Persecution (9781609458744) (7 page)

“But if we don't have any money . . . ”

“Well, now, no, but the day after tomorrow yes. They won't ask us to pay right away. What are you worried about?”

“It's just that . . . ”

“It's just what? Come on, I'll have a shrimp cocktail, a glass of wine, and a wonderful crème brûlée, and you?”

“Nothing, dearest, I'm not hungry . . . well, maybe I'll have a café-au-lait . . . ” she had answered, clutching their few remaining coins.

“Not even a brioche? Sure?”

“A café-au-lait is fine, thanks.”

To which she added, “I'm not hungry.”

She told her sons she had said “I'm not hungry,” although she was. And after a few minutes there was her husband, in his white bathrobe with the hotel crest on the pocket, scarfing up shrimp in cocktail sauce, as he kept asking, “You're sure you don't want something? You haven't had a bite since this morning.” And she, looking out the window at the famous lights of Monte Carlo (which she romantically associated with
To Catch a Thief
), and suffering sharp pangs of hunger, kept repeating, “Nothing, thanks, really, I don't feel like eating.”

That time Leo had been right. Rachel's scruples turned out to be exaggerated. A couple of days later Uncle Enea and his disdainful sister arrived, loaded with money to spend. But that was not to say that things would always go like that. It was not to say that there would always be a genie in the lamp capable of putting everything back in order.

This time, for example, the stakes were a thousand times higher. It wasn't about settling a bill and making a bad impression on some snobbish concierge; it was about their life. And Filippo and Samuel's. That is to say, the whole world! Until this moment such a calamity had never occurred. Which meant nothing. There exist privileged couples who spend decades in the most prudent and carefully calibrated well-being to arrive at old age unharmed. And for some time Rachel had hoped and believed that one day it could be said of them that they belonged to that exclusive club. That their path had been, as the saying goes, “clear” of obstacles.

Things had turned out differently. Those accusations had an alarming specific weight in the life of a family so respectable, and Leo practiced a profession in which respectability is a decisive attribute. That's why the whole business had to be treated with particular care. Well, maybe Leo was right: at least in the first instance everyone had been roused to take his side, to defend him. But how could he be so sure that things wouldn't change? It was clear that the prosecutors working on his case wished to destroy him. Just as it was evident that Leo, like all people who are powerful but not too powerful, could not count on the benevolence of the press, much less of the people.

Certainly if things should take an ugly turn, the intervention of some Uncle Enea (besides, he had been dead for several years) would not be enough to settle the bill. No, this time it was much more complex. A wretchedly dangerous business. Incredible as it might seem, there were employees of the state whose job consisted in demonstrating that Leo was a crook. People paid to haul him in to court. Bloodhounds who couldn't wait to sink their teeth in his neck and never let go. Vampires whose success would consist in putting him down, after bleeding him dry, after incinerating the respectability built up with so much effort over the years—fucking nitpicking bureaucrats, eager to distort the truth to Leo's detriment. Against those treacherous enemies optimism was certainly not a resource, if anything a hindrance.

 

And if Rachel was wrong? If Leo's problem wasn't an excess of optimism but, rather, the opposite: an excess of pessimism? It certainly could be. She had often observed how behind certain of her husband's blustering attitudes, behind the dazzling scrim of all that trust, lurking like a mole in the guts of a lush garden, was the much darker feeling that is called fear.

Was that what explained everything? Fear? Her husband lived in fear. It could be that, like all people unused to difficulties, like all people spoiled from birth, Leo did not have at his disposal the tools necessary to exorcise fear. Because to do so he would have had to recognize it.

Was it fear that had paralyzed him? Was it fear that prevented him from getting involved in his court case, day and night? Maybe so. A person less frightened would at that point be spending whole days with his nose buried in the documents that concerned him. And instead he did nothing but delay. Delegate. Yes, those were the two things that came easiest to him: putting off the moment when he would have to face a problem and, in the end, placing it carelessly in someone else's hands. All that trust in a lawyer employed by a hospital that had every interest in shifting any responsibility onto a doctor and his team—a hospital that had already circulated several memos in which it stated that it felt itself “the injured party”—was true professional suicide.

But it was also a way to delegate something that he was incapable of facing. Leo increasingly resembled the type of hypochondriac who torments himself endlessly with fantasies of the most disparate and improbable illnesses, and yet is not willing (through a kind of tremendous sloth) to free himself of the vices of smoking and drinking. And who, at the appearance of worrying symptoms, can't find the courage to make an appointment with a specialist or submit to further tests. As if he preferred the anxiety of uncertainty to the despair of truth. That type of more or less imaginary sick person who prefers to live in ignorance.

But of course. What Leo had been struggling with for weeks was a crisis of creeping terror. Rachel recognized the unmistakable signs: lack of appetite interrupted every so often by a fierce hunger. Insomnia suddenly vanquished by long Sunday naps. A tortured alternation of moods.

It's that her Leo was such a sensitive type, so easy to upset! A mere nothing was enough to hurl him into terror.

Rachel recalled the day, a few months earlier, when a letter had arrived, forwarded to him by the editors of the
Corriere della Sera
, the newspaper in which Leo's popular column, “Prevention Is the Best Medicine,” appeared. Breaking with his usual habit, Leo, in one of his recent pieces, had not entertained his readers with a description of specific pathologies, nor had he provided a trite catalogue of recommendations for their health. For once, impelled by one of his idealistic impulses, he had taken sides and denounced the Catholic curia's “insidious boycott” of certain scientific institutions that had been engaged for many years in research into fundamental genetic questions. Leo had written (let's be specific: with the cautiousness imposed by his social position and the mildness of his character) that “the Pope should perhaps show himself more indulgent toward fervent researchers who are working for the benefit, certainly not the detriment, of humanity.”

The last phrase—the one calling on the Pope directly—had caused a reader to fly off the handle, and, driven by contempt, send Leo a letter (neglecting to inform him that he had sent an identical one to the editor of the
Corriere
), in which, in a few very concise lines, he had spewed out all the bile in his body.

Below I cite the conclusion of the letter:

 

How can Professor Pontecorvo dare to discourse on the conduct of His Holiness? Does Professor Pontecorvo know what Holy Institution he has dared to give his valuable advice to? And you, Dear Editor, how can you permit this self-described professor, this hypocritical scientist, this unbeliever in a white lab coat, to address His Holiness in this way, and in public? Perhaps Professor Pontecorvo would do well to think of the failures of his own religion, and the crimes committed by his co-religionists in the Holy Land, rather than occupy himself with Things that have nothing to do with him.

 

At the bottom, in place of the signature, was written: “Hostile greetings from a former reader.”

“And how should I have addressed him?” Leo kept asking Rachel. “Can you explain it to me?” He couldn't let it go. And again: “Does it seem to you, dearest, that I addressed him in some way? If you think so, please tell me. Maybe this guy interpreted the expression ‘insidious boycott' as a lack of respect toward the Pope. But you are the witness that it's not true. You know how much respect I have . . . And then all that extravagant use of capital letters. Doesn't it seem disturbing?”

Rachel was astonished by Leo's reaction to that letter. It was as if it had awakened the agitated obsessiveness that no one, outside the few people who knew him intimately, would ever have attributed to him. Leo had spent the entire afternoon pacing around the big glass table in the middle of the living room, in one hand the letter from the angry correspondent, in the other a clipping from the newspaper of the offending column. Every so often he stopped to reread a passage from one or the other. Then he started pacing again. And there was no way to calm him. Or to make him stand still. There was no way to bring the matter back to its modest proportions.

“Come on. Don't exaggerate. He's just a nutcase. He has the tone of a nutcase. The style of a nutcase. Why give him such importance? Why make such a big deal of it?”

“It's the excess of hatred, sweetheart. It's the resentment. It's the tone of contempt. The intimidation. It's as if this guy had a private argument with me. Such hatred boils over from this piece of paper! As if he wanted me dead. I don't understand these things.”

“You don't understand them because they're incomprehensible. You don't understand them because you're a good son. You don't understand them because you don't know how far an anti-Semite can go in his hatred of you. You don't understand them because you would never do what that man has done.”

“Which is?”

“Which is read an article and get angry to the point of grabbing paper and pen and writing this obscene letter.”

At this point Leo seemed to calm down. But a second later, there it was, a veil of quivering panic spreading across his face.

“You know what I'm afraid of?”

“What?”

“How will the paper take it?”

“How should it take it?”

“Well, thanks to me it's lost a reader. Plus, a Papist reader.”

“They must be in despair!”

“Don't joke. Please. Not now!”

“Come on, professor, be rational! Do you have any idea how many readers a newspaper like the
Corriere
has? And do you have any idea how many letters from these nuts it must get every day? They must have wastebaskets full of this garbage!”

“What if they take away my column?”

“For an idiotic thing like that?”

“Yes, for an idiotic thing like that.”

“I didn't think your column was so important to you. You're always complaining about it. You always say you have nothing to write, that it distracts you from your work. It wouldn't be a tragedy. After all you're hardly a journalist . . . ”

“Yes, but in fact I think it's important for my career. I consider it a kind of insurance for the life of my unit.”

Rachel knew that his career and his department had nothing to do with it. That the column fed his vanity. But it didn't seem to her very nice to point out her husband's bad faith or his narcissism. And then she was really alarmed by the panic that had invaded him in the face of such a harmless misadventure. Was Leo's equilibrium so precarious?

Rachel had watched the passing of that small crisis. Yet her amazement at seeing her husband in trouble was equal only to her surprise in discovering that all it took to cheer him up was the weekly phone call from the regular editor, who asked, with the deference due a prestigious contributor, if the new piece was ready or if he was still writing. A second after he hung up the phone, Rachel saw him transfigured: there again was
her
Leo, at the peak of his emotional power. In shape, ready to start again. To Rachel that peak seemed even higher.

But what was happening to him now (the investigations and all the rest) seemed a hundred times more serious. This Rachel knew. Nonetheless her husband's reactions astonished her.

As was to be expected, this time the paper couldn't put it off. After the first searches carried out in the hospital and the clinic, Leo had received a phone call from the editor, who very politely explained that it was perhaps necessary to “suspend the column for a while, not stop it.” Rachel was there, facing her husband, as he was punished, like a student after a prank. She looked at him. He kept repeating, “I understand”; “It's clear”; “No problem”; “Of course, of course, it's the procedure”; “Yes, yes, don't worry”; “Thank you, I, too, am sure that everything will be in order”; “Of course, I'll happily come and see you.” Even after hanging up the phone he had maintained his aplomb, as if it were not his wife beside him but still that editor who had aroused such submissiveness. Or even an audience eager to test his endurance. If Rachel hadn't known him so well she might have thought that her husband was perfectly serene. Sure of himself.

Too bad that she knew him. And so she knew that that very reasonable behavior was simply the other face of anguish. The paradox was right there. If in the case of a trifle like the offensive letter from an anonymous reader, Leo had found the strength to express his anguish, now, in the presence of a true threat, the courage to express himself failed. Poor dear, he must be so terrified he couldn't even vent. He was traumatized. This time the watchwords were hide, underestimate, look away, don't meet the eyes of the monster.

There was another small incident that Rachel would have interpreted in the same way, if only Leo had dared to tell her.

It had happened at the university, ten days before he received the phone call from the newspaper editor firing him. During one of the last classes of the second semester. Late May.

Leo liked teaching. He was good at it and did it with great care and a sense of detachment. He was endowed with natural eloquence, and was eager to communicate to the students the sacred fire that inspired him and at the same time demonstrate the self-sacrifice that had led him to the professorship. He had a sensual voice, which with the microphone sounded like a radio broadcast. And certainly he wasn't so ingenuous as to underestimate the weight of his own attractiveness. What do you think? He saw the girls in the first row, widening their eyes and resting their chins on the backs of their hands with an ecstatic gesture. He felt their gaze on him, intuited their comments, interpreted the flirtatious little laughs that, each time, blessed his entrance into the classroom. There was something theatrically sexual in those sessions, whose sacredness was sanctioned by the fact that for years now they had always been held in the same place, the same two days of the week, at the same time: Tuesday and Wednesday at six in room P10, on the ground floor of the Faculty of Medicine.