Persecution (9781609458744)

by Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)

  “I talked to Loredana. I asked her for advice, a professional opinion: basically addiction is a psychological problem. She gave me a couple of addresses of colleagues of hers who run clinics, who work with addictions. You know, Alcoholics Anonymous and all that other nonsense. I’ve been there. I’ve seen how and where they work. I’ve seen the people who go there. It’s terrible, Leo. Like zombies. I can’t see my mother among all those people. She’s delicate, a person not used to suffering, she has a bad relationship with suffering. I can’t put her there, it would destroy her. One of the many reasons she hasn’t been able to recover after my father’s death is that, without his income, she’s had to reduce her life style drastically. I think she drinks not to see all the squalor she’s besieged by. That’s why I can’t put her in one of those places, with those people. She wouldn’t come out alive. Or she’d come out thirstier than before.”

  “And so what have you decided?”

  “I was almost desperate. Until a little while ago, a friend I confided in gave me a brochure for a kind of clinic. A fabulous place, Leo. On the coast, near Amalfi. A pink villa on the sea. A garden looking onto a marvelous cove. I read this booklet at least ten times and I realized that it makes no mention of alcoholism or drug addiction. I ask my friend what the place is, and he tells me it’s a private clinic where important people go to dry out. Celebrities can count on the maximum of efficiency and professionalism together with the maximum of discretion. Last weekend I also did some investigation. I talked to the director. And I understood immediately that it’s the right place. That maybe there my mother could go back to being my mother. I don’t know if you understand. The trouble is that the treatment costs an arm and a leg. We can’t afford it, at least at the moment. I’m trying to sell a small property that my father left me. I’m sure that to get a good price I just have to wait for the right moment.

  “So, now you know my sad story. If you can advance me the money for the first three months, I’ll undertake to pay you back a little each month. At least until I can sell the house and pay off the debt all at once. And then with me your loan is safe: no one better than you knows how little I earn now and how much I could increase my income in the next years. Look, Leo, I’ve given you the reasons and I’ve given you the guarantees. It’s all straightforward, isn’t it?”

  Very straightforward for Leo, but definitely not for Rachel, who, once informed of the situation by her husband, without hesitating to hide her sarcasm, had said:

  “And naturally you gave it to him, without batting an eye?”

  “What should I have done?”

  “For example, not given it to him.”

  “Calm down. I took my precautions. It’s a sure thing. Walter is about to sell some property. He’ll give it all back sooner than you think.”

  “Have you seen this property?”

  “I’m hardly a real-estate agent.”

  “Did he show you some document?”

  “I’m hardly a bank director.”

  “Where is this property, Leo?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea. Does its location seem important to you?”

  “It seems important to me to know if it exists. It seems important to know if it really belongs to him. If it’s not already mortgaged. It seems important to establish whether he really used the money you gave him to take care of that sob story he sold you. Or if it was just the right amount to settle an account with some bookie or loan shark. Knowing him . . . ”

  “I don’t see why an assistant of mine, a good kid, besides, whose career is in my hands, should extort money from me by deceit.”

  “A good kid? A megalomaniac, if anything. A bullshitter. A liar. Let’s say even that the story he told you is true, couldn’t he send his mother to a center? He had to send her to a five-star hotel? And at our expense?”

  “I’m astounded, Rachel. Astounded by your insensitivity. Astounded by your sarcasm . . . And let me say, sweetheart, that sometimes your distrust dismays me. Why you obsess about the details without taking into account the scenario.”

  “And, my dear Mr. Scenario, in what way did you give him this money?”

  “Not certainly in cash. I wrote him a check. Something official, in other words. You wouldn’t want me to be taken for a loan shark?”

  “And when is he supposed to make the first payment?”

  “In one month, exactly. To demonstrate his good faith he told me that the first month he’ll pay back a sum amounting to more or less one and a half installments. Calm down, love, I have everything under control. I told you, it’s a straightforward deal.”

  A straightforward deal indeed. Too bad Leo couldn’t know that some time later Walter would publicly charge him with usury. And would reveal to the judge that he had been first blackmailed and then fired by that wretched loan shark. And that to confirm his charge he would hand over to the investigators a receipt signed by Leo certifying that that bastard of a usurer had been repaid a figure fifty per cent larger with respect to the agreed-on installment, taking further advantage of his momentary state of need. A truly unsustainable rate of interest.

  One of the most significant and paradigmatic examples of Leo’s gullibility. But also one of the most spectacular.

  Leo’s problem—in his work as well, both in the hospital and at the university—was that confronted with formalities of a bureaucratic nature he became so dazed that in the end, simply in order to get rid of them, he delegated. Every time someone showed him a document he signed it rapidly, whispering, “You take care of it.” As if speed in removing practical things from before his eyes diminished his responsibility. Like those bulimics who are always on a diet, who eat quickly, under the illusion that that way the organism can’t absorb all the food they’re gorging on, Leo devoted as little time as possible to the paperwork demanded by his profession.

  The worst bureaucratic abominations could happen under his jurisdiction without him even noticing. His attitude in the hospital was similar to that of certain landowners of earlier times: in order not to be troubled and not to concern themselves with things they considered beneath them, they delegated everything to shrewd, crooked agents, only to find themselves later, after generations of dissipation and theft, swindled, with their patrimony almost completely mortgaged. Rachel trembled for her husband’s haplessness, the negligence that was the opposite of what had been instilled in her by a very prudent parent. But the therapeutic brilliance, the successes Leo piled up, the river of money with which he flooded her would not allow her to reproach him as she would have liked to and should have. Although every so often she couldn’t restrain herself and asked him some embarrassing questions about the management of the accounts.

  “Why hasn’t the clinic sent the November bills yet?”

  “How should I know? If only one could work in peace, without all this nonsense!”

  “Will you tell me that you might have lost those bills?” To which he, to cut it short, with the typical arrogance of the moron and out of a desire not to open the Pandora’s box on which he sat his precious behind all day, answered, “Do you think that with all the number of colleagues around to take care of my affairs I should be the one to worry about these things? The bills will go out.”

  I think this picture gives an account of the mental state of anguished questioning that torments Leo, who is still standing there with that envelope in his hand (by now open), in the completely irrational—for now, at least—terror that in a few seconds sinister-looking Swiss policemen will come to arrest him, accusing him treacherously of corruption of minors and who knows what other infamies.

  And yet . . .

  And yet, amid the inner chaos that feeling of excited curiosity advances. Of course, the excitement is linked to the desire that our worst nightmare may end up coming true. But beside this type of insane excitement is another, much more ordinary, that has to do with vanity. Yes, just that. Basically, beyond the artificial barriers erected by the occasion, this whole busines
s can be reduced to a letter that a woman, although very young, has written to a man, although getting on. If we leave aside the age of this woman and this man, forget their place in the world, and disregard the closest family ties, the essence of this reduction is a male and a female. One confronting the other. In that relationship of permanent seduction through which nature perpetuates itself.

  Now, there is no male who doesn’t derive at least a little flattery from rousing the interest of a woman, even if she seems for various reasons most inappropriate. And it must be said that Leo (although he would never admit it) is susceptible to the pleasures of erotic vanity. Rather, I would say that vanity is alive in him with such dominance as to have prevented him, by antiphrasis, from betraying Rachel even once since they were married.

  And I assure you that that sort of faithfulness, in the world Leo lives in and the environment he comes from, is an eccentric rarity. There is no old family friend, not even a colleague at the university or the hospital, who hasn’t embarked on at least a small relationship, or who hasn’t yielded to the call of a little adventure at a conference or a flirtation on the unit. Not Leo Pontecorvo.

  God knows he could have!

  But Leo had always preferred to shake off with style the incomparable erotic advantages that a prominent position in two emblematically promiscuous places like the University and the Hospital brings with it. And yet to be concentrated on his affairs and royally uninterested in all the rest certainly did not prevent him from noticing the sexual interest he was the object of on the part of the brighter students, the more capable nurses, the more enterprising colleagues. And even the mothers of his patients, sometimes, above all when their children were out of danger. And yet to rebuff those advances had never been too difficult.

  He found it gratifying enough to feel how, for many women, his position in society, joined to a robust, youthful body with a few tufts of blue-gray hair on the chest, represented an irresistible carnal provocation. People underestimate the erotic euphoria derived from not giving in to the offers that turn up at random intervals.

  The milieu in which he had grown up (the Jewish fifties, filled with the desire to live) had been too libertine not to have caused in him, by contrast, a profound nausea for flirtations, for dalliances. He detested his colleagues who used their petty power for erotic blackmail. No less than those who wrecked their families to chase some little piece of ass from the suburbs. Just as he deplored those who addressed unpleasant remarks to students or nurses, playing fluently on the ambiguities. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to distinguish himself from that type of male. That was why ignoring any sexual provocation entered into his idea of masculinity. An aesthetic question even before a moral prohibition. But for goodness’ sake! He had only to imagine himself next to a young woman to be attacked by a sense of the ridiculous and to see his fifty-year-old body instantly shrivel.

  Nonetheless, on those occasions when he had received a more or less explicit erotic offer, he never failed, a moment before rejecting it and a second afterward, to experience a subtle pleasure: the joy of feeling that he was still a man so desirable mixed with the pride of remaining faithful to his wife and his principles without too much effort.

  (Even today the human material that inspired his masturbatory activity, moderate but punctual, as in all middle-aged men, was presented to him by the perfumed army of women to whom he had said no.)

  This was the tenor of his feelings, while Leo couldn’t stop turning over and over in his hands the damp, open envelope. He felt excited. Not by the fact that a twelve-year-old had written him a letter (there was nothing desirable in her or any other twelve-year-old). But perhaps by the fact that the twelve years of that girl broadened the range of his virtual hunt. Titillating the idea of omnipotence that devastates the character of many men kissed by success. It was as if Leo were saying: not only nurses, not only residents or students. At this moment of your life you can have them all . . .

  That may be why, having worked up his courage and taken the letter out of the envelope, and having carefully unfolded it, he found himself so disappointed by such a note:

  Monsieur Pontecorvo,

  Je tiens à vous remercier de m’avoir invitée chez vous avec mon Samuel.

  L’amabilité de votre famille rend très agréable notre séjour.

  Cordialement à vous,

  Camilla2

  You didn’t have to speak perfect French to know that the language used by Camilla in her little note would have been more suited to a business communication than to a private message. A bureaucratic French, and so doubly inadequate. Such that the whole thing appeared a pointless, pleonastic formality. Not that Leo had expected a real confession. But at least a thank-you for the way he had taken care of those two rude sons of his. Not to mention the energy and style with which he had saved her life.

  But then why put a letter like that, with no content, no revelation, in with his underwear and socks? Why announce it with a blood-stained panty liner? What the hell did all this mean?

  Finally the idea crossed Leo’s mind that it simply meant nothing. The girl was just a little odd and very mixed up. He was the idiot, to have been swamped by all these useless reflections. What could you expect from someone who spoke to her parents in French but that she would write pointless letters in French? Evidently for her it was a pattern. She took refuge in French whenever she was embarrassed. She had done it that day with her parents, she did it now with him. After he had seen her in such a bad way, so fragile, spluttering . . .

  It was that mixture of disappointment, worry, and frankly a certain relief that led him into the living room, after he got dressed. There was nothing in Camilla’s behavior signaling that something had changed. She was there, as usual dressed in pale clothes, lying on the sofa in front of the fire. The heels of her bare feet dangling off the sofa were slightly flushed by exposure to a fire that had stopped crackling. She raised her head from her book and rested her large eyes on him for a few instants, but immediately immersed them again in her reading. She had brought with her the whole garish company of Little Princes, young Buddhas, Jonathan Seagulls who poison the literary taste of thousands of adolescent readers. That literary trash occupied a royal place on the table next to the sofa.

  She didn’t seem disturbed to find him there. Much less showed signs of a general conversation. Which meant that she didn’t expect a response? Or that it was enough for her to have brought twenty minutes of confusion into the life of an adult? What was it, a joke? Did she want to test him, make fun of him? Everything was possible. And maybe none of what was about to happen would have happened if he had not decided in turn to play.

  When Leo wonders why he did it, why he chose to get on that merry-go-round, he can’t find an adequate answer: only a contradictory catalogue of nebulous retrospective explanations. He acted out of boredom. Or maybe out of disappointment that in Camilla’s first letter there was no sign of what for a few seconds he had been certain of finding there. As a challenge. A challenge fed by the fact that she hadn’t pressed the accelerator as she should have.

  Was it that tiny disappointment that reawakened the libertine instinct kept at bay for decades with hordes of young women at his feet? The fact is that that girl, who wasn’t all there, had somehow succeeded in getting what no one before her had ever got.

  But Leo knows very well that wondering how she succeeded is no less idle than wondering why people get cancer. In nature everything obeys the perverse logic of madness. It’s not only the cells of your prostate or your colon that suddenly go mad, without warning. You, too, go mad.

  And yet before diving into the fire, the cautious Leo had again put fate to the test. On the morning of the fifth day, he had put a letter of response, no less brief and no less pointless than the one written by Camilla, into the same drawer of the same dresser, full of underwear and socks, before going to the ski slopes with the boys.

  A game. Nothing but a game. A small prank in response to a
prank: let’s see if she’s so clever and enterprising she can sneak into my room a second time, and so smart she can guess where I hid the letter. Leo had enjoyed thinking about this. Except that all morning he was in a state of anxiety that Rachel might intercept that letter. And then, yes, he would certainly be in trouble! How would he justify it? How to explain to his wife that he had hidden among the underwear a letter addressed to his son’s girlfriend? Well, some things are simply unjustifiable.

  All right, there is nothing in that letter. But the sole fact of writing it, the sole fact of having conceived of writing it, and then having hidden it . . . well, that already makes you a sick and irrational man.

  That’s how Leo was transforming the fifth day’s skiing into a nightmare. A real pity, given all that splendid fresh, swishing snow under his skis, the magnificent sun, the sky enameled with a fierce cobalt. It wasn’t like him not to enjoy the omelette and the roast potatoes. His only racking desire was to go home and see what had happened to that letter. To check if it was still there. I swear that if I find it there, that disgusting letter, I’ll burn it, along with this whole ridiculous business I’ve let myself be dragged into.

  He nearly broke a leg going down the valley in a crouch, imitating the boys, forgetting that a man of his build can reach really dangerous speeds. And all because he was bursting to find out as soon as possible if someone, whether Rachel or Camilla, had found the letter, or if it was still there.

  Not to mention speeding in the car over the icy asphalt, on his feet only his wet socks, since, in the urgency of the moment, he hadn’t even put on his soft after-ski shoes.

  Then, having parked in front of the chalet, he affected composure. He took his sneakers out of the trunk, put them on, and with his heart in his throat went into the house.

  Finding it silent and in disarray had really given him a shock. Where had the two of them gone? It was the first time they hadn’t been there. Where had they run off to? And why was the house still a mess? Leo hurried to his room. He opened the drawer. The envelope wasn’t there. Someone had taken it.