Persecution (9781609458744)

by Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)

  The door that opened and the demeanor of the two women (a woman and a girl who, to judge from their slender build and the look of friendly complicity that animated them, might be taken for mother and daughter, or anyway aunt and niece) put an end to the two most frightening hours of his life. He had only to look at them—bright, tired, happy—to understand that, whichever of the two had found the letter, he had nothing to worry about. And yet he had been in such a state of anxious prostration that he couldn’t help attacking them heatedly:

  “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Are you crazy? What kind of talk is that? Forgive him, Camilla, my husband never expresses himself like that unless he’s really angry. We just have to find out why he’s so angry.”

  “I’m not angry. I was just worried. I come home, I don’t find you. Everything is a mess. After what happened to Camilla last night. I was thinking the worst.”

  “You’re right, sweetheart. It’s that Camilla suddenly wanted to go out this morning. She seemed so happy. She asked if I’d go for a walk. And you know she never asks for anything. So we took the bus to Crans and did a little shopping, like two real ladies. That’s all. By the way, do you like these?” And she took out of a bag two wool turtlenecks, one blue, the other rust-colored: “This is for Fili and this for Semi.”

  It was as if in half a day of shopping all the distrust that Rachel felt for Camilla had dissipated. Now look at them, they seem like the best friends in the world. That complicity lasted for the whole afternoon. This time, Camilla helped Rachel make dinner. And Leo, as he piled logs on the hearth to light the fire, heard them laughing like two schoolgirls. But what had happened to the letter? For a second he wondered if by chance Rachel, knowing him so well, had contributed to a scene that at that moment seemed to Leo more a joke. But no. Rachel didn’t make jokes like that. On the other hand Leo regretted that Camilla had seen him so beside himself. That a man of his age and position had let himself go like that: that was really undignified. He felt ridiculous. This was something that had been happening more and more often lately. And he didn’t like it.

  All right, it’s time to put an end to this sordid business. That little sociopath sent me a ridiculous letter, I thanked her, adhering to her code (ridiculous) of behavior. Enough now. The matter ends here. My friend, you’ve simply found a way of torturing yourself a little with your paranoias. This, too, is classic. Now let’s retake possession of our life. At this point she certainly won’t respond.

  Dear Leo,

  You don’t know how angry it makes me to see you so sad with your wife. I thought my father was the saddest man in the world. But knowing you I’ve seen that there’s something worse. So I want to save you. Save you from the revolting mess you live in. It’s hard to tell you what I feel. But it’s the most special feeling I’ve ever felt since the beginning of my life. I love you. And now I love you more because I know you love me. I’ve known it for a long time. That day in the mountains I couldn’t believe that you answered me. But when I saw your letter I said to myself, “He loves you.” And then I understood that I had to help you at all costs. Now, at the age of twelve (almost thirteen), I understand what I have to do in my life. I have to help you get out of that marriage.

  With all my heart,

  Camilla

  “I have to help you get out of that marriage”?

  And God only knows how she would manage it! Yes, Camilla would succeed in the greatest, most useful, and destructive of undertakings: removing Leo Pontecorvo from the marriage he had always wanted to be in; and she would succeed in the ridiculous and paradoxical form that seemed to her most congenial. With those mawkishly and threateningly ungrammatical letters. By which Leo’s life was invaded in the weeks following their return from the mountains, as if by an avalanche. Those increasingly long letters, increasingly passionate and increasingly resentful that awaited him every day in the dressing room, in the underwear drawer (the young lady was not then so original as she thought was), and that unfailingly shook him with nausea. Like the example I gave a few lines above: the fifteenth letter in all and the eighth after the return from Anzère.

  Months of words, months of emphatic phrases, months of limping syntax and shallow vocabulary, in which Camilla gave wonderful proof of how her brain had cut off every relation with the universe. Of how the dear old concept called “actual facts” in her hands was inverted to the point of losing all meaning.

  It was then, in close contact with that verbose epistolary garbage, that Leo became conscious of the intolerable isolation in which he was floundering, in which we all flounder. It was then that he discovered that his absolute solitude was dictated by the impossibility of revealing to anyone the grotesque comedy of which he was the reluctant not to mention clandestine co-protagonist. He was already in a situation in which he was unable to tell anyone that he had lost control, that something unbelievable was happening to him and he could do nothing about it. There existed no confidant, no psychotherapist, no rabbi to whom he could explain such a story.

  The most loved and protective person in his life—that is, Rachel, the woman who had perfectly replaced his mother—was also the last being in the world he could tell. If he had, he would have had to explain too many inexplicable things. Above all, why he hadn’t told her everything when that first letter arrived? And then what had induced him to answer it and to continue to do so the next times, when the whole business was taking an increasingly monstrous turn? He would have had to explain to her how a child had managed to checkmate a man like him. And how a man like him had let himself be conned by a child. How he could have let himself be intimidated and terrorized in that way. He would have had to explain why under close analysis the denials that he continued to present to Camilla would appear on the page so affected and irresolute. He would have had to say to his wife that the reason he had not taken that grotesque little redhead aside and said to her, “Listen, honey, you’ve been a pain in the ass. Don’t you dare put your crazy letters in with my underwear ever again, and now get out of my house forever, out of my life and my family’s life” was his lack of courage, of far-sightedness, of virility, of moral strength, of initiative, of trust in his neighbor, and on and on. And that it was precisely the lack of these qualities, qualities that a man of his age and his background should have possessed, which had led him to respond, point by point, to Camilla’s letters with messages in which he very gently ordered her (rather, entreated her) to stop.

  And at that point he would have had to explain to Rachel that it was precisely that meek and conciliating attitude which had provided Camilla with the evidence demonstrating the existence between them of something that in reality had never existed. Expressions like: “It has to stop here”; “What’s been has been”; “We have to return to our lives” sounded like an implicit admission that there had been something between them.

  Well, Leo would have had to explain to Rachel that he had used that tone and had had recourse to such expressions just to satisfy her. Because he was afraid of her. Because he had seen how furious Camilla got whenever he denied that there had been something between them. Maybe—he had thought irresponsibly—if I indulge her a little, if I explain that I’m sorry, it will be easier to get her to stop bothering me. But, naturally, allowing her to extort the concession that there had been a kind of semi-relationship between them had simply confirmed to future readers of those letters that he had had a passionate love affair with a twelve-year-old, who was, besides, the girlfriend (in the way you become attached at that age) of his younger son.

  The trouble is that when he realized what was happening it was already too late. That is to say that the “too late” had arrived very quickly. That girl already had the dozen letters that could trap him. Letters in which he asked her to cut off a relationship. But in which he did not dare to remind the recipient that that “relationship” had existed only in her psychopathic little head. There, and, now, on the page as well.

  As in those fatal dise
ases that go into remission, simulating improvement, just before killing you, Leo had occasion to nourish an unreasonable hope, which deluded him that the situation was resolving itself.

  It came out of terrible months. For the first time, on the professional front as well things were not functioning as they should. The tax authorities, through avenging angels dressed in gray, were doing an audit on the Anima Mundi, the private clinic where Leo had his pediatric office. And this had filled him with an anxiety that by now, knowing him, you will be able to imagine.

  On the other side, the family idyll in which he had always found relief from his professional troubles seemed a distant memory. There was almost no evening when his torturer wasn’t at dinner. That little whore had insinuated herself into their family so deviously. She was always following Rachel. It seemed that, having overcome Rachel’s distrust, she had really managed to win her over. Leo knew how much Rachel had wanted a girl. There, now she had her girl.

  Every night Leo hoped that there would not be a letter waiting for him. Every night he was disappointed. Now he didn’t even read them. He opened them, was gripped by the nausea that madness and lying bring, skimmed a few lines, and then hid them in the drawer in his study. He locked them there and good night.

  He had stopped answering her: his last, desperate move to free himself from that situation. Maybe, no longer finding replies, Camilla would get tired. Considering the number of letters he received in the days following his resolution not to reply, one might say that the only result of that punitive measure had been to infuriate her. The frequency of the letters was in itself a threat: for some time Leo had been reading only the first three lines before hiding them in the drawer in his study. Three lines were now sufficient for him to understand the general tone. And that unreasonable number of letters appeared definitely threatening.

  Until the last letter arrived. So it proclaimed on the envelope: Last Letter. Only for that reason had Leo read it to the end. At first he had looked at it with real fear. What did it mean that it was the last letter? Had she got the message: there was nothing more to do? The madness had to stop here? Or otherwise, after that letter, she would carry out an extreme act intended to destroy the lives of them all? Leo had fiddled with envelope for several hours. Finally, at three in the morning, in the bathroom, trembling and bathed in sweat, he had opened it.

  And here was yet another delirious, senseless, grotesquely romantic letter, in which Camilla, after expressing a tortured farewell, made a last request, which at first appeared to him reasonable.

  The girl wished to have her letters back. Then she would disappear, along with her grief. She would leave Samuel and would vanish from their lives. She would relieve that family, which had given her so much, from the weight of her presence. The only condition she imposed was that: to have back the concrete symbol of her love and suffering. Those letters.

  The thing appeared extraordinarily reasonable to him. On the fifth consecutive rereading of Camilla’s last letter (last! Get it? Thank heaven), he felt he was, after so long, a free man. Free to reappropriate his life and make of it what he wanted without having to take account of that little madwoman. He read the last four words (written in French, naturally)—Adieu, mon ange adoré—and he couldn’t help laughing. The indulgence of the triumphant.

  Thus—impelled by the usual insane ingenuousness, by irreproachable candor—Leo gave back to his tormentor the only evidence of his condition as a victim of blackmail and persecution. And he had given it back without thinking that a responsible man, before restoring those letters, would at least have had the wit to photocopy them. Without thinking (in spite of the fact that the elements of the thought were all within reach, like one of those elementary puzzles for children), I was saying, without thinking that his correspondence with Camilla could one day reappear in his life, with a power of plausibility in inverse proportion to the real unfolding of the facts. Without thinking of the possibility that she (or her easily manipulated father) would deliver it to the authorities and the newspapers, in a speciously mutilated version: from that substantial file they would be able to leave out (“to protect the identity and the feelings of a criminally corrupted minor,” the noted journalist of the noted weekly who was covering the noted “Pontecorvo affair” would certainly write) all Camilla’s letters, and all those in which Leo sought to free himself from the grip of that obsession.

  At that point, after such purposeful mutilation, there would survive of the original correspondence only the disgusting pet phrases “my little one,” and “dear girl,” with which poor Professor Pontecorvo had tried to flatter his persecutor.

  Phrases that, removed from the original context, made a really nasty impression.

  But these are only hypotheses made (if retroactively) by the narrator of this story. Leo doesn’t know anything.

  Hidden in his bunker for almost three days now, like a Mafioso, locked up in the secrets of his own castle like a deposed monarch, he doesn’t know, nor can he know, what is happening outside or what is about to happen (of course, he doesn’t even know what’s happening on the floor above). He doesn’t know because no one comes to call him, or to get him. He has only the vague information given by the TV news. He has only that gratuitous and generic bomb. He can’t know anything else. He doesn’t want to know anything else.

  He imagines that outside the walls of his catacomb is the inferno. That for him, now, the world is a hostile place. He imagines that the man accused of tax fraud, private interest in official acts, embezzlement, loan sharking will, in the light of what is announced as a new, horrible accusation, appear even more obscene.

  What remains to him—while his eyes are wounded by the bloody light of sunset, and the specter of another sleepless night materializes—is the ninety square meters of the cellar. In the end, carelessness, fear, neurosis, irresponsibility have been punished. Leo should be angry. Shout his innocence to the universe.

  But he’s paralyzed. He wasn’t brought up to resentment. He’s not equipped for that type of aggressiveness, he’s unfit for war. He’s like those center forwards who score goals by the handful in easy games but, catapulted into difficult matches, into more violent battles, disappear into the cocoon of their own timidity. He is the classic type who succumbs.

  This drives him on to lofty thoughts. He seems to understand what he always said he couldn’t understand: the submissive attitude of so many of his co-religionists who, several decades ago, let themselves be loaded onto freight cars without blinking. Let themselves be carried to distant, frozen lands, to be murdered like mice. Yes, there isn’t much left for him now except to be murdered. Without forgetting, however, that the three people who were closest to him, by whom he always felt protected, and whom he, in his way, loved more than anything, overwhelming them with kindness and offering them the comfort of a life of opportunity, are now his worst enemies.

  2 I wish to thank you for inviting me to your house with my Samuel. The kindness of your family has made our stay very pleasant. Cordially yours, Camilla

  PART III

  But, darling, I thought Rabbi Perugia taught you that a twelve-year-old cunt isn’t kosher.”

  An inappropriate remark addressed to a man devastated by anxiety and insomnia, his blood vessels saturated with drugs he has self-prescribed, and Leo has to repress a gesture of contempt, not to mention a desire to turn on his heels and leave. He doesn’t do it because he can’t do it: he’s the one who asked for this appointment. He’s the one who needs it.

  And he doesn’t run because (although he won’t admit it immediately) that phrase carries a whiff of old times, and, after an instant’s restraint, he can only give in to its bracing effect. He feels a burning heat rise up inside to free his guts, which for days have been clamped in a steel vise. A beginning of gastric release that fills him with an unhoped-for peace, and is followed by an immediate awareness: it’s been days since he has put anything in his mouth, since he closed his eyes, since his body has been ill.
And in that same instant Leo realizes how important and wonderful it is for a man to be able to eat, sleep, defecate with ease.

  A twelve-year-old cunt isn’t kosher?

  Just the sort of creative cynicism (and in essence tender and tough) into whose secrets Herrera Del Monte initiated him, when they were the worst-matched pair of friends in the little gang enrolled in Rabbi Perugia’s bar-mitzvah preparation course, in the early fifties.

  Not coincidentally is it Herrera Del Monte who comes out with such a vulgarity. Leo went to see him in his office. Importantly spread out over two adjacent apartments on the top floor of a pink stuccoed building, on the most glorious stretch of Via Veneto—the Fellinian strip of sidewalk that divides the Café de Paris from Harry’s Bar.

  Finally, after a short wait, Leo was led into the dark cave where Herrera, his childhood friend, spends most of his days, from eight in the morning till ten at night, with the sole purpose of getting men whose power is equal only to the degree of their corruption and despicableness out of trouble.

  And there he was, behind the enormous glass desk, neurotically neat and sparkling, after thirty-five years exactly like the stocky kid whose almost dwarf-like stature had been the distinguishing mark of the perfect martyr to the proverbial meanness of twelve-year-olds: the mirror image of the successful boy, at that time cheerfully embodied by the radiant and long-limbed Leo.

  The long-ago years of early adolescence, when physical appearance is all. When the world, in its beginnings, still seems divided between gods and pariahs. When social hierarchies are decided by the sweetness of a pair of eyes and the gracefulness of high cheekbones rather than by any moral credential or intellectual merit. The age when appearance says of you everything that others want to know. And of course the relationship between him and Herrera was based on that treacherous aesthetic opposition: the attractiveness of the one who asks nothing better than to be reflected in the ugliness of the other.