Persecution (9781609458744)

by Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)

  How could he not have thought of it before? How difficult, how terrible to live that shame. You could never relax. There was not a single being on the planet who would not look at you with disbelief and scorn.

  From then on, starting that Sunday, outside of public or social occasions, they hadn’t met. So that day at the dentist, seeing the picture of Herrera in the women’s magazine, seeing his friend, older but still full of rage, Leo had smiled tenderly. It’s still him, he had thought first: a mixture of shame and revenge. Assessing the anger with which Herrera was chasing off the photographers, Leo had thought, You haven’t changed a bit, my friend. You got everything you wanted. You’re rich as Croesus. You’re the most talented and controversial lawyer in Italy. You can fuck all the Valkyries you want. But that shame—the shame of being Herrera Del Monte—well, that certainly has not passed.

  It was natural, then, that Leo, at the greatest impasse of his existence, should think of Herrera. Herrera was what he needed. Not only someone who could help him out of his troubles but the only one who could understand Leo’s state. A true master of shame. A world-class expert.

  Everyone had abandoned him. But Herrera would support him. Because he knew what it means not to be able to look up out of fear of seeing depicted in the eyes of a stranger all the disgust that the sight of you provokes in others.

  In short, for days Leo had been pondering the idea of going to see him. Asking him for help. If he hadn’t done it from the start it was because of his usual sloth, embittered by the wretchedness in which he was living. Now that his wife had stopped helping him, now that Rachel had abandoned him, now that she behaved as if he didn’t exist, now that he was living in that sort of bunker lined with records, books, and memories, Professor Pontecorvo was adrift.

  If a serious and deplorable event hadn’t taken place, Leo wouldn’t have called the Del Monte office, or made an appointment with Herrera, or found the strength to get in his car to visit him in his bunker on a hazy, hot Via Veneto.

  Just that morning Camilla’s father had appeared at the gate of the Pontecorvo house. Along with his wife and the beloved .9-caliber Beretta he had bought for the protection of his shops. The idea was to empty the entire cartridge into that dickhead. And do it openly. In the early light of dawn, to imprint his revenge with Homeric vigor. Premeditated murder? Jail? Life in prison? Kill an unarmed man? Kill him driven by vague, generic accusations, still to be verified? And then deliver himself to the police? Or, in the manner of certain serial killers, take his own life right after shouting “You’ll never get me!”? Why not? There are worse things in life. Like leaving that pig unpunished. They still haven’t arrested him. What a shitty country! Some pointed out that Leo no longer left his house. Big deal, they can all stay shut up in that palace!

  For days Camilla’s father had been going around in a rage, saying that pig would have to pay. As if the pretentious and somewhat exhibitionistic indignation typical of certain uneducated and excessively virile men had lodged in him. This pushed him to take refuge in a sampling of rash and melodramatic statements, like “I want to see him dead!”; “Hanging from a hook at the butcher’s like a side of beef”; “For certain crimes we need the electric chair”; “The thing you can’t forgive is the betrayal of trust”; “It’s a disease”; “If I just think of my child . . . ” and so on. The truth is that Camilla’s father couldn’t wait to show off in front of his adored daughter, who for too long now had despised and rejected him.

  So there he was, engaged in his sordid show. First he had tried the intercom, and then he had begun to shout: “Come on out, dickhead. Out! Try to get out . . . I’m waiting for you and I’ll show you . . . ”

  And Leo, no less inclined to melodramatic gestures in those days, didn’t make him wait. He asked nothing better than to do something reckless after yet another sleepless night. So he appeared in T-shirt and boxers before that man who was preparing to be his murderer.

  This was the unseemly picture that was served for breakfast to the extremely seemly neighbor: an exceptionally tanned man with long red hair holding a gun, and an unrecognizable Professor Pontecorvo in a state of undress.

  The obvious loss of weight and an unkempt beard made him appear even lankier, and even more like a penitent character from an El Greco painting. Written on his face is: “Shoot. Please. Shoot, what are you waiting for? It’s what everyone wants. And what we want.” And, to be even clearer, Leo goes down on his knees. In front of his executioner he kneels. And not with the gesture of one who asks for mercy but with the self-possessed, compliant, and impatient motion of the man condemned to death who asks only to get it over with as soon as possible. The polite and implacable gesture of one who is ready for martyrdom.

  The ironic part is that Leo chose to kneel down on the same narrow strip of earth where, not so many months earlier, at the end of Samuel’s birthday party, he had welcomed Camilla’s parents: when he had ordered them to stand still so that he could photograph them. Just like that, Leo kneels in the same place where, in his time, he was able to display the benevolent sense of superiority induced by the sight of those two embarrassed boors. Now the situation is definitely reversed, and all to his disadvantage. Now it’s he who has to be ashamed. Now it’s he who’s at their mercy. Now he’s the helpless one. With the same politeness with which they made themselves available to his camera, he makes himself available to their gun. But it’s one thing to photograph someone, it’s another to shoot him. This banal observation explains why that lout can’t do it. Why he can’t do what he came here to do. Why he can’t shoot.

  Demoralized by that painful docility, astonished by that Japanese-style courage, or suddenly aware of the consequences of such an act performed in front of such a numerous audience, he lowers the weapon; his cheeks are streaked with tears, and he begins to whimper like a child. Mumbling his words. And after him his wife, too, begins to sob: “Please, dear, let’s go, leave him alone . . . please, sweetheart, it’s no use . . . don’t you see what sort of worm . . . don’t you see, love . . . ”

  And then Leo weeps, too. No longer on his knees but on all fours. He weeps. And he doesn’t even know why. Until that moment he had managed not to (except in sleep), not in front of his family or in the prostrate solitude in which he spends his days. But now yes, now that they’re all watching, he manages to cry. As when he was a child and before starting to cry he would wait till his mother was there, so she could comfort him.

  The contagious collective weeping spares only Filippo and Samuel, who are watching the scene from behind the French window that opens onto the garden. Seeing them so catatonic, close together, almost embracing, as if to give themselves courage, one would say that they are ready to witness the execution of their father.

  “Do you know your father is a pig? Do you know it or not? If you don’t know it I’m telling you! You, Samuel, you know your father is a pig? You know what he did to me? What he did to us?” Thus the father of Camilla to the Pontecorvo boys.

  Until, collapsing with weariness, he gets in the car, escorted by his wife, who is sobbing even harder, and disappears into the rosy air of morning.

  So it was after this trauma that Leo had found the courage to pick up the receiver, dial the number of his old friend’s office, and ask for an appointment. To hear him say:

  “About time! I thought you’d never call,” in the familiar and slightly resentful tone of a friend you usually see frequently but whom you’ve somewhat neglected lately. In reality, apart from the wedding of a cousin of Herrera’s, three years earlier, it was a very long time since they’d been friendly. The only thing Leo managed to say was “It’s that . . . ” But Herrera immediately interrupted him: “Come on, I’m here, I’m waiting for you. Come right over and explain.”

  How would Leo explain what was happening to his life now? How to explain the state of terror in which he had been living for days? The claustrophobia that alternated with agoraphobia, according to whether the cellar was perceived by his s
enses as a narrow cave dug into the earth or an immense empty square. And then that terrible sensation, which had suddenly possessed him, of no longer being part of the human assembly? Of being an undesirable?

  Only a few days earlier, after some time had passed, had he found the courage to go out, to abandon his household bunker and drive around. And he had immediately realized that he hadn’t gone out by himself in years. He didn’t know where to go. Obviously not to the restaurants where he used to go with Rachel and other couples. Certainly not to the movies, which would intensify the sense of claustrophobia that tormented him. The world, now that there was no place to return to and be welcomed, seemed an infinite wasteland full of things that were indistinguishable from one another.

  So he had found himself having a drink in a place packed with kids in the neighborhood of Corso Francia. He didn’t even know how he had happened on a place like that. He remembered only that he had got in the car making sure that no one in his family saw him. And that he had traveled kilometers and kilometers as if in a trance.

  And had found himself there. A cheap vodka in his hand. A meaningless din. Surrounded by kids with tanned legs all dressed the same way: shorts, Lacoste shirts with the collar raised, boat shoes. The paranoid sensation that they were all pretending not to look at him. From the waitress to the other customers. Had they recognized him? Was it possible? And why not? As far as he knew, it wouldn’t be strange if, since the day the nightmare began, his photograph had appeared obsessively in the papers and on the news shows.

  Suddenly he noticed that he was dripping with sweat and that he had a troublesome, banging headache. He was agitated by an unprecedented cardiac arrhythmia. He would have liked to ask for help but he was afraid someone would say, “Drop dead, you fucking pervert.” So he left, and headed toward the car. Behind him he heard someone calling: “Sir, sir! Hey, sir, I’m talking to you!” There, that’s it, he thought, now they’re going to lynch me. He turned. It was the waitress, out of breath and definitely irritated.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “You didn’t pay for your drink. I’ve been following you . . . ”

  “Oh Lord, I’m sorry . . . Here, keep the change, I’m sorry . . . ”

  No, the world was no longer for him. There was nothing around him that did not arouse fear. Terror vanquished any nostalgia.

  And Leo was right to be afraid and stay alert. Because, even if he had chosen not to know it, all this happened in the very days when the national press had declared its prurient love for this ugly story, examining it in its embarrassing details, attributing to it pretentious allegorical significance: if only the Famous Writer and the Renowned Journalist had resisted the temptation to offer a penetrating account of the Fall of the One Above Suspicion or the Unmasking of the Imposter. Of course not. That August the beaches along the Italian coast were transformed into a piazza, where herds of mad philosophers wished to have their say about greed, betrayal, lechery, illegality.

  And to do it they took as an example the story of the doctor who treats children stricken with cancer and finds nothing better than to make money off their misfortune and, in his spare time, seduces twelve-year-olds (Did he fuck her? wonders the envious pervert devouring the morning paper).

  Evidently the combination of illness, violated childhood, political collusion, academic iniquity had given the common people the illusion of being substantially more honest and deserving than all the Leo Pontecorvos in the country—those with power, those with money, those with women, those who’d had everything in life and therefore believed they could profit from it, and who now deserved to die in ignominy.

  On one thing they all agreed: a man like that could not remain free. A man like that should be arrested.

  That was what was happening. That was what Leo could have asked Herrera’s opinion about if only he hadn’t cut off all contact with the external world, if only he hadn’t chosen prudently not to watch TV, not to buy newspapers, not to answer his phone, which rang continuously.

  The truth is that at this point Herrera knows the story much better than Leo. That’s why he welcomed his friend to his office with a remark of such vulgar insinuation. The crowning touch was to call him “darling.” The phrase with which, many years ago, in their world (that of the solid Jewish bourgeoisie that had emerged unharmed from persecution, of the rowing clubs and the long summer card games in the shady pinewoods of Castiglione della Pescaia), men used to address one another ironically. The odd affectionateness with which Leo’s father could have consulted Herrera’s father and vice versa.

  That that phrase had been carefully pondered is demonstrated by the fact that never again—in the course of the conversation that followed and those of the succeeding weeks, when every morning Leo would appear exactly at nine at the office of his childhood friend—did Herrera allow himself a similar intimacy.

  Now that he has given that suffocating man some air, now that he has put Leo back at ease (the vigorous co-religionist who in life, all in all, at least up to that point, had been as fortunate as he, but on whom fate some time ago began to turn its back . . . ), now it’s time to treat him as a client, and try to get him out of trouble. Not before having clarified certain preliminary conditions:

  “The advance is seventy million lire. In cash, tax-free. My secretary will wait for you in the lobby of the Hotel Cicerone the day after tomorrow at five. If you agree to be defended by me, you have to agree also to the idea that I will be your rabbi, your confessor, your psychologist, and above all your general. You’ll have to answer to me for everything. And you’ll have to do what I say. First, you have to fix your residence at my office. It means that all the documents relative to the investigations will come here. Second, I forbid you to watch TV and read the papers. I forbid you to poison your life with all that shit. Third, I forbid you to talk about the case with anybody (and you have no idea how many shitty anybodies there are around) without first talking to me about it. Fourth . . . ”

  So far it’s all easy. I’ve been ignoring the papers and television for weeks, and then who would I talk to, if no one speaks a word to me? Leo catches himself thinking, again pierced by anguish. But right afterward he feels a voluptuous pleasure: someone is treating him like a child. Isn’t this what he most needs? Someone who will treat him like a child. Someone who will present him with a strict set of rules.

  “Listen, could you explain one thing?”

  “Shoot. But don’t get used to it. Usually before opening my mouth I want to see the money. My eloquence is more expensive than a Porsche.”

  “So many things I don’t understand. The news of those letters. Coming out like that. On TV. Implying who knows what. . . Well, in other words, I would have expected to get a legal communication from the court, a notification, a summons. Why doesn’t anything happen? Sometimes I want so much for something to happen. This nothing happening is killing me.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. I’d have to know the details, the charges . . . But I can make some hypotheses. Apart from any dark moralistic considerations there aren’t sufficient grounds for prosecution. Of course, it’s not a very seemly thing to write and receive letters from a young girl. It’s the sort of thing that brings discredit to a man with a fine collection of existing charges like yours. And yet it’s not a crime. Not at all. Molestation. Violence. Those are crimes, and you can rest assured that if there was evidence that you’d committed them they would have come to get you already! With all the unpleasantness in the air. But evidently they have nothing in hand. As for the other crimes . . . well, it’s plain that if they were afraid that you could tamper with the evidence or slip out of the country they would have arrested you. But they’re not worried about this. It’s not like Leo Pontecorvo to flee. Not the Leo Pontecorvo I knew. A Leo Pontecorvo full of good citizenship and a sense of responsibility. An example of bourgeois respectability. Not a common fugitive.”

  These last comments seemed to Leo full of sarcasm. He he
ard in Herrera’s voice a not very veiled reproach. Was Herrera taking his revenge?

  Leo chooses not to notice. He has other things to think about. All in all he’s pleased. He feels protected, in good hands. Isn’t this the important thing? Herrera’s innate nihilism, which now seems so brutal, if properly directed can prove very useful to his case.

  Suddenly Leo feels a profound affection for his friend.

  “You know, you look splendid!” he says, lying and telling the truth at the same time.

  “Seriously? Well, after all my life hasn’t been the failure decreed by my mother.”

  “I know, I read the papers.”

  “God, my mother . . . it’s a year since she left me.”

  Leo knows. He used to read the obituaries in the newspaper. But, since at the time he chose not even to send a telegram of condolence, he pretends to be surprised and dismayed.

  “What do you want?” Herrera continues, as if talking to himself. “My girl was old. A lot of ailments. And recently a serious senile dementia to drag around. I must have found a hundred caretakers for her, each one better than the next. She drove them all away. She didn’t understand anything anymore, her brain was mush, the only thing she knew is that she didn’t want to die with those girls, she wanted to die with me, her only son. And in the end I convinced myself that maybe it was the best thing. So during the day I worked and at night I stayed with her. You’re a doctor. You know how devastating it can be. You want to know what she said to me the night before she died, when I was putting her to bed?”

  “What?”

  “‘Darling, I love you very much.’ There, the only affectionate thing my mother said to me in her whole life. And, the dirty whore, she whispered it to me when her brain had already gone haywire!”