Persecution (9781609458744)

by Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)

  And Leo had not attended any of those children’s parties precisely in order not to be exposed to what on that birthday he couldn’t escape: that is, the spectacle of his son’s horribly precocious maladjustment. His son who couldn’t fit in even when the entire world was mobilized to honor him. His dissonance, his oddness.

  It had been truly unpleasant to observe how Fili, even in the presence of so many companions, appeared detached, closed off in a permanent private game. Always clinging to those wretched comic books. Blasted Donald Duck, blasted Huey, Dewey, and Louie! What do they have that we don’t? Why, my little one, are you always with them, why not come out here with us, who love you so much?

  Suddenly the mothers of the other children, perceiving the unease aroused by the bizarre behavior of the birthday boy, had grabbed their children and led them over to Filippo.

  “Come, won’t you play with him?” one said. And Leo felt deeply pained. In that woman’s voice was an insulting note of pity. After some insistence three children gathered around Filippo. The mothers returned to their chat. Leo observed how confidently the three talked, and how they tried in some way to involve Filippo. But he refused. He stayed on his own. Until one of the children impatiently addressed to the others a phrase that Leo would never forget: “Leave him alone, he doesn’t understand anything. Filippo is stupid.”

  Little bastard! The cruelty of children. The frankness of children. It had been such a blow to Leo. To the heart of “affectionate social relations.” No, there was nothing affectionate about social relations. Social relations are cruel. And he, Leo, knows it well.

  When you have a very small child (particularly if this child is the first) you tend to magnify any problem he has, imagining that, just like the problems of adults, it’s doomed not to be resolved . . . And you are scarcely aware that, while you’re torturing yourself with the doubt that your son will ever speak—because if he hasn’t learned to do it up to now he probably never will, because it’s evidently something too complicated for him—suddenly, almost overnight, he begins to speak with utter naturalness. But then on the horizon a new problem appears, which to you, poor fearful father, doesn’t seem any less insoluble than the previous one. So it was with Filippo.

  In the end Rachel had been right: after a while Filippo began to speak. At first he struggled, distorting his words in a sweet, funny way. Saying “I don’t lighe” instead of “I don’t like.” Getting confused about some verb persons: you might say to him, “Am I wrong or did my Filippo eat a little too much today?” and he, all polite and offended, would answer, “I’m wrong, I’m wrong!” Later his language became impressively correct.

  But with the arrival of words, which were increasingly clear and precise, and before Filippo revealed his helplessness with the alphabet, another odd thing had manifested itself, which disturbed Leo and Rachel in a way that was different, perhaps, but no less pointed.

  They noticed that, in order to fall asleep, Filippo had got in the habit of beating his head violently against the pillow. And he usually did it in time to music. This had started when Rachel bought a brightly colored child’s portable record player, made just for 45s, which were all the rage in those years. And Leo had inaugurated the machine by inserting an old single by Ricky Nelson, one of those hard-to-find records that the same American aunt every so often sent Leo, her Italian nephew, when he was a boy.

  The record was from 1957. At that time Ricky Nelson was a teen idol. And that single, titled “Be-Bop Baby” (what audacious alliteration!), had for several weeks been at the top of the charts in the United States. Which had inspired the diligent Aunt Adriana to get it and send it to her nephew. It was a catchy tune, typical of the time. Leo had always liked it. Maybe because it was connected to some memory stored in that romantic jewel box that was his youth. He certainly hadn’t the slightest suspicion that he would come to find that song intolerable because of the hundreds of times his son forced him to listen to it. For Filippo it was the only song that existed. You were in trouble if you made him listen to another one. Even from the same era. Even with the same chords. Even by the same singer. Then he became furious. He wanted only “Be-Bop Baby.” And nothing else. Here was his new obsession. The new method he’d come up with for keeping out everything else.

  Well, all right, it’s true, Leo said to himself, children are like that: obsessive and conservative. Stubborn reactionaries in miniature. But Filippo’s obsession with that record seemed pathological. Just like the way he beat his head against the pillow for several hours in a row, stopping just to start the record again. Where did he get so much energy? And what was the sense of expending so much energy for nothing?

  Filippo and Semi’s nanny was called Carmen. She was a simple, proud Cape Verdian, whom the boys adored and whom Rachel, at least at the time (before Carmen gave signs of instability), trusted entirely. Carmen was the first to give a name to that bizarre behavior. As she said good night, a moment after turning off the light in “her” boys’ room, she exhorted Filippo, “Don’t work too hard.” And then she warned his little brother, who was in the lower of the bunk beds, “And you, Semi, don’t copy him.”

  Work. This was how Carmen had described Filippo’s mania for beating his head against the pillow. And in fact some evenings, when Leo and Rachel came home from a dinner out, and, passing the boys’ room before going to bed, heard that eerie squeaking sound, felt an odd tenderness for their little worker. Rachel thought of those factory assembly lines that operate all night. And Leo of Charlie Chaplin’s Mod­ern Times.

  Once Leo had hypothesized, “Maybe it’s a kind of Jewish atavism.”

  “In what sense?”

  “Well, like the Hasidim at the Wailing Wall. Maybe at last we have a great rabbi in the family.”

  “Don’t be a fool. The speech therapist says it might be a mild form of autism. She says it’s not so alarming, but it could also explain his difficulties in relating to the world . . . ”

  Did there always have to be something? Was it possible that that blessed child every so often had to come out with a new peculiarity? Possible that all those doctors, groping in the dark, always felt a need to give a name to his peculiarities?

  When Leo, after a nighttime call, came home at dawn, he liked to go and see the children sleeping. Entering their room he was invaded by the poignant odor of cookies just taken out of the oven. He was very careful not to wake them. He sat first on the lower bunk, where Samuel slept like a little angel, caressed his hand, pulled up the blanket. Then he rose and repeated the same gesture with Filippo. But merely touching him set in motion that infernal machine. See how Filippo, without even waking up, began to butt the pillow with his head. This always produced a certain anguish in Leo, inducing him to leave the room immediately, as if he didn’t want to face another demonstration that his son wasn’t completely normal. But mixed with that worry there was also a lot of pride. For the character and the determination that Filippo put into things. For his wisdom and his patience. Attributes that were far from childish.

  One thing that struck Leo was his son’s endurance. His extraordinary compunction in accepting everything his parents forced him to do. Never once did he complain. He showed such stoicism. As if by being subjected to those treatments he had developed a passive acceptance of his own imperfection. All that effort to learn to speak. All that effort to learn to write. All that effort to try to go to sleep without rhythmically hitting the pillow with his head because it upsets Mamma and Papa so much. All that effort, in short. For what?

  Maybe they were too apprehensive. Maybe it would have been better to let Filippo give in to his harmless weaknesses. But what could Leo do if, in certain things, both he and Rachel had an interventionist spirit? And if Filippo’s compliance made things even easier? He wasn’t the type of child to whom you have to keep saying: we’re doing it for your own good. Something in his brain must have led him to believe that the life of a child was a continuous, persistent process meant to correct you. He must
have been sure that he was a creature full of factory defects.

  But was it really so normal and so necessary to spend childhood afternoons with his mother in some waiting room, to then be greeted by yet another specialist? Was it really indispensable to subject him to all this? Or maybe little Fili was paying the price of having been born into a horribly perfectionist era, and of being the child of two doctors with a weakness for straightening what was crooked? Two tidy bourgeois parents incapable of accepting that their child expressed himself in a different way from the dreariest average and the most ordinary excellence?

  Leo at times wondered if he himself wasn’t a little too submissive to Rachel’s will. He knew how proud she was of her son’s stoicism. That was the way she was brought up. To consider personal sacrifice a kind of demonstration of humanity: people sacrifice themselves without a fuss. And certainly the fact that Filippo never complained must have been in her eyes truly admirable. Often at night Rachel would tell Leo about how impeccably the child had behaved at the speech therapist’s or the psychologist’s.

  “He’s so good, he sits there, without saying a word. Every so often he smiles at me. He pages through his comic books so politely. He looks at the other children in the waiting room with amazement. And he seems to be asking, ‘What’s wrong with these people that they complain so much?’ Our Filippo’s a little grownup.”

  “Where did you take him to eat?” Leo asked, to change the subject, because he knew that the pact agreed to by mother and son was the following: if he was a good boy when she took him out of school at noon to see one of his doctors, in exchange they would have lunch in a place of his choosing. Filippo loved to eat. He had a big appetite. And fiercely childish tastes: sandwiches, French fries, Coca-Cola, steamed milk, chocolate cupcakes, cream puffs . . .

  “We went to the Hungaria. He ate an entire hamburger and all the French fries. Then we went to the doctor. And on the way there he read me the newspaper. Or at least he tried to. Every so often he utters strange words, which don’t exist, but then if you think for a moment you realize that it’s an ordinary word where he’s mangled a syllable and changed a vowel . . . ”

  These accounts, which Leo asked for almost every evening—not for the pleasure of hearing them but each time in the hope (inevitably frustrated) that Rachel would say to him, “Everything’s fine, Filippo is finally reading with the composure, the style, and the diction of Vittorio Gassman”—had a terrible effect on him. Sometimes they made him furious, other times they made him feel insanely affectionate. Certainly they never left him indifferent. That his son should spend most of the afternoons of the only childhood he would get being tormented by doctors filled him with indignation and made him reconsider the whole interventionist choice that he and Rachel had made.

  The compliance Rachel told him about, the greediness with which Filippo ate the hamburger, the blunders and frequent and ridiculous mistakes he made reading the newspaper irritated him. Surely, surely he should have had greater understanding. Didn’t he treat gravely ill children? But the point is that without him those children wouldn’t survive. Very often they didn’t survive anyway. Filippo, on the other hand, without his speech therapists and his psychologists would manage very well, no question.

  And then the children Leo treated were not his sons. Over time he had learned to tolerate the fact that his work consisted of seeing innocent beings suffer. It was also for that reason—in fact, for that very reason—that he couldn’t bear to have a child suffering at home. No, he really didn’t like Filippo’s stoicism, as much as he didn’t like Rachel’s perseverance. Paradoxically he would have preferred from both some lessening of discipline. Indeed, laxity would have seemed to him a completely natural reaction.

  Besides, Leo knew that if he hadn’t been six feet tall, if he hadn’t been the stylish man he was, if he hadn’t over the years won such an eminent place in society, if he hadn’t had the duty to keep up a certain comportment in front of his wife, probably, listening to Rachel’s accounts of the daily activities of his son, composed of docility and resignation and such endless difficulties, he would have broken down in tears.

  Dear God, his Fili sometimes seemed so defenseless, so incapable of fighting back against even the smallest obstacle!

  One morning, in the house at the seaside in the Maremma where the Pontecorvos spent a month every summer, Rachel found Filippo on the bed in the maid’s room, where the nanny—on vacation at the time—usually slept.

  Rachel found him there, motionless, still wearing his sneakers, T-shirt, and soccer shorts, and exuding the salty, goat-like smell of someone who hasn’t washed after sports. Rachel was astonished not only at finding him there but at the fact that he was so extremely happy to see her. Filippo was about to cry. The night before, Leo and Rachel, coming back from dinner at the house of friends, hadn’t realized that Filippo wasn’t sleeping in the room with Semi. Now Filippo explained to her that, returning from a soccer game on the beach, he had lain down for a moment on that bed, Carmen’s bed. He had fallen asleep. Waking up a few hours later in absolute, terrible pitch-darkness.

  “But, sweetheart, you couldn’t go into the bedroom with your brother?”

  “I thought I had gone blind.”

  “What do you mean, blind? Why blind?”

  “Because it was all dark. I kept my eyes open all night to see if there was any light. But no.”

  “The shutters are closed. We’re in the middle of the lagoon. It’s normal that night is darker than in Rome. But couldn’t you turn on the light?”

  “Yes, I thought of that. I kept my hand on the switch all night.”

  “And why didn’t you push it?”

  “Because if the light didn’t go on, then I really was blind.”

  “But look at you, my little silly.”

  Again the image of his son courting the light switch for an entire night, unable to make up his mind to push it, out of fear that he had gone blind, produced in Leo a feeling less cheerful than the one roused in his wife. Here was another demonstration of his fear and his inability to react. Poor Filippo, it must have been a real nightmare to think for all that time that he was blind. Why hadn’t he called them? Why hadn’t he shouted to summon them? Simple—because their arrival could have confirmed his blindness, just like pushing the light switch. Better to wait in anguish for the arrival of dawn! All that fear, what did it mean? What value did it have? What obstacles would it lead to? And, above all, was this the message that he and Rachel had given their son? The subliminal message that said, My boy, you are a defective child. A child who is coming apart, destined to fall ill and break into pieces.

  “But do you know, sweetheart, how difficult it is to become blind?” Leo had explained later. “Do you know why many people, even if they want to, don’t kill themselves?”

  “What?”

  “Because, in spite of what you think, dying is difficult. Getting sick is difficult. Our body is a structure that is marvelously designed to resist and adapt. Above all at your age.”

  And, after uttering these sensible words, Leo wondered if they were appropriate for a child of eight.

  It also occurred to Leo to wonder what it could mean for a child like that to have a younger brother who seemed his exact opposite. Who had learned to speak precociously, who slept profoundly and quietly, who wrote and read effortlessly, whose preferred activity seemed to be to excel in school, in sports, and in pleasing others. What did it mean for such a complicated older brother to have a younger brother who enjoyed the birthday parties organized for him by his parents? A lighthearted child, whom life had spared the torture of speech therapists, psychologists, neurologists? Semi was the child everyone would like to have: cheerful, easygoing, funny. Maybe less handsome than Filippo: his looks were marred by a slight distortion of his features. But those imperceptible imperfections were what made him, if possible, even more likable.

  It would be natural for them to hate each other. It would be natural for them to figh
t. When Semi was born someone always kept an eye on him. Rachel was afraid that Filippo, who had already shown signs of strangeness, might be violent toward his brother. Everything conspired to make the two competitive and envious.

  Not at all. They were the closest, most solidly allied brothers that Leo had ever seen (and he knew something about children). In the morning they went to school together. In the afternoon they came home together. The older had infected the younger with his love for comic books, while the younger had introduced the older to collecting soccer jerseys. Over the years (and every year a little more) the two had elaborated a coded language all their own, which excluded others, it’s true, but also made their fraternal solidarity something mystical, enigmatic.

  And by now one could not be without the other. There was something unhealthy that made Leo uneasy but that Rachel was able to reduce to a reasonable and modest dimension. In the end life would separate them, making them autonomous, in a spirit of emancipation no less inevitable (and in a certain sense no less sad) than that which would one day drive both Filippo and Samuel to leave their parents. And to form, if fate offered them the chance, new nuclear families totally independent of the original one. Isn’t this the great tragedy of life?

  Some two years before finding himself at yet another moral crossroads—to emerge from his cave and go to the aid of his son who was writhing on the grass with a broken ankle or stand frozen at the window?—Leo had asked Rachel, along with the boys, to come with him to an oncology conference that was to be held in London in early December. His speech was scheduled for the Thursday evening, he had explained to Rachel, to lure her. Which meant that they would have a long weekend to enjoy themselves in a city where he—he loved to boast—knew “every puddle.” Like all bourgeois families, the Pontecorvos were devoutly Anglophile. Like all bourgeois families (except English ones, I suppose) the Pontecorvos had a ridiculously conventional idea of the British world: rough as tweed, tough as Dunhill tobacco, soft as the whiskers of an admiral of the Royal Navy, and elegant as an aphorism of George Bernard Shaw . . .