In recalling this second answer, Leo felt another shiver. A sense of elation. As if those words would explain how things stood. The reason for everything. He was happy that the rabbi had checkmated his best student, and that now that same student, who had become a famous lawyer, could be checkmated again, by the same phrase. Yes, dear old rabbi, tell this conceited man how it works. Tell him the only reasonable thing about my present situation: the truth is everything that images don’t say.
And so, thirty-five years later, Leo decided to repeat that sentence to the person who had triggered it: “Do you remember, Herrera? The truth is everything that images don’t say? Do you remember, Herrera? Please, tell me you remember.”
“Leo, calm down, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m afraid you’re raving mad.”
“But really, come on, what an extraordinary answer! I understand it only now! Now that I’m confronted by that photograph, I understand it. I understand how photographs lie. It’s photographs that are the problem, you see? Those bastards use the photographs to destroy your life. Like that night when they broke the story on the TV news. Behind the anchorman there was a photograph of me. When I heard him talking about me, I looked up at the TV, incredulous. And I saw myself there, next to that guy. It was me but it wasn’t me. That photograph showed me but said nothing about me. Photographs are the problem. They’re what ruin everything. It’s because of certain photographs that later your wife won’t ever speak to you again, that your sons don’t want to ever see you again, that you hide in the cellar like a madman, like a thief. And it’s because of photographs like that that I’m ashamed. Tell me you understand. Tell me you see what they’ve done to me. What they’re doing to me.”
“Yes, I see, Leo. I see it very well. Now calm down. Sit here and calm down. You’ll see, we’ll make them pay. They’ll take it all back.”
“No! You see you don’t understand. I just want you to say that this photograph produces the same feeling of terror in you, too, that it produces in me. Mystification, distortion, deception. Those are their weapons.”
And although Leo had the tone of a fanatic, although part of his perception of reality was by now almost completely compromised, you couldn’t deny that that photograph was at least so stupidly grandiose as to border on a lie. What was more fallacious than the photograph that Rachel kept, ironically, in a frame set on a small table near the entrance (who had taken it from its spot and given it to those hyenas?), far from indiscreet eyes, and put there to remind him of what he would never again do? The photograph captured him in an impeccable riding outfit, mounted, reins firmly in hand, on a bay with a light-brown coat and black mane, shins, and tail.
There did not exist a photograph, among the thousands taken of him in half a century of life, that more poorly represented a man who had chosen good taste and self-irony as codes of survival. But who would explain to the distracted consumers of newspapers and television news that the horseman in that picture, if not exactly innocent, was guilty in a much more debatable way than that picture seemed to suggest?
Rachel had taken it the previous spring at the riding school in Olgiata, when, after years of inactivity, he had decided, on the advice of a nutritionist colleague, to take riding lessons and, yielding to the vanity of the beginner who believes he can hide his ignorance behind correctness of equipment, had acquired form-fitting cream-colored pants, shiny brown leather boots, and a ridiculous checked jacket. Anyone who knew how to ride would have seen in Leo’s posture the signs of inexperience: heels up, back bent, cautious rigidity. But how many equestrian champions are there around? A handful of snobs and riders who probably don’t read the newspapers and don’t watch TV because the fresh air is better.
That photograph was destined to produce the completely opposite feeling: something that led people to be suspicious of such unexpected self-confidence, a suspicion that easily degenerated into anger and aggression. A person who today agrees to be photographed decked out like Beau Brummell, a person who has lost the sense of the ridiculous to the extent that he’ll pose for the lens like an equestrian statue—from such a person you would expect certain nasty pathological crimes. Only a big shit in jodhpurs can, unlike many contemporaries of his background, face the crisis of middle age not by buying a custom car and fucking his wife’s aerobics instructor but by embarking on the road of no return that leads to corruption, loan-sharking, pedophilia . . .
And no one gives a damn that the photograph doesn’t represent you. Indeed, that photo is the spectacular denial of everything you’ve tried like mad to be. Because that photograph is stronger than your life. It’s truer than you. More definitive than any sentence, more persuasive than any witness for the prosecution, more circumstantial than any expert evidence or testimony. That photograph is you as others believe they know you. That’s why it’s so vibrant. So potent. So cruel. Why it says to the world what the world wants to hear: that nothing goes better with depravity than vanity.
Four men in uniform violated the peace of his basement office early on a late-September morning. And they did so with seemliness and discretion. Knocking and waiting, before entering, for a sign of life. Although Leo, whose sleep by now was extraordinarily light, heard the cars parking in front of the house, the voices of the policemen as they approached, the front gate buzzer, and then the front doorbell and the indiscreet shuffling above his head, he started when someone knocked at the door.
Who could it be? Who would dare knock at the wicked hermit’s door? Rachel? One of the boys? Telma? Maybe the plumber? Maybe his toilet wasn’t the only one where the water pressure had decreased? Maybe it had happened in the whole house. And maybe the diligent Rachel, who, in a certain restricted form, was still taking care of him, was sending the plumber to fix the problem down there, too . . .
Whoever it was, Leo preferred not to answer. He pretended it was nothing. Unable to restrain the emotional upset that the idea of an intrusion caused, of whatever nature it was. For a moment he even entertained the impulse to hide behind the flowered sofa that for some time now had functioned as a bed. In essence it could be anyone. Nothing would have surprised him. Not even a gang of boys with sticks arriving to beat him. Or Camilla’s father, who had finally come to a decision . . . But it wasn’t fear for his own safety that kept him from answering; if anything it was a sudden modesty. Embarrassment at hearing the sound of his own voice. It’s true: when he went to Herrera’s office he talked, he talked excessively. But when he went home, to his bunker, the mere idea of uttering a word seemed to him sacrilege.
After another volley of increasingly harsh blows the four policemen, having grown impatient, entered.
The sight reassured Leo. And yet he remained silent, melodramatically offering them his wrists so that they could handcuff him. But one of the four, a kid (he couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Filippo), said, “Professor, there’s no need.”
Leo’s surprise at seeing those kids in uniform had been no less intense than that of the police officers at finding themselves in the presence of a man completely different from what they had seen in the newspapers and on television.
The ruinous fall into the abyss of such an improbable destiny had taken the form of a somatic revolution: an involuntary loss of weight and the whitening of his stylishly cut hair had distorted his aspect. Then something must have happened to his coloring: the florid copper color of his complexion was blemished by gray-blue highlights, and the skin, especially on his hands, was marked by coffee-colored stains, of a type usually manifested at a more advanced age.
Which merely emphasized an even more revolutionary metamorphosis, that of character: presenting, during this morning blitz by officers with an arrest warrant, yet another public performance in which Leo gave proof of a striking timidity, as if he wished to demonstrate to those four incredulous cops and to himself that a few months had been enough to eliminate from his nature any trace of arrogance or pride.
More than two months had pas
sed since he had last slept with Rachel and since he had seen the boys, except every so often by chance through the high, narrow windows of the cellar. Two months since he had left in the morning to go to Santa Cristina. Since he had received any phone calls except from Herrera, from some latecomer busybody, and an obscure, methodical, yet raving bearer of threats. He had relieved his family from the weight of an unwelcome presence, like the wary and diffident Gregor Samsa . . . Not surprising, therefore, that he was inclined to welcome any living being who knocked at his door, but at the same time also frightened.
Maybe because of the long isolation, the surprise, the headache, and the ferocious weariness that afflicted him, or maybe because meanwhile, after a month and a half, he was losing faith in Herrera’s thaumaturgical powers, but there was Leo, exhibiting an incongruous hospitality toward the men who had come to arrest him, the men who stood there, with the handcuffs attached to their belts, ready to take him who knows where. This is my new family, Leo thinks, with emotion. And that’s why he is so polite. Maybe he would have shown the same gratitude to anyone who came to free him from that domestic nightmare. In essence one confinement is the same as another!
Even to that guy who called up and threatened to kill him and then piss on his corpse he was in some way grateful. Yes, he was grateful even to that psychopath, who said things like “You enjoy yourself with little girls, right? You go out with them? But God sees these things and I see them, too. I see them, too. Professor, may you hope only that God finds you before I do . . . ” Anything, even the words of that maniac, was better than the silence by which he felt besieged, that absence of tender human contact (God, Rachel’s smooth hip! Did it still exist somewhere?); anything was better than those crushing thoughts, as heavy as reinforced concrete, and those sudden revelations of consciousness, in which he took note of the inexorableness of what was happening.
The fact is that any of his acquaintances who had seen him in that situation, up against the boys in uniform, would have been goggle-eyed at that compliance, which was on the point of dissolving into emotion.
In other words, where had the well-concealed pride of Leo Pontecorvo gone? With which he had always kept his neighbor at bay, ever since the days when he was the top student in Professor Meyer’s postgraduate course? And what was the source of the obsequiousness with which he prostrated himself before his jailers? Was two months of isolation and social unfitness enough to transform a great man into a timid, whimpering creature?
Believe me: much less would be enough!
The police, besides, showed themselves perhaps too accommodating. After sparing him the humiliation of the handcuffs, the boy, the most obviously inexperienced, defying protocol and the anger of his superior, had whispered, “Professor, you certainly won’t remember, but you treated my brother’s daughter,” in a tone indicating that the daughter of the young policeman’s brother was in excellent health. She was on the list of former patients who had made it, some of whom came to see him every year, to demonstrate that if they were still there they owed it to him.
A very untimely confidence, the young policeman’s, which led the higher-ranking one to intervene: “Excuse me, Professor, I don’t want to make you hurry, but it might be best if you take some personal things. It’s possible that tonight, anyway . . . yes, well, you understand . . . ”
What is there to understand, in the end?
The wall that separates your beautiful marital bedroom from the cell where at any moment they might throw you is much thinner than your presumption of social inviolability led you to believe. Is this what you’re supposed to understand? Well, it doesn’t take a genius.
Leo let them escort him out as if he didn’t know the house where he had lived for so many years and which had cost him a lot of money. He was relieved to observe that on the journey from the cellar to the front door there was no one. Probably Rachel had arranged it in a way that no living soul would be present at his arrest. Sparing him a mortification or sparing herself and the boys. And things went smoothly. Coming out into the open air, Leo was greeted by a sparkling sunny late-September day. The apricot-colored light of the morning was like dawn in Jerusalem. On the horizon a solitary, polished front of white clouds had assumed the form of a shark with its mouth half closed, alert, ready to hurl itself on its prey.
Those September days. He had always loved them. When everything in the house started up again. He, worn out by August at the beach, returned to work. Rachel returned to being the unopposed mistress of the house. Filippo and Semi returned to school. There was something touching and reassuring in that inexorable return. In the morning, before he got in his car and rushed to the hospital, Leo took a short walk to the café just outside the northern entrance of the compound, which the boys called “the ditch.” He got coffee and newspapers for himself. And hot croissants for Rachel and Telma.
Those September days. It used to be the time of year when Rachel devoted at least one afternoon to getting the boys all their school supplies. She went to stationery stores and the big department stores to get binders, notebooks, pen and pencil sets, backpacks. It was a habit that Rachel particularly cherished, and which had also infected the boys. Semi, for the whole five years of elementary school (or, as he said at the time, “nementary”), before his consumer desires shifted to clothes, couldn’t help asking his mother every year, “Will you buy me the set with the compass and magnifying glass?”
And she: “We’ll see.”
And he: “We’ll see means no.”
“We’ll see means we’ll see.”
Rachel had to restrain herself in order not to get the boys everything they wanted. Still vivid in her was the frustration at not having the same supplies as her schoolmates. For Rachel school was important. Unlike her husband, she had always loved it. She had been an exemplary student. For her school had been a gym, an alternative to the dreariness at home. Not for Leo. For Leo school had been above all an obstacle. Getting up at dawn was painful. He belonged to the fraternity of night owls who wake up at midday. If there was one thing he thanked heaven for it was that at a certain point school was over and no one could force him to get up at that insane hour. That sweet and caressing air must be the same as those mornings when his mother crept into his room, opened the blinds, placed the milky coffee on the night table, gently pulled his soft, sleep-warm feet out from under the covers, and put on his socks. An incomparably tender gesture which nevertheless was the prelude to a reluctant awakening.
As the agents escorted him out of the gate and opened the car door for him, Leo wondered if that year Rachel had found the strength to take the boys to buy new school supplies. Probably not. They were too old for such pastimes. And then how could what had happened not have had an impact on the family’s daily behavior? Leo no longer knew what to hope. He didn’t know if he preferred that the events had left a mark or that nothing had left a mark. His mark on his sons. This was truly a terrible subject. On which he was afraid to question himself. His sons were an atrocious mystery. They had always been. And certainly they would never stop being one.
Although he lived one floor away from them, Leo knew nothing about his family. He was wary of asking Herrera or anyone else, just as he was wary of even a minimal attempt to make peace with his wife. That time—the time for making peace—was over. She had always been the one to make the first move.
Getting into one of the two police cars, which smelled of apples and onion, Leo had felt his nerves release, as if they were taking him away from a nightmare.
The twenty square meters of damp, stale twilight where they threw him is definitely overcrowded. And not exactly with gentlemen of his type. The air reeks of urine, sweat, dripping pipes, rust, wet dog, and many other equally fragrant things.
Everything here says that it’s an intermediate stop on the sinister journey to the unknown that he has been compelled to undertake. All this filth and all this excitement, all this take this one out and stick this other in, makes Leo think of the
waiting area of an emergency room. Yes, evidently this is the place where the new arrivals are sent before . . . before what?
There must be a mistake. Leo remembers that Herrera told him that in prison they usually don’t like to mix up people of different backgrounds. Or maybe not? Maybe he didn’t say that at all. Maybe Leo dreamed it. He had placed one of his last hopes in class prejudice. What did you think, my boy? That they would put you in with some kleptomaniac member of the Lincean academy?3 With a depraved baroness? With Dr. Mengele or Silvio Pellico? What did you expect? That for big-shot professors of your lineage, for a man endowed with your good manners, there was a special area outfitted like the V.I.P. lounge of an airport? What do you say to a good cigar and an aged cognac?
Instead they had no compunctions. Why should they? Justice is blind (as is injustice). They put you in here: a small space crowded with shady-looking brutes, who, thank heaven, are minding their own business. With the single glance he felt able to cast around, he observed a great extravagance of T-shirts. The rest is what you might expect: several-day-old beards, tattoos, curly hair, some pierced earlobes from which the earrings had been confiscated. The aesthetics of crime. The banality of crime. When Leo entered he was greeted with a welcome from a dozen brown distracted eyes. The behavior of these thugs—from what Leo could understand (for hours now his buttocks have been sinking into a worn mattress thrown into the room, which is already so full of twin mattresses that it’s almost impossible to walk without stepping on them)—savors more of indolence than of intimidation.
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