The Fugitive (10 page)

The thing I hated most about moving was having to buy everything all over again; all the household objects, from furniture to silverware, that you find in any home. Normally, you buy them with the idea that they are going to last over time, be part of your everyday life, and have a history. For a fugitive, it's different: the only criterion is temporary use, and so each and every object necessarily loses its worth. I thought of them as non-objects, the non-possessions of a non-person living a non-life.

This transience of my everyday life was so painful to me that, when I left for Mexico, my mother went to the house that I had lived in as Jason and took a wooden bookcase that I had there. She took it back to Italy with her so that there would be something left from that period of my life. Now it's in my bedroom. Even though it is just a piece of cheap furniture, just a set of shelves that can be easily disassembled, I will keep it with me wherever I go, every time I move.

In other words, it wasn't easy to live from one day to another without the least prospect of a future, except for the virtual certainty that I would be going back to prison someday.

Time passed, and my presence in Europe, with its modern and efficient police forces, endowed with well-organized archives, fingerprint files, and interconnected terminals, became increasingly freighted with danger for me and for those who were helping me. The third world, with its vast spaces and its enormous contradictions, was beginning to look to me like the only possible destination: a place where I could at least formulate a hypothesis of a life.

My friends didn't want me to leave Europe. They were afraid I was too fragile, both physically and psychologically, to risk such an adventure. When I explained to them that I couldn't stand to put them in danger with my presence any longer, they told me that that was their problem, and that I needed to focus on holding out until things improved. I was certainly tempted to stay in Europe, and I had a pretty clear foreboding that the third world would wind up screwing me, but in fairness I couldn't say that I had an alternative.

Leaving my friends was heartrending. I met them, one at a time, in the street, a farewell gift, a hug, a terrible struggle to remain indifferent.

The time came to bid my family farewell, too. They had come to visit me in Paris many times before. In terms of security, it was an absurd risk, but we couldn't stay away from one another, we couldn't stand only to talk over the phone. We needed to be close together, to share an everyday life that was normal and untroubled, at least in appearance.

Our family has always been very close and the separation caused by my life on the run was a wound that would never heal in our life as a family. We experienced many trying moments in those eighteen years, but perhaps the period when I was on the run was the worst. When I was in prison, we were separated as well, but it was a different form of suffering, mitigated by daily letters and weekly visits.

Whenever they arrived in Paris, I would strip off my costumes and set aside my characters. I became a son and a brother once again. I didn't want my family to understand what I had been forced to do to myself in order to preserve my freedom. I moved out of my apartment while they were in town, and we all moved into a larger place, lent by a friend, where we all lived together. Our time together was like a holiday; we would travel around Paris, touring museums, art galleries, and monuments; we even took a ride on the Seine in a
bateau-mouche
. We would dine out, but the thing we loved best was to spend hours at the dinner table in our apartment, just talking. Tasting my mother's cooking again was always a deeply moving experience for me. In those days, we managed to heal the pain of separation and of the trials with the simple pleasure of spending time together.

The first time that they came to stay with me, I spent days on end quaking with terror at the idea of behaving like a tourist instead of a fugitive. Then I thought it over carefully and, through an exceedingly complex process of reasoning, I managed to persuade myself that I would be in absolutely no danger when I was in the company of my family. During subsequent visits I found myself behaving as if we were all invisible. And probably we really were, because we did things that were completely unthinkable for a fugitive, like spending a whole afternoon at the Centre Pompidou during a holiday weekend, surrounded by Italian tourists, or sunning ourselves high atop Notre Dame cathedral, or even spending a few hours chatting idly as we looked out over the city from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

That, in fact, was where I told my parents about my decision to leave Europe. They both fell silent, and I watched as their faces changed expression. This was the moment that we had all been dreading: being separated for good. Until then, we hadn't talked about it, but we had all known that the day would come when I would need to put the greatest possible distance between my past and my future. And that meant breaking off relations with my family, gradually, but forever.

They were the hardest words I have ever spoken.

“Where will you go?” my father asked me.

“To Mexico,
papà
.”

“What will you live on?” he asked.

“I don't know. I'll think of something.”

There is a place on the Eiffel Tower that shows the direction and the distance to every country on earth. My mother put her arm around mine and led me to the display, and asked:

“Show me where Mexico is.”

I pointed in the general direction, and she bent over the plaque to read the distance. Then she turned to me and said:

“We'll never see you again.”

“Sure we'll see each other,
mamma
; maybe less often, but we'll never stop seeing one another,” I lied.

In the few days that remained to us, time went galloping past. The hours flew by too fast for us to say everything we were feeling. My efforts to leaven the sadness were awkward, and only sharpened the sense of bewilderment that was slowly taking hold of us all.

The train for Italy left the station at eight in the evening. I couldn't go to see them off. We had already been silent for a while, waiting for the moment when we would have to say goodbye. I burst into tears. My father stepped close to me, took my hands in his, and started crying too.

“Massimo, I don't know what more I can do to help you,” he said.

“You've always done your best,
papà
; this is just how it went.”

He kept on crying, gripping both my hands in his. My mother was sitting down, staring at the wall. I called to her. She turned to look at me, her face streaked with tears, and she came over to my father and me, wrapping her arms around us both. I walked them to the door. My mother went out first, stroking my hair the way she did when I was a little boy. My
papà
couldn't seem to let go of my hands, he continued to look at them and weep.

“My poor boy, I don't know what else I can do to help you.”

“Goodbye,
papà
.”

He kissed me on the forehead and caught up with my mother, who was already going down the stairs.

 

Twenty days later, in a port in Galicia, I boarded a ship bound for Veracruz.

We will glow like lanterns

bright fireflies in July night skies

and we'll live on silk and pearls

pale Ulysses on eclipsed seas

 

 

 

 

The decision to go to Mexico, as I mentioned before, was fairly haphazard: a book, Alessandra's baseless enthusiasm, and a vague notion of its history and traditions, derived entirely from movies I had seen. I had seen all of the classics: from Eisenstein's
¡Que viva Mexico!
to Peckinpah's
The Wild Bunch
, from Sergio Leone's
A Fistful of Dynamite
to Marlon Brando in
The Appaloosa
. I also knew that Mexico had offered refuge to Trotsky, Vittorio Vidali, and Tina Modotti. In short, compared with the dictatorships and the horrors of the other countries in Central America, it seemed like the least of the possible evils.

The love and the allegiance that I felt toward Cuba and Nicaragua had obliged me to rule them out in my planning from the very first, because I was afraid that I might damage their image if I were arrested there by the Italian police. In reality, for an accidental fugitive, without well-placed government supporters or the money to pay for them, the world is pretty much all the same. If I hadn't stumbled into the lawyer Melvin's trap, I would have been arrested pretty soon anyway, because I was circulating in the most pathetically wrong circles imaginable for a fugitive. I might, perhaps, have managed to stay at liberty for a little longer if I had holed up in some pleasant tourist resort and devoted myself to studying the Maya, Aztec, and Olmec civilizations. But even though I traveled extensively throughout Mexico, exploring the country, I could never manage to break away from Mexico City.

Which is not really Mexico (and I even wonder if it's actually part of the planet Earth); more like an episode from
The Twilight Zone
, where everything conceivable happens, amidst the most complete indifference. This lunatic megalopolis dealt such a violent blow to my awareness and my imagination that I fell completely under the spell of its everyday madness. I lived in a permanent state of bewilderment, tension, and fear.

In the end, with Calle de Soto, Mexico City tore me to shreds.

It's been nine years since I left Mexico, but only since my pardon, and the end of my troubles with the law, have I found myself able to think back to that period. Before, I never had the strength. Now I understand that the “peculiar” quality of my experiences in Mexico derived from the impact and intertwining of two distinct situations, each of them dominated by perverse mechanisms: my personal condition of accidental fugitive and the milieu of the Mexican left, which accepted me and offered me safe haven. When I arrived there, I was exhausted from years of trials, imprisonment, and life on the run, with a special predisposition for catastrophes. In spite of all that, I was pretty certain that my new friends were no better off than I was. The Mexican left had been decimated by reaction and repression, and perennially divided by the ferocious hatred between Trotskyites and Stalinists; by the eighties, it was floundering in a general state of crisis that rendered it flabby, shallow, and inconsistent.

In contrast with European society, where the decline and crisis of the left coincided with a period of social peace and tranquility, Mexico City was a battleground, riven by continuous duels, guerrilla skirmishes, and outright warfare in every walk of life. And this tattered, confused fragment of the left was obliged, by a militant sense of duty, to launch into the battles, in support of this or that struggle. Selflessness and generosity of spirit were never enough; every lunge forward ended in total defeat. There seemed to be a sort of ancillary curse that befell this left-wing milieu; the nature of the curse was that each defeat on the political plane was accompanied by a matching tragedy in the private lives of the militants.

 

I first came into contact with them at the university. I had enrolled in the history department, and I was especially interested in attending courses on the Mexican revolution. A sociology professor happened to notice me, and began inviting me to parties and dinners where the conversation was always about politics. This sector of the left seemed to spend a lot of time socializing, frequenting salons and chattering endlessly, divided by old resentments that always emerged at the end of the evening, at first with veiled and then increasingly open barbs, and in the end with all-out verbal brawls, insults riveting in like machine gun fire.

And I was often the cause of these furious disputes. I was new to the milieu, and inevitably someone would ask me if was a Trotskyite or a Stalinist. Because I wanted to remain friends with everybody in the group, I would always find myself walking on eggshells, spinning intricate ideological webs in order to give the most neutral possible response. I told them that I had no clearly formulated position because the Italian left had “culpably” failed to address the issue properly, and that I had been a member of an organization, Lotta Continua, that, still more “culpably,” had never even explored it.

At that point, as each faction eagerly explained their own positions, the discussion would grow increasingly ferocious, and I would take advantage of the confusion to edge out of the room. Not only did I care nothing at all about this issue; it struck me as hopelessly outdated and even a bit idiotic.

I couldn't tell anyone that, when I was thirteen, I spent all my spare time frequenting a Marxist-Leninist group of a very strict Stalinist persuasion. Every Saturday afternoon, right after the meeting of my Boy Scout troop, I would go to the office of this group in the Via San Giovanni da Verdara, still dressed in my junior explorer uniform (with short pants), and there I would attend the lessons for cadres. But the real attraction luring me to those tiresome weekly meetings was the attendance of a good number of partisans. After the class was over, they would let me sit on their knees and they would recount old stories of the Italian armed resistance and exile in Eastern Europe where they had fled to avoid being sent to prison after being found guilty and sentenced for episodes in the resistance movement.

In that setting, I had grown up with a highly romanticized opinion of Stalin, whom I imagined as a sort of jolly uncle who had done a great deal on behalf of the proletariat of the world. As I grew older and gained political experience, I came to understand that things were a trifle more complex, but my fondness for my partisan “grandpas” had always prevented me from taking a clear position, preferring to avoid the issue. I had always tried to skirt around the matter.

I instinctively disliked the Mexican Trotskyites, whom I found pedantic and irritating, and who seemed to have no other purpose in life than to settle accounts over the murder of their ideological leader.