The Past is a Foreign Country (17 page)

WE WENT OUT together at sunset. The heat was only slightly less intense. Francesco had his military rucksack with him, with forty million lire in hundred-lire and fifty-lire notes inside. We walked along together for a while, then separated. We would see each other again at the hotel, he said, later that night or next morning.

It was sure to be next morning, I thought as he vanished between the buildings in the rapidly gathering darkness.

I went back to the park where the River Turia had once flowed. I liked the idea of walking on the grass, between the trees, where there had once been water and boats. Another world.

Many years later, I would feel something similar – though much stronger – at Mont St Michel, walking in the wet sand between patches of water at low tide, peering into the distance, trying to see the sea. I imagined it would arrive suddenly. I imagined a wave forming on the horizon. A great foam-laden wave, indistinguishable from the sky and the clouds. Everyone ran away, but I stayed where I was, between sand and sky, with the mount and the fortress on my right.

Watching the wave arrive.

I spent hours walking in the park. I looked at the people – boys, girls, families with children – enjoying the coolness, and a feeling
of gentle melancholy came over me and I thought of childhood and holidays. I’d forgotten all about Francesco, and the cocaine, and everything that had happened in the past few days and months. It was all a long, long way away. I felt pleasantly languid. The way I used to feel at the beginning of summer when I was in junior high school. Everything was possible then, and the world was an
enchanted
garden, luminous and at the same time full of cool, welcoming shadows, benign secrets to be discovered.

Why was I reliving the sensations of my childhood so intensely on that August night in a strange place in Spain? It was as if I was on an island, in the midst of all that was happening.

I had something to eat, drank a few beers, smoked some cigarettes and then lay down on the grass, my hands behind my head. I looked up at the sky, trying to pick out the constellations. As usual, the only one I recognised was the Great Bear.

Without being aware of it, I fell asleep. 

THE NEXT DAY we packed our bags, checked out of the hotel, and went and got the car out of the garage. Francesco’s rucksack was on the back seat. The same one he had when he had gone out the previous evening with the money. Now the drugs were in it.

I drove, and Francesco gave me directions. We were on our way to the central post office. We would send the package from there and then quietly leave.

All very easy, all very clean. But I was dying of fear.

I was driving, and yet it seemed to me as if I had eyes at the back of my head, and I couldn’t take them off that rucksack, with about ten years in prison inside it if any part of this
easy
,
clean
business went wrong. I was dying of fear, and Francesco was in a good mood. He made jokes, said that it had taken just four days – had we only been there four days? – to be sick to the teeth of Valencia. But next time, he said, we’d have a real holiday.

I was dying of fear.

We came to a big building which I guessed was the post office. It was big and ugly: that’s all I remember about it. We drove slowly past the main entrance. Francesco told me to go round the block, and when we were at the back of the building he told me to stop.

He pulled out a brown package shaped like a shoe box, enclosed in wrapping paper and sealed with light brown tape. In black felt-tip pen he had written a box number in Bari.

Francesco handed me the package. ‘Now you go in, get in the
queue, and send it. Obviously you have to use a false name for the sender. I’ll wait for you in the car. As soon as you come back we’ll go, and this city and its fucking heat can go to hell.’

Go in.

He’d said go in. He’d wait for me in the car.

What if they caught me? What if there were police inside, and they became suspicious and made me open the package? What would he do? What would I do?

I felt a blind fear, a real sense of panic. I’d only known terror like this once before in my life. I was three or four years old, Mum had taken me to the park, and I’d got lost. I don’t remember anything about that spring afternoon except that absolute fear, the sense of being totally lost, and my desperate sobs, which continued for a long time after my mother had found me.

I don’t know how long I sat there with that brown package on my knees. I’m sure Francesco knew what was happening to me. I’m sure, even though he didn’t say anything and certainly didn’t do anything.

I’d have liked to ask him why we didn’t go into the post office together. Or else I’d have liked to tell him I’d changed my mind, and didn’t want to have anything to do with any of this. Let him send the drugs on his own and keep all the money for himself.

I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t even open my mouth. The
silence
was filled with the hum of the air conditioning.

In the end, it was Francesco who spoke. ‘Go on, hurry up. Then we can get a head start on the road while it’s still light.’

He sounded calm. He was telling me to hurry up and to do a simple errand, because we had to go and there was no point in
wasting
time.

I opened the window and took the keys mechanically from the dashboard.

‘What are you doing, taking the keys? What if a policeman comes along…’

His voice was neutral, lacking in tension, almost cheerful. But I felt my blood freeze. He was telling me that if the police appeared, he had to get away.

‘…and I have to move the car? We’re double parked. Go on, hurry up, I’m getting pissed off here.’

I gave him the keys and got out of the car, into the heat. Petrified with fear, and powerless – I was only just starting to realise how powerless.

There was no air conditioning inside the post office, only an old, noisy fan to relieve the two disheartened-looking clerks behind the counter. There was a small queue at the window for parcels. The place smelled of people and dust and something else I couldn’t make out. The person in front of me in the queue was a tall, sturdy woman in a sleeveless floral dress, with long dark hair coming out from under her armpits.

The clerks were in no hurry, and nor apparently were any of the people queuing. To pass the time, I started to make bets with myself on who would come in, or on which of the people in front of me at the two windows would get seen to first.

If the next person who comes in is a man, then everything will be fine, and I’ll get away. If the little old man in my queue gets seen to first, then everything will be fine.

If the next person who comes in is a woman – by now the only person in front of me was the virago with the hairy armpits – then I’ll definitely get away.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man in uniform come in.

The police!

I saw these words inside my head, with the exclamation mark, written in thick black felt tip on a kind of white banner. I don’t know which part of my brain this image had emerged from. It looked like some crude prop from an amateur dramatic show.

It was then that I realised what the expression ‘bated breath’
really meant. After my first glimpse of that uniform entering the post office, I immediately looked away, and stared down at a point on the floor, between my shoes. I had the impulse to run away, but even in that moment of panic I realised that it would draw attention to me and only make things worse. Though it was quite possible the policeman hadn’t come in by chance. He was there for me. There had been a tip-off, they had tailed us and had been waiting for the best moment to arrest us. Or rather, to arrest me, because I was sure Francesco would get away in my car. Any moment now, they would touch my arm and tell me to follow them.

The man in the uniform walked past me, opened a small door next to the counter and went through to the other side. He had a big leather bag over his shoulder.

A postman.

It took me another few seconds to realise that I’d been holding my breath. Now at last I could breathe.

About a quarter of an hour later, I was back in the car, puffing
furiously
at a cigarette, my head empty, my hands shaking uncontrollably.

THE RETURN JOURNEY was as unremitting and exhausting as the outward one.

We sped on like maniacs, taking turns without a break, going back along the road we’d driven down a few days earlier, as if rapidly spooling back through a videotape made incomprehensible by the speed.

The only thing I remember about the whole journey – which
lasted
maybe about thirty hours – are the sharp bends in the road and the hair-raising viaducts on the border between Italy and France. It was just before dawn. I was driving at the time. Francesco had put his seat back and was fast asleep. I was exhausted and felt as if I was going to pass out, and then we would smash through the guardrail and out into the terrible void I glimpsed beyond the asphalt and the hedges and posts. Francesco wouldn’t even notice what was
happening
. But I would see and hear everything, right up until the last moment.

The thought of it didn’t scare me, and I drove on, at a speed that was crazy on a road like that – almost never touching the brake, sometimes changing gears with the cheerful, angry roar of the
engine
in my ears, often coming very close to the edge of the abyss, half closing my fevered eyes and reopening them just in time to swerve smoothly a fraction of a second before it was too late.

We got back to Bari on a mild August evening, unusually cool for the time of year. One of those evenings when you realise that
summer
is drawing to an end, even though it’s still at its height. When you’re a boy and these first stirrings of autumn appear in August, you feel a particular kind of gentle melancholy.

A melancholy full of memories and nostalgia, combined with the certainty – or the illusion – that you still have all the time in the world.

The city looked the same as ever. Everything, I thought, would soon go back to normal.

Even though I didn’t know what normal meant any more.

Anyway, I’d soon have a lot of money in my pocket, and that was the thought uppermost in my mind now. It made me feel dizzy, as if drunk. Of course I didn’t know what I was going to do with the money, but I didn’t think about that.

In the meantime, the trip, Spain, Angelica, my semiconscious walks through that unreal city, that legendary dawn by the sea, then the posting of the drugs, the smells, the lights, the noises, my fear, everything was far, far away. It seemed to have happened a long time ago, or in a dream. In fact I had to make an effort of will to convince myself that it had happened at all.

As I walked home, I thought for the first time about my parents, and the fact that I would be seeing them soon, if they were back in Bari. I hadn’t called them since the morning we left, on the
motorway
. I thought of what they would say to me – with justification – about the fact that I’d vanished, that they had been worried about me, that they didn’t recognise me any more, and so on. That gentle feeling I’d had earlier quickly faded. I felt the impulse to turn round and run away, somewhere, anywhere.

But then I told myself that I was tired, overtired in fact, and just
needed to go to sleep. In my own bed. One way or another, I told myself, everything was going to be all right.

One way.

Or another.