Persecution (9781609458744)

by Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)

  “Nature: Stories of Parents and Children.”

  It was all in the title. An exhaustive title. A magnificent title. Don’t you also think all nature is contained in that? In that infinite relationship. Which repeats. Which goes on repeating itself. You should have seen the images. The lioness with the lion cubs. The gazelle with the pups. Even repulsive animals like the boa and the frog prove to be loving with their children . . . Everything expressed a single feeling. A fierce, desperate desire to protect and be protected. You understand, my dear ones, a desire to protect and to be protected. And this is the most important thing. The thing I miss most . . . Yes, I know you understand me . . . See? You haven’t abandoned me. You are here. You have joined me. It couldn’t be otherwise. Really, it couldn’t be otherwise . . . But don’t stay there, come closer. Yes, just like then. Just like when I was scared and sneaked into your room. I knew you would protest. I loved those protests. But I also knew that in the end you would give in. I was electrified by the absolute power that I had over you and you over me . . . I was euphoric in a bed that seemed so big to me. Your mattress of wool. Here, now, come. Settle yourselves here. Since you weigh nothing. You’re very light.

  Thus Leo fell asleep held like an infant, or like the filling in a sandwich, in the arms of his mother and father. Who went on caressing him. Soothing him. Who continued to whisper: don’t worry, everything’s all right, you’re not alone, don’t be afraid. Mamma and Papa are here. And Leo slept very well. Deeply. His father’s aftershave, the camphor-like odor of his mother. He slept sweetly. As he had not for many months.

  During those months, Leo, in a completely arbitrary fashion, had attributed to the investigating judge (or group of judges), who was doing all this to him at least a hundred different faces and bodies.

  His imagination had worked hard! It had done overtime, scaled mountains. Sometimes portraying the “doctor” as the small unhappy fat man who can’t wait to crush the balls of a good-looking guy like Leo. Then as a lean, lanky, peevish character. Then it had been the turn of the ignorant, vigorous cop, quickly replaced by the quick-tempered sharp dresser, by the inexperienced new graduate, fanatical about the Law. And a throng of other more or less unlikely human types who from time to time had a turn.

  But he hadn’t been able to imagine anything resembling the man he found himself facing when, finally, on the morning of the fifth day of detention, two guards came to get him and led him, through endless corridors, to a stuffy, disorderly room where the gray, the beige, and the yellow lived unhealthily together.

  Opposite the door of the public prosecutor’s office Leo found Herrera waiting for him. A disheveled Herrera. An irritated Herrera. And more, much more: an enraged Herrera!

  Leo, at first, seeing the wild eyes of his lawyer, observing the state of muttering agitation he was in, thought that he was the object of that fury. Why not? He was inured to people who got angry at him for no reason. Here’s another one, he had thought, but without getting too upset, with the stoicism that prison in just a few days had taught him.

  But as he approached he understood that Herrera’s stammering invective—“It’s intolerable, unheard-of. It makes no sense. It makes no sense at all!”—was not addressed to his client. But rather to the sheets of paper that Herrera was holding. And that Leo immediately recognized. It was a copy of the arrest warrant. A clone of the one that Leo still had in his pocket and had been careful not to look at. In there was everything that Leo had tried not to know during his detention. That is, why they had arrested him. On what charge. Why they had put him in isolation. Why they had kept him for five days from seeing his lawyer or any other human being . . .

  The astonishing thing was that Herrera, far from being interested in the condition of his client, was so obsessed by those pieces of paper. As if they were a certification of his impotence, a personal affront. That Leo had had his first, traumatizing ration of prison seemed to interest Herrera completely incidentally: Leo’s imprisonment was only a collateral effect (one of many) of the aberration represented by the papers that Herrera was savagely clutching.

  Might there be a risk that as soon as the door opened Herrera would attack the judge with the recklessness he seemed in the grip of at that moment? That he would be unable to restrain his dwarf’s resentment?

  Leo naturally hoped not. That was all he needed! In essence, Herrera had kept urging on him coolness and composure . . . and now he was the one losing control?

  Leo suddenly felt like the boy who is brought by an angry parent into the presence of a feared principal. A father who wants to express all his indignation at the treatment of his son by the mathematics teacher. A parent so wrapped up in his own fury that he doesn’t realize his son will pay for that attitude later, with interest.

  Leo wasn’t pleased. He didn’t like the fact that Herrera was in that state: I wouldn’t say about to explode but more than anything already exploded.

  It was more or less then that Leo Pontecorvo remembered that he was Leo Pontecorvo. And boldly reappropriated his identity and his place in the world. It was then that Leo began to tremble. And felt his colon contracting in sudden and insidious spasms. Increasingly conscious that beyond that threshold was the most important thing in the world. That in a few seconds the mother scene of his whole life would be consummated. For which was required an exceptional performance, and so a general condition different from the one he was floundering in.

  All this while his lawyer couldn’t stop blathering: “This piece of shit tricked me. But don’t worry. Now we’ll make him explain what sort of comedy this is, now they’re going to tell us why they kept you from seeing your lawyer, as if you were a Mafioso. Stay calm, Leo. Leave it to me. Look at me. Take your time before you answer. In fact, answer as little as possible. If you have any doubt that the question might be a trap that means it doesn’t merit an answer. You understand?”

  And this was the great lawyer? The infallible lawyer? The shark of the law courts? This agitated little gnome who couldn’t do anything better than poison him with his tension? Shouldn’t he be reassuring him? Wasn’t that one of the reasons he got so much money—for his capacity not to lose control at moments like this?

  Maybe Herrera’s problem was Leo. Why not? He always had been. Whatever they say, people never change. If an individual provokes ambiguous feelings in you in adolescence it’s likely that he’ll continue to provoke them even in full maturity. An exemplary career and widespread approval aren’t enough, women aren’t enough, money isn’t enough to free you from the frightened and bitter child who languishes inside you. Leo could have written a treatise on the subject.

  Certainly when Leo regained possession of his faculties it wasn’t the best of moments. Right at that instant the detachment, the indolence, the stoic acceptance of his destiny, which had protected him until a moment before, went to the dogs. Which didn’t help. He wasn’t content with a return to being Leo. Leo confronting his drama. Leo facing the most perilous test.

  The most perilous test. Exactly. The most difficult and torturous examination. There was no doubt about that.

  You could hardly consider Leo a creature of exams. He never had been. Everything he had obtained, starting at a certain point of his life, he had had to win by hard work. He had had to keep in check an overflowing emotionality and struggle against an innate apathy. He had had to reconcile an inclination to creative contemplation with a tough competitive spirit. And, on the subject of competition, the family he came from, as far as scholastic results were concerned, would not have tolerated any faltering in its only offspring.

  It’s true, certain things came naturally to him. Translations from Greek, for example. Those he could do. During high school he had only to come face to face with an ancient-Greek text to see the right words emerge from a deep and unknown place in his consciousness with unusual spontaneity. The rest was simple. Seize those words, fill them with meaning, copy them neatly onto the page and wait for the enthusiastic approval of a te
acher-admirer. Leo had a real talent for Greek. A skill as fantastic as it was impractical. What was the use of knowing how to translate texts, written in a long-gone language, that celebrated the deeds of men who had been dead for millennia? None.

  Mathematics. That was useful, yes. Or at least everyone thought it was: a pity that Leo had no talent for it. It was the black beast that pursued him along a decent but far from exemplary school career.

  It’s that when he was confronted by all those numbers and all those symbols he was overcome by a bovine, almost invincible somnolence. Pursued by anguish. What was the sense of working so hard in an exercise of such inhuman abstraction? All he did was wonder about it. A first response to this philosophical question arrived in tenth grade from the mathematics teacher, who made him retake his final exam in September. See how this lazy fifteen-year-old was given the opportunity to meditate all summer on the indispensability of that soporific subject. And also to reflect on how dishonorable it was for a Pontecorvo to repeat an exam. All that summer term, in fact, until the stain was washed away, his vacation at the beach was punctuated by looks of disapproval and the factoring of polynomials. Three laborious and humiliating months. Three months of graph-paper notebooks. No going out, no going to the beach, not even the evening walk for ice cream with his friends, because he had to settle fully his debt to society. But above all three months in which he had learned that, although in other things his parents were basically indulgent, in that area they would not accept a misstep. School no. That’s no joke. You have to repeat the mathematics exam? It means that you haven’t sacrificed enough. That you haven’t tested yourself fully. That you’ve given up too soon.

  That was the most important lesson Leo learned that summer. Apart from equations, which instantly disappeared from his mind. What he learned was that everything he had (and he had much) he had to deserve. And that that implicit blackmail was the basis of the education they were giving him. Bourgeois education. Old school. More draconian than a biblical precept. Whose unique commandment solemnly decreed: “You have to be better than your father and you will bring into the world individuals who will do everything possible to be better than you.”

  He was a thoroughbred, and had to behave like one.

  A lesson he remembered in his first year of university, when he had had to confront a new insurmountable obstacle: the chemistry exam. Again that somnolence. Again that sensation of vacuousness. Again a confusion of mixed-up formulas in his mind, impossible to memorize. What torture! But by that point the horse had been trained. By that point Leo knew how to behave. And he did his best to pass the most difficult exam of the first year of Medicine with the biggest bastard of a professor. That old madman who insisted that you learn the textbook by heart. Who did all he could to make you nervous. Not to mention that he was a close friend of Leo’s father. But the same bourgeois morality that compelled a privileged student like Leo to repay his parents with an impeccable university record kept his father from saying a word about his son to an old friend.

  Leo remembered the day he went to take the exam. The fierce humidity of July. The bastard who, for some reason, wasn’t sweating. He remembered when that man had asked, in an incredibly patronizing tone, if by any chance he was the son of his dear friend Gianni Pontecorvo. Leo remembered how he had followed his father’s instructions and said no, he wasn’t the son of that Pontecorvo. He was the son of another Pontecorvo. The son of some ordinary man, who, in order to pass that difficult exam, had to start where everyone else started.

  Lord, the pitiful state he was in as he lied about his identity to that notorious bastard. His mind was empty. Or, rather, so packed with formulas and bad omens as to be unusable. He came from four months of depraved study. He was nauseous. He hadn’t slept for the past two nights and had even taken some pills to keep himself going. He felt close to fainting. He wished he had a passage of Thucydides in front of him to translate. Or a fragment of Sappho to interpret, and to give meaning to. Then indeed he would have prevailed, could have shown what he was made of. Leo was one of those athletes who get excited when they play at home and are disproportionately depressed in an away game. And there was nothing that resembled a hostile away game more than that humid classroom, in the shape of an amphitheater, where the bastard and his assistant bastards evaluated the students with the systematic indifference of a firing squad retaliating for some wrong.

  And Leo had made it. The triumph of self-denial. He had come out alive and triumphant from an unequal contest. That time he had made it. And from then on he had passed every exam he faced, always relying on force of will and betting on the efficacy of sacrifice.

  But what would have happened if he hadn’t passed the chemistry exam? What would have happened if, by some chance, betrayed by emotion or ineptitude, he had said something foolish? What would have happened if the bastard had suddenly, with a characteristic gesture, thrown the book in his face, saying, “We’ll see you in six months”?

  Nothing would have happened. Nothing more serious that what had happened a few years earlier when he had to retake the mathematics exam. He would have had an extra ration of study. He would have had to put off getting his degree by a few months, and hence his emancipation from the family. He would have had to face his parents’ anxiety. Their disappointment. Their anger. That’s it? That’s it.

  And now, on the other hand? Now what would happen if, during the interrogation he was about to undergo, he didn’t give the right answers?

  Well, Leo was about to find out.

  So this was the enemy. This his face, this his body. Or rather what Leo had tried to imagine for all those months and, to judge from the individual standing on the other side of the desk, had in no way succeeded in portraying with any verisim­ilitude.

  So this was the persecutor. The Grand Inquisitor. The Torquemada on duty.

  By a series of coincidences (not random at all?), the man who opened the door and invited them to come in, the polite but not in the least formal man who told them to sit on the other side of the desk, had been assigned the majority of the numerous investigations involving Leo. It meant that, for almost six months now, a great part of his working life had been devoted to gathering evidence capable of proving that Leo Pontecorvo was a thief, a malefactor, a pervert. It also meant that it was he who had signed the piece of paper that was responsible for the five most ludicrous (certainly not the most horrific) days of Leo’s existence: the piece of paper that Leo still had in his pocket and whose contents he insisted on ignoring.

  Herrera had presented a petition to ask for a formal preliminary hearing after his first meeting with Leo. The prosecutor had rejected the petition, but before Herrera was able to present his appeal, the public prosecutor had arrested Leo.

  “That shit got in there before me!” were the words that Herrera kept muttering, growling.

  Why such passion? Why get angry at him like that? Why should he be obsessed with a human adventure that was basically not so different from that of other fathers of families, other eminent doctors, other professors? Leo had wondered innumerable times.

  But now that he was in front of him, now that he could have had an answer, he didn’t wonder anything of the sort. Now it seemed to him that everything was perfectly linear and logical. That was the job of the investigator. Which he carried out with no less commitment and no less dedication than Leo, in his time, had put into his.

  Leo thought again of all the speculating he had done with Herrera, who, like many lawyers of his generation, was convinced that everything came from a political prejudice.

  “That man hates you,” Herrera repeated.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You can tell from the way he writes the orders that he hates you. He hates what you are. He hates what you do. He hates your damn column in the Corriere. He hates your Jaguar. He hates the doll’s house that you shut yourself up in. He hates Craxi and your pathetic Craxian idealism.”

  “But why? Can you tell me why?�
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  “Because he does!”

  The investigator’s wholesome appearance spoke of his perfect good faith. He acted like that because he couldn’t act otherwise. If a judge learns of some crimes it is his duty to be concerned with them and to pursue whoever committed them. The penal code says so but also common sense. And, even if you knew, as Leo knew, that a considerable number of the charges lodged against him were unfounded, you couldn’t help appreciating the diligence with which this man performed the tasks that society had entrusted to him.

  Leo remembered the time when he had asked Herrera if he had ever had anything to do with that man.

  “Of course. Besides, I had to meet with him several times for your case. But I already knew him by reputation, everyone knows him. He was just transferred, or had himself transferred, I don’t know.”

  “From where?”

  “Calabria. Aspromonte, to be more precise. He was in the trenches. They don’t joke around there. And it seems that our friend stood out there, too, for a certain stubbornness, let’s say. And there, too, he pissed off quite a few people. That’s why they gave him a team of bodyguards. Threats, intimidations, letters with unexploded shells. In short, the usual grotesque means by which mobsters let you know you’re a pain in the ass. Maybe that’s why they transferred him. Or he had himself transferred. You remember those Piedmontese idealists, rock-solid, whose dream, from the time of university, consists of going to the South to restore, at last, the rule of law? That’s it, something like that. Good books. Loves music. In short, the classic type to watch out for.”

  “But aside from that, what type is he? As a judge, I mean.”

  “What type is he? A type like Adolf Hitler: harsh but fair.”

  Thus, with one of his cynical and hyperbolic digs, Herrera had let his client understand that it was a taboo subject. This was a matter that Leo should absolutely not get mixed up in. Stuff for lawyers and not for clients. Even though that sarcastic remark had had the effect of further transforming in Leo’s eyes the essence of the man who was now facing him. The name of Hitler had vanished. The pair of adjectives endured: harsh but fair.