The Fugitive (9 page)

Back then, I thought that we would all meet again someday, free and happy. It seemed that the tribute that this generation of third-world revolutionaries had paid to history was already overwhelming. I miss them terribly. I know that someday I will go to the plaza in Santiago where Lolo's ashes were scattered, and I will see them all again. Someday.

On the brink of the abyss

you grasp at words

but they have nothing to do with you

they speak for themselves

 

 

 

 

All things considered, the routine of life on the run in Europe was an unhurried delirium. In the bits of free time left to me, when I wasn't working to gratify my insatiable appetite, I tried to do something with “meaning,” such as work, for instance. They were always jobs that were subcontracted, officially attributed to someone else. Most of the time, I did translations, an activity that allowed me to stay home and earn a decent living. For a long time, I translated Italian photonovellas into French. It was fun but exhausting; I was paid two francs a frame, and I basically had to invent every word of it, because all I got was a brief summary of the plot. Once I realized that no one checked my work, I started “slipping in” social and political messages here and there, at first very cautiously, but later, on a grand scale, since it was evident that the publisher never received complaints or objections. I think I reached the high point of daring when I had the heroine of the series express profound sorrow over the death of Andropov and equally keen disappointment over the election of Chernenko.

To keep from upsetting the flow of the heartwrenching love stories, I only toyed with the pictures in which people were either meeting or saying goodbye. For instance, instead of: “Hello, Gino, how is your grandmother doing?” — “Oh, she's fine, she just has a slight cold . . .” I would put: “Hello, Gino, what does your grandmother think about the strike over at the Renault plant?” — “Oh, she thinks it's generally a good thing, though she has her doubts about the platform of demands put forward by the CGT.”

Admittedly, these additions did little or nothing for the characters, who, on close reading, seemed like mental cases given to fugue states, and probably socially dangerous. But most readers of photonovellas are primarily interested in only one thing: a happy ending.

 

I also typed theses or worked as a research assistant. I spent a lot of time finding research material in libraries.

For ten days I even worked as a waiter in an Italian pizzeria in Madrid. It wasn't a bad place to work, though I sort of resented the fact that the restaurant staff had to be satisfied with just a pizza for dinner. The Moroccan pizza chef had it in for me though, because he said that I had taken a job that should rightly have gone to one of his cousins. All my order tickets went right to the bottom of the pile, and my customers expressed their irritation at the resulting delays by forgetting to leave a tip. I knew that if I stayed on, this would end in an argument, a fight, and who knows what other trouble, so I quit and went in search of another job.

If I had had to depend on my earnings, I would have lived in dire poverty. Luckily, my parents were very generous. I felt a burden of guilt at not being able to fend for myself, but the life of an accidental fugitive is expensive. Whenever I was forced to move, I would lose my security deposit, all my furniture, and my various household objects, and that meant that I had to buy new things for the house. Each of my characters had a wardrobe of his own, and I always needed to have at least one fall-back suit of clothes, for emergencies. And last of all, I always needed to have a substantial sum of money on hand so that I would be able to leave whatever country I was in at a moment's notice.

From this point of view, I had an enviable situation compared with most of the exiles and refugees living in Europe in those years. Despite the solidarity of all the exiled comrades, making ends meet wasn't easy. If you didn't have specific professional skills, such as a degree in medicine, then you had to make do with the first job that came along. Even back then life was expensive, rents were high, and apartments were hard to find. I lived for a number of months in a rat hole in the Place de la République; there were many others who did that for years at a time.

The Italian community in Paris had the hardest time. I never had anything to do with them because they were all suspected of being terrorists and were therefore closely monitored, both by the French and the Italian police. Other exiles, from other communities, would bring me reports about them. They strongly recommended that I steer clear of them. A number of the Italians, they told me, were collaborating with the Sûreté, informing on their own community, in exchange for assurances that they would not be sent back to Italy. I never gave much credence to that rumor, though, and in fact in all these years I have never found any substantiation of it.

In part, the Italians were genuine victims of political persecution, and in the end they were allowed to return home. In other cases, the homesickness for Italy was so overwhelming that they were willing to serve their time in prison rather than spend the rest of their lives in exile. A substantial number of them still live in Paris, or in who knows what other remote part of the world, waiting for their country to close the book on the Seventies, once and for all.

Recently, one of them died. He was a lawyer, he was fifty-seven years old, and he was waiting for the statute of limitations to run out on the crimes he was accused of, so that he could go back to Italy. I read he died of a heart attack. That's not true. Exile killed him. He wasn't the first and, unfortunately, he is not likely to be the last. Someone who is twenty years old today knows little or nothing about that period. Those who are older, unless they lived in direct contact with what happened, have forgotten. Certainly, aside from friends and family members, no one remembers their names, no one remembers the story of their troubles with the law.

At the beginning of my life on the run, I had no idea of just what it meant to live as an expat. I looked around me and I didn't understand what I was seeing. The first job that I found was as a research assistant on a major history of political exile in France. In particular, I was supposed to find information in the French National Archives, focusing on documentation gathered by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. As I sat there reading those files, the personal dossiers and the police reports on a century of political asylum-seekers, it finally dawned on me what this all was. It sent a shiver of fear up my back. It was a prison without walls.

 

Even though I had a relatively stimulating social life, I spent most of my time alone. But work was the best way of staving off the loneliness that logistical considerations and security concerns imposed upon me.

I had made a promise to myself during the very first few days of my life on the run: “No matter what, hold out.” It meant: “Abuse yourself as needed, but never give in to the temptation to surrender.”

That temptation always lurks in the sheer human cost of this sort of life. I was perfectly aware of what I was doing “to myself.” That is, I was aware that I had set a self-destructive mechanism in motion, but it was the only tool available to me to keep my despair from sapping what strength I could muster, the strength to keep on going, the strength to pursue that choice of freedom.

If I had simply agreed to serve out my time in prison, doing whatever I could to shorten the sentence, it would have been the smartest thing I could do in terms of the future of my own life. It would however have meant lending my endorsement to the legitimacy of the verdict and sentence issued against me. Instead, I opted for a gesture of complete rejection—flight, escape—to make an unmistakable distinction between truth and lie, justice and injustice, the law and blatant abuse of power.

I used any means necessary. When the bulimia was no longer enough to deaden my despair and my anguish was building up to the threshold of a scream—after which, of course, would come surrender—I began to activate a series of defenses to neutralize the impulse. I had identified two types of dangerous crises, which I described as “street crisis” and “home crisis.”

The former was the most worrisome, because it took hold of me in full public view. I had learned to recognize the symptoms of an onset: a growing feeling of insecurity and anxiety, rising like a deep, dark tide. My footsteps became hesitant, I began to sweat profusely, and I felt a growing impulse to let myself go and drop into a dead faint. The first time this happened was in a restaurant, and when I fell, I broke a wrist. Fortunately, I was eating with friends, and they handled matters admirably.

After my wrist had been set and a cast applied, they took me to see a Turkish doctor who worked with refugees. He told me that I needed a daily cocktail of tranquilizers, antidepressants, and anti-hypertensives. That wouldn't be possible and I told him why. In order to keep my bulimia in a state of equilibrium I needed to self-administer a substantial dose of alcoholic beverages. If I mixed that with psychoactive drugs, it would slow down my response time and deaden my instincts. As a fugitive, I couldn't afford that.

And so he decided to prescribe only anti-hypertensives for me, and over the course of a number of sessions, taught me to recognize and resist these panic attacks with forms of relaxation that involved breathing techniques. That way, whenever I sensed the premonitory signs of an onset, I managed to contain the crisis and hurry home. Once I got there, I was invariably exhausted and I would drop onto my bed like a limp rag and lay there for endless hours.

The “home crisis” was not as dangerous, but much harder to overcome. Loneliness triggered it. Every once in a while, despite my rigid scheduling of the day's activities, my mind would wriggle off its leash and begin rooting around in homesickness. Every day it would get a little worse, a little more piercing. I longed for my family. The breathing technique was not a sufficiently powerful remedy. So I decided to make use of a technique I had used when I was in solitary confinement.

Between pretrial isolation and punishments, I had spent almost eight months in solitary confinement, and I learned a way of defending myself from all that useless cruelty by taking a little stroll in the world of madness: I would pretend to be a lawyer. On the table in my cell (if I had one) or on my cot, I would lay out eight objects, each of which corresponded to a judge of the Court. I would assume the role of my own defense lawyer, and I would deliver a summation for the defense that would last for hours and hours, a fiery and passionate piece of oratory, an impeccably logical exhortation. I would go on until I collapsed from sheer physical exhaustion. Then, my mind completely voided, I would drop into a troubled but restorative sleep.

During my life on the run, whenever I got to the point that I knew I just couldn't take it anymore, I would pull out a newspaper clipping with a photograph of the Appeals Court in Venice that had found me guilty. Then, after hanging it on a wall and donning an imaginary black lawyer's gown, I would begin my summation with the following words: “Most illustrious Presiding Judge, eminent judges of the Court, Esteemed Magistrates and Jury Members, fate and God's will have placed in my hands the task of proving to you the innocence of this unfortunate young man, whose sole error has been to trust in justice . . . ”

Since I knew the record of my trial by heart, I was able to develop my summations in a “professionally” credible manner. They were often so long that my panic attack would be over well before my exposition of the arguments for the defense. And so I would bring my diatribe to a close with these words: “I therefore respectfully beg this most illustrious court to adjourn the present hearing to some later date, because the effort of this daunting task has exhausted the physical strength of this advocate for the defense.” And with the onset of the next attack, I would resume my summation, taking up where the court had adjourned the session.

It was a stroll through a landscape of pure madness, but as I said, any means was acceptable if it allowed me to hold out.

The “home crisis” had a variant that would manifest itself whenever I had to move. Since I couldn't call a moving company, I was forced to leave behind everything I couldn't carry with me. I went out the door one morning, never to return. These were always painful moments of extreme anguish because, more than any other time, I was forced to see clearly how makeshift and transient my life had become.

I always did my best not to become too fond of the place I happened to be living and the objects that inhabited that space, but I could hardly help it. After all, it was the only place I could feel safe, thanks to the painstaking security precautions that I took. More than that even, it was the only place I could be myself again, at least mentally.

A new place to live was a leap into the void. Was it safe? What were the neighbors like? Would my cover hold up?

The night before the move, the crisis would set in. Sleepless, I would wander from room to room, opening drawers, touching objects that I was about to lose forever, running my hands over the walls that had housed me and protected me. For the last time, I wore the clothing of a character who would be dead by sun-up, and I experienced something verging on mourning, because a “mask,” “behind” which I had laughed, wept, talked, listened, and made love, would be exiting my life for good. The idea of the “new” character or the “new” house terrified me. Morning would come, and I would be sitting on the bed, still wearing my old costume, my arms wrapped figuratively around everything that I was abandoning, unable to bring myself to face the new.

Occasionally I would remain in that state for days at a time, until my friends, worried at my disappearance, would show up, reassure me, and take care of the short-term, immediate problems of the actual move for me.