“That's not true.” He shoved the chair to one side and sat down again, his shoulders slumping. “If there were any social justice in this country, children wouldn't disappear. The group has drawn new strength from this tragedy. We will continue the struggle. It is Odile who was wrong to leave. She surrendered, and took my daughter away from me. As a mother, she should have stayed, in the hope of finding the boy.”
Something inside me began to rebel. I didn't want to listen to him anymore.
“Odile did the right thing by leaving. Julio's not coming back, Bulmaro. He's dead. Get it into your head: Julio is dead!”
I'd said it. Till then, no one had dared to say what everyone knew for certain. To scream it right into Bulmaro's face had been a catharsis, perhaps even for him.
“Listen,” I continued. “Odile went to Paris to save her own life and the girl's life. She couldn't stay here to wallow in grief and guilt. It was her duty as a mother, Bulmaro, her duty to keep on living. You need to go be with her. You might be able to start over, maybe have another child, replace death with life. This is your family. Otherwise, you'll be alone for the rest of your life, alone with your regrets. Hanging on to politics is an excuse, a wall you're hiding behind so that you don't have to look at reality. Mexico will follow its destiny, with you or without you. You're not a leader, Bulmaro. You're a good labor organizer, you're a staunch Communist and you'd give your life for the cause, but the cause doesn't need your life. Your family needs it. I said what I needed to say, and now I can leave. But believe me, I came here tonight only because I love you.”
He put his hand on my arm. “Don't go, Max. Please. I don't want to be alone again tonight.”
We sat, not looking at one another, lost in our respective thoughts, drinking and smoking in silence. I didn't know what else to say. Suddenly, in a desperate attempt to regain the sense of closeness that had vanished, I asked him:
“What are you thinking about?”
Bulmaro looked up.
“Odile. I can't go to Paris, Max. I couldn't look her in the eye, because I can't stop thinking that it's her fault Julio is gone. I hate her for that.”
For the second time, I felt a profound sense of rejection. I loved Odile, and I knew how much she already hated herself for what had happened. I stubbed out my cigarette and replied:
“That's wrong to say, Bulmaro. It wasn't her fault. Certainly, if that's how you feel about it, you'd better stay away from her. Odile is a special woman, and I hope that you don't regret losing her one day. Sometimes life is truly indecent. You have a chance at a great love story, and you're flushing it down the toilet. I'm sorry, but I don't understand you. I'm in a completely different situation. There's a woman that I've loved since I was fifteen, I want to live with her, and I can't. Actually, if she left me it would be better for both of us.”
“Max, why are you saying these things?”
“Because I am a man who has borrowed his freedom. Tonight, tomorrow, in ten years, they'll catch up with me. It would be wrong, it would be senseless to drag her down in the wreckage of my life.”
“Why don't you leave her? I think that's your decision, Max. Find the courage to leave her.”
“I've tried, but love is strange, Bulmaro. It hides reality from you and it makes you clutch at the most forlorn hopes. I've told her how I feel, but deep down I know I could never say goodbye to her. I feel like an emotional vampire, sucking love out of everyone I meet. And especially from her. You know what the best solution would be for me, Bulmaro? To die, without anyone knowing, to disappear into the void, like your little boy. I would cause some grief for those who love me, but a grief full of questions, which is one step down from absolute grief. It would let everybody have a chance to go back to their lives, a chance that you, my friend, are throwing out the window. And above all, I would win my battle, because then they'd never catch me, and not knowing that I was dead, they would continue to consider me a fugitive, a wanted man, for all time.”
“You're drunk, Max.”
“Sure I am, Bulmaro. But I know what I'm talking about.”
I looked at him. He seemed surprised.
“I've never heard you talk about yourself. The comrades and I just thought you were a cold guy, like the snow on your Alps. But you're just hopeless.”
Yes, we were friends again. With a smile, I answered him: “Good old Mexican comrades, you've fumbled the critical analysis once again!” Bulmaro let me fill his glass of calvados once more. He took another sip and said:
“Listen, Max, explain to me why you came here. This place isn't safe for you.”
“Bulmaro, I'm not sure exactly why I came here. In my situation, one place is as good as another. I don't like Mexico, it scares me, and it's only hurt me so far. But what scares me even more is the idea of changing again, of starting over somewhere else. The only thing I care about is staving off the inevitable, every day that I remain free means that I can defend my innocence a little more powerfully, give a meaning to this battle I've been fighting since 1976.”
“What you're saying is crazy.”
“No, Bulmaro, what they did to me is crazy.”
“What meaning is there to this kind of life?”
“None. It's just the price I pay to annoy my judges.”
“Now you're the one talking horseshit, Max. Forget about your judges and start living again. There must be a place somewhere on this earth where you can start a new life.”
“I don't want a new life, Bulmaro. I want the life I used to have.”
After that evening, I thought frequently about my conversation with Bulmaro. Talking like this had reawakened in me all those conflicts that I had instead worked so hard, for such a long time, to lull to sleep. I tried to understand this state of mind, explaining it away with the fact that I was “too European,” and therefore it was impossible for me to accept what had happened to Julio, Odile, and Bulmaro without some rational explanation. And so, for a long time, I decided not to see anyone from the group.
My friends in exile back in Paris were right: I was too delicate for the third world. My mental and physical state was steadily deteriorating. I was successfully keeping my panic attacks under control but, unlike before, I was going through long periods of abulia. During those spells, I experienced the present solely in terms of regret. I had lost all hope of seeking a new life because I felt the future was imprisoned by my awkward past. In the end the guilty verdict, so unjust and so disgraceful, had become something I could not overcome.
In order to escape from this situation of hopelessness, I found myself daydreaming about unlikely surprise twists in the appeals process and my ensuing triumphal return home. When I snapped out of these vivid fantasies and looked around, what I saw was truly depressing. That was when I began to consider the possibility of waging a new legal battle to reopen my case. The idea wasn't mine. One of my lawyers had come up with it. He still hadn't given up on the idea of obtaining justice, and he had submitted a motion with the court to preserve the trial evidence, indispensable for reopening the case. I knew that the odds were against me. The Rocco code (enacted under Mussolini and still in effect) allowed for new trials in only an exceedingly narrow range of instances.
I didn't know what to do with my life. I could go back to Italy and wait for my lawyers to submit a motion for a new trial to the Court of Cassation. But it seemed to me unfair that I should spend more time in jail, and so I decided to leave Mexico only if my case was resolved in my favor. Other times, I thought it would be best to forget about my past life and try to obtain Mexican citizenship. And when I was overwhelmed by despair, I gave up on finding any solution at all, and sank into my morass of abulia, waiting for fate to work its will.
In that sense, my encounter with Melvin Cervera Sanchez gave a fairly random turn to my life, because it came about just when I was opting in favor of Mexican citizenship and not for a return to Italy.
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During the time when I was avoiding the group, I took refuge at the university and began to hang out, in my free time, with foreign students, most of them from the US and Japan. Mexico City was a world that didn't concern them, and they even managed to consider it picturesque. They saw the city as tourists, even when they spent four or five years there. In that way, they managed to see only the things they liked. The worst thing that could happen to them was to be shaken down for a little money by the police.
I was especially well liked by the Japanese, who invited me to all their parties. There, they inevitably cajoled me into making them some Italian or French food and to dance. I didn't particularly enjoy dancing because my size made it hard to move with any agility; vigorous activity would make sweat pour off me. But once, in an attempt to offer a courteous refusal to their invitations, I told them the only dance I knew was the twist, certain that no one could possibly remember it, and that the records were impossible to find. But nothing is impossible for the Japanese, and at the next party I found they had managed to collect a substantial portion of the world production of twist recordings, and even more astonishing, they had learned to dance the twist.
Often, on Saturday afternoons, they would take me with them to watch Mexican wrestling, where they constituted a special cheering section. I thought the Japanese were a lot of fun, and perhaps a bit childishâwith their enthusiasm for everything they did, work and play, and their absolute lack of any historical depth. I met Japanese people who had never heard of Hitler and who had only the vaguest idea of their national history. Obviously, I was hanging out with science students, not students from the history department. On evenings when we had nothing in particular to do, they would ask me to tell them stories. I would talk to them about the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or the French Revolution as if they were fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen.
The young women were almost all married to computer experts who had found a genuine gold mine in the backward expanses of Mexico. The bachelors were for the most part students attracted by the low cost of studying at the university and the desire to marry a Mexican girl, as they never tired of saying. It was the fashionable thing.
Kioko was twenty years old. She had gotten married in a hurry to a brainy, boring older guy; but she fell in love with me and began to court me relentlessly.
I met her at the university. She was attending a Spanish course for foreigners, where I would go with other university students to browse, as it were, in search of new female students to befriend, and to watch as the Japanese students took their orals, which we found hilarious. The course was not limited to language; it also taught a smattering of Mexican customs. One piece of protocol that was taught was the Mexican way of shaking hands, a four-part ceremony: a straightforward handshake, a back-of-the-hand variant, straight again, and then a jovial slap on the right shoulder with the left hand. For the Japanese, generally unaccustomed to physical contact with other human beings, this was a challenging routine, and there was a fair bit of irresistible slapstick when the professor would break the class up into couples to practice this form of greeting. In particular, they found it impossible to eliminate the traditional bow. Thus, they would take one step backward, make a little bow, step forward, perform a Mexican-style handshake and, after a resounding slap on the shoulder, step back again for a final bow. They thought it was as funny as we did, and they would laugh till they wept. And it was between one Mexican handshake and another that she and I locked gazes, and stared into one another's eyes till the end of the lesson.
Kioko wasn't very good at languages, and it was several weeks before we were able to speak our first few words. In the meantime, we played at exchanging glances and subtle hints. At first, I wasn't particularly interested in getting involved with her. I had other concerns at the time. But I didn't mind being courted; it had been quite a while since that had happened to me, and it was a nice distraction from my constant state of mental pressure.
She invited me to a party at her house to celebrate the arrival of her brother, who was vacationing in Mexico City for a couple of weeks. He was a comedian on Japanese TV, and we had to spend the entire evening watching videos of his latest shows. I met her husband, too, a short, peevish, balding forty-year-old. He seemed to have sensed what was going on, because he avoided me the whole time I was at his house.
I saw her again a few days later. I was waiting for a bus and noticed that Kioko's Nissan was parked about a hundred feet from the bus stop. She was with a girlfriend, and both of them pretended that they were there by chance. The suspicion dawned on me that they were planning to follow the bus to see where I lived; I knew that all the Japanese students were curious about that because I was the only one who never invited the others over, and whenever anyone asked me where I lived I always gave vague replies. And in fact, the car pulled in behind the bus and never shook the tail once during the forty-minute ride. That day, I walked into a department store that had a rear entrance and lost them. But Kioko was pretty stubborn. In the end I let her follow me home to keep from arousing her suspicions. She parked her car outside the front gate and walked in as if it were the most natural thing imaginable.
Our relationship lasted until I was arrested. The only thing that kept it going was her desire to be with me; I would never contact her myself, and in public we kept our distance. Whenever she felt like it, she would come by my house, and if I was there she came in. Otherwise she'd leave a note.
I never understood what she liked about me. I couldn't always fully maintain my cover as a student/tourist. Sometimes she'd see me in the throes of one of my anxiety attacks, and she would massage my back, hoping that would cure it. She was too young and too Japanese to understand my political beliefs and the sea of troubles in which I was thrashing and floundering. My bedroom was wallpapered with posters of revolutionary political leaders. When she asked who they were, singling out a poster of Lenin, and then seemed satisfied when I answered that he was “an Italian actor from the silent movie era,” I realized that I had nothing to fear from her.