Girls found his ugliness revolting, because it was accompanied by the mad hygienic neglect that (who knows why) many boys not favored by nature indulge in (as if to give artistic perfection to their own repulsiveness). But, in spite of everything, Herrera had Leo. Herrera, like those who are poor in spirit but fervently religious, rejoiced in Leo, obtaining in exchange from his idolized friend the kindly, disdainful benevolence that is granted to followers. This at least was how it looked from the outside. From the inside things worked differently. Leo admired the dwarf’s ability to be sarcastic about anything. To illuminate the dark side of existence. From the height of his physical attractiveness, Leo was able to intuit that the iconoclastic spirit he so admired in his friend was the effect of a life spent continually parrying the blows that his physical repugnance provoked.
Blows that fell on a being who was extremely gifted intellectually, with a sensibility, so to speak, sharpened by a mother as fierce and intelligent as her son.
If from a mother you seek protection and hypocrisy, then beware of one like Maria Del Monte. She hid nothing from her son. Rather, she never stopped reminding him that everything would be more difficult for him than for anyone else. So she had risked destroying Herrera’s life. By hiding nothing from him. Developing in him the tragic sense of his own inadequacy. Cultivating in her only son, whom she pretended not to be proud of at all, the preventive disappointment that in fact Herrera set up as a bulwark in confronting any adversity. Here’s how, by means of a Spartan upbringing, Signora Del Monte had made a real hardass of her son.
Leo loved to hear his friend talk about his mother. Because he managed to do it in the irreverent and at the same time sorrowful way in which Leo would have liked to speak of his.
“Mine is the only case of Oedipus unrequited,” Herrera said. “I love that woman to die for, and she, well, forget it . . . ”
“In what sense?” Leo asked.
“You know why she called me Herrera?”
“Why?”
“Not certainly because she loves soccer or Balzac. That is, my mother doesn’t give a fuck about soccer or Balzac. She did it in honor of my speech defect, my bloody French ‘r’s. She gave me the first name that popped into her head with at least three ‘r’s in it. The bitch obviously wanted her son to find even the pronunciation of his own name to be an embarrassing experience.”
“Come on! How could she know that you’d have the French ‘r’?”
“Statistical calculation. Genetic probability. Darwin and all that other nonsense. My father has it, my grandfather had it. In other words, it was likely that I would, too . . . And then, do you believe it? My little witch has divining skills,” Herrera added, with unusual tenderness. “And now here it is, Herrera Del Monte, a name worthy of an enemy of Zorro!”
And he’d conclude with a sentence like “If that woman loved me a quarter as much as I love her . . . well, it would be enough for me!”
Leo knew that Signora Del Monte didn’t hate her son at all. The punishments and nastiness that objectively she inflicted on him derived from a perverse (and very Jewish) conception of pedagogy that could be summed up in a simple phrase: “Stay calm, my boy, there is no injustice that the world will one day inflict on you that your mammina hasn’t already.”
You, too, can see how the comment on the presumed passion of Leo for the twelve-year-old cunt is perfectly in line with the spirit of the long-ago days when Herrera taught him that if there’s one thing that doesn’t deserve to be respected, well, it’s your personal tragedy. And yet the same comment is completely indifferent to the professional delicacy that an important lawyer should use toward those who show up in his office as future clients.
And Leo wonders if that irreverence, which has opened an unexpected crack in his already fissured spirit, is part of a shrewd strategy, the product of careful reflection. Perhaps Herrera, with keen intuition, has understood that his old friend, at least in this area, doesn’t need a professional consultation, or even some phrase suitable for the occasion, much less the self-serving sympathy that some might have shown him at every turn in recent weeks. And he has probably also cornered the market in reproaches and insults.
And maybe, considering the inferno that the life of his onetime hero must have lately become, Herrera wanted to submerge him in the moral atmosphere of the past. Drag him far away, to a world where to be Leo Pontecorvo was a good thing. To a time when Leo was decidedly at his ease in the role of himself. When Leo was a happy kid, hugely entertained by the nihilistic remarks of his unhappy friend. Evidently Herrera hasn’t lost the gift. Which consists in pleasing Leo by means that are not at all pleasant. In fact, he has really refined that talent, making it a vital tool of his profession. The art of reading inside you. Of understanding what you need even before you understand it. And serving it to you with coarse arrogance.
Suddenly Leo is glad he came to see Herrera. After so many wrong things, here’s one right. He hesitated far too long before turning to his old friend. He had been thinking about it for weeks. Even before he was hit by cyclone Camilla. Becoming more and more convinced of what Rachel had explained from the start: being a client of the same law firm that represented the hospital was suicidal. And now, although the girl’s defamatory slander has not yet produced any reaction, Leo is sure that something is about to happen. Soon the prosecutor’s office will be in touch. The thing is too gross for something not to happen. And this time he has to be prepared. He needs a specialist in dirt: someone tough, fierce, implacable. And it so happens that Herrera Del Monte is one of the most established and controversial criminal lawyers in the city. A real courtroom shark, whom Leo’s more enlightened friends, the snooty type, despise apocalyptically. As if he were a kind of sewer capable of receiving, disinfecting, recycling, and putting back in circulation all the feces in the country.
Several times in the thirty-five years that have now passed since his bar mitzvah, Leo has chanced to run into his friend’s public exploits. Once, in the dentist’s waiting room, he was distractedly leafing through one of those glossy women’s magazines when suddenly he found himself facing, in the centerfold, a very grainy photograph that showed his friend at the beach.
Herrera looked furious. A hairy whitish gnome with an adorable potbelly. His hair was the same: uncombed and almost too black (like the artificial hair of a toupee). The photographer had caught him spreading lotion on a television starlet who at the moment was the desired prey of the paparazzi, and who that summer was consorting with, according to the caption, the “famous Roman criminal lawyer.” Yes, Herrera seemed really furious. One hand was busy spreading the lotion and the other inveighing against those goddam busybodies. And Leo couldn’t help laughing. God only knew how well he was acquainted with the fury of that silly dwarf. His bursts of anger. It seemed to him that he could hear Herrera’s voice at the moment of the click: harsh, croaking, trembling with anger. Maybe—Leo had thought with the good will of another era—the anger had to do with the squalor in which he felt implicated. The dwarf and the chorus girl. Beauty and the Beast. Herrera had too much good taste and self-awareness not to know that that scene on the beach was repulsive. The fact is that, although Herrera had pursued, as a sort of intellectual vocation and a protest against the Heavenly Father, all that seemed to him eccentric and original, evidently he couldn’t resist the banality of lusting after those big blond ibexes. Six-foot-tall giraffes who should have compensated for his shortness, but instead only emphasized it grotesquely.
In the dentist’s waiting room Leo had thought back to how his friendship with Herrera Del Monte had been destroyed by one of those Valkyries. The reason that the memory of their break was still so vivid in Leo, after many years, was a result of the mortifying astonishment with which he had seen a decades-long alliance crumble because of a little business that hardly deserved mention, but instead . . .
No, Leo hadn’t forgotten that September Sunday. How could he forget? It must have been in the mid-fifties. They had
just enrolled in the university. As on all Sundays when Lazio was playing at home, Leo had showed up at the Del Montes’ elegant apartment, at 15 Piazza Barberini, on the seat of his metallic-gray Vespa, and waited for his friend to come down. Leo’s outfit was the usual: the same good-luck jeans and the same good-luck blue sweater that he had been wearing since the day when, years before, his friend Herrera had initiated him, in his own particular fashion, into the absurd torments of the soccer fan.
Herrera had come out of the entrance without his usual quickness and bounce. It was the first Sunday of the championship. Mid-September. The two friends had been anticipating it since the start of summer, and Leo would have expected greater enthusiasm. Instead Herrera seemed upset. Leo also noticed that his own tan made Herrera look, if possible, even more like a fairy-tale character than usual. His dumpling-shaped red nose gave him a striking resemblance to Grumpy, one of the seven dwarves. A Grumpy who, at least on that day, seemed to have no wish to grumble. On the trip to the stadium, he had kept to himself. He had let himself be driven without opening his mouth.
Herrera’s behavior once they reached their usual place in the stands was no less indecipherable. He was silent. He was gloomy. And the match on the program that day—Lazio-Naples—should have kindled his competitive ardor. Herrera hated the Neapolitans. To tell the truth he also hated the Florentines. Not to mention the Milanese and the Juventists. If you thought about it, Herrera hated them all. And he had taught his friend to do likewise, explaining to him that sports fandom is, above all, a matter of hatreds. That’s why Leo would have expected the usual behavior: a range of gratuitous insults addressed to the opposing players but also to those on his own team, the usual stream of floridly scurrilous remarks, veins swollen and arms waving. Instead nothing. He had sat through that sad match without opening his mouth. Only on the way home on the Vespa had he let out:
“I think I’m in love.”
Herrera Del Monte in love? But come on, does that make any sense? Leo had never known him to gush over anyone. For a long time Leo had doubted that his friend was even interested. He changed his mind when Herrera gave him some photographs of bare-breasted women:
“I’m entrusting them to you, my friend: it’s the best that life has given me.”
Herrera the wanker. Herrera the self-ironic masturbator. This made sense. Herrera the misogynist. This was in the order of things. Not Herrera in love. Not Herrera tight-lipped and sappy, saying things like “I think I’m in love.”
So that Leo couldn’t find the right thing to say, as if the other had just confessed he had a fatal illness.
“My mother has naturally blessed her.”
“What?”
“When she’s in a bad mood she calls her the shiksa. If she’s in a good mood she calls her the haver. In her moments of happiness she’s ‘your German.’ She says she goes out with me because of our money. And many other unpleasant things which I prefer not to mention . . . ”
“Where did you meet her?”
“In the mountains. She works in a shop, you know those local emporiums that sell everything. Newspapers, cigarettes, toys, brooms . . . Next week she’s coming here by train. My mother said I must not bring her home. That I must not name her. I could care less about naming her in front of her! Just think, she asked my father to cut off my money until she leaves and I come to my senses. If it were up to her I’d be masturbating until I retire. If it were up to her.”
That’s the Herrera of yesteryear. He had just announced that there was a woman in his life, and he continued to rant about his mother and his jerking off.
“And your father?”
“My father, poor man, what can he do? He’s at the mercy. An order from the matriarch is never under any circumstances discussed . . . Well, in short, the point is . . . I wanted to ask you for a small loan. I’ll pay it back as soon as possible and I promise that in exchange one of the nights she’s here I’ll introduce you.”
There. It wasn’t comments that Herrera needed. He wanted a small loan.
“Will you at least tell me what her name is?”
“Valeria. Her name is Valeria.”
The break between the two friends occurred exactly two weeks later.
And it all happened rapidly. They were on the Vespa, returning from the usual game. Not even the defeat of Lazio that had just taken place before their eyes could explain Herrera’s dark mood. In other words, what was going on? Where was his Herrera? What had they done with him? There was not a trace of energy in him, as if they had dried him up. What was the matter? The fight between his mother and Valeria? This was really intolerable. The most stoic creature Leo had ever met was finally revealing his breaking point? The only thing a man like that couldn’t bear was the atavistic clash between the rights of his mother and those of Eros? And why was Herrera so unfriendly toward him? Why, sitting there on the Vespa, didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he show off with one of those pyrotechnic invectives against defeated Lazio or his meddling mother? Why didn’t he indulge in one of those orations that would one day surely make him a better lawyer than his father?
But just as Leo was thinking these things about his friend, the other had stung him with the most absurd statement. Herrera had got off the Vespa, in front of the entrance to his building, and, just like that, in passing, as he repaid the loan, had whispered, “I don’t want to see you anymore,” in the same tone in which he might have said “See you tomorrow” or “Call you later.”
Leo had barely managed to ask, “Why?”
“Because I’ve decided.”
“Sorry, but what have I done to you?”
“You haven’t done anything. Not deliberately. But you’ve done a lot of things maybe without realizing it. Maybe by accident. Because you couldn’t do otherwise. And that is the most serious thing. And that’s why I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Leo was incredulous. He couldn’t say a word. He was offended. And if he hadn’t been so disconcerted he would have been angry. And Herrera no less: all red, flushed, as if he were about to explode. As if that painful conversation were wearing him out. He was ending things there. Period. He had nothing to explain. He wanted only to go.
“Come on, don’t be an imbecile. I understand that something happened. But why should I have to pay for your bad mood? I think I deserve a decent explanation. At least tell me what happened!”
Leo was truly stunned. And he was also upset. Never in his life had anyone dropped him like that. He didn’t know what it meant to be dropped. That was why he was upset. And then he was irritated by the words he was uttering, too similar to those of a man who asks a woman who has just dumped him for the reasons. If he thought about it his state of mind was not so different from that of a husband abandoned without warning and without explanation.
And Herrera had only exacerbated that feeling of painful dismay with another of those generic and oracular utterances: “You know, that was really terrible the other night.” And he had said it with such wretched misery.
The other night? What had happened the other night? Then a vague memory emerged, something uncertain and wavering like a drunk man walking. And in fact the evening when Herrera introduced Valeria to him, Leo had consumed more alcohol than usual and more than was necessary. Maybe in that alcoholic altered state he had done something inappropriate? But now, no matter how hard he tried to remember, he was almost positive that he had maintained a standard of behavior well above the threshold of decorum.
Of course, he had been astonished by that large garish girl. With her martial tone of voice and her Trentino accent. He had had to control himself in order not to laugh at the sight of the dwarf next to that Viking. A circus scene. But he was certain, good Lord, that he hadn’t laughed. That he hadn’t let out any potentially outrageous thought. He had behaved very well. He had drunk only a little. And he had also talked a lot. Yes, this, too, he remembered. Just as he remembered Valeria’s eyes. Valeria’s eyes that were drinking in his words, an
d Herrera sitting silent in a corner.
The sense of inadequacy. The sensation of being unable to compete with a friend so handsome, so loquacious, so capable of being in the world. Was that the point? Was that the reason Herrera was cutting him off, like a maid caught in the act of stealing? Certainly that was it. Leo suddenly remembered the vague sense of guilt that had come over him, at the end of the evening, a moment before they parted, when, transformed by the alcohol and his loose tongue, he had told Valeria a stupid little story that he should have kept to himself. About the time he had bought cigarettes for Herrera and the cashier had said, “Aren’t you ashamed to be buying cigarettes for your son?” Lord, how Valeria had laughed. Frighteningly. Lord, how Herrera hadn’t laughed. No less frighteningly. Why had he told such a stupid story? It’s true, it was amusing when the two of them recalled it. But to tell it to Herrera’s girlfriend, Herrera’s first girlfriend, that was intolerable. Herrera’s face at that moment! It expressed such humiliation. Such complete shame and disbelief.
Leo was now thinking back to that face, after Herrera had said, “You know, that was really terrible the other night . . . ”
And at that instant Leo understood why when Herrera was with him he was always so amusing, so full of interest, and why, instead, in the presence of others (especially of the female sex) he withdrew into a shell of hostile awkwardness. It was a matter of shame. He was ashamed of being what he was. Shame followed him everywhere. He was that shame. Was it possible that Leo understood it only now? They had known each other for so long. Their parents had been friends forever. And he understood him only now. And so why was he astonished that his friend cast him off without explanations? There was nothing surprising about it. And above all there was nothing to explain. It had all been there, for years, within reach. He had only to pay attention. His own fascinating presence made the shame of being Herrera Del Monte all the more bitter.
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