Persecution (9781609458744)

by Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)

  For this reason Leo was particularly happy about his now ten-year friendship with Professor Alfred Hathaway, a smooth-spoken, genial oncologist who worked in a large hospital complex in the western part London. Every year Alfred organized, on behalf of the Royal Holloway University, a conference at which Leo always played the role of protagonist. Leo considered his colleague, Professor Hathaway, a kind of fellow-soldier in the great civil war that in those years pediatric oncology was waging to set up common strategies and protocols.

  That year, with Christmas approaching, well . . . wouldn’t it be magnificent to go with the boys? They could do the stupid things that tourists like, and the fashionable ones of frequent visitors. They would go shopping and eat strange, fatty things.

  Everything was set when Rachel, because of a sudden flu, defaulted.

  “Now what?”

  “Now here I am in my funeral shroud.”

  “Come on, don’t be stupid, what shall we do?”

  “My plan for the weekend is to stay in bed, envying to death all the scones you’ll be eating in spite of me!”

  “How can I manage without you? Thursday I’m at the conference all day. At night I’ll have to go to dinner with Alfred and the other participants. I can’t take the boys with me. And then it would be so wonderful if you were there, too.”

  “You always complain that you don’t see them enough. That you can never be together. That they’re growing up before your eyes . . . Here, you have your chance. And it wouldn’t be bad for me to have a few days without them around. And they’re so eager to go. Samuel is all excited, I don’t know which pair of pants or shoes I heard him babbling about the other day on the telephone. Filippo is happy because he’ll be able to buy Secret Love or whatever the heck it’s called.”

  It was typical of Rachel to mangle the names of books, films, comics. This habit played an important role in an iconoclastic strategy that was typical of Roman dialect and opposed by the philological rigor of her husband, who knew very little Roman. In the specific case the comic book that Rachel alluded to, and that Filippo had tormented her with in recent days, was Secret Wars, by Jim Shooter, a publishing event from Marvel. It had come out that year in England and the United States and fabulous tales were told about it (the Italian edition wouldn’t appear until long after Leo’s departure from this world).

  “After all,” Rachel resumed, “for several summers already we’ve sent them out on their own! Of course they can stay for one day in a comfortable London hotel and take a nice walk around the neighborhood. Don’t worry.”

  “Sweetheart, you don’t know how sorry I am that you . . . ” Leo had commented complainingly.

  A few weeks before this conversation took place, Leo and Rachel, discussing the trip, had come to the subject of the airplane tickets. Filippo had flown once, with his father, on the short leg from Rome to Milan. Samuel had never flown: another reason for excitement.

  Leo’s ticket, bought by the conference, was in business class: as Alitalia, following other airline companies, now designated what at one time had been called, in a much more classist way, first class. But, apart from the designation, things were not so changed: green seats that were a little larger than those in economy class, better service and meals, prettier hostesses, and a price at least four times as high. Leo would have liked to take the whole family with him in business class. And Rachel naturally was opposed, indignant.

  “It seems unnecessary.”

  “But really, doesn’t it seem ridiculous to fly in different classes? You want us to play the great lord and his servants?”

  “I don’t want my sons, getting on an airplane for the first time, to do it like snobs. It seems revolting. Unseemly. Impolite.”

  “What nonsense! The same old story. Why do you never surprise me?”

  “I could say the same to you.”

  “But for once let’s do something all together. After all it’s the first time Semi’s been on an airplane. I’d like to share the experience with him.”

  “You can always do that.”

  “Yes, but after takeoff.”

  “Never mind. It means that your son will take off without you and will eat with plastic utensils.”

  “But takeoff is the moment most . . . ”

  He wasn’t allowed to say “most” what.

  “I’m not going to talk about it. If you buy first-class tickets you’ll have to go to London without me.”

  “It’s not first, it’s business.”

  “Whatever it’s called.”

  “All right. It means that I’ll ask the secretary for the conference to get me an economy class ticket . . . ”

  “No, really, what does that have to do with it? They’re paying for you. You’re going for work. You have to arrive fresh and rested. You deserve some extra comfort. It’s another matter. But to spend all that money for two and a half hours of flight seems to me contrary to every . . . ”

  Rachel was unable say to “every” what. Notion of logic? Morality? Sense of appropriateness? We’ll never know.

  One thing was certain: while Rachel had had the best of it on the question of tickets, and thus no longer had any reason not to go, it was the flu, in the end, that decided for her.

  So Leo found himself at the airport, standing in line to check in, with his sons a little sulky because of their mother’s absence and this problem of the airplane seats to resolve.

  “If you promise me not to tell Mamma we’ll make a last attempt.”

  “Signor Pontecorvo,” the woman at the check-in counter said, “there is only one seat free in business class.”

  “So?”

  “So I can only do the upgrade for one of your sons. Otherwise . . . ”

  Leo looked at the boys. Let them decide. Filippo, with a gesture habitual to him, had shrugged his shoulders as if to say: let him go, what do I care . . . While the face of Semi, who was so crazy about luxury, had lit up.

  The only thing that Filippo asked for was a window seat. It wasn’t hard to satisfy him. And now there he was, over his ears the headphones of a Sony walkman—a gadget obsolete today but avant-garde in those days, which Leo had bought some time ago in Hong Kong—his forehead resting on the windowpane, his gaze kept by only a sliver of wing from being lost in the immensity.

  Semi, twenty seats forward, had no such contemplative attitude. Like a real parvenu, Leo thought fondly, he did not refuse a single option made available by Alitalia to VIP customers. Beginning with the glass of champagne offered by a pretty young hostess, which Semi accepted with a slight, polite nod.

  Leo, winking at the girl in uniform and taking the glass from his son’s hands, had said, “Champagne isn’t strong enough for him, give him some Scotch. On the rocks, of course.” And so the hostess, taking the hint, had brought a glass of Fanta, with three ice cubes.

  Then Semi had taken such pleasure in the takeoff, his body contracting in a spasm of excitement and fear just at the heroic instant when the wheels left the runway. The December morning sky had a pitiless clarity. Leo, resting his chin on the shoulder of his son, whose face was turned to the west, had watched the line between sea and land sharpen. The fantastic patchwork created by yellow, beige, green, brown squares gave the earth a kind of pointillist shimmer. The slender white stripes of two boats fearlessly entering the open sea made him think of two wriggling spermatozoa in search of an opportunity. At that point Leo returned to his work. He took his notes out of his briefcase. He needed to concentrate.

  Too bad Semi would not sit still for an instant. He had gone to the bathroom at least three times. He noisily unwrapped the earphones given to him by the same hostess. And he took on the job of unwrapping his father’s as well. He had played with the buttons and controls. His excitement had reached a peak when the lunch tray arrived. Leo never ate on an airplane. But it was clear that his second-born would not imitate that paternal habit. On the contrary! Semi buttered the two rolls he had taken from the basket offered by the hostess and
also the one on Leo’s tray. He inhaled the lasagna, and then cut the roast beef into tiny pieces but didn’t touch it. He had devoured the plum cake and demanded a double scoop of vanilla ice cream. Finally, the hostess, with a pewter coffeepot in her hand, had winked at Leo: “Coffee for everyone, sir?”

  And Leo, “Yes, but if you could do me a favor, and dilute his with a little hot water.”

  Just when, more or less around the Riviera, Semi seemed to have calmed down and Leo had reached the right degree of concentration, again the little pest returned to the charge.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going over my lecture. Tomorrow I have a test in class,” Leo said, trying to be funny. “You know, papa will have to speak off the top of his head, and in English, and, well . . . it’s always better to speak in your own language.”

  Leo had got in the habit of speaking about himself to his children in the third person, like his own father. It was the late Dr. Pontecorvo senior who had taught him that that is how one speaks to one’s son. Papa does this, Papa does that . . . It was an expressive mode that in its impersonality and its pedagogic effect stopped just short of pomposity.

  “But the notes are written in Italian,” his son observed pedantically.

  “The notes, yes. For Papa it’s easier that way. But then I’ll have to speak in English.”

  Samuel was always asking why. He hadn’t stopped since he began to speak. “Why do birds fly?” “Why do cars move?” “Why are the ants eating that butterfly?” “Why does the television work?” “Why do we eat?” “Why does Mamma have blond hair and why is Papa’s black . . . ?” These were the questions with which Semi bothered any adult within range. Huge, not to say useless, questions, which should have deserved tautological answers—“Because,” “Because that’s how the universe works”—but which instead obliged Leo and Rachel to invent detailed and instructive answers. “Cars move because man invented something that’s called the internal-combustion engine,” “We eat and sleep because if we didn’t we wouldn’t survive,” “Ants, just like us, need nourishment. For them, as for us, food is assured by the functioning of the food chain. Probably the butterfly crashed and happened to fall near the anthill: the accident made it the ideal meal for the ants . . . ”

  The fact is that Semi couldn’t be satisfied. There was no answer that did not lead to another question, more metaphysical than the preceding, if possible. And although this was exasperating, still it gave evidence of a certain argumentative liveliness.

  If for his older brother language had been a difficult and dramatic conquest, Semi had forged ahead: his precocity in appropriating expressions had appeared almost miraculous to his parents. From the first years of his life Semi had tormented them with two great passions: the desire to create a relationship between things and the taste for asking questions. Those two vocations combined made him a tireless interviewer and a frantic comparison maker. “Between me and Filippo who’s a better swimmer?” “Between Mamma and Papa, who’s been in an airplane more times?” “Who’s stronger, me or my friend Giacomo?”

  A kind of comparative delirium that also indicated a passion—very Pontecorvo—for competition. A passion that Filippo seemed totally immune to. A passion that, for different reasons, neither Leo nor Rachel minded.

  “What’s this?” Semi asked, pointing to a place on the page that his father was holding.

  “The title of my paper.”

  And then Semi, with his nose stuck in his father’s notes and uttering the words clearly, had read: “The Three Phases of Communicating the Diagnosis to Pediatric-Age Oncology Patients: Progress and Development.”

  After a moment’s hesitation he asked, “What does it mean?”

  “I told you. It’s the title of my paper.”

  “Yes, but what does it mean?”

  “Is there a particular word you don’t understand? Or is it the entire formulation you don’t get?”

  “Both.”

  “For example, what word do you not understand?”

  “ ‘Diagnosis.’ ”

  And so our failed Hellenist began to pontificate: “It’s a word of Greek origin. Like, in fact, almost all the words doctors use. It comes from dia, which means ‘through,’ and gnosis, a wonderful word that means ‘knowledge.’ It’s the way doctors determine and classify the pathology the patient is suffering from after they’ve subjected him to a series of tests.”

  Seeing that Semi still looked perplexed Leo went on: “You know when you have a fever, when your bones ache and your mouth is hot and Mamma keeps you home from school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you come to me and say, ‘Papa, I have a fever, achy bones, a hot mouth,’ first of all Papa will ask you for a lot of money. And then probably, given those symptoms, he’ll tell you that you have the flu. That is a diagnosis, which you arrive at through the symptoms that the patient states. Flu is the diagnosis. The only difference is that the diagnoses that Papa has to make are more complicated and more, how can I put it . . . dramatic.”

  “Why dramatic?”

  “Because they are more difficult and because they concern illnesses that are more serious and more insidious than the flu. And because for the patient and the relatives of the patient they lead to some very unpleasant thoughts.”

  “What does ‘oncology patients’ mean?”

  “Those are the patients afflicted by the diseases that Papa deals with.”

  “And ‘pediatric age’?”

  “That means it has to do with children.”

  The reason that Leo got lost in all that chat and took refuge in all those flowery euphemisms was the result of a peculiar and deep-rooted difficulty in speaking to his sons about his work. Not that he wanted to protect them from a profession that, to all intents and purposes, could be considered extreme. It would be more exact to say that he was superstitiously afraid that, if he talked to them about it, he might in some way infect them. Make them more vulnerable. Make them like all the other children on the planet, or all fragile creatures exposed to the caprices of chance, liable to get sick and die at any moment.

  Leo—the son of hypochondriac parents—had chosen not to be, in turn, a hypochondriac father. Mindful of how unbearable it had been to carry that burden of shadowy parental fears, he had decided to relieve his sons and himself of it. But in order to stick fully to that decision he had had to convince himself that, unlike others, Filippo and Semi were not part of the cycle of life: invulnerable to any illness, they would remain that way as long as he lived. This was above all the reason that he had always been hesitant to talk about his work in their presence. The same reluctance that he had in speaking about them to anyone in the hospital. He didn’t want to create any connection. He preferred to manage his life like that: in watertight compartments. His sons were not “pediatric age.” His sons were his sons and that was all.

  “So what are you going to say at the conference?” Samuel asked him, opening yet another can of Fanta. “I’m presenting the results that have been obtained in the past two years, thanks to innovations that, with the help of some enlightened colleagues, Papa has managed to introduce in his units. Results that have been really encouraging.”

  “Like?”

  This time Leo hesitated a little more before answering. Not so much because he lacked the euphemisms but because with that question his son had forced him to think about all the battles he had had to fight in recent years, against a rigid system, in order, finally, to be able to work in what seemed to him the fairest and most decent way.

  Innovation. There is a word hated by the bureaucrats of Santa Cristina. Innovation. There is the cause for which he had worn himself out, for which he had fought, argued, for which he had almost risked self-destructing, and ruining his career. There is the persistence that they might one day find a way to make him pay for, but that for now had produced extraordinary results, which Leo was eager to discuss with his colleagues in other nations.

  The princi
pal therapeutic innovation that, about five years earlier, Leo had introduced into his treatment protocol (with some years’ delay with respect to other, more advanced European and American practices) was the central venous catheter: an instrument thanks to which he could easily inject his patients’ bodies not only with the poison of the chemo but also with the so-called “comfort therapies,” necessary to keep them alive and make them feel better. All this without having to torture the small, young veins, at risk of being damaged for good.

  There had been an equally decisive revolution in, precisely, communication of the diagnosis to the patient. To introduce this Leo had had to challenge a more insidious enemy: the parents and their desperate wish. It was they, the parents, who couldn’t accept the idea that the doctors should communicate the diagnosis to their children. What need was there to do so? Wasn’t it already shocking enough that they were sick? Wasn’t it enough to subject them to those frighteningly destructive treatments? Now they also had to be informed of the illness that was trying to kill them, the risks they ran, the extreme therapies to which they would be subjected?

  Well, yes, Leo believed. And with him an entire school of thought. Helped and supported in turn by a substantial and combative group of child psychologists.

  If Leo merely thought back to all the nonsense he had told his patients in the early years; if he thought back to how difficult it was to keep all that nonsense in mind and exercise control over it; if he thought back to the distrust with which his patients, especially the adolescents, looked at him while he served up all that rubbish . . . If Leo merely thought back to it he felt sick to his stomach.