Gisèle? Is she talking about Gisèle? Did Semi talk to his girlfriend about Gisèle? Leo felt confused. How was it possible that a twelve-year-old child was talking to him about Gisèle? Leo looked around. There was nothing that at that moment did not speak in the tender and familiar language of the usual. He was in the same chalet that he and Rachel had rented for more than ten years. Ever since Filippo had had his first skiing lesson, and had learned to climb up the school slope and come down in a snowplow. The air was full of smoke because the fire was sputtering. Outside the window the snow was still falling, with the insidious grace of a symphony. Where had Gisèle come from? Because, as far as he knew, no one had any idea about Gisèle, he had never even talked about her to Rachel.
Or maybe he had? Maybe he had talked about her soon after they met, who knows? It was possible. Telling her about Paris he had let slip the name of Gisèle and she had done the rest: guessing what Gisèle meant to him, or, rather, had meant. The road not taken and all that romantic nonsense. Yes, but what did Gisèle really mean to him? Absolutely nothing. A good lay. A good lay but too brief. When his body held up. When his dick held up. That’s what Gisèle was for him. And so why thinking back did he feel that sense of childish bewilderment? Was a slightly less surging virility enough to make a man of middle age disastrously sentimental?
Then Leo wondered if the story of Gisèle might be one of those which Rachel often told the boys. The stories that sent Filippo into raptures. Like the time at the hotel in Monte Carlo when he had eaten and she hadn’t. Suddenly Leo felt angry at Rachel. Her lack of tact. Her capacity to take apart anything. Her talent for recycling and manipulating pieces of Leo’s life to entertain the children. And to think it was she who always accused him of indecency! Sometimes Rachel talked to her children about their father as if he weren’t there. Sometimes it seemed to him that Rachel was increasingly similar to that mother-in-law she had so fervently hated.
Or maybe Gisèle had nothing to do with it. Maybe Camilla, that strange girl, was inventing. Improvising. That’s all. From the little that Leo knew her, it was a more than legitimate hypothesis. Camilla hadn’t said a name. She had talked about a “girl.” She had not said “Gisèle.” That there was a girl, that at that time there had been one, was so normal and likely that for a mind drawn to certain Parisian romanticisms it must not have been so difficult to imagine it. She had imagined it, that’s all. No panic.
“What do you say, shall we have some tea?” Leo then asked, to get out of the little emotional impasse in which he had gone hunting.
“What a good idea . . . tea . . . yes, I’d like some tea,” she had said enthusiastically.
This time, too, Camilla’s reaction was surprising. Why did Leo have the impression that whatever he said was interpreted by that girl the wrong way? Why such enthusiasm for a cup of tea? It was afternoon. It was snowing. It was as cold as the gallows. Tea was very appropriate. And so why all this enthusiasm?
In the kitchen Leo managed to calm down. He put the water on to boil. He got two teabags from the package of Twinings Earl Grey. He cut the lemon slices and poured some milk in a little pitcher. His only fear was that Camilla would appear. Who knows, to give him a hand. Thank heaven she didn’t. She confined herself to turning on the stereo and starting “Last Christmas” again.
Returning to the living room Leo found her standing near the fire, now nearly out. She was trying to rekindle it in the frantic way typical of someone who has never dealt with a fireplace.
“Leave it, leave it . . . ” he said. And, after putting the tray down on the low table covered with Filippo’s comic books, he went over. Gently but with extreme propriety he took the wrought-iron implement from her. It seemed to him that Camilla, before letting go, resisted a few seconds too long.
And why did she stick to his side? Why didn’t she go sit on the sofa? Now really she was up close to him, leaning over the fire with a piece of paper in her hand.
“No, no—no paper! It burns instantly and it’s useless.” Leo felt one of her little hands graze his side, as if she had been tempted to lean on him as she got up. While this laborious operation was completed Leo felt threatened by the sharp, bitter odor of a sulking girl: the diluted, feminine version of the stink emitted by the rooms of adolescent boys. And yet again he felt in the air the extremely unpleasant impression of lust. An impression. Which, now that the fire had flared up again and Leo had sat down, didn’t disappear. The question was: who was lusting for whom? Not him. But on the other hand there was nothing in that girl that expressed either an explicit or even implicit wish to provoke him. But if she wasn’t provoking him, then why had he started to think of what until that moment had never entered the anteroom of his brain?
It was as if Leo had suddenly realized not only that before him was a girl but that she was his Samuel’s girl. And that if she was there now, in the living room where for years the Pontecorvos had perpetuated their blameless family idylls, she owed it to him. Precisely, to Leo. It was he, the irresponsible father, who had allowed his barely adolescent son to take his girlfriend on vacation with him. As if he were an adult. Only now did Leo understand what Rachel had tried in vain to explain to him weeks earlier: the presence of Camilla was not appropriate. And that if it happened it would be unpleasant. And that it wasn’t a question of morality, of puritanism, of prudery, and all those fancy words with which Leo had demolished his wife’s objections. It was simply a question of good sense.
That was Samuel’s girlfriend. His Samuel, the happier and less complicated of his sons, the child for whom everything came with extreme ease. For that very reason it wasn’t so odd that already, at twelve, Semi had a girlfriend. Precocity had always been one of the two characteristics (the other was eclecticism) that made his parents so proud of him. The only surprising thing is that the gifted little man had such an irresponsible father.
Yes, this was Samuel’s girlfriend. Which means that, although in an embryonic form, the two must have had some physical contact. This banal observation made an impression on our professor. And, all right, he was a doctor, and a children’s doctor. Certain things he was aware of and he knew. He remembered the time when a nurse had burst into his small office at the Santa Cristina clinic and breathlessly told him she had just caught two kids in the bathroom, in a position that was to say the least intimate . . . But why use euphemisms? They were fucking. Those two little leukemia patients were fucking. “Like adults,” the nurse explained, and he had wondered if there were others.
Leo recalled that he had stubbornly defended—first to the nurse, and then to Loredana, his psychologist friend—the right of those two poor kids to enjoy themselves a little, given the terrible reception that life had reserved for them. He recalled with how much insistence, and with what eloquence, he had defended the rights of nature.
Too bad that now it was not a matter of any two kids. Too bad that now, if he thought of his Semi with Camilla, something seemed wrong to our luminary.
Suddenly he felt so uneasy. His own thoughts embarrassed him. He had to turn away from her, afraid that his eyes were focused on details of that small body, sprinkled with freckles, that had welcomed the caresses of Samuel and who knows what other.
There is no lust without intimidation. This is a hard natural law. If lust is explicitly aggressive, invading, brutal, then it’s not lust. And perhaps this explains why Leo felt so confused. On the edge of something he didn’t know or refused to recognize.
Was it that sense of shared intimacy, triggered by an allusion to two French writers (Camilla’s France, or, rather, freedom, the imagined world against the experienced, the fantastic universe into which she withdrew in order to escape from the vulgar world of her parents), that impelled Camilla, on the fourth day, to write to him? Or was it the mounting sensation of promiscuity and violation that evidently Leo was not the only one, in that room, to perceive?
It’s what Leo is now asking himself and can’t answer.
Not bad for only th
e third day in the mountains, he thinks, with the crumb of irony that remains to him. But was it really like that? Or is this a classic retrospective distortion? What do they call it? Hindsight? Maybe Leo simply needs to remember the third day like that. He needs to dramatize it. To give it depth through pathos. Just because if he didn’t remember it like that all this would not make sense. Only by overinterpreting can Leo convince himself that things could not have gone otherwise. That he would not have been able to modify them in any way. That this is his story, period. And set his mind at rest.
Probably if things had gone differently that third day it would not have persisted so obstinately in memory. Nor would it have become such an obsessive object of study. And perhaps he now would not remember it with the sacredness that is conceded to milestones. Or really he would not remember it at all. In other words, if that first letter had never arrived, if Camilla, impelled by who knows what, had not written to him, Leo would not now, seven months later, be here analyzing the third day in such minute detail.
Besides, other things had happened on that unforgettable third day which could have led her to the insane gesture full of inappropriate initiative. The letter, I mean.
In the end Fili and Samuel, because the snow began falling more thickly, had in fact returned earlier than usual, to be precise five minutes after Rachel, who had likewise returned early. Seeing the Pontecorvo brothers enter, transformed by the circumstances into a pair of walking snowmen, Leo had felt a sudden relief.
The five minutes spent alone with his wife and that girl hadn’t been a big deal.
Rachel was put out by the fact that Camilla, seeing her come in loaded down with packages, hadn’t gone to meet her, but sat there with her nose in a book. Leo knew how annoyed Rachel was also by the fact that, since they’d been there, Camilla had never once offered to help, not even to set the table. If she had offered, she would certainly have been refused. But that Camilla had not even once made the gesture Rachel found intolerable.
It was one of the small rules of behavior that Rachel had learned in her modest family and from which she never deviated. In the place where she came from, work was the only, the unique, value. It was what gave dignity to people’s lives. Thus, whenever a carpenter, for example, showed up in the early afternoon at the Pontecorvo house to put up a bookshelf and brought with him a son or an adolescent apprentice, Rachel would rush breathlessly into the boys’ room, where, after lunch, they were camping out on the bed reading comics or watching TV, and order them, “Come on, get up, the carpenter and his helper are here.”
As if they, too, were supposed to help. It would be terrible if the carpenter or, especially, his helper were to see her sons lolling in dissolute idleness. How shameful! It was better if they appeared pointlessly active rather than busily playing. They should be on their feet, at least. If for no other reason than respect for that boy, their contemporary, who was working. It was for analogous reasons that when, just to give another example, the upholsterer came to take away two heavy divans to reupholster, Rachel, during the journey from the living room to the van parked in the driveway, made her muscles available to help (in reality hindering) the potbellied brute the upholsterer had brought with him to help out.
For Rachel Pontecorvo it was better to present an unrealistic idea of yourself as a worker or a pain in the neck than to give the impression of the idle chatelaine who watches others work. This was the work ethic inculcated in her by that Stakhanovite father from whom she had in no way succeeded in freeing herself. Inevitable, then, that Camilla’s insolent immobility seriously annoyed her. But what could she do?
(All right, come on, Rachel, tell us what you don’t like about this Camilla. What it is that oppresses you. Vent all your discontent. Don’t go on hiding. Don’t be a hypocrite. Don’t go on elaborating practical reasons, or reasons of principle. Explain what is intolerable to you. Explain once and for all that if at first it was sweet, touching, even moving to see your little Samuel cooing like a dove in love, as time passed the thing began to worry you. And now, in spite of the pair’s tender age, the whole business is assuming dangerous and unacceptable proportions. Explain to everyone why your inner sirens have been blaring madly for weeks. Admit, if you have the courage, what is wrong with that girl. And what will always be wrong. Confess that, in spite of the irresponsible tolerance of your husband, the fact that Camilla isn’t Jewish is a problem. An insurmountable obstacle. For God’s sake, spit it out, tell it all: you didn’t bring two fine Jewish boys into the world to feed them to the first shiksa who comes along!)
Filippo and Semi’s early return from the slopes helped to relieve the tension Leo felt, crushed between the two women (one a woman in miniature but it comes to the same thing), both in full temperamental turmoil.
By the mere act of re-entry, Filippo and Semi gave their mother the opportunity to do her female five minutes of venting. All the orders she hadn’t dared address to Camilla she was now taking out on Filippo and Samuel. It was all do this and do that. And, in response, nothing but leave-us-alone and let-it-go, Mamma.
A few hours later, at the dinner table, the boys took care to finish exasperating their mother and again offered their father the chance to distinguish himself heroically in the eyes of Camilla.
Filippo and Semi were in the state of excitement that often drove them to a form of demented, exclusive camaraderie, inducing in others the suspicion that they weren’t intelligent enough (or not stupid enough?), or in any case not competent enough, to participate in an esoteric conversation between initiates. It was a complicity that in a moment could become, for that very reason, irritating and unpleasant.
The truth is that their coded language was the most visible and least attractive aspect of the symbiosis between Filippo and Semi. It made use of an infinite series of materials, whose bibliography, if someone had really been interested in compiling it, would have been pointlessly tortuous: movies above all, but also phrases of Leo’s or Rachel’s transfigured by time and by the thousand occasions and most disparate contexts in which Filippo and Semi had repeated them; expressions typical of superheroes from cartoons or animated cartoons on TV; some grammatical howler produced by the uneducated assistant in the after-school program; an especially clever vulgarity formulated by a schoolmate or the judo teacher.
That was their papier-mâché world. A parallel universe consisting of an irrepressible and utterly private chatter, in which it was as easy for them to indulge as it was difficult, once inside, to abandon it. A game whose preferred victim was Rachel. Who, struggling to comprehend, asked her husband, “Do you know what they’re saying? I can’t understand them!”
“Forget it, they’re just two idiots talking nonsense!”
Their mother’s lack of comprehension only increased the boys’ hilarity. Then Filippo would ask her, “How could a stupid woman like you have given birth to two rad guys like us?” And Semi appeared both proud of and amused by his brother’s audacity.
Well, that evening Filippo and Semi were in top form, and especially obnoxious, and there was nothing the others could say that did not inspire them to some new, incomprehensible joke. In particular the doomed targets were Rachel and Camilla (with their father they didn’t dare).
Leo had already observed how Semi’s behavior toward his girlfriend changed in relation to his brother. In Filippo’s absence, Semi behaved toward Camilla in the clumsy, cloying manner that he had demonstrated the night when, the preceding spring, he had introduced her to his parents, during that absurd dinner when Leo and Rachel had had to endure candlelight and so many other sickening things . . . But here, in Filippo’s presence, Semi’s behavior toward Camilla underwent a radical transformation. He became insolent. Sometimes, with real rudeness, he didn’t answer the questions she asked him. Or he withdrew when she approached him. It was as if Semi wanted to prove to Filippo that, in spite of that girl’s arrival in his life, nothing between them had changed. He was still on his older brother’s side. And their fr
aternal bond would certainly not be called into question by despicably giving in to a love affair.
Another of the techniques used by Samuel to demonstrate to his brother the degree of his loyalty to the cause was to gang up on Camilla with him. Like that evening, when, after refusing to sit next to her at the table, he started looking at her derisively, which seemed to provoke in the girl, who was usually so enigmatic and indifferent, bursts of dejection. It was as if her childish eyes wouldn’t stop asking, What did I do to you? Why are you treating me like this? Why are you a different person when your brother is around? What is it that I don’t understand?
The sense of exclusion was transformed into a fairly pathetic attempt, not at all natural to her, to join the conversation. Leo had noticed how every so often Camilla tried to get Samuel’s attention by inserting some completely banal comment. It was a suicidal strategy, to judge from Semi’s behavior, as he became increasingly contemptuous. Suddenly, perhaps in a desperate attempt to be noticed, or maybe trying deliberately to make fun of him, she had said to Samuel, “You’re all red, you got too much sun today!” Leo naturally thought back to the embarrassing tan of Camilla’s parents. And he deduced that the remark hid a not too veiled reproach.
Semi gave no weight to that reproach, which provided him, instead, with the opportunity to make fun of her in a way that would certainly amuse his brother.
“Too much sun, too little sun. Too much water, too little water . . . ” Semi shouted triumphantly.
And Leo recognized a line from Bianca, a film of Nanni Moretti, which his sons had liked enormously and which had increased their vast repertory by a dozen more quotations.
Camilla was frozen by yet another joke at her expense, while Filippo laughed hysterically. Camilla’s sad expression and the boys’ boorish, inappropriate insistence on firing off their incomprehensible nonsense caused Rachel to ask her husband, with a light pressure on his hand, to intervene actively. Rachel knew how much the boys respected their father, just as she knew the physical charisma (bordering on fear) that Leo’s slender figure exercised over Filippo and (especially) Samuel. Leo, no less irritated than Rachel, scarcely needed to be asked:
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