Persecution (9781609458744) Read Online Free Page A

who then, after his death, set herself up as the most devoted and fiercest guardian of his memory.
    And Flavio, who let himself be dominated by the natural disaster he had married.
    Two witnesses to eliminate, along with all the evidence for the prosecution and all the motives of a crime that she no longer wanted anything to do with. And only many years later would she settle accounts with them (from certain things you can’t escape). But that’s another story.
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    Flavio Albertazzi had been Leo’s deskmate for all five years of high school. And he had quickly learned that the best way of exorcising the sense of inferiority produced in him by the affluence that his classmates wallowed in was to throw his poverty in their faces without holding back. If at the time that strategy had got him out of more than one embarrassment, now that, thanks to determination, self-denial, and powerful intellectual capacities, he had won an important place in society, which made his bank account fat and his social redemption exemplary, it had become a rather unbearable habit. Such, at least, Rachel considered it, having been brought up on the idea that hiding one’s situation (whatever its nature) is always better than flaunting it.
    The first time Flavio had showed up in class he was in short pants, so Leo, wearing a blue suit with crease and cuffs, felt that he had the right to ask him, “Why do you still wear short pants?,” obtaining in response a sort of rhetorical question that had closed the subject for good: “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
    This exchange had taken place in the early fifties, and in the succeeding decades the two friends continued to recount it with great amusement. It produced in Rachel a series of questions about her husband: why was he so fond of a stupid anecdote that showed what an insufferable little snob he had been, and how his friend had so cleverly put him down? This, for Rachel, was only one of the many mysteries of that friendship of her husband’s, which she, like many other wives of her generation, had learned to put up with.
    Is it possible that Rachel saw what Leo didn’t see? That in spite of all the time that had passed Flavio still treated him like a snotty little rich kid? There was something in her husband’s ingenuousness that exasperated her. An exasperation sharpened by the fact that Leo, against all the evidence, saw himself as the shrewdest and most undeluded man in the universe. Whereas to his wife he seemed the most ingenuous.
    It should be said that, for his part, Flavio had effortlessly let himself be seduced by his friend’s social graces. The first time he set his large dusty shoes on the squeaking parquet of the Pontecorvo apartment he had wanted to believe that the fascination roused in him by his friend had nothing to do with the marble, the boiserie, the upholstery displayed in that dwelling but was provoked by the volumes collected in the bookshelves at the entrance. The conversational polish of which Leo gave precocious evidence, the eloquent language that Flavio so much envied, surely derived from that cultural bedrock, not from living in a world in which the functionality of a piece of furniture was obliged to find a polite compromise with two things as immoral as beauty and elegance.
    After so many years Flavio still experienced as a personal victory the fact that his friend had decided to add to his medical profession a career as a scholar and academic that you would not have expected from that handsome, privileged, and indifferent youth.
    â€œIt’s really incredible that you weren’t spoiled by everything you had,” he would say, with satisfaction, “and at a time when no one had anything.” And Leo was pleased, with the satisfaction of someone who has never tried to be anything other than what, finally, he is.
    For his part Leo had followed with equal gratification the route by which Flavio,