Persecution (9781609458744) Read Online Free

him when he felt depressed or when things didn’t go right.
    â€œI don’t feel like it, I’m not hungry,” Leo had answered, lowering the volume of the stereo a couple of notches.
    And then that little woman, counting on a sensuality you would not have attributed to her, embraced him tenderly, warmly from behind, and began to laugh and tease him.
    â€œCome on, Pontecorvo, don’t be like that, Semi is already there, Filippo is on his way . . . ”
    At intimate moments she called him by his last name, the way classmates do in school. Or otherwise “professor,” a reminder of when he had been her teacher at the university. Yes, in other words, delightfully affectionate ways that for that sentimental fool were irresistible, no less than the nickname Little Bear Cub, which his mother used to call him.
    â€œI’m coming, O.K., I’m putting old Ray to bed, then I’m coming,” he had said, pervaded by the sweetness that comes only from forgiving one who has just forgiven you.
    This exchange of remarks occurred more or less three-quarters of an hour before zero hour. Neither Rachel nor Leo could know that it would be the last gesture of peacemaking between a man and a woman who many years before had challenged the authority of two such different families in order to be together. The Montagues and Capulets of their generation!
    Ah yes, because Leo and Rachel had overcome obstacles and challenges of every sort to consummate their contested conjugal dream, which, over time, and with the acquisition of that fine house, the birth of the children, his success at work and her impeccable household management, had grown increasingly brilliant. Nor could they know that the quarrel that Rachel had just resolved would close forever (and beautifully?) their history of altercations and reconciliations (the secret archeology of every marriage). Even less could they imagine, as they headed toward the kitchen, pushing and shoving each other affectionately like two fellow-soldiers on leave, that what they were about to consume but would not finish consuming was their last meal together, and that the words that they were about to address to each other were the last of their shared life.
    In a few minutes everything would fall apart. And although from that day on Rachel chose not to speak to anyone about what happened—burying the story of her marriage in the mental storeroom assigned to clearance and oblivion—very often, after her husband’s death, in the dreamlike conversation in which she could never succeed in keeping at bay the protests of that distant phantom, she would ask herself if maybe everything had begun the evening before, during the dinner with the Albertazzis: if the first splatters of slimy mud from the tidal wave that was about to sweep everything away had not reached them then. And if the Albertazzis were not in some way implicated in the calamity.
    It couldn’t be coincidental if, from that day on, and even more after Leo’s death, Rachel no longer answered Rita’s phone calls or Flavio’s pompous letters, full of self-serving offers of help and friendship when it was too late. It was as if Rachel needed to blame them for what had happened to her. Having borne on her shoulders for such a long time the duties and responsibilities of a marriage that functioned in fits and starts (like every happy marriage), Rachel, now that it had ended wretchedly, moved to the counterattack: identifying in that pair of her husband’s friends—who were so emblematic, and whom basically she had always hated—if not exactly the guilty ones then the first, unwelcome witnesses of the grotesque event that had transformed her life as a diligent chatelaine, sweetly lodged in the beautiful villa in Olgiata, into a real battle for survival.
    Two witnesses, precisely.
    Rita, who at first had done her utmost to make her husband break definitively with the pervert Leo, but