Persecution (9781609458744) Read Online Free Page B

the sixth and youngest son of a working-class family, had managed to acquire his own little place in the sun. He had been one of the first Italian graduates in information engineering (at the time it was called that), and was now the managing director of a leading-edge company that fine-tuned sophisticated programs for Olivetti.
    Flavio, though he claimed to revere scientific progress no less fervently than Leo, nevertheless considered Italian society in those years to be in full
regression
. Affluence. Vulgarity. Lack of engagement. (TV, how he hated TV!) Those were the watchwords that Flavio used to excess and which provided the occasion for long, friendly disputes with Leo. Another thing that Flavio hated was the soccer championship that Italy had won a few years earlier in Spain, in which the Germans had been thrashed in a glorious final at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, in Madrid. Flavio assigned that sporting event a symbolic power as vast as it was harmful.
    â€œIt gave the people of this country the illusion that winning is the important thing. It developed in us a cult of competitiveness and victory. It made us all a little bit American. To see a president of the Republic, a Socialist, someone who took part in the resistance, who risked his life to defeat Nazism, raise that utterly garish gold Cup, the golden fleece . . . An undignified spectacle. It doesn’t surprise me that the final in Madrid was one of the most watched events in the history of Italian television. As you see,
tout se tient
.”
    So Leo, as much a soccer fan as a maniac about the modernization of the country, found himself passionately defending the heroes of Madrid and justifying TV. (How could he know that the latter would repay him so well?)
    Flavio, unlike Leo, never raised his voice. He calmly wore you down, taking all the time he needed to complete arguments as rotund as his satisfied face. Faithful to Marxist principles, he was suspicious of everything and attacked his interlocutor with endless rhetorical questions.
    But he, too, had a weak point.
    Rita, his wife. Whom Flavio loved more than mathematics and more than those political ideas marked by what was in appearance pragmatism and in substance wishful thinking. A tall, curly-haired, angular woman, always on the edge of a nervous breakdown, whose brutal thinness contradicted a voracious gluttony. The slender cigarettes that she always had in her hand were aesthetically suited to her bony, tapering fingers. Sometimes, seeing her against the light, you would have said that it was a skeleton smoking. Other times, in the pitiless neon light of the Pontecorvos’ kitchen, she might look like one of those madams painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.
    For Rita, marrying Flavio had been a most successful slap in the face of her extremely wealthy parents. Although for years she had had no contact with her family—a dynasty that had turned a vast amount of land it owned on the edge of Rome into building lots and had made a lot of money—she nonetheless seemed to have inherited the arrogance of those speculators and their insupportable lack of tact. Her stinging arguments, unlike those of her husband, were sustained above all by the strength of her prejudices and the ferocity of her shattered nerves. The cunt, Leo sometimes thought. It’s the cunt, the most capricious organ created by mother nature, that makes her speak.
    Rita’s indignation about inequality was a pretext for saying enormously unpleasant things in a strident, superior tone. For her there were no limits, maybe because to resist the family she came from she had had to lose control, or maybe because her family had taught her, by example, to have no boundaries. In her time she had studied literature, but without much direction. And she still boasted with impunity of how she had challenged a professor—a dusty, self-important academic—who inflicted on the students a class in Montale: a bourgeois, decadent,