It should be said that there was nothing positive about Leo’s rage. It was all devoted to negativity. The days were over when he took pleasure in imagining the rise to public rehabilitation. It was a long time since he had fantasized about the scene in which he descends the marble steps of the Palace of Justice, in a rain of roses, applause, and tears. It was an infinity of time since he had imagined the faces of Rachel and the boys bursting with pride for the redemption that had taken place. Hope had become, so to speak, so rarefied as to disappear. At the end of the tunnel there was no virtuous happy ending waiting for him. At the end of the tunnel there was only another tunnel. At the end of which there was yet another. And so on.
But now, now that his rage was rekindled, now hope, too, was rekindled: it reappeared in his eyes in a less noble but more exciting form. He wanted to see that girl shown up as a liar, annihilated. He wanted to see Herrera make fodder of her publicly. Only a bloody scene like that might give him some joy. In other words, it was bitterness that had rekindled the fire of hope. And it was the desire for revenge that kept it burning.
And to think that the hours preceding Herrera’s phone call had slipped by in grotesquely comforting reflections on the most hygienic way of clearing out of this world in a hurry, if possible on tiptoe. Not exactly a specific thought, rather a pastime with which he had been amusing himself for several weeks. For a need like his there was a word: suicide. But it seemed to him so emphatic. So literary . . . he preferred to think of an instantaneous break.
If only I were like Camilla’s father, one of those fascists with a gun . . . if only I lived on the top floor of one of those nice big apartment buildings . . . if only that time I had listened to what Luigi, the anesthesiologist, said about a lethal combination of drugs . . . if only I had the courage to hang myself . . .
It isn’t that Leo had had enough of life. He liked life. He absolutely liked it. He still had dreams sometimes in which he miraculously wore again the clothes of the man he had been before this obscene business defiled his existence. Well, the good god of dreams is a witness of how much Leo, in the role of his former self, had enjoyed himself. The pleasures, the many innocent underrated pleasures of the civilized individual, of the blameless ordinary man. There was not a single instant of his new life in which Leo had committed the sin of disowning them. There was not a single instant when he had not celebrated them with fervent nostalgia. The Friday evenings when Rachel picked him up at the hospital: he was too tired to drive, and so he left the car in the parking lot. He took off his tie and got in Rachel’s car; as usual she showed up a few minutes late. They barely arrived in time. They entered the theater breathless, almost always last, stumbling over the knees of their neighbors to get to a seat.
After the movie they always went to eat at the same place: in the world there was only Berninetta. Leo ordered a mug of ice-cold beer, a vegetarian fritto misto, an extra-large pizza margherita, and that inimitable sour-cherry tart (the secret is in the short-crust dough, Leo explained to his wife every time). Then it was time for the cigar and coffee, in that order, for goodness’ sake. On the way home in the car, Leo napped. That’s what I mean by the pleasures of life. Napping in the car beside your Rachel after a perfect evening and a week of killing work.
No, Leo did not belittle the power of those delights. He wasn’t angry with life in general, but with the particular turn that his had taken lately. The suicidal thoughts he toyed with were nothing but the fetid dross of mental tiredness. His brain was exhausted by the most idle of thoughts: all that might still be if things had happened differently. The specific weight of that useless thought was really too demanding for a single brain. Leo didn’t want to die. Leo wanted to turn off his brain, at least for a little while. He wanted to nap in the car beside Rachel in the hope that the journey home would last an entire year at least. But since that was no longer possible, then there remained only option B. The plan in reserve. An option and a plan that, just because he knew death so well and in his life had seen hundreds of cadavers, made him shudder with terror.
He was at the mercy of that horror when the telephone rang. And he had only to exchange a few remarks with Herrera to feel that horror diminishing. Replaced by a ferocious will to live: a vitality in the form of contempt for that crazy little bitch. And an ardent desire to kill her.
It then had occurred to him that perhaps, somewhere in the house, there might be a letter from Camilla, one of the most passionate and one of the most threatening. Leo hadn’t read it all, to the end. But he was sure that right at the beginning that psychopath had written him that she felt the moment had come to give herself to the man she loved. That is, to him. Too bad that that letter had been written a couple of weeks after the presumed carnal violence they were accusing him of. (At least, so it seemed to him.) In short, that letter not only exculpated him from the most lurid accusation but at the same time revealed that girl’s madness, her spiteful intentions . . . Hence it would make the entire structure of the accusation collapse. As if in a flash Leo remembered the evening when he had found that letter, in the usual place. He had started to read it. Maybe because of the irritation and the fear that the sexual offer roused in him he hadn’t realized that Rachel was entering the room.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
“Nothing, a circular from the Santa Cristina administration . . . ”
“They’ve started writing the circulars in a pen with fuchsia ink?”
“In fact it’s just a draft that the director sent me to look at before he makes a clean copy and sends it out.” He had closed the subject without losing his courage.
And without paying too much attention, and without even finishing it, he had hidden the letter somewhere. Yes, but where? He had been sitting on the bed. So maybe he had hidden it in the nearest place, the drawer of the night table, inside a big folder stuffed with other papers. Yes, it must be there. And where if not. Crazy to remember it now. Might his foolishness, his messiness, have been advantageous for once? Yes, the letter must still be there. Undeniable proof of that girl’s madness. The letter would demonstrate that if there was someone who had been violated, brutalized, well, it was him.
He was so pleased with the opportunity that life had suddenly presented to him, so anxious to recover that sinister evidence. So elated at the idea of revenge. But at the same time our poor cockroach was so frightened by the prospect of making a journey that would expose him to the risk of running into one of the three people in the world he least desired to encounter . . . For that reason he couldn’t do anything but sit there, in a daze: his senses strained and his nerves an instant from breakdown. Over time his fear of finding himself face to face with Rachel, Filippo, and Samuel had become a superstition. Leo knew that the only domestic space allowed him—according to an agreement tacitly reached with his immovable jailers—was the kitchen. He was allowed to enter only at night, within an extremely restricted time, somewhere between eleven-thirty and one. Which was more than sufficient, since the stairway that went up from his study-prison led directly to the kitchen, which at that hour would be empty, clean, and tidy.
For that reason he was now there, near the stairs, undecided what to do, afflicted by palpitations and the sort of nausea produced by excitement about a dangerous mission. He wanted to ascertain as soon as possible if that letter was still there. So much time had passed. So many things could have changed. No one could guarantee, for example, that his bedroom still existed as he remembered it. There was even the possibility that since then Rachel had cleared everything out. That she had decided to get rid of everything belonging to her husband. Yes, this could not be excluded on the face of it.
In the end Leo—like the night when the burglar alarm began to screech—allowed prudence, allowed cowardice to have the upper hand: the disappointment he would feel if the letter wasn’t there would have been much more intense than that aroused by the pain of not being able to get there. Yet again his cowardice seemed to be extraordinaril
y protective.
Or at least it had been until that Thursday. If things in the life of his family hadn’t changed, then Thursday was the propitious day. In the afternoon Telma went out, Rachel took the boys to tennis lessons, and usually, then, she went to the hairdresser. Which meant at least three hours to carry out his mission.
So, at four-thirty on a late-spring afternoon Leo goes upstairs. He violates the boundary that months ago he ordered himself not to cross: the threshold that divides the kitchen from the rest of the house. Finding himself in the place that for so long constituted the ordinary background of his daily life does not rouse in him the overwhelming emotion he imagined. Rather, there is something irritatingly sad about such a display of unchangeability. And then he feels affronted by all that cleanliness. Don’t these people know that they live above the lair of a cockroach? Don’t these people know who the cockroach is? It’s incredible how families immediately get used to their own hypocrisy. How little it takes to become that hypocrisy. Everything around him demonstrates that, after the July night when all hell broke loose, everything has gone back to moving on its proper path. Leo doesn’t feel nervous. He is so disappointed that he’s no longer afraid. If someone comes in? Come on in. I’m a grown man, I’ll know how to face it.
Finally he’s in his bedroom. He merely has to open the door to recognize the bluish half-light that Rachel wants that room to have. And this time the emotion is strong. There is something soft and relaxing in that space. Maybe the regal orange leather armchairs near the window, or maybe the two Art Deco lamps bought on the Rue de Seine, in Paris, on the way back from their honeymoon, or maybe the cotton bedspread with its candy-colored pattern, the strips of rosewood parquet . . . who knows what.. but it all lends the room a welcoming sweetness that Leo didn’t remember. And it’s as if just then he felt on his shoulders the accumulated weight of all the insomnia of that year of life-not-life. He would like to lift up the covers and slip inside. He would like to fall asleep in his bed and never wake up. He is so overcome by emotion that he has almost forgotten the reason he’s there: the letter, the trial, Camilla, all that garbage . . .
To distract himself, and at the same time to revive the diminishing sense of exultant surprise, he goes into the walk-in closet. But this time the surprise is of an opposite nature. If earlier Leo was offended by everything in the house that hasn’t changed, now the moment has come to be offended by all that has. The small room that functions as a closet, with two large mirrors that challenge each other from opposite walls, has been emptied of every trace of his earthly presence. What happened to his pinstriped suits, his tweeds, his shoes, scarves, jackets, hats, gloves? There is nothing anymore. This is the walk-in closet of a lady, a divorcée, a widow. Leo feels a ridiculous hatred for Rachel. For her common housemaid’s diligence. For her damn moral fiber. For her obstinacy. For her mania about hygiene . . . Because it’s hygiene that drove her to eliminate every trace of her husband from that closet. Where his clothes used to be, now—hanging on the brass rail that runs from one end of the room to the other—are only Rachel’s jackets, coats, pants, skirts, which, seen in a row like that, look like a herd of well-dressed ladies lined up at the post office.
The sight of his many wives—which the game of mirrors comically replicates—makes him dizzy. So he sits down on a low chest of drawers. Next to so much disappointment he feels a strange, and decidedly inappropriate, happiness stirring. Something that has to do above all with the senses. And meanwhile he breathes very cautiously. He absolutely doesn’t want to get used to the odor he has rediscovered. The odor of his wife. The odor of a suddenly cut-off intimacy that, if you think about it, would soon have been entering its twentieth year. To keep it alive Leo holds his breath for a few seconds, and then sticks his nose in the sleeve of an old raincoat of Rachel’s. He is desperate. And, just as when he was desperate as a boy, he feels an untimely desire to masturbate. How long since he’s ejaculated? Too long. His sexuality, his masculine brutality have been trampled on by the many humiliations he’s endured. The persistence of embarrassment has been his bromide.
And now he finds himself desiring Rachel in a new, unthinkable way, even more passionate than when, in the early days, she, like a good Jewish girl, wouldn’t give in to him. No, Leo has never desired Rachel with such exhausting passion. Not even at the beginning of their relationship, when she refused him in the car and our young professor’s pants swelled with contained vehemence. Not even then.
Leo feels that, just like a child, he would come in an instant. He has only to yield to the impulse, take it out, touch it a little. He is so excited and so desperate. His mind does nothing but select and isolate delicious moments in the long list of conjugal couplings. There is nothing more terrifying than nostalgia for conjugal sex. There is no perversion more lethal than to masturbate while thinking of your wife. Leo is thinking about this. And then of the first times with Rachel. The beauty of the first times. The barriers they had overcome in the course of years. When he deflowered her a few days before their marriage. The first time she took him in her mouth. The first time he convinced her to let him come in her face. The first time he licked her. The first time he took her from behind. Yes, all the first times condensed into a single image, a sole instant, trapped in the fibers of that useless raincoat. All that explosive material is there, in his mind, in his body. It took nothing to set it off. And to keep it alive very little is needed: he has only to press the sleeve of the raincoat against his nose with greater force and breathe in more violently.
But now another thought gets in the way. Something that resembles jealousy. How has Rachel been behaving in these months? Other men? A steady relationship? Everything that’s happened to Leo in recent times proves that there is really nothing that can’t happen. That the unthinkable is around the corner, waiting for you, with a smile.
The jealousy that starts to torment him is what makes him capitulate. In the end Leo can’t resist: he pulls out his penis, which demonstrates an adolescent reactivity. And he starts masturbating, as every man knows how to do. As every man learns to do at thirteen and never forgets. Nothing odd about it. Men are made like that. You’re always ready to jack off, at the most inconceivable moments and in the least appropriate places. Ever since the beginning, when your body discovers the glory of those stickily mysterious spasms and asks nothing more than to make them happen again and again and again . . . ever since it has been natural to take that solitary gymnastic syncopation for an exorcism. The last depraved resource of your nerves to keep from giving in.
It’s the same for Jews who, when they leave a cemetery after the annual visit to their dead spouse, feel the obligation and the need to eat something. Life is reclaiming its rights. Life requires respect and dedication. But it’s also the only way that’s left to vent frustration and confront disaster. A bad grade at school? Your girl has cheated on you just because that guy had his butt in a Porsche Carrera? You’re upset by the idea of a new Ice Age or the inexorable desertification of the planet? Have no fear, my boy. Run to the bathroom and masturbate. Jack off. Let go. Ardently, violently. It’s the best way to get through it. A sacred gesture, blessing and cursing at the same time. A feral, ancestral instinct like that of the dog who pees on the roots of a tree. It so happens that this time Leo’s tree is his former conjugal boudoir, orphaned by his dazzling collection of clothes and saturated with the tormenting odor of Penelope.
But, just as he’s about to come, he’s distracted by something, a noise behind him. Is someone observing him? He turns his head suddenly but sees no one. Another noise. Faint as fabric sliding on a floor. Panic. Has someone seen him. Has someone seen him jerking off on his wife’s raincoat? Was it Telma? Or one of the boys? Was it Rachel herself? Was it a ghost? Was it no one? Embarrassment once again disengages his virility. Leo, after composing himself as well as he can, runs away to bury himself again.
I will never go out again. I swear. Yes, that was the last time.
Then summer e
rupted: a month early with respect to the calendar, as sometimes happens in Rome. The days of Leo Pontecorvo were attended by two contrasting feelings: a renewed and meditative fatalism and the sensation that someone was keeping on eye on him twenty-four hours out of twenty-four. A shadow. A sprite. Something supernatural. This impression had been with him ever since he had had to abandon his plan to masturbate on the raincoat of his wife. The excitement had disappeared, but not the presence that had made him flee.
He no longer had much desire to eat. For several days he hadn’t even gone to the kitchen to get the food he needed. On the fifth day of not eating, he found the tray with the food outside his door. And from that day on that’s how it was. He was glad the tray was there, and he wondered if the presence he felt around him had put it there or a family member who preferred to remain anonymous. They wanted him alive. Evidently that thing didn’t want him to die, didn’t want him to waste away. Evidently that thing needed Leo to endure, to live. But nevertheless every day he ate a little less. He was discovering the pleasure of not eating.
Then true summer arrived. And it was giving the best of itself in the perfumed warmth that arrived form the garden. The boys had just finished school, and one of Leo’s greatest pleasures was to look out through the window to watch their legs playing ball in the garden. He recognized both Filippo’s and Samuel’s. It was so poignant to recognize them. To witness the miracle of obsessively repeated moves, which Leo never tired of. He felt a pang of grief when the game ended and the teams of four against four, which his sons and their friends formed every morning, broke up, to agree to meet there at the same time the next morning.
Samuel played defense. His vehemence as a defender, the passion with which he stuck to his opponent and kept on him were in contrast with his temperamental and capricious character. Although in life up to then he had been successful in everything he did, Samuel never gave the impression that he could become deeply involved in something. The price you pay if life functions too well for you. If it hadn’t been for that nice gift that Leo and Camilla had given him the year before, his life would have grazed perfection. At least as far as his father knew.
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