The Fugitive (15 page)

Long before the truck plowed into me, I fully understood the objective absurdity of our relationship, and how harmful it ultimately was to her and to her life. I had talked to her about it more than once, but I always found myself dealing with a woman who preferred to deny there was a problem—no doubt, unaware that she was doing so—in order to spare me the immense pain that would inevitably ensue. Her furious outbursts, and phrases such as “I am adult and mature enough to decide these things for myself” kept me from taking any initiative of my own, and postponed the discussion to some unspecified date in the future.

There are two things that, even now, I still find difficult to accept: her rejection of a friendship with me, and the fact that all the books, records, and other objects that documented our fifteen-year relationship vanished with her. Even things that rightly belonged to me, such as her letters and her gifts. One day she raided my house, basically, and carried everything away with her. As if she wanted to wipe away all traces. At first, I waited for her to change her mind, but she never did. Only now, after long and patient work to heal this wound, am I clear about it, and only now has the pain lessened.

The reason that I feel compelled to write about my relationship with Alessandra is the degree to which it resembles—is, indeed, identical to—the thousands of similar stories between men and women who have experienced, directly or indirectly, the world of prison and/or exile. And what these two conditions share is their powerful destructive effect upon human relationships.

A human being who is deprived of liberty or forced to flee his own country must deal with a stark and tragic set of experiences. As a result the fugitive will desperately cling to any relationship, driven not only by love but also by the need to create a minimum sense of continuity with his own past. Seen from the point of view of the other man or other woman, the situation is equally dire. Distancing and detachment are practically physiological elements in these relationships, I would venture to say, because everyday life in the end obliges them to try to safeguard their own lives. It is not selfishness, but simply the need to recognize the inevitable, after doing everything possible.

In Paris, my friends had told me right from the outset, with the wisdom inherited from a century's experience of exile, that my relationship with Alessandra would come to an end, and that it would be better for both of us to make a clean break as soon as possible, in order to offer her a chance to lead a “normal life,” and me an opportunity to seek out relationships “within” the emotional universe of exile. This was good advice, but difficult advice to accept and implement in the context of interpersonal dynamics that refused to comply with the laws of reason. On the one hand, of course, I felt the need to make a decision, to choose, and on the other, I was reluctant to administer kicks in the ass to what was, after all, my own life. It was a mistake, because long before my arrest in 1985, Alessandra had, against her best intentions, already created a series of tensions in my mind that led me to make bad decisions, like the final, fatal error I made in Mexico. More or less subconsciously, she was laying the foundation for a final break.

I witnessed many, all too many, relationships that ultimately ended the same way. When I think back on my own, I feel a sense of bitterness at having lost Alessandra as a friend, because I will never be able to tell her how much I respect and appreciate the bravery that she showed when I was arrested in Mexico.

 

Our love story began when we were both fifteen and members of the scouts. It was a beautiful, carefree time. At least, until January 20, 1976, the day that my legal soap opera began its long run. At the age of nineteen, I became a prison inmate and she became a “vedova bianca.”
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She followed me from prison to prison, showing up faithfully every visiting day; she became a member of my own family, in part because her family—and I am referring specifically to her mother—strongly disapproved of her relationship with a man sentenced to almost twenty years of prison.

Then I was acquitted and our love became more intense. We started to plan our life together. And then I was found guilty by the appeals court and, while awaiting the verdict of the Court of Cassation (Italy's supreme court), all our plans gave way to an intense day-to-day experience of hoping the nightmare would soon come to an end. That's not the way it went. It soon turned into a far worse nightmare: life on the run. A few months later, Alessandra came to see me in Paris and thus began her regular round of commuting, so that she was forced to live a double life, two completely different and incompatible lives. In Padua, she studied and lived at home with her family; periodically, she would meet me in some place or other in Europe, in complete secrecy. A secret, first of all, from her family, who would never have tolerated these trips of hers.

She continued to be what amounted to a “vedova bianca”: even when we were together for a couple of weeks, for her it was like visiting me in prison. As a convict, I was a non-person with my non-life and no future on the horizon. After a while, she couldn't stand the double life. Padua become nothing more to her than a place to pass the time while waiting to see me again. She could no longer study (she didn't take her degree until after we broke up) or work; her folks never gave her a penny, and my parents wound up having to pay for her trips and her expenses while she was staying with me.

I soon came to realize that she too had a split existence; that she had stopped thinking about the future and was living one day at a time. When I started worrying about her and asking her serious questions about it, she lied, and spun tales of imaginary exams and promising employment opportunities.

When we were together, we forgot everything else and lived in a world all our own. We spent the days making love, strolling through the city, laughing, joking, and flirting, exchanging gifts and swearing our undying devotion. Even the security rules weren't a problem; she learned them all immediately and operated with great agility while still scrupulously obeying the laws of the underground.

 

Time was working against us. We were forced to deal with reality, a reality that demanded that I leave Europe. Alessandra became an enthusiastic advocate of Mexico, displaying an urgent desire for change that at first I couldn't understand, because she had hated every place we had visited so far. Just before my departure, however, when it was already too late to turn back, a discussion that began by pure chance led me to understand that she did not want to leave Padua and her family, much less to go and live with a fugitive. She loved me deeply, but she could not accept the idea of my conviction and insisted that we had to demand a new trial.

From this point of view, she got no argument from me, since the trial “was” my life and I would have paid any price to obtain justice. But at that moment, it took on a completely different meaning, practically a disassociation from the decisions we had made together; I felt all alone when I made the seventy-five-hundred-mile leap into the dark.

When the ship set sail for Veracruz, she was on the wharf, waving her scarf goodbye to me; it was a pretty scene, the sort they like to use to end romantic movies. I assumed I'd never see her again. I was wrong. She came to Mexico, but only once and for a very short visit. She found Mexico slightly revolting and very frightening. She would only talk about our legal strategy for obtaining a new trial; she avoided any other discussions about our relationship. When it was time for her to leave again, I noted that her face betrayed a slight sense of relief. But I knew I had already lost her in Paris.

When I was arrested by the Federales, my friends alerted Alessandra, who took the news to my sister. Together, they went to see my mother, who understood instantly and asked, in a tiny voice: “But he's alive, at least?”

Then Alessandra did something remarkable. She asked my family for all the cash they could raise, turned it into dollars, and took a plane to Mexico City, determined to purchase my freedom. As soon as she landed, she went straight to Calle de Soto. Fortunately, a few members of our group who were in the area spotted her and managed to stop her, hustling her away, practically kidnapping her.

Still today, when I think of the risk she ran, I get goose bumps, even though I am proud of what she did. Despite our present distance, I will never forget that last act of love, which I still consider to be one of the most significant events in my life.

After returning from Mexico, Alessandra devoted herself to the cause of the new trial until the very last. Then she disappeared. For good.

 

During those years, I was with other women as well. Aside from Kioko, my Japanese girlfriend in Mexico City, they were all relationships “inside the universe of exile.” They were all certainly much more problematic than my relationship with Alessandra, and they were strictly short-term: a few weeks, a month, and then either she or I had something else to do, and it was over. They were good for me, I always emerged happy, refreshed, and more optimistic.

The nicest of them all was also the oddest. She was Iranian. I had met her in Madrid and then bumped into her again in Paris. I knew that she was an exile but little more. I liked her from the minute I laid eyes on her, and when I saw her intently gathering signatures against the Khomeini regime, I decided to get to know her.

“Hello, you remember me?”

“Sure, Madrid, a couple of months ago.”

“What are you doing here?”

“My family moved to Paris.”

“And besides collecting signatures, what do you do?”

“I work for the newspaper of my organization.”

“What organization is that?”

“Mujahedeen of the Iranian People.”

“
Sei tutta casa e causa
?” I asked her in Italian—roughly, “Are you all home and cause?”

“Pardon me?” she asked, eyeing me with some confusion.

“I asked what you do besides your political work.”

“I'm attending a course for interpreters at a school in the Montparnasse area.”

She said goodbye and went back to her work. The next day, I waited for her outside the school for interpreters. She seemed very surprised to see me.

“I couldn't resist the temptation to come pick you up after your course,” I greeted her.

“What's that mean?” she asked, with a sullen, wary expression.

“That I like you and I'd like to see you more often.”

That was the beginning of a long, patient courtship. I went to meet her after school, I walked her to her front door, and I participated in all of the public demonstrations against the Iranian regime, just so that I could see her.

I liked her more and more. She was a very sweet woman, intelligent, fiercely proud, with a special vein of irony that invariably targeted the status of women under Islam. I thought she was very pretty, even if her face was always wrapped in a scarf and her body was shrouded in loose flannel smocks, longer than knee-length skirts, and boots, all strictly dark brown. A color that I have always detested; I would joke with her, telling her that I had an eye disease that worsened when I had to look at dark-brown objects.

One day she asked me a series of questions about my past. Afterward, she said:

“That's a very sad story. May I tell my family about it?”

“If you like.” We often talked about our childhoods, and it became a frequent pastime to tell each the other the fairy tales of our respective countries. As I walked her home, we would stop in a park, sit down on a bench together, and one of us would speak the magic words: “Once upon a time . . . ”

Giggling, one day, she said to me:

“My father wants to meet you.”

That made me nervous. I hastily said: “There's no hurry.”

She burst into laughter: “You'll come for tea tomorrow.”

“But I only drink tea when I'm sick,” I objected.

I was introduced to her father, and also to her brothers. There were five of them; they all had mustaches, and they all looked at me with inscrutable expressions.

The house they lived in had belonged to her mother's family. Her mother wasn't home. I knew that her mother was French and had met her Iranian husband at the university. He was a handsome man, between sixty and seventy years old, tall and austere, with a neatly trimmed white beard.

“I had seven children, six boys and a girl,” he told me, pointing to my friend, who was busy serving tea.

“Now I have only six children. The oldest boy died in Teheran prison; he was killed with the sponge torture. You know about it?”

“No.”

“The war with Iraq is slaughtering our young people. The war front needs blood, for transfusions. And the Pasdaran, the revolutionary guard, takes it from political prisoners. Right down to the last drop.”

“I'm very sorry . . . I had no idea.”

“My children are all
mujahedeen
, and they all want to go back to Iran to fight. Even her, my only daughter.”

I looked at her in surprise. She had never mentioned any of this to me, and I felt uncomfortable.

“It is a hopeless struggle. Khomeini is strong, and his strength will endure even after his death. I was a leader of Tudeh, the Iranian communist party. We believed in Khomeini's democracy, and he betrayed our trust. We no longer exist. Those who aren't dead or in prison are in exile. I am in exile for the second time; the first time I was fleeing the regime of the Shah. Now my children all want to fight on the Iraqi side. Many other young people are already at the front.”

I broke in: “I understand your bitterness. But I don't understand why you're telling me about all this.”

“You are courting my daughter, and this I don't like. From what she has told me, you are wanted as a criminal in your own land and this I like even less. My sons will leave us, and my wife and I will be all alone. I have some hopes of persuading my daughter not to squander her life pointlessly, so in the meanwhile, would you please leave her alone? I ask you this as a courtesy, our family needs tranquility.”