If Filippo’s reaction to the musical was much cooler than his brother’s, his enthusiasm for tandoori chicken was not— it was so overwhelming that he ordered an extra portion, after polishing off of the first with a dozen solid forkfuls.
In short, everything seemed to have returned to normal. Leo had gone back to being the conscientious and brilliant parent who never shouts and they two privileged boys, on the threshold of adolescence, enjoying the advantages placed at their disposal by an adored and munificent father.
But at bedtime the atmosphere was again spoiled.
The older of his sons still had the habit of going to sleep every night with the headphones of his Walkman over his ears, listening to the same anachronistic music and running through his nighttime ritual. It was something he couldn’t do without. For that reason Leo, after turning out the light and saying goodnight, had said nothing when he heard that bothersome sound, which meant that Filippo was beating his head against the pillow.
He began to get annoyed only when he realized that Samuel, driven by an incomprehensible spirit of imitation, was following him. There they were, his sons, who, instead of sleeping, were butting their heads in unison, making the bed squeak like two bloody fags going at it. One does it because he can’t do without it. The other because of an insane instinct for imitation. And Leo couldn’t really decide which was worse, all he knew was that he couldn’t stand it. But he also knew that he had to control himself. He had no wish to reproach them again. So, in order not to hear it, first he put his hands on his ears. Then he put his head under the pillow, then he took refuge in the bathroom. Then he went back to bed. Until he realized that what irritated him was not the noise produced by his sons but what that noise implied. It wasn’t enough not to hear them: he wanted them to stop being strange. This was what drove him to intervene. He turned on the lamp. He got up. And he shouted: “Will you stop it, God damn it! Anyone would think you were insane!”
While it couldn’t have been so hard for Samuel to stop doing what he didn’t do naturally, for Filippo it must have been torture. And yet, from then to the end of the vacation, not even once had he done it again. He lay there motionless. Surely he struggled to fall asleep. Without a doubt he was overwhelmed by his anxieties.
But he wasn’t the only one who had a terrible night: Leo was tortured by a sense of guilt. All the things that psychologists, tutors, teachers, professors, speech therapists had told him not to do ever since Filippo was born he had done that night. He had prevented him from expressing himself. He had humiliated him. He had emphasized his strangeness. He had given it a name. And he had let him know how much he was repulsed by it.
But now it was too late to recover. If that first evening Leo had been so bothered by the fact that Filippo indulged in his grotesque rituals, on the following nights he was tormented by the idea that his son was doing everything possible not to give in to them. He would have liked to say to Filippo “Come, sweetie, it’s not important. Start again where you broke off.” But how could he? It would only make matters worse.
And so the weekend that Leo would have liked his boys to archive in the box of “memorable memories” was catalogued instead under large or small “missed opportunities.” The rest of the little vacation was besieged by the dark sky of ill humor. Filippo’s sleepless nights could be seen in his face, just like the mute rancor that took the form of a respectful demeanor and an ostentatious lack of enthusiasm. Maybe it was all that he had suffered, maybe his character, but that boy knew how to be hard and obstinate! O.K.—he seemed to say to his father—I will not act like a clown at night but during the day you will have beside you a statue of salt. And God knew that Leo was bitterly learning his lesson.
Since then many things had happened: Anzère, the first charges, Camilla’s torture, the scandalous public disgrace, the definitive break with his family, prison, the trial, that cockroach-like seclusion . . . Was it possible that only now did Leo think back to those days, to how he hadn’t been able to seduce his sons as he would have liked, to how he had done everything wrong? Possible that only now he thought back to the irritation produced in him by the spectacle of their pathological behavior? Seeing them sniff each other, beat their heads against the pillows to fall asleep, how difficult it was to make them happy and how easy it was to upset them.
It must have been Filippo’s accident that provoked the memory of London and all that it meant. Now that he saw his sons there, a few dozen meters from him, in the midst of yet another crisis, yet another trauma: the older with that leg dangling and the younger frightened by his brother’s pain, not to mention, surely, full of guilt for having caused it.
The burning memory of those days in London—and of his indecisiveness then—was urging him to action. Finally some action, after so many months of ineptitude. He was ready, in short: about to go out. To go and save them. He had an absolute desire to. But, just as he was about to take the first step (the most difficult), Rachel emerged. The moment she knelt down, bending over Filippo’s leg with the knowledge of one who has a degree in medicine, Leo finally saw her face. He realized that, between one thing and another, it was almost a year since he had seen her face. She appeared beautiful, just like his boys.
No, he would not spoil all that beauty (a mother rescuing her son) with the ugliness that he represented. No, he wouldn’t do it. The last opportunity offered by the Heavenly Father to try to rejoin his family was destroyed in a few seconds. With Rachel lifting up Filippo, who was whimpering with pain, and Samuel asking with an insistence not unknown to Leo, “Right, Mamma, everything’s all right?”
This was the last drawing to arrive. Exactly like all the others, it was slipped under the door. Imperceptibly.
By now we know Leo well enough to imagine how the sight of a drawing like this would upset and infuriate him. Whoever had conceived and executed it—after conceiving and executing all the others—had really screwed up. Dragging into that perverse game those whom Leo would have wished to leave out: it was the first time they had dared to depict his family. How to interpret that sudden involvement? A prelude to further developments? A change of perspective and ambition? A warning? An intimidation? Tired of killing him, were they now raising the stakes, threatening what Leo loved most?
Yes, what he loved most. Although at this point Leo had the right not to, it was nevertheless impossible for him not to love Rachel, Fili, and Semi, to damnation if necessary. Leo Pontecorvo wasn’t a resentful or vengeful man. This particular nuance of his character leads me to say that, confronted by this drawing, he would react badly. Maybe he would be furious. Maybe he would even find the strength to leave his cover and take possession of his life. On the other hand I can only make hypotheses: through a concatenation of circumstances, in fact, the sight of this drawing was spared him; our recluse could not evaluate it with the care with which he had evaluated all the others.
Although I have been careful up to here to distribute these drawings in an illustrative way throughout the narrative, it has to be said that, with the sole exception of the last, the others reached Leo in no order and with no respect for chronology. The one of the panty liner abandoned in the bathroom in the mountains was the first, delivered a few days after he came out of prison. Followed, at a distance of a few weeks, by the one that showed him fleeing on the stairs, all out of breath. But this is not, I realize, the most disconcerting fact of the matter. What had begun to undermine Leo’s faith in the sharpness of his own mental faculties was the impression that he had unknowingly posed as a model for an invisible cartoonist.
Was something or someone spying on him? Something or someone keeping an eye on him? A silent witness of the climactic moments in the course of his human degeneration, of his social decapitation? A presence that wished to make him understand that it was the only thing in his life now that would never fail?
From the start, the drawings and their mysterious maker had frightened Leo the way all things that don’t make sense are frightening. But,
with the passing of weeks and months, he had ended up accepting serenely the idea of that presence around him. Sometimes he had even tried to consult it. Other times he had had the temptation to strike a pose for it. Even though Leo immediately understood that drawing him in a pose did not interest it. The only subject that interested it was his model in a state of anxiety. There was no drawing that could not have been titled “Embarrassment.”
Even though that presence might not be so mendacious and so derisory as he had naturally been led to believe. Maybe it was the only resource that remained to him. When the drawing that showed his mother and father’s visit to the prison arrived, Leo had really reached the point of wondering—a little touched and a little anguished—if one of his parents was the cartoonist in the shadows.
Many times Leo wondered if he did not owe to that presence the evening meal that kept him alive. And, on the other hand, it was impossible not to wonder if it had been the one to trigger the alarm that had tortured him for a whole night. Was it that alarm? Was it calling for some attention? And what about the graffito of the hanged man on the wall that had greeted his return from jail? Could that, too, though the style was definitely different, be attributed to the same hand?
In any case, just as that last drawing was sliding silently under the door, Leo’s nostrils, still possessed by a tormented half-sleep, had been tickled by the overwhelming smell of coffee.
And it was as if something inside him had exploded in a flash of incongruous welcome. Maybe because it was a long time since the fragrance of coffee had visited him. Probably because Rachel and the boys had been on vacation, as if it were any ordinary August. And now, at the end of that ordinary August, they had reappeared: returning to occupy the domestic spaces with a carelessness that bordered on impudence, without worrying about slamming the car door, calling Telma in a loud voice, walking or even running over the head of the reclusive and undesirable tenant, weakened (this they could not know, but, if nothing else, they might have imagined it) by weeks of a tropical heat that in the city had claimed a lot of victims.
In short, if the darkness had restored silence, the light of dawn had brought back the smell of coffee. Causing Leo’s organism to rejoice in well-being. A delight that not even opening his eyes to the same anguishing ceiling could dissipate. Rather, in order not to let that small morning gift escape, Leo had closed them again, and, clutching the pillow with the passion of a teenager in love, went back to sleep.
The smell of coffee speaks to you so affectionately of your whole life. For years it heralded the end of nocturnal hostilities, the return of Mamma into your life after hours of insomnia. At that hour of the morning, perhaps because of her déshabillé or her lack of makeup, the angular wrinkled beauty of your mother had something Lebanese about it. That was your mother, the mother you loved, the mother who on June mornings, when you came into the kitchen, was already sitting at the table, in the middle of which sat enthroned, like an idol of antiquity, a large blackened coffeepot, resistant, having survived the siege of flames for years. From it, from that statue with its incomparable shape, from that masterpiece of Italian design, came the biting yet soft odor of the morning: life that opens up and starts hurrying along again. A streaming sensation, kindled by the drink that at the time was forbidden. And that the years would transform into the fuel needed for your every activity.
Getting up at an ungodly hour to be present at the anatomy lessons that Professor Antinori held at six in the morning.
“This is the time when medical examiners work. This is the hour of the pathologist. The hour when vampires and werewolves go to bed and we get going!” that madman said, sticking his hands into the thoracic cavity of Mickey. This was the name the third-year students gave the corpses they diligently dissected, as if it were always the same one. An old cadaver, the legend went, available to the institutes of pathology and forensic medicine from time immemorial. Dear old Mickey had a long history. It was said that he was one of the numerous legacies of the last war. Whatever had happened, now it was the property of that sadistic son of a bitch Professor Antinori, whose preferred sport seemed to consist in shocking the first-year students by confronting them with that viscous, repulsive mystery of life and death called Mickey. It seemed to have been an Italian-American student who saddled it with the affectionate nickname Mickey. Because it resembled an uncle of his in Queens. Uncle Mickey.
Now you recall the taste you had in your mouth before entering the kingdom of Antinori and Uncle Mickey. Coffee. From the university bar, in the entrance hall with its solemn Fascist architecture, almost completely empty at that hour of the morning. A dirty, oily coffee, with an aftertaste of shit, but effective precisely by virtue of its distastefulness.
Completely unlike the delicious coffee that characterized your married life. One of the demands of the young, fascinating, faithful husband had to do with the quality of the coffee. On that Rachel was not to skimp. The most precious Arabicas, the finest roasting. And especially the freshness. You had to buy it every week if you wanted it always fresh and fragrant.
That coffee, so aromatic, speaks to you of Sundays: yes, Sundays, when you don’t go to work. You’re in bed and you hear from a distance the squawking of the boys. Rachel is running their bath. And they can only give vent to childish protests. Filippo is five, Semi three. Rachel puts them in the tub together. It’s the only day of the week when you let someone enter your bathroom. That imperial bath, which you had made in your image and likeness when the villa was built: white majolica, smell of lavender, large towels of rust-colored linen, and the tub in the middle, immense and round as if it belonged to a Roman proconsul. It’s there, in that little pool, that Rachel sticks Filippo and Semi for their Sunday ablutions. They always make a fuss about getting in, but, once they’re in, it’s almost impossible to get them out. They wallow about in your tub while you wallow in a soft, savory half-sleep.
But now that odor pierces you, that odor gives you a charge. Rachel is approaching with the coffee tray. You feel your temples jolt, a slight shock between the shoulder blades, and your warm mouth flooded with saliva. It’s like a Pavlovian reflex. The drug arrives: aromatic caffeine diluted in water. Here, too, the scene is repeated every time in a delightfully unchangeable way. Rachel arrives with the tray, accompanied by a frowning Filippo, his skin pink from the steam of the hot water he has just emerged from, in his blue junior-size terrycloth bathrobe.
“Leo, Semi wanted to come with us to bring you your coffee. But we can’t find him. He must have disappeared . . . ”
Rachel’s words, always the same. Naturally Semi is right behind her. Perfectly visible: the only one who thinks he can’t be seen. All that ingenuousness is a prerogative of his three years. That’s why you stay in the game. With the scant breath you have in your throat you start calling his name as if you were really worried: “Semi, Semi, where are you? Where has that child gotten to?”
But he doesn’t answer, even though you hear him laughing with joy. “Filippo, have you seen Semi?” Filippo gives you a complicit smile, as if to say, “You and I know where he is, but he likes to think he can’t be seen, let’s let him think . . . ” And now Semi, overcoming the obstacle represented by his mother’s legs, hurls himself onto the bed, still wet. And Filippo jumps up after him.
“Don’t get Papa wet. Come, let him have his coffee in peace.”
Your sons are in your bed, they don’t dare embrace you or even touch you, they’re exploding with energy, they’re soaking Rachel’s part of the bed. The room is still bathed in a blue-tinted yellow half-light. Rachel places the tray on the night table, lights the lamp. You know, she can’t stand darkness. If it was up to her the house would always be lighted.
“No, sweetheart, please, the lamp, no. Open the blinds if you want, but not the lamp.”
Finally the coffee. The children have climbed off the bed and gone around it, now they’re at the night table. They quarrel over who puts the single spoonful of sugar you need. The quarr
el is too noisy for your taste, you’re about to lose patience. Thank heaven Rachel intervenes. “So: Filippo puts the sugar in and you, Semi, stir. All right?”
All right. That’s what they do. Until Rachel speaks again.
“Come, Semi, that’s fine. Don’t stir it too much or it will get cold.”
You have the cup in one hand and with the other you hold the saucer. You’re about to bring the drink to your lips. Fili and Semi have again occupied Rachel’s part of the bed and they are scuffling. Rachel with a gentle shove of her hip has let you know that she wants to sit next to you. You move enough so that she has room. Now the coffee, really. It’s not very good. It’s a little cold, a burned taste on the palate.
But it’s your life. Like this bed. It’s your life, your whole life.
Suddenly Leo discovers, without even giving it a name, what intensity nostalgia can reach. An infinite and primordial whiff of vitality. Leo wants everything, desires everything. He would like his children to be small again, even smaller. The scene changes: now it’s not Sunday morning, now it’s Friday night, it’s very late, it’s winter. The light has vanished, outside a storm is raging. The light from the lightning that pierces the large windows of the villa has transformed it into the set of some second-rate horror film. You’re in bed and you know it’s only a matter of time. Here they are, in fact. One behind the other, Filippo and Semi do their best to hide their fear. Without even asking they get into the bed, between you and Rachel. They are sweetly and irresistibly annoying. They fall asleep again almost immediately. And after a few minutes there they are, languid, gilded, their breath regular . . .
All of that is gone forever. To utter, if internally, in a semiconscious state, that forbidden word, “forever,” fills him with agitation. Something that has the taste of happiness and also of despair. Something he dares not give a name to. The strange sensation is that the big bed he is imagining—his marital bed, the one that from a spatial point of view is just a floor away from him, and from the temporal seems to him set in a different geological era—is widening.
Persecution (9781609458744) Page 34