2.

Luisa has always dealt with people who are more powerful and overbearing than I am, so she didn’t let this intimidate her. Whereas I myself, to be truthful, was soon ashamed of having giving her some attitude. What motivated me was, clearly, a private interest, not unlike that of the children and grandchildren who had forced the names of their parents and grandparents onto that list. So the phone call ended with reciprocal declarations of respect: I apologized for being impetuous, but meanwhile hoped for a serious enforcement of the selection criteria, and she asked for some bullet points on my father, and promised to champion him to the selection committee.

I stared for a while at the computer screen. I was in a bad mood. As usual, I’d reacted heedlessly. I shouldn’t have exposed myself, I should have found someone who would have been able to propose my father’s candidacy after outlining, authoritatively, his merits. Instead, I’d hopped onto the phone without thinking, and now I was forced to assume that Luisa was already talking about me in the way I hate most: as usual, Vella flipped out, I don’t know who she thinks she is, she likes to point her finger at everyone and talk them down, and instead she pulls strings and begs for favors like anyone else.

I pulled strings? I asked for favors? All I needed now was for my father to get word that I was pulling strings and begging for favors so that he would receive a stupid prize, and this would have made him suffer greatly. But now what should I do? Say nothing, let it go, avoid going to bat so that his merits would be recognized? No, I should, I told myself. This, too, would cause him pain. He’d always fought so that merits would never be overlooked, especially those infinitesimal ones that were, nevertheless, the fruit of incredible labors. So why shouldn’t I insist that now, in his old age, his merits, too, should be recognized, merits that were immense and indisputable?

I wouldn’t have to invent anything, indeed, I wouldn’t have to blow anything out of proportion at all. My father really had been an excellent teacher, I was wrong to feel embarrassed, it was right to plead his case. Teresa Quadraro, sure, she had the vibe of a famous scientist, and she’d be unassailable proof of the excellent work he’d done. But what to say about all the other students, the ones who would come to the house—as if it were a pilgrimage—even after they graduated, for years, for decades? I remembered so many, I’d seen them ever since I was a little girl, when I was a teenager, up until I’d moved out of the house. Their gratitude had left a mark on me. I hated my teachers—incompetent slackers with extreme swings of temper—and after I graduated from highschool, I was careful not to pay tribute to them not even once, not even for a second. So just imagine the effect, in those days, of that extended gratitude, that untarnished devotion. Recently, it so happened that I’d gone to pay my parents a visit just when one of his former students, one I’d seen when I was a girl, a handsome dark-haired boy who was now graying and nearing sixty, had stopped by to say hello and have a chat with his old teacher. I had a peek; he was hanging on my father’s words as if he were still a schoolboy. Well, summoning up that image now, while I was in front of the computer, was crucial. My mood didn’t lift, it was still dark and stormy, but my opinion shifted. I’d been right in making Luisa realize, with the necessary aggression, that the question of that prize meant a lot to me. Rather, maybe I should have also told her that I, myself, wanted to meet with the president. Seriously, as soon as possible. Not that I know him well, I’ve only interviewed him a few times: years ago, once regarding a political situation, and the other time about grief. And it was on that second occasion that we got to know each other. Luisa was there, she was the one who’d arranged for me to receive a thank you card for my fine work when the interview came out. Which is why I think that if I made her say: Emma Vella would like to talk to you, he’d find the time, and say, all right. Rather, deep down I anticipated another nice thing. The president and my father are the same age, they have the same heft to them, the name Pietro Vella should be one he knows. So it would be easy for me to explain that my request wasn’t the gushing gesture of a daughter, but an objectively worthy one. My father, Mr. President, was a teacher for over forty years. My father, Mr. President, was a contributor prized by important newspapers. My father, Mr. President, was an exceptional student. My father, Mr. President, was a passionate politician. My father, Mr. President, really was called upon, more than once, to weigh in on various attempts to reform the school system, and I could name several dull, gray, extremely damaging public education ministers who have sought him out.

I stopped there. My father was: this reiterated perfect tense brought tears to my eyes. I’d never had to use it so pointedly. Usually, when I think of him, it’s in an ongoing present. That’s how it is even if I remember something from decades ago, when he was always leaving for somewhere—he was often leaving—or came back tired and nevertheless always found time for me, and for my brothers. His carriage as a young man, very tall, brightened by a light that shone from him as if hidden in his blond hair and in his eyes, even from his fingernails, never faded from my eyes, it’s still part of right now, and right now I suffer from solitude and fragility the way I did when he would go away, and right now I feel happy and invulnerable the way I did when he would come back. But the indisputable fact is that my father’s entire life is now in the past tense; he behaved such that the prestige he acquired didn’t last, didn’t accompany him into his old age. And so I realized that if, standing before the president, I only listed all that he had done, he wouldn’t have understood a thing about his life. I’d have to also list, immediately afterward, seated before him in a light blue and gold armchair, all that my father had refused to do. The president, in fact, would surely have asked me, even if intimated by a glance: why did this this incredibly talented man stop? He would ask this because he, the president, has never stopped, the poof being that he’s the president today, and my father isn’t. He’s at home, being not much of anyone. At that point I would have struggled to explain that it’s a question of morality. My father was the most politely willing and able man on earth. Teaching? He taught. Writing books? He wrote them. Writing for the papers? He wrote for them. Politics and the skills to get elected? He turned political and had the skills to get elected. Consulting for the most enlightened of ministers, or almost the most? He consulted for them. He always threw himself into each of these activities with a kind heart and keen intelligence, a formula he greatly loved, and passed on to me. I, too, use it for the rare people who deserve it. But he also retreated with the same politeness, at the first blemish, at the first sign of swindling, at the first request for servile yielding. And he did this without arrogance, rather, by showing great understanding for the suffering of all those who agreed to sully themselves with the world, or at least dirtied themselves as much as they needed to, slaving away without nothing but vulgar pleasures in return. Mr. President, I’d have to say, I’m the daughter of an extraordinary man, whose inner limpidity has never been muddied by opacity from the outside, which is the reason he isn’t presiding or vice-presiding over anything, and spends his time studying and writing, on his little veranda, or he looks after my mother who, in turn, lovingly looks after him. My brothers and I love him, we see to all of his needs, and our mother’s as well. We need a model of empathy: that word, currently fashionable, and therefore lackluster, is an elixir against the world’s ferocity, difficult though it may be to find it uncorrupted by fictions. The model is my father, empathic to the highest degree. Our lives, as his children, still amount to a desperate attempt to resemble him, or at least to not do anything, at least now that he’s an old man, to cause him grief.

But I’ve understood that it’s a minefield, these courteous rejections of my father; my exposition wouldn’t work. I, to my misfortune, am not like him; his ability to push against evil is equal to his capacity to understand it. In me it’s mutated into an extreme political intransigence that won’t let anyone off the hook, and that distresses me, above all. The risk, therefore, if I really am able to speak with the president, is that in order not to wrong my father, a man who’s left the scene and relinquished his power, I’d end up being rude to an elderly person who has never left the scene, and today holds the highest office of the land. So, I’m better off preparing a clear-cut CV of Pietro Vella for Luisa, hoping it ends up being seen by the honest eyes of a few members of the commission, or even lands on the president’s desk. Then we’ll see. If my father doesn’t make the cut in the end, they’ll have me to contend with.