girl’s life resembled those stylish Cary Grant movies she was mad about. Finally, even for her, romance had arrived. Now it was her turn. There had been moments, during the honeymoon, when she had felt like Maria Callas, whose vicissitudes she never tired of following in the glossy women’s magazines. Leo was so at ease in his unconscious role of Ar
istotle Onassis—not as rich, of course, but a thousand times thinner—who, faithful to the megalomaniac exhibitionism of his family, had arranged the trip so that everything happened as in a fairy tale: from the dilapidated splendor of the hotels to the tickets for the Stockholm Opera, from the mini-cruise in the fjords to evening clothes that she had found waiting for her in the Second Empire bergère in the suite in the Grand Hotel in Oslo. How marvelous!

  And yet Rachel recalled that she hadn’t completely enjoyed the scene arranged for her by her husband. The idea that Leo had thrown away all that money on things that Rachel had been brought up to consider vain, if not in fact immoral, had spoiled the party for her. She was sure of it: somehow, in the end, all that wastefulness would be punished by a higher authority. And the prophecy had been fulfilled on the way back, when, arriving at the hotel in Monte Carlo, the newlyweds found themselves without a cent.

  In those days there were no credit cards, and to send money abroad took time and an endless series of precautions. Leo therefore decided to send a telegram with a request for help to his mother, who was vacationing in Castiglione della Pescaia at the house of her brother, the fatuous Uncle Enea.

  When Rachel, alarmed, exclaimed, “Does it really seem right to call your mother? Ask her, like that, all alone, to come and pay the bill? She doesn’t even have a license!,” Leo hadn’t shown the least sign of anxiety.

  “You don’t know Uncle Enea. He’ll offer to drive her. He would never miss a chance for a hand or two of chemin de fer.”

  Thus, returning to the hotel half an hour later with a copy of the telegram in hand, Leo had said to Rachel, “You see, there was nothing to worry about.” And she had looked at him as if he were mad. How was there nothing to worry about? A telegram, that was all he had. The copy of a telegram dictated by him, not a telegram in response. So to speak, a hope. The note in a bottle of the shipwrecked sailor. Who knows how many unexpected events might intervene between that sent telegram and the arrival of the saviors. They might not receive it. They might receive it late. They might have an accident on the journey to Monte Carlo. They might . . . But there was also something else, which Rachel, in the toned-down version of the story intended for her sons, was careful not to confess: it’s that she didn’t love the idea that it was Leo’s mother who was rescuing them—that woman who had opposed her from the start, without pretenses. Rachel felt she couldn’t bear her mother-in-law’s air of triumph, just as she couldn’t tolerate the blame that she would certainly express for her not having dutifully watched over the hedonistic impulses of her wastrel son.

  Just as Rachel was grappling with the thought of the imminent arrival of her mother-in-law, no less tormenting than her possible refusal, she had heard herself asked, “What do you say we order dinner in the room, since I don’t feel like going out?”

  “But if we don’t have any money . . . ”

  “Well, now, no, but the day after tomorrow yes. They won’t ask us to pay right away. What are you worried about?”

  “It’s just that . . . ”

  “It’s just what? Come on, I’ll have a shrimp cocktail, a glass of wine, and a wonderful crème brûlée, and you?”

  “Nothing, dearest, I’m not hungry . . . well, maybe I’ll have a café-au-lait . . . ” she had answered, clutching their few remaining coins.

  “Not even a brioche? Sure?”

  “A café-au-lait is fine, thanks.”

  To which she added, “I’m not hungry.”

  She told her sons she had said “I’m not hungry,” although she was. And after a few minutes there was her husband, in his white bathrobe with the hotel crest on the pocket, scarfing up shrimp in cocktail sauce, as he kept asking, “You’re sure you don’t want something? You haven’t had a bite since this morning.” And she, looking out the window at the famous lights of Monte Carlo (which she romantically associated with To Catch a Thief), and suffering sharp pangs of hunger, kept repeating, “Nothing, thanks, really, I don’t feel like eating.”

  That time Leo had been right. Rachel’s scruples turned out to be exaggerated. A couple of days later Uncle Enea and his disdainful sister arrived, loaded with money to spend. But that was not to say that things would always go like that. It was not to say that there would always be a genie in the lamp capable of putting everything back in order.

  This time, for example, the stakes were a thousand times higher. It wasn’t about settling a bill and making a bad impression on some snobbish concierge; it was about their life. And Filippo and Samuel’s. That is to say, the whole world! Until this moment such a calamity had never occurred. Which meant nothing. There exist privileged couples who spend decades in the most prudent and carefully calibrated well-being to arrive at old age unharmed. And for some time Rachel had hoped and believed that one day it could be said of them that they belonged to that exclusive club. That their path had been, as the saying goes, “clear” of obstacles.

  Things had turned out differently. Those accusations had an alarming specific weight in the life of a family so respectable, and Leo practiced a profession in which respectability is a decisive attribute. That’s why the whole business had to be treated with particular care. Well, maybe Leo was right: at least in the first instance everyone had been roused to take his side, to defend him. But how could he be so sure that things wouldn’t change? It was clear that the prosecutors working on his case wished to destroy him. Just as it was evident that Leo, like all people who are powerful but not too powerful, could not count on the benevolence of the press, much less of the people.

  Certainly if things should take an ugly turn, the intervention of some Uncle Enea (besides, he had been dead for several years) would not be enough to settle the bill. No, this time it was much more complex. A wretchedly dangerous business. Incredible as it might seem, there were employees of the state whose job consisted in demonstrating that Leo was a crook. People paid to haul him in to court. Bloodhounds who couldn’t wait to sink their teeth in his neck and never let go. Vampires whose success would consist in putting him down, after bleeding him dry, after incinerating the respectability built up with so much effort over the years—fucking nitpicking bureaucrats, eager to distort the truth to Leo’s detriment. Against those treacherous enemies optimism was certainly not a resource, if anything a hindrance.

  And if Rachel was wrong? If Leo’s problem wasn’t an excess of optimism but, rather, the opposite: an excess of pessimism? It certainly could be. She had often observed how behind certain of her husband’s blustering attitudes, behind the dazzling scrim of all that trust, lurking like a mole in the guts of a lush garden, was the much darker feeling that is called fear.

  Was that what explained everything? Fear? Her husband lived in fear. It could be that, like all people unused to difficulties, like all people spoiled from birth, Leo did not have at his disposal the tools necessary to exorcise fear. Because to do so he would have had to recognize it.

  Was it fear that had paralyzed him? Was it fear that prevented him from getting involved in his court case, day and night? Maybe so. A person less frightened would at that point be spending whole days with his nose buried in the documents that concerned him. And instead he did nothing but delay. Delegate. Yes, those were the two things that came easiest to him: putting off the moment when he would have to face a problem and, in the end, placing it carelessly in someone else’s hands. All that trust in a lawyer employed by a hospital that had every interest in shifting any responsibility onto a doctor and his team—a hospital that had already circulated several memos in which it stated that it felt itself “the injured party”—was true professional suicide.

  But it was also a way to delegate something that he was incapable of facing. Leo increasingly resembled the type of hypochondriac who torments himself endlessly with fantasies of the most disparate and improbable illnesses, and yet is not willing (through a kind of tremendous sloth) to free himself of the vices of smoking and drinking. And who, at the appearance of worrying symptoms, can�
��t find the courage to make an appointment with a specialist or submit to further tests. As if he preferred the anxiety of uncertainty to the despair of truth. That type of more or less imaginary sick person who prefers to live in ignorance.

  But of course. What Leo had been struggling with for weeks was a crisis of creeping terror. Rachel recognized the unmistakable signs: lack of appetite interrupted every so often by a fierce hunger. Insomnia suddenly vanquished by long Sunday naps. A tortured alternation of moods.

  It’s that her Leo was such a sensitive type, so easy to upset! A mere nothing was enough to hurl him into terror.

  Rachel recalled the day, a few months earlier, when a letter had arrived, forwarded to him by the editors of the Corriere della Sera, the newspaper in which Leo’s popular column, “Prevention Is the Best Medicine,” appeared. Breaking with his usual habit, Leo, in one of his recent pieces, had not entertained his readers with a description of specific pathologies, nor had he provided a trite catalogue of recommendations for their health. For once, impelled by one of his idealistic impulses, he had taken sides and denounced the Catholic curia’s “insidious boycott” of certain scientific institutions that had been engaged for many years in research into fundamental genetic questions. Leo had written (let’s be specific: with the cautiousness imposed by his social position and the mildness of his character) that “the Pope should perhaps show himself more indulgent toward fervent researchers who are working for the benefit, certainly not the detriment, of humanity.”

  The last phrase—the one calling on the Pope directly—had caused a reader to fly off the handle, and, driven by contempt, send Leo a letter (neglecting to inform him that he had sent an identical one to the editor of the Corriere), in which, in a few very concise lines, he had spewed out all the bile in his body.

  Below I cite the conclusion of the letter:

  How can Professor Pontecorvo dare to discourse on the conduct of His Holiness? Does Professor Pontecorvo know what Holy Institution he has dared to give his valuable advice to? And you, Dear Editor, how can you permit this self-described professor, this hypocritical scientist, this unbeliever in a white lab coat, to address His Holiness in this way, and in public? Perhaps Professor Pontecorvo would do well to think of the failures of his own religion, and the crimes committed by his co-religionists in the Holy Land, rather than occupy himself with Things that have nothing to do with him.