“Cut it out, God damn it!”
Then he waited for his sons to be quiet to lend greater strength to his scolding:
“Do you think it’s polite to behave like this? Don’t you hear how unfunny it is? Don’t you find it pathetic that you are the only ones laughing at your jokes and allusions? Haven’t you had enough of all this self-reference? I can assure you—and I would ask you to trust me—that you are not witty, you are not polite, you are simply irritating, to anyone looking at you and anyone listening. You’re acting like idiots. Not to mention that you’re repetitious and boring. Even Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Nanni Moretti jokes—all of which, for the record, I taught you to appreciate—repeated three hundred times become tiresome. Now stop it. Understand?”
And then, but in a tone that had moved on from intolerant to become definitely Biblical:
“But above all I forbid you to make fun of your mother, who refuses to understand you, because she is too intelligent and too sensible. And I order you not to exclude our guest from the conversation.”
The great savior. The hero of women! So he must have appeared to Camilla. He who arrived at the right moment to restore order and chivalry. His words had an extraordinary effect. Filippo and Semi giggled nervously. His lecture had silenced and mortified them. A sudden change that Camilla could observe more clearly right after dinner, when Filippo went out with his mother to the village to get a strudel and ice cream and Samuel returned to treating her with the usual sappy attention.
And now Leo recalls the sense of peace he felt that evening, after dinner, when he said good night to Samuel and Camilla, sprawled on the floor in front of the fire. He recalls his own voice saying, “Don’t lie so close to the fire!” Just as he recalls Samuel’s cries: “Papa, come, please come, Camilla’s not breathing! Please, Papa, come here . . . ” That is the cry for help that Leo heard a few moments after going to his room and lying down on the bed to read. He recalls his sprint to the living room. And he found Samuel, terrified, bending over Camilla, her body contorted by retching and by her gasping attempts to cough, in search of the drop of air that her body needed more every second. Her bluish face, her hands, literally livid, at her throat.
And suddenly all the timidity that Leo had until then felt toward that girl, who inexplicably embarrassed him, disappeared. In the moments following the violent asthma attack (caused perhaps by the smoke from the fire or perhaps by nervousness), Leo Pontecorvo, the great pediatric oncologist, used to managing much more complex emergencies, displayed an exemplary calm and sang-froid.
He opened the door of the closet where Rachel had placed the first-aid bag. He took the inhaler, the syringes, and the vials. He approached Camilla. He pushed Samuel aside with a gesture of his arm, and performed all the necessary actions. First he made her lean against the wall, then, almost violently, he stuck the inhaler in her mouth, flooding her with adrenalin, and finally, since that first intervention seemed to have resolved the problem only partially, he took the vial and the syringe and—with what manly efficacy!—injected into the girl’s veins that diaphanous liquid.
Two minutes later it’s all over. Camilla lies on her back on the sofa, breathing heavily. Samuel, next to her, can’t stop whimpering, and Leo, Olympian, in the decisive and assertive tone that in the past minutes has transformed him, says, “I’m going to make you both some chamomile tea. I’m afraid you need it.”
Was it the calm and tranquility with which he had faced the emergency that so struck Camilla? Was it the affectation of manliness? Had she confused the intervention of a consummate professional with a truly heroic gesture? Was that the mistake that inspired such audacity in the little psychopath?
It might be. Who knows how many times she had seen her parents, the friends of her parents, the teachers at school undone by the violent manifestation of those attacks which, although they had always afflicted her, continued to terrify her.
At those moments the extreme tension clarified into a broad, definitive lucidity, which allowed her to see her Semi’s father in all his cool and poetic efficiency. He had treated her as she wished to be treated. He had taken care of her as she wished to be taken care of. He had touched her as she ought to be touched. With resolute, precise gestures, stripped of any violence, cleansed of any excitement. Was this what Camilla had let herself be so influenced by? Not taking into account the fact that he was on his home ground. That he was swimming in his own sea. That this was his job, a kind of routine. But how could she know that?
Or maybe she did know it?
In the altered state in which Leo is living (he has curled up again on the bed and now has both hands on his neck), as he recalls all the events of the recent past, he is struck by the suspicion that she faked it. That she used her superb acting and manipulative abilities, not to mention her experience, to simulate an attack. Knowing that that was the only way she could flush him out. Is that what had happened? Had she set him up from the start? Leo doesn’t know. He can’t say. He is so alone, so confused, so delicately balanced over the abyss.
In short, on the fourth day at Anzère the first letter arrived.
The first strange clue: the place where it was delivered. Leo—in bathrobe, towel over his shoulder, and bare feet—had gone into his room and closed the door. He had taken off the bathrobe, thrown it on the bed, shivering, and mechanically opened the drawer of the dresser where, the day they arrived, Rachel put his underpants, socks, and undershirts. Just then, reaching in for his boxers, he had felt against his fingertips a papery roughness. Probably an envelope. He had grabbed it, sure it was a mistake or a joke of Rachel’s. But on the back the words “For Professor Pontecorvo,” in a handwriting of looping and graceful precision, had appeared to him another unequivocal clue (or at least it seems to him now, as he thinks back to it).
It wouldn’t have disturbed him so much if, just an hour earlier, going into the bathroom for his regular shower, he hadn’t found a still more unpleasant surprise. Lying on the shelf under the window was a panty liner, evidently just discarded, faintly stained. A sense of irritation took possession of Leo. He had thought it was Rachel’s forgetfulness. Except then he considered the fact that in many years of marriage a thing like that had never happened, and he understood that the blood-stained panty liner belonged to Camilla. And he dismissed it as the typical lack of awareness of a thoughtless adolescent.
But now? Well now, in the light of that envelope containing a letter whose contents were definitely inappropriate, that used panty liner took on a completely different relevance. Had it been left there deliberately? But why? To prepare for the arrival of the letter? A kind of treasure hunt with scattered clues? And, in that case, what was the final prize? Was it perhaps a perverted message of love, or a threat? But really what could one expect from someone who was always silent and then found fluency in another language? All this was definitely annoying. Rather, more: indecent and unacceptable.
What should he do? Go out there, give her back the letter without even opening it, reproach her harshly, tell her she must never again leave such souvenirs in the bathroom or stick her hands in the dresser where an adult keeps his piles of fucking underwear . . . Speak to her with the same severity he would have used with one of his sons, and explain to her that a girl of twelve does not write letters to fifty-year-old men.
That’s what he should have done.
Let’s say he had, what would have happened? Certainly she would have burst into tears. Camilla’s anxiousness. The bizarre disproportion of her reactions. That was something it was right to be afraid of. The risk was that Rachel and the boys would find her like that, humiliated, in tears. At which he would have had to explain to his family several unpleasant things: starting with what Camilla had done. The vacation would be irremediably spoiled. Then he would have had to face the bitterness of his younger son and Rachel’s irritation. And it wouldn’t end there. He would have had to speak to Camilla’s parents, those two uncouth types (the Viking and his concubine)
and explain to them the unpleasantness of the matter. Because of the way they looked at their daughter, the way they excused her, and gave into her on everything, because of the extraordinary number of times they had telephoned her since she had been there, and the fact that they had agreed to let her go to the mountains although it had obviously upset them, it wouldn’t have been difficult for Camilla to convince them that he had been the one to lead her into such inappropriate behavior. He tried to remember if the preceding afternoon, when they talked about Paris, he had said something unseemly.
All these hypotheses—as he stood there, naked, dripping, cold, with the envelope, now also saturated, in his hand—tormented him.
Maybe it would be better to wait for Rachel. Maybe better to put the whole business in the hands of the most practical woman in the galaxy. Yes, of course, it should be Rachel who spoke to Camilla. It should be Rachel who spoke to her parents. He didn’t want to get involved in this business. And suddenly the idea that his Rachel would, as usual, take care of everything calmed him.
It should be explained that if in his profession Leo Pontecorvo did not lack the audacity and initiative of people who have been successful, in the face of certain practical difficulties he displayed all his tremendous inadequacy.
Since childhood he had been accustomed to delegate every managerial complication to his mother. And to concentrate first on his studies and then, right afterward, on his career. “Race horses don’t organize the races, race horses race.” This was the catch phrase of his extremely obliging mother!
The result of such self-denial in his studies and such ineptitude in practical matters was paradoxical: even today, at almost fifty, the great teacher, the fearless luminary, the fascinating lecturer, adored father and faithful husband would not have known where to get in line at the post office to send a certified letter and would have had great difficulties in paying a bill. Suffice it to say that he became agitated whenever he had to sign a check. Luckily when his mother died and he was overwhelmed by the weight of all those tasks and responsibilities, Rachel had been at his side.
In other words, this utter lack of pragmatism combined with success in his profession made him a man with a dual personality: extremely efficient in things that interested him, childishly inept in the management of all other business, toward which, in time, he had begun to feel a kind of superstitious uneasiness that in the face of the most aggressive and inquisitorial bureaucracy—or rather ordinary justice—became true anguish. It was enough for a traffic patrol to stop him for a check to make him go nuts. There he is, fumbling in the glove compartment of the car in search of documents with the ardor of an inexperienced drug dealer who, stopped at airport customs, pretends not to know how to open the two suitcases whose false bottoms are stuffed with cocaine.
All to explain why, a moment after connecting the letter to the pad, and both objects to Camilla, Leo began to tremble. And why his overexcited brain was crowded with the apocalyptic hypotheses that infect the life of paranoiacs. Making him feel suddenly trapped. And leading him to blow up the whole business to the point of seeing himself already in the dock. That also explains why he had only to think of Rachel to calm down and dismiss his torments as the ridiculous product of neurosis. But above all that explains why suddenly, after vacillating for some time, he had opened the letter, forgetting that the preliminary condition for him to remain totally clean was that the letter be delivered to Rachel sealed and untouched.
The fact is that, once he had calmed down, he was overcome by curiosity to see what was written in it.
Perhaps there was no malice. But then why put it there? Why not deliver it by hand? Maybe it had seemed to her a safe place, where he would find it without anyone else seeing it. But wasn’t that just what people call “malice”? Creating an exclusive complicity with a person you should treat with formality. And in any case what sense would it make to answer her in turn with a note? However polite and cold his response might be, it would still be a compromising document. It would be the note that a father of a family sent to a girl of twelve. The proof that he had responded (and hence given importance) to the provocation of a girl. It would take nothing to convince them that he was the corruptor.
(You see? Every time Leo Pontecorvo found himself at such an impasse he began to think of the world in the third person plural. The entire world became a generic “they” eager to harm him, get him in trouble, trap him.)
These new distressing thoughts kept him, if nothing else, from tearing the letter out of an envelope that by now had been opened.
The inconsistent part of the matter is that anxiety, which should have induced him to care and caution, directed him rather toward error, carelessness, contradiction. This usually was the road at the end of which he met paralysis. This was the vicious circle: great fear produced carelessness, carelessness took shape in an irresponsible gesture. And it all resulted in paralysis.
Leo had presented the same terrible evidence of himself some time earlier, with Walter, one of his assistants. Then, too, he had made a big mess of things. But yes, Walter, the young fellow who always showed up late at the university and always with the dark-circled eyes and drawn face of one who has stayed up till the small hours. A really gifted kid, one of those whom Leo liked immensely and Rachel was allergic to. (“Why do you bring him home so often? Why does he always come here to eat at night? Doesn’t the obsequious way he treats us bother you? Those compliments, that flattery? He’s such a sweet-talker.” “Yes, we laugh at it. But come on, he’s a good boy. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He amuses me. He knows a lot of things. He’s so enthusiastic. Among all the students I’ve had he’s certainly the most promising. He’s got some trouble at home. I like helping him.”)
Well, this very fellow, about whose supposed agreeableness or disagreeableness Leo and Rachel argued quite frequently, one day, right after class, had lingered with Leo in his office longer than necessary. Until at a certain point he had asked for a loan.
“How much do you need?”
“A fair amount, Leo.”
“Yes, but how much?”
“Around ten million lire. But look, if you can’t . . . ”
“Calm down, I didn’t say I can’t . . . but you also understand that it’s a large sum . . . and also that I’ll have to talk to Rachel about it. You know, she’s the one who keeps the accounts . . . you know me, I’m hopeless in such things.”
“Then no, thank you. Better not. I don’t think I’m so popular at your house . . . ”
“Don’t talk nonsense. Rachel adores you.”
“No, Leo. Better not. I’d rather anything than cause problems for you with Rachel.”
“Calm down. After all, it’s my money. I sweat for it daily. All I said is that I’ll have to speak to Rachel about it because she’s the one who keeps the accounts . . . Can I ask you what it’s for, at least?”
“Well, it’s something painful. Mortifying . . . ”
“If you don’t want to or can’t tell me it’s not important . . . it’s just that . . . ”
“No, no, I’d like to tell you. Rather, it seems right to tell you, I don’t need to hide anything from you . . . It’s my mother.”
“Your mother?”
“Yes, my mother. Since Papa’s been gone, since he died, well, anyway . . . she hasn’t been the same. You know, my mother is the type of woman who relies completely on a man, one of those women who live in symbiosis with their husband. Who without their husband don’t exist. And my mother without my father doesn’t exist. And I don’t know how to tell you how hard it is to witness this painful spectacle. And how terrible for me to know I can’t intervene. Especially since I also have a lot of problems to resolve.”
“I can imagine.”
“I think I’m at fault. For not having been close enough to her in these last two years. For not having seen what was happening. Or anyway for becoming aware of it too late . . . ”
“Yes, but of what?”
“Leo, my
mother has become an alcoholic. I still have trouble believing it. And I can’t believe her problem has any other name than that: alcoholism. It’s really just like they say. It starts slowly, and you fall into it gradually, until suddenly there you are, hooked. And then it’s too late . . . Poor Mamma, everything began with those damn aperitifs. You know, I can’t even stand to hear the word ‘aperitif’? The word turns my stomach. When she says, ‘Shall we have an aperitif?’ I have to stop myself from smacking her. She has a totally degenerate way of pronouncing the word ‘aperitif’ that irritates me!”
“And how are things going now?”
“You should see her, Leo, she’s like a ghost. It took a while for me to understand what was happening to her. One day she tells me that a quick drink before dinner is good for her, picks her up. Because evening is the most difficult time. And she needs to get through it somehow. Relax. And so then the glass of wine, the Aperol, the Martini before dinner . . . Then, you know how it is, one glass leads to the next . . . By now her life is one long, exhausting aperitif that begins when she opens her eyes in the morning and ends when she goes to sleep, completely drunk. Every morning I find her in a different place in the house: on the toilet, the couch, a stool in the kitchen. She prefers anywhere to her bed. There’s not a moment of the day when she doesn’t stink of alcohol. She’s never sober. She raves. She laughs. She cries. She’s paranoid. She lies, Leo, she never stops lying. It’s been six months since I’ve been fighting this thing, and I’m beginning to think it will end badly. That the situation won’t stop getting worse. And I can’t take it anymore, Leo. I can’t take it.”
“Who have you talked to about it? Before today, I mean.”
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