The Fugitive (2 page)

Things went from bad to worse. They took me to Calle de Soto, the notorious headquarters of the Mexican political police. They held me there for ten days, and beat me black and blue. I have never been very good at dealing with the police. I always come off as a smart-ass, and whenever I claim to be innocent, not only am I generally not believed, but it tends to make my questioner lose his patience. I also have a special gift for creating misunderstandings in the dialogue. This tends to stoke the already simmering anger of the police, whose sole aim is to pry loose a nice solid confession and go home, happy to have earned their salary.

The first thing that made me unpopular with the Federales was my surname.

“What is your name,
cabrón
?”

“Massimo Carlotto.”

“Your whole name,
hijo de puta
!”

“Massimo Carlotto, like I just told you.”

“Is Carlotto your father's surname or your mother's?”

“My father's.”

“What's your mother's surname?”

“Villani.”

“In that case,
cabrón
y hijo de puta
, your name is Massimo Carlotto Villani.”

“No, Señor Detective, my name is Massimo Carlotto, and if my name was Massimo Carlotto Villani, I would be somebody else.”

“What do you mean somebody else?”

“That's right. Massimo Carlotto is my name. If you say Massimo Carlotto Villani, it's not me anymore.”

“Take him away! This
pendejo
wants to be a wise-ass. He needs a little more of our special treatment,” the detective roared, turning purple in the face.

While his subordinates worked diligently and with consummate skill to give my face a new appearance, it dawned on me where the misunderstanding had arisen: in Mexico, in contrast with the way things are done in Italy, everyone has a double surname. I tried to interrupt the special treatment to explain, but it was too late. Say what you want about the Mexican police, but you can't deny that they obey orders to the letter. When I was finally able to speak to the detective, though I was slurring my words by then, I managed to clear up the misunderstanding.

The second question was about my age. There too an unfortunate misunderstanding arose, and the policemen had to start their work all over again. In ten days' time, the police only managed to set down two pages of legal transcripts. In brief, it was an unpleasant experience. I only think back on it when I piss and I notice the whitish scars that the electrodes left on my dick.

And so, for a long time, I hated Melvin and his entire family. No longer. Time, we all know, is a gentleman and heals all wounds. Bygones are bygones and, more to the point, Melvin is dead.

I learned of the “tragic” event in 1987, during my extended stay in the Padua house of detention. One day, I received a letter from Mexico with a newspaper clipping. It reported the news of the murder of the young lawyer, “hit by
cinco balazos
from a .45 caliber pistol, as he was leaving his house.” The article ventured the hypothesis that the murder was a revenge killing by the Salvadoran guerrillas of the Frente Farabundo Martí, annoyed at Melvin's customary entrepreneurial approach to business. Apparently, in fact, in one of his last professional endeavors, Melvin had arranged to sell out a group of political refugees to the El Salvador secret police.

I still don't understand, to this day, what mysterious mechanism transformed me, on my tenth day in Calle de Soto, from a dangerous terrorist into an undesirable alien, to be expelled from the country as quickly as possible. In a single busy morning, the police managed to hustle me over to a doctor's office, where I was stitched back together, to the Migración office, to procure the necessary documents for my expulsion, to a laundry where my clothes were cleaned (all the clothing that I had at home, as well as my other personal effects, was already the property of the Federales), to a hotel, where I took a shower, and finally to the KLM office, to buy a plane ticket back to Italy.

I could have traveled anywhere in the world I wanted; I could have started all over again from scratch. But my experience in Mexico had taken its toll, and to wage a battle in court, even if I was doing it from a jail cell, didn't seem like such a bad prospect. At least, not at the time.

That same afternoon, I was flying back to Milan's Linate Airport, via Amsterdam. During the boarding process, my status as an
expulsado
was brought to the attention of passengers and crew. While the Federales were eager to slip yours truly into an economy seat as quickly as possible and be rid of me, the airport police insisted that I pay the required expatriation tax. When I informed the airport police that my police escort had already robbed me of everything I owned, including my money, they took the position that the Federales had to pay the exit tax. Words began to fly and tensions were rising. The argument was finally settled by a steward who took me by the arm and hustled me down the aisle to the seat that had been reserved for me.

I was sitting next to an English girl traveling with her parents; they were returning to Liverpool after a long vacation in the Yucatan. She spoke good Spanish; the scene with the Federales had aroused her curiosity, and she started asking me about what had happened. I gave her a revised and corrected version of events. I couldn't bring myself to tell her that I was flying back to a jail cell, with fifteen years of “time-to-serve” ahead of me.

She seemed to like me, and she was in the mood to talk. I stared at her hungrily; I knew that for years and years to come, I would think back on this rare opportunity to be close to a woman. I savored every move she made, every word she said. After the stopover in Chicago, she fell asleep and I continued to stare at her. But there was no room in my mind for her now. My mind was teeming with all the memories of prison that I had tried to wipe away over the years.

I was a prisoner once again. Gradually, as the hours ticked by, prison became increasingly real. I could even smell it; the unmistakable sounds filled my ears. Slamming gates, shouting, keys turning in locks. And the silence, so unnatural and freighted with despair that I would startle awake in those first few months. When I was nineteen. Then, I turned twenty. Twenty-one. Then freedom. Acquitted and convicted. Convicted again. Escaped. And now, at twenty-nine, I was flying back to it all.

I had to change planes in Amsterdam; while waiting for my flight I phoned my family. My mother answered the phone. A woman of honey and steel. Hearing her voice left me breathless and for a moment, I couldn't help thinking that, at least, I was going home.

“Ciao, Mamma, it's Massimo.”

“Ciao Massimo, we're coming to Milan.”

“You know all about it?”

“Yes, they told us.”

“Mamma, what now?”

“We're going to fight for a new trial.” Prophetic words.

There's no end to bad news. When I arrived in Milan, without papers, and with an expulsion decree in hand, I held out my wrists to the border police, thus informing them of my intention to turn myself in. It was a stunning blow to learn that there was no warrant for my arrest, much less an international all-points bulletin. I had lived for years like a hunted animal, while no one at all was looking for me, not even back home. That's injustice for you. They took me to San Vittore prison all the same and there, thirteen days later, I was handed a warrant. At last. I was starting to wonder if I had just dreamed all those trials.

What had happened was that they had drawn up a warrant for my arrest, but then it had lain forgotten in a drawer somewhere. If I hadn't come back to Italy it would probably have stayed there forever, considering that it took them thirteen days to find it.

 

So while this marked the end of my life as a fugitive from justice, it also marked the beginning of my years as a prison inmate. It wasn't easy to get used to the change. Every so often I would behave as if I was still on the run. Once I tried to pass myself off as the convict from the cell next door, who was due for release. I cut that out pretty quickly though; the prison guards made it clear that it was a bad idea.

 

During my long battle in the courts, which was to continue for another eight years until April 7, 1993, people often asked me to talk about that particular part of my life, when I found myself living as an accidental fugitive. I told most of the people who asked that it had been a horrible experience that I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemies. If someone insisted on trying to dig deeper and asked me to define the concept of life on the run, I would answer that “life on the run is like the blues: it's a state of mind.”

I can't claim credit for this definition, but I adopted it to respect an ethical commitment that I had made to the one, brief friendship that I made in Calle de Soto. I had a German cell mate there. I never learned his name, or why he had left Germany and come to Mexico. All I know is, as a fugitive, he left a lot to be desired. Trying to travel around Central America with the physique of a Viking, light-blue eyes, platinum blond hair, a totally unworkable accent, and a Guatemalan passport made out to a certain Ramón is truly the mark of a reckless fool. He had been there since the evening of the day before. When the Federales opened the cell door to put me in, there he stood, before me. That was the one time I got a good look at him because the cell was dark and, for only a couple hours a day, depending on the position of the sun, a faint shaft of light shone through the slits in the door, illuminating strips of wall. As soon as he opened his mouth and began peppering me with questions, I realized that he wasn't much of a jailbird, either.

“Listen carefully, my friend,” I said to him. “I don't know who you are, and I don't want to know. And I really don't want to answer your questions. The only topic of conversation in here will be life inside this cell. By the way, have you looked around to see what there is in here?”

“There's nothing in here,” he replied, “just a broken toilet.”

“You need to know how to look,” I said, and started feeling around with both hands, exploring the cracks in the floor, walls, and toilet. Ten minutes later, I had found a cigarette, three matches, and a pencil stub, and I had killed all the insects I could lay my hands on.

“Somebody broke the toilet so that you can get drinking water when you push the flush-button. It must mean that they won't give us much water in here,” I informed my German cell mate. Then I asked him: “Did you find any graffiti on the wall?”

“No, why?”

“The hidden cigarette butt. Whoever was in here before us left it so that those who came after could leave a message. Then, whoever gets a chance passes the messages on. You ever been in jail before?”

“No.”

“It shows.”

I dug around in my pocket and found a Kleenex, carefully rolled it up, and sacrificed one of my three precious matches to turn it into a jury-rigged torch. I was thus able to read some of the graffiti on the wall. It was just as I had said: they were all identical—first name, last name, date of arrest, the address of a relative to be contacted. In some cases, the name of an informer or the policeman who made the arrest.

“Shall we smoke the cigarette?” he asked me.

“Do you already know how often the guards go by?”

“No.”

“Then we'll wait and figure it out. If they see us smoking or smell it, they'll beat the shit out of us.”

The cell was suffocatingly hot, and we moved as little as possible, dressed only in our underwear. He talked the whole time. I ignored him as much as I was able. His endless jabbering about life, people, and nature kept me from thinking. My brain was already feverish with the effort to come up with a reason to keep the grease-heads from crushing my balls again.

The phrase about the blues being a state of mind came out like this: “Ramón” suddenly grabbed one of my arms and, staring me straight in the eyes, said: “
Mano”
(Mexican slang for
hermano
, or ‘brother') and then all the rest. I thought to myself that he had lost it from the heat, and I hissed at him, threateningly: “
Callate
!” (Shut up.)

I regretted it the next day. He was in pretty bad shape when they brought him back from questioning; he died during the night, while I was asleep, but he was still with me for three more days, until I managed to bribe a guard with the gold chain that my mother had given me. When the light of the sun filtered back through the cracks in the door and illuminated the wall, I extracted my pencil stub from its hidey-hole and wrote the epitaph of:

“Ramón”—male, German, died during the days following 21 January 1985, alert the German embassy
.

I decided that that was a good time to smoke the cigarette butt, and I savored it without haste, waiting for dark to fall again. I considered writing something about myself, but all I could think of were high-flown phrases, ill-suited for a cell in Calle de Soto, so I decided to skip the idea entirely.

Nowadays, my sense of guilt makes me think that the German's flow of words had been nothing more or less than a sort of spiritual last will and testament, which I had refused to hear.

I've only gotten really drunk a very few times in my life. Once when I read in the newspaper that, following the massive earthquake that hit Mexico City, a rescue team of excavators had found in the basement of Calle de Soto the corpses of a number of people who had been tied up and tortured. The government of the Distrito Federal, in a transport of indignation (indignant at how thoroughly the rescue teams had done their work, more than anything else), ordered the building shut down, and some grease-head paid for the sins of all the others.

Even now, I try to stay true to my ethical commitment, and I continue to say that life on the run is a state of mind, even though I actually believe that my experience as a fugitive might be more accurately described as a sort of meta-theater of survival. As in the
commedia dell'arte
, I was a face that gave origin to a series of different masks, caricatures of clearly defined social stereotypes, improvising day by day within the context of a general plot structure which was nothing more than the intertwining details of my wending progress through the halls of justice and my own decision to become a fugitive from the law. Characters that I selected and chose: a decision to shake off the role, straight out of the legal soap opera, into which I had been typecast by the trial, both before and after I went on the run, the only role that I never figured out how to play. A role that I always rebelled against completely.