Persecution (9781609458744)

by Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)

  Rachel began her day in the snow early. Sipping “in blessed peace” an entire pot of coffee (she brought it from Italy, like an immigrant) as every so often she glanced at the valley, which had the shape of an amphitheater whose sides were sharp peaks, uniformly snow-covered and at that hour, when the weather was clear, lacquered with pink and pearl-gray. Even the boys liked to get up early but for reasons different from their mother’s: they wanted to get to the trails (who knows why!) before anyone else. They seemed to feel an exclusive satisfaction in observing that their father’s sedan (it, too, had been loaded onto the train) dominated, in solitary splendor, the icy parking lot below the lifts. Besides, it was only the first contest won in a morning consecrated to competition.

  Leo wasn’t mad about skiing and in fact, with the cold, and the weariness that had accumulated during the year, would have taken his time in the morning. But he didn’t want to disappoint Filippo and Samuel. It was as if for his sons there were nothing more sensational than to play a sport with him. You should have seen how those boys strutted when Leo, at the start of every summer, granted them the season’s first, and last, three minutes of “passes and shots at the goal.” There, in the yard at home, until his smoke-encrusted lungs and the piercing protests of his spleen enjoined him to throw in the towel, Leo watched his boys showing off for him with the fervor of a halfback on the junior team ready to hurl himself at every ball to impress the varsity coach. There they were, his boys: hyperactive, enthusiastic, full of energy and health, looking at him with such disappointment when he quit!

  On the ski trails the atmosphere was the same. Ardor, adrenaline, competitive spirit. Filippo mocked his brother’s fear of jumps. Semi, on the other hand, couldn’t bear that Filippo, although he had been skiing for much longer, wasn’t careful to keep his skis joined. And meanwhile, in the midst of these disputes, the father struggled on. The trouble was that, while Filippo and Samuel were at the age when one doesn’t know the meaning of the word “fatigue,” to the extent that they could ski for nine hours straight, for Leo the best part was the silence as he rode up in the lift. He let his head sink back, took off his gloves, poked his poles at the snowdrifts encountered along the way. He lighted a cigar. He inhaled, exhaled intensely the aphrodisiac cocktail of thick smoke and thin air. He felt the muscles of his legs go numb from a sudden blast of cold, and, when the ascent got steeper, returned to himself and was nearly in danger of falling.

  Keeping up with the competitive impulses of his sons became more complicated every year. Until a few years ago he had been the one to instruct, wait, goad, but for a while now the roles had been reversed. In the meantime, it seemed, his style had become obsolete. And Filippo and Samuel kept pointing it out to him with impatient reproaches: “Come on, Papa . . . ”; “Let’s go, we’ll never get there like that!”

  Luckily his authority was still intact enough to allow him to impose a pit stop, at lunchtime, in the lodge, a cabin of dark wood shingles clinging nimbly to the icy slope, a dozen meters from the chairlift for one of the more accessible trails. Inside, it was more spacious than it appeared from the outside, and was welcoming even at the peak time of Christmas weekend, when it was crowded with skiers who, in their boots and silver uniforms, looked like participants in a conference of robots, astronauts, or medieval knights in armor. Thus, while the boys had a coke and a sandwich, he allowed himself a bacon-and-mushroom omelette, with roast potatoes and a couple of glasses. All accompanied by the usual comment: “Remem­ber, not a word to the old lady,”, alluding to the meal just eaten, which wasn’t properly kosher.

  The waltz of alcohol in his veins allowed him to enjoy the last postprandial descent. In the afternoon he didn’t ski. The boys didn’t even make an attempt to ask him.

  Then for the professor the day in the mountains took a definitely more congenial turn. At home a long sit on the throne awaited him, followed by a scalding shower that lasted at least ten minutes, using up the hot water. (“Consuming the glacier,” Rachel mocked him, always amazed by her husband’s excessive use of the planet’s natural resources.)

  “Why don’t we have a nice cup of coffee?” It was the standard phrase with which Leo addressed Rachel as soon as he came out of the bath, perfumed with cologne and talcum powder and with a cigar in his mouth. Both Leo and Rachel knew that what was wrong with that question was the use of the first person plural. That ecumenical grammatical choice was hypocritical and fraudulent: the coffee, which only he needed, would be made by her. The climb of the contemporary woman in pursuit of parity was in an intermediate phase. For now the wife continued to make the coffee, but at least she was asked politely, and, above all, in conditions that let a little uneasiness seep into the husband. At this rate the wives of Filippo and Semi—if those two confirmed bachelors should get married—would compel their docile spouses to make the coffee, and more than likely they wouldn’t bat an eye.

  After the coffee and a nap on the couch in front of the fire, Leo went to the village with Rachel. While she did some shopping, he, with a cosmopolitan attitude that the fluency of his English did not, unfortunately, match, bought the British and American papers. And sitting, freezing, on a bench he read them with enormous effort, dreaming of a dictionary.

  As they headed home, the mountains on the horizon vanished behind a curtain of shadows, and the village lighted up. The windows of the shops on the main street began to sparkle. The precious goods, delicately arranged among red ribbons, wooden boxes, gilded balls, pinecones, branches of fir, asked nothing better than to be taken out for some air, be adopted, and, if possible, visit other countries. And luckily for them the right sucker was in town.

  “Don’t tell me that’s the latest Nikon . . . ” “Not bad, that pashmina! The salmon-colored one, a really fine cashmere”; “And those Blues Brothers Persols? Am I wrong or has Semi been driving us crazy about needing new sunglasses?”

  Who, in those times, didn’t dream of brand-new sunglasses? Who didn’t dream of giving gifts? Now that the world was more or less peaceful, now that it offered so many opportunities, giving gifts was the best way of showing the people you loved that the worst was over and how important they were to you. A gift-giving euphoria that Leo was defenseless against. What could he do if those windows decorated for the holiday made him wish to remind his wife how indispensable to him she was, his children how satisfied he was with them, and himself how much he loved himself?

  So began the usual pantomime. His insistence, her refusal. His certainties, her uncertainties. A pantomime whose result was taken for granted: in the end he would get his hands on the salmon-colored pashmina and the Nikon. And that was right. He needed nothing else. There was nothing else that interested him more at that juncture than to photograph with his new Nikon his wife wearing the equally new salmon-colored pashmina. He knew that to fulfill that dream he would have to confront—and rout—the trite objections of the beneficiary of such generosity. Which in fact were swift in arriving: “Leo, don’t you think it’s a little too expensive? And a bit gaudy? You’re really sure it’s my style?”

  Coming out of the shop carrying the packages, he was all triumph while she hunched her shoulders and lowered her eyes, as if she feared that the God of Israel might track her down even there—in that frozen corner of paradise—determined to punish her for her vanity and her idolatry.

  Returning to the chalet, while the boys had showers and Rachel took out the food she had just bought and put it on the plates (cooking was not her strong point), Leo finished reading the newspapers by the fire, transfigured by the milky fog of his cigar. Or he showed the boys, in their bathrobes, the latest purchases. Or he fiddled with the new Nikon while Samuel, thanks to his twenty-ten vision, read him the instructions. All this as he waited, still triumphant, to sit down at the table. Fresh bread, cheese, red wine, and a dessert that oozed Austro-Hungarian nostalgia. And finally beddy-bye.

  Yes: all this, every year, for years, stupendously immutable.

  Was it possible
that everything had begun there? In such a pure and innocuous context? That the great misunderstanding that, seven months later, he would not find the moral force to explain to his family had begun to deposit its sediment right there?

  For several minutes now Leo had been torturing himself with a lot of questions. Ever since, with enormous effort, he had managed to drag himself to the bathroom in the cellar. Now he is standing. In front of the mirror. He pees in the sink the way adolescents and drunks do. In his mouth the taste of a rotten cherry.

  The idea of being able to give adequate answers to the useless interrogation he is inflicting on himself is no more reasonable than the hope of lifting his head to ask the mirror what has become of him in the meantime. Probably his face would reveal the killing effort he has lavished on trying to go to sleep. Two nights and two days. Or if you prefer forty-eight hours. That’s what it took to break the siege of insomnia.

  Which means that, after that utterly unrestorative sleep, the exile in the study-cellar is about to complete two and a half days. The two and a half longest, most stationary, most sleepless days of his life. The most interesting and the most banal. The most meaningful and the most useless. The most incontrovertible and the most mysterious . . . in other words, the “most,” in every sense.

  Leo, in any case, is still lucid enough to understand that his insomnia was not solely the result of the anguish for all that had happened and for all that was about to happen. There had also been an inconvenient technicality: in moments of crisis, it was impossible for him to relax in a place where Rachel was not within reach. To place his fingers on his wife’s hip, slide down to her thigh, to play with those soft and familiar surfaces was the only tranquilizer that Leo had abused in all those years of marriage. But it seems that Rachel (not to mention her hip and her thighs) was unavailable this time.

  For a few minutes after his flight from the kitchen, Leo had expected her. Embarrassed, terrified, incapable of believing that he could meet her eyes, but he had expected her. She is about to come down. We’ll quarrel. We’ll shout. We’ll lash out at each other. Maybe we’ll hit each other. But at the end she’ll offer me a chance to explain. And things will settle down . . . Of this Leo became increasingly less certain as the hours passed. With the thickening of the shadows around him and the anguish within.

  Then he had had a dizzy spell. He had felt his limbs stiffen. Was that tiredness? He remembered the discussion he had had with his wife, in the presence of a brawny furniture seller, at the time of the renovation of the cellar: Rachel who wants to buy a horrid little sofabed, Leo who has vowed eternal love to a useless, extremely expensive blood-red leather Chesterfield.

  “You’ve furnished the upstairs like a space ship. Let me at least exercise down here the practical spirit that you despise so much.” Lucky he had given in that time! Otherwise, now he wouldn’t have had that makeshift bed at his disposal.

  So, having transformed the couch into a bed, Leo lay down on it, certain he would collapse. But something had gone wrong. And the Calvary had begun: the search for impossible sleep.

  All because he had made the mistake of turning off the light. In the darkness the space dilated in a frightening way: now the room was immense, like the cave of Polyphemus. His mother always told him—when he was a sleepless child—that damn story of Ulysses and Polyphemus. It seemed that she did it on purpose. (Leo had never been able to understand if that woman had loved him too much or too little.) But why just at that moment should he remember Polyphemus and his cave, when he hadn’t thought of him for a thousand years? A cave the size of a giant, whose exit was barred by an equally giant mass. Children of the world, do you know of anything more terrifying?

  In short, a second after turning off the light Leo had felt the pillow swelling under his head in a dismaying fashion. He had understood how it must feel to be a mere little fish in the immensity of the ocean. But just when, in order not to get lost in such an empty vastness, Leo, by a skillful manipulation of his fingers, had managed to reduce the size of the pillow, making it appropriate to the surrounding space—just then his breath was obstructed, as if the giant cave were rapidly growing smaller. A few seconds more and it would crush him.

  So, increasingly short of oxygen, he got up, turned on the light, and started walking again. That was the secret: walk, get tired, like a child. And like a child keep the light on. Then throw yourself down on the bed again, waiting for the right moment.

  Not to think. Not to think about himself. To forget for a few sumptuous moments who he was. Forget the story of which he was the incredulous protagonist. At times, in those two days of Calvary, the magic worked. Leo had been able to forget everything: why he was there, what had happened, what was at risk; and then Rachel, the boys, the TV news, colleagues, patients, the university, that damn girl, that damn girl, that damn girl . . . As if his organism refused to be constantly vigilant. As if his brain and body had called on the standard ration of oblivion and unconsciousness that allows us not to go mad.

  But God only knows that Leo paid dearly for those instants of repose! The recurrences were frightening. Usually it was a concrete detail, placed on the horizon of his abstract mental landscape, that started up the torture machine again: who knows, Filippo’s French fries, Samuel’s labored breath, Rachel’s muteness . . . Then, like the man who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease and, waking from a tranquil sleep, suddenly remembers the death sentence hanging over his head, Leo felt a wave of panic rushing over him all at once. An anomalous wave that didn’t come from far away but from within. The nightmare was concentrated in a few square centimeters of his chest. His legs shook, his ears buzzed, his blood burned. Leo would have hit his head against the wall to empty it out again. But now it was impossible. You can’t go back. Now Leo Pontecorvo is no longer a human being. Now Leo Pontecorvo is all his embarrassment. All his shame. All his terror.

  So he began to blather, or maybe to pray: “They’re going to tear me to pieces . . . They’re going to tear me to pieces . . . They’re going to tear me to pieces . . . ” Those words, a hundred times less powerful than their meaning, turned out to be a paradoxically effective exorcism.

  Then, after two days of fighting, when he was sure that he would never make it—would never sleep again because insomnia was his punishment, his death sentence—Leo fell asleep.

  Now he’s been awake for several minutes. Dawn is making him wait.

  He must have dreamed a river of tears. In the dream he was weeping continuously. So, as soon as he woke up, he touched his hands to his cheeks, observing that they were perfectly dry. Immediately afterward, his left hand hurried to seek a bit of warmth between his knees. While the other, following a course to the north, reached his skull, or rather the curly surface on which Leo’s fingers had paused, in a pensive manner, for two nights and two days.

  Now that same hand was fumbling with a skinny little dick, at an all-time low, aiming at the drain of the sink.

  And so it happens, as his bladder empties, that (in one of those flashes which are so abundant in films and so rare in life), Anzère returns to Leo’s mind. The light and snow of Anzère. Maybe because his brain, during those days of desperate interrogation, had always been more attracted by the opposites: the great and the small. Peace and terror. Sleep and wakefulness . . . And what could be a greater contrast, compared to the dense shadows in which he had wakened, than the brilliance of the days in the mountains? Was it possible that all that joyous shared light was implicated in this obscurity and this silence? Yes, in short, was it possible that to explain why he now finds himself here—in exile, terrified, peeing in the sink and determined never to look at himself in the mirror again—he has to interrogate something so lacking in pathos, so calm and relaxing, so starry and ineffable as the last vacation with his family in the Swiss snow?

  To be more precise, the series of equivocal events that would conclude in the mountains had been set up, so to speak, by a state of tension. Nothing special. A small marital
quarrel that had warmed their souls two weeks before leaving for Anzère.

  Everything had begun with a seed planted by Samuel with his mother: that spoiled child wanted to take Camilla to Switzerland. Rachel had said she wouldn’t even discuss it.

  “Why not?”

  What did he mean, “why not”? Did it have to be explained? Because he and Camilla were too young to go on vacation together. Because such a cohabitation would make Filippo and Papa uncomfortable, and this she could not allow. Rachel was surprised that Camilla’s parents had agreed. And that they would lightheartedly deprive themselves of their daughter at Christmas.

  “Her father said she could.”

  “And I say no! We’re not going to discuss it.”

  “Then I’ll ask Papa.”

  He had asked him. To Leo the matter didn’t appear so unseemly: he didn’t mind at all if Samuel brought someone. And for the same reason that, on certain Saturdays in June, he loved it when his sons’ friends invaded his house and stayed for dinner. To have a “full house”: this was one of Leo’s favorite expressions. Above all if that fullness had to do with his children’s friends. Not that he was present. He was careful not to go beyond two or three ritual phrases. But at the same time, in his heart, the idea that a dwelling so pointlessly vast was available for the entertainment of so many boys flooded him with an unspeakably sentimental warmth. And then there was the energy that Leo felt pouring out. The energy of adolescents. Something so radiant, fleeting, and smelly that even his youngest students had already lost it. And at the same time something so inescapable that it radiated even through the corridors of his hospital unit, full of small sick patients.

  In short, the presence of Camilla in the mountains had the merit of proclaiming energy and fullness. And, further, Leo thought that if Camilla came his sons’ attention would be focused on her. Maybe they would leave him alone. Maybe with Camilla around they wouldn’t insist that he ski.