Persecution (9781609458744)

by Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)

  Leo spends January first of 1987 waiting for someone to enter. But no one comes.

  And the days continue to pass.

  The only miracle presented by the new year is snow. Snow in Rome. Leo is looking outside, and there, suddenly, the landscape he knows best—the corner of the cosmos framed by the glass of one of the two little windows—is transformed. The slow, swaying waltz of an immaculate manna that has the power to slow down time and immobilize space. An image of agonizing eternity that is moving to our bearded poet-philosopher. The scene is so strange and unexpected that he doesn’t even feel the usual need to attribute esoteric meanings to it. The world is only giving a demonstration of how white, beautiful, harmless it can be when it wants to. That’s all. Nothing else to say, nothing else to explain.

  For hours and hours, Leo’s eyes are glued to the window, watching the implacable gentleness with which the snow manages to transform everything—path, garden, terra-cotta patio, porphyry driveway—into a gauzy white expanse. Smoothing wrinkles, softening roughness: that’s the healthy effect of those thirty centimeters of snow. The only irregular elements in the increasingly soft and uniform whiteness are Rachel’s dried-up flower beds, which the snow has transformed into white lunar craters.

  The snow lasts a couple of days. Then it begins to melt. And what remains after it melts is a landscape of ugly brutality.

  Like a flayed human body.

  One night—it must have been three-thirty (an hour that Leo has always considered unpleasant)—the house’s extremely loud alarm starts to intone a percussive, sharp, penetrating singsong. Leo gets up from the sofa bed with a start. That device is ringing for the first time since they installed it (the year before, when some villas in the neighborhood were robbed). Leo recalls the installer, a goggle-eyed kid who at the time explained to him how, although the device was reliable, it could possibly, at times, be set off for no reason. “What do you mean, no reason?” Leo had asked. To hear the reply: like that, no reason, set off by an imperceptible excess or activated by some natural calamity—rain, lightning, thunder, wind. Leo had been amused by the fact that the kid treated the device like a living organism, subject to sudden switches of mood.

  But hearing the sharp wail now, in the night, he seems to understand what the kid meant. The sound is like the cry of a slaughtered pig, a lobster submerged in boiling water. A tortured whistle.

  Whatever has happened, the alarm is sounding. If there are thieves in the house that gadget will cause them (or must already have caused them) to flee. If instead it’s a false alarm, so much the better: Rachel, or one of the boys, will take care of turning it off. They were also present when the installer explained how it worked. On the other hand, until someone disengages it the alarm will continue to shriek; then it will go silent, only to start up again in a few minutes. And all this indefinitely.

  At the first interruption Leo gives a sigh of relief. But when the alarm starts wailing again, he is frightened. What’s happening? Where are Rachel, the boys, Telma? Maybe they don’t know how to turn it off or maybe the device is broken? Or maybe . . . No, that he doesn’t even want to think . . . Maybe they are hostages of some thug (and in Leo’s mind the thug immediately acquires the features of one of the frightening guys in the first prison cell).

  Leo had decided to get the burglar alarm at the time—defying Rachel’s contrary opinion (she is hostile to technology and unwilling to accept the hypothesis that crime could threaten her family)—after reading in the paper about three sons of bitches who one night broke into a villa on the Cassia, not too far from one of the entrances to Olgiata. Leo also recalls the details of the robbery. The owner was bound and gagged, the valuables obtained by means of threats and beatings. And, to make the horror more unforgettable, right before the eyes of the gagged man, his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter were raped. And a steaming pile of shit left on his marriage bed.

  Meanwhile the alarm continues to sound, and no one is turning it off. While the distressing contents of the article he read last year return to poison Leo’s mind along with the face of that man in prison. What’s happening? Did they get in? Are they threatening, beating? Maybe they are raping Rachel, or Telma, or one of the boys? And what should he do? Be bold, open the door, go upstairs, find out what the situation is, intervene? For a second a petty thought possesses him. A heroic gesture. Yes, maybe that would restore things. If he saved them he would win that sort of rehabilitation he stopped hoping for some time ago. It would be worth it even if he died in the attempt. Posthumous rehabilitation.

  Until the alarm is silent again. That sudden pure silence is no less chilling than the noise. Leo puts his ear to the door. Nothing. No sound. No one seems to be aware of anything.

  Maybe this time they’ve turned it off and gone back to bed. Here, this is the right moment. I could go up and take a look. If they catch me, I have a reason ready. Excuse me, Rachel, I’ll say without any trembling in my voice, I was checking to see that everything is all right. I just wanted to be sure . . . Yes, those are the words ready for her if only he could rouse himself, open that door, go up the stairs, and take a few steps into the living room. Those are the words to speak if he should run in to Rachel, sleepy, in her nightgown.

  Just as he is fantasizing about this clarifying nighttime encounter the alarm yet again sounds the trumpets. No, they haven’t turned it off. Didn’t they hear it? Maybe, even though they’ve heard it, they aren’t able to deactivate it. And, yet again, a trite flurry of anguished thoughts. Interrupted by a new idea.

  Or maybe they’ve left. Yes, that’s the explanation. Who can say that they haven’t gone away? In fact, in recent days the house has been more silent than usual. No floor waxer in the morning, no patter of feet. It’s the first week of February. Not far from Valentine’s Day. The time of year then Rachel takes the boys skiing. Maybe they’re on a skiing vacation. There, yes, they’ve gone skiing. All explained.

  But then who has left the food in the usual place? Maybe Rachel instructed someone to leave food for her husband. One of her little men. That’s what she calls them: “little men.” It’s funny to see that small woman, whom everyone respects, giving orders to her “little men,” gently but with authority, and the affection they feel for her is obvious. That’s why it’s been only cold food for the past few days. Yesterday evening some cheese. Today dried meat. That’s what it must be . . .

  A noise. He seems to hear a noise. A noise plunges him again into agony. What does he want, anyway? All you have to do is open the door, go up a few stairs. You’ve done it millions of times. Why can’t you do it?

  Although all night that wretched alarm continued to go on and off at regular intervals, although he was furious at himself and at the world, although he could not take his hand off the doorknob, Leo stayed there for all those hours, petrified, cheek and ear against the door, chewing the bitter pill of his own cowardice. Continually falling asleep and waking up.

  Until some sounds from the garden waked him. In an instant he remembers everything that happened. And he stands up. He feels a great pain in his side, after the night spent on the floor leaning against the door. He limps to the window and looks out, and the scene grips his stomach in a hot vise.

  The legs and feet of the three people he loves most and who don’t want to see him anymore are still there. They walk along the path, toward the Land Cruiser, as if nothing had happened. Leo sees Filippo’s hand holding the squares of milk chocolate that Rachel has given him every morning since he was very small. Then he sees an edge of red down and the gray sneakers that belong to Semi running breathlessly to the car.

  What happened the night before? Why, if they were there, did no one dare to turn off the burglar alarm? Why didn’t anyone move? Why? Why? Leo would never know.

  Another day—and outside the green shoots of Virginia creeper were a luxuriant promise of spring—Leo had been suddenly invaded by a hope. Vague, ridiculous, outside the time limit. But, whatever, a hope. He had stopped hoping
long ago. Maybe because along the way he had learned to appreciate the formless, safe, slight comfort offered by despair. A despair that leads you to choices and actions that are rational and dignified.

  For several weeks now, he had stopped listening to the detailed reports from the trial furnished by Herrera almost every evening. During them Leo was silent. Keeping up with all that stuff made him seasick. All those charges that were brought against him. Five charges. Really, too much. All that attention on him. All that enthusiasm for sticking their hands into the muck of his life, not so different, basically, from the muck of any other life. The whole business was revolting.

  The verbose court sessions must be so brutal. With an insulting repetitiousness. With such bureaucratic mendacity. Why talk about it so much? Why still talk about it? Why drag it on so long? Did no one share his nausea with the whole situation? How could one live talking only about those things? How could one live attempting to establish the wrongs and rights of Leo Pontecorvo?

  His life as it was recounted by those old fogeys in the courtroom had to be so dark. Just as the one recounted by Herrera had to seem so rhetorically virtuous. Was that all right with everyone? Well, for him it wasn’t. He couldn’t bear it anymore. He was exhausted.

  But no, it’s not that he was angry with the behavior of those men of the law. There was nothing outrageous in fulfilling as well as possible the duties imposed by one’s profession. There was nothing bad about being so detached. In fact, if he thought of his previous existence, he saw clearly how he, too, had lived happily for many years beside so many terminally ill people and so many corpses. So many people who were suffering and so many others who wept for their suffering. For him, too, it had been an achievement to insure that living with pain and death did not influence the tone of his life. He wasn’t sick, he wasn’t about to die, he was only the caring doctor, who very often had to yield to the power of nature: the desire of nature to renew itself through destruction. It’s a hard thing to accept. But in that type of job you have to learn to take it on before the age when you have little time left to live. You have to learn it in your youth. That is, right away. As soon as you enter the hospital. Cynicism? Call it what you like. Spirit of survival, common sense. So Leo had learned to call it.

  After a while death had stopped interesting him. It had become a job. Like an executioner, an undertaker, a soldier, Leo had managed to separate those two parts of his life. The happiness from the horror. Like a psychopath. As the saying popular among garbagemen goes: “It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it.”

  Leo remembered clearly a night when he had come home particularly upset by the death of a patient. It wasn’t the first time he had seen a child die and witnessed the anguish of the parents. It was his job to fight with death for the children. Nor was it the first time it had happened under his medical jurisdiction. He was a thirty-five-year-old oncologist. He had behind him plenty of chilling experiences. Not to mention that it wasn’t a special child. Then why feel so badly for that particular child? Leo didn’t know. But it was a fact that that child had triggered something. It was a fact that for him that child hadn’t been like all the others. And that that child had begun to be different from all the others once he hadn’t made it. Just as it was clear that if he, Professor Leo Pontecorvo, hadn’t settled accounts with that child he would have been unable to take care of all those who followed after.

  His name was Alessandro, and he was nine. He was a lively child, one of those who laugh at everything. One of those who teach you a lesson with that mixture of good humor and toughness. One of the bold ones, who like to talk to you about what is happening to them and what might happen to them with a lucidity that you wouldn’t expect even from a brave adult. One who had a way with the nurses, a really bright nine-year-old.

  He had a blood disease, but not among the most devastating. And maybe one of the reasons that Leo became fond of him was precisely the possible remission of the illness. And he seemed to have been right: Alessandro got better. His illness was beating a retreat. Leo agreed to discharge the child from his ward with some satisfaction. Feeling like a God the Father.

  But a few months later Alessandro’s parents brought him to the emergency room. They had been at the seaside, on the beach, when blood began to gush from his nose and his parents couldn’t stanch it. Then a sudden weakness. Delirium. A fever so high his brain is about to fry. Leo gets a phone call. He is also at the seaside for the weekend. He has to go to the hospital immediately. Alessandro’s parents need him. Alessandro needs him.

  Leo certainly didn’t have to wait for the tests to know that it was serious. A recurrence. Extremely violent, pitiless, like all recurrences. And unexpected. This time the treatments had no effect. Things deteriorated quickly. Why? the young doctor asked himself. Simple, because things deteriorate. Because no case resembles another. Because no patient resembles the one in the next bed. Because each adventure is its own adventure. Because to seek comfort in statistics is a scientific perversion that a doctor endowed with common sense and experience should never give in to. A knowledgeable doctor should know his enemy. A knowledgeable doctor should know that his enemy is that capricious and unknowable thing called the human body. And he should know that nothing is more fragile than a fledgling human body. People say that the psyche is unknowable, is a mystery, but, if there is one thing that’s unknowable and mysterious, it’s the body.

  And then, a few weeks later, after he had told the parents that their son was no more—those same parents to whom he had said, only a few months earlier, that Alessandro was out of danger, that he needed to be watched but was out of danger, that he would have a life different from that of other children, under the threat of the treacherous disease, but anyway he would have a life—Leo had taken off his white coat, returned to his car, driven to his house at the seaside, with its view over a beautiful lagoon, and there had found waiting for him a young wife who was nursing their newborn second child and scolding his rowdy older brother. A scene that celebrated the triumph of life.

  A scene so sweet-smelling and so stinking. And he had felt guilty. He had felt dirty. For a second he had been tempted by the moralistic shortcut of not accepting the joy of his house, the joy of his life. But then he had understood that he was wrong: his work was his work, his life was his life. The two things often met. They lived together on a very fine thread, suspended a thousand meters above the ground, under which the abyss opened. But if one didn’t want to go mad one had to keep them apart.

  There, the same was true of the courtroom. It resembled his unit. The battle was inexorable. Strangers spoke with pompous gravity of things that wouldn’t change the course of their life. And this time the only life in play was his: he was the terminally ill person in this circumstance. He the child whose life was in danger. Everything around him was scenery.

  And now he understood those sick people who stop fighting, who seem to have found an inner peace. Who no longer have the strength to complain. Whose only impatience concerns the treatments whose object they are, and which have no use except to sharpen the agony and cruelly postpone the time of nothingness. What he was going through in court was nothing other than therapeutic persistence, there came a point when he was unable to bear it any longer and had pulled the plug.

  That’s why he stayed home, in his hole. Placidly resigned.

  At least until that day.

  That day when he was captured by a ridiculous hope, triggered, paradoxically, by yet another piece of bad news. A telephone call on his private number. Herrera. Camilla had asked the judge to be heard a second time, she had new revelations to make. It meant that they were ready for a final encounter: her parents or the psychiatrist would have her say painful and devastating things.

  “Why are you talking about it?”

  “I’m afraid they’ll increase the charges. They might be fabricating more nonsense: I want you to be prepared. It might be something really terrible for you and your family. If that little lunati
c should make revelations of a certain type, the spotlights of the press might go on again.”

  “What type of revelations are you talking about?”

  “Something even more serious.”

  “What do you mean, more serious? What could be more serious than what they’re accusing me of? What are they coming up with this time? An orgy? Cocaine? That she showed up with some luscious little friend from nursery school?”

  “Leo, don’t talk nonsense. Don’t joke. And, for heaven’s sake, not on the phone. I don’t know what there is that’s new. I know only what I told you. It’s a rumor. But you have to prepare yourself. You have to remain cool.”

  Leo had listened calmly to this further madness. The sarcasm with which he had received the news testified to his calm. After Herrera’s reproach he had made no other comments. Except when Herrera said that he would come and see him, that they would talk about it. Then Leo confined himself to whispering that he didn’t want him around.

  But now, right after he hung up, an old rage possessed him. The only thing he could still feel was a sense of frustrated contempt. What else did they want to do to him, the little whore and that lout her father? All this was not enough? When would their hunger for revenge be satisfied?

  Revenge. Might it not be time for him to take revenge? Leo was seized by a passion for revenge against that girl. It was just the gratuitousness of the folly and cruelty that continued to enrage him, even on the emotional Aventine to which he had withdrawn.