Free Persecution (9781609458744) by Ann (TRN) Alessandro; Goldstein Piperno

despair!”
    â€œDon’t joke. Please. Not now!”
    â€œCome 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!”
    â€œWhat if they take away my column?”
    â€œFor an idiotic thing like that?”
    â€œYes, for an idiotic thing like that.”
    â€œI 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 . . . ”
    â€œYes, 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