The Fugitive (4 page)

He just forgot to tell me that his house was located on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital where he worked, which I only found out when we drove through the main gate. It was an insane asylum for the wealthy, just outside of Paris; a handsome mansion with extensive grounds, and old stables that had been turned into a hospital. It was a private hospital that favored alternative psychiatry. The psychiatrists lived in elegant little row houses that blended into the greenery. There were tennis courts and playgrounds for children. After showing me around his home and recommending that I read a number of party documents (which I later found to be in Greek), we agreed on a plausible cover in case of indiscreet questions. We created the character of Alberto, an Italian colleague, who had come to visit him for a few days. I had never pretended to be a psychiatrist before, but the real psychiatrist told me not to worry. It's a lot harder to pretend to be a heart surgeon, he told me. It was early on a Friday afternoon, and he took his leave, saying that he'd be back on Monday, since he had no appointments till then.

About an hour later, I went over to the guard station. I wanted to go back into town to get matters back on track, though my first errand would be to give Horacio a thorough dressing down. I tapped on the glass and waited patiently while the guard finished reading an article in his sports magazine. When he finally looked up, I told him that I wanted to go out for a while. I was a friend of the Greek psychiatrist, I added, by way of explanation. The guard smiled pleasantly at me, but made no motion to buzz the gate open. I tapped on the glass a little harder, and made the same request, providing a greater array of details this time. His smile was just as benevolent as the first time, but I could tell that he had no intention of letting me out. I lost my temper. And it wasn't so much because he wouldn't open the gate to let me out; it was that the idiot refused to acknowledge that I was “sane.” Pounding furiously on the glass, I found myself shouting things like “I'm a psychiatrist myself” and the classic phrase, “You have no idea who you're dealing with.” At that point, he lost his temper too, as only the French know how to lose their tempers. He unleashed a torrent of foul insults and rude gestures and threatened to call the male nurses.

That's when I began to smile pleasantly at him; I waved goodbye and left. Not quite running, but moving fast, I made it back to the house. I was terrified (I could already envision myself in a straitjacket, trying to explain to muscle-bound syringe-wielding nurses that I was Alberto, a colleague of the Greek psychiatrist) and furious (enough crap had already happened to me for one day); so I headed straight for the phone, only to remember, just as I was about to dial his girlfriend's phone number, that he hadn't left it. I started to search through the house for clues of any sort that might help me to discover her identity. Nothing.

On the other hand, I found something that gave me food for thought: a shopping bag full of condoms. Greek condoms. I'd never seen anything like it. There were hundreds of condoms, enough to stock a nuclear fallout shelter. In one drawer, I found an address book that gave me a moment's hope, but evidently the guy was friends with half the population of Paris. The address book was crammed with names and phone numbers.

Before giving in to despair and accepting the idea that I was going to spend the next three days as a prisoner in an insane asylum, I decided to try my luck with a few phone calls. I singled out a series of phone numbers that corresponded to women's names without surnames, imagining that they all might be friends. The first phone call was also the last one. Monique was very adamant that the psychiatrist wasn't at her house. She only saw him once a week, since she was his patient.

Twenty-four hours later, I ran out of cigarettes. It was a terrible weekend. About ten days later, I moved out of that damned hospital and into a new place in the Place de la République neighborhood.

I had found a place to live and a job in the same area. I was working as an usher in a movie house owned by a Portuguese guy. The movie house didn't attract many customers. The movies were definitely high quality stuff, but really boring. He would schedule things like a week of Angolan film, or Vietnamese movies in the original language, with Russian subtitles. In France, the only money that ushers make comes from tips, so from time to time, I attempted to persuade the owner to show something a little more commercial, but there was so little interest in third-world cinema in Europe that the Portuguese owner, rightly, preferred political commitment to profit.

Next to the movie house was a major punk club, the Gibus. Brawls were a nightly occurrence: inside, among the club-goers, and outside, between punks and North Africans. The neighborhood, once inhabited by middle-class families, had slowly declined through the strange urban alchemistic process typical of big cities, and even though it was in the heart of Paris, it had become cheap enough for the lowest classes of immigrants to live there. I could have afforded better, but I hadn't found anything. I was living in an apartment building that had known better days; now, however, it was a warren of studio apartments, one-room cells no bigger than two hundred square feet, swarming with rats and cockroaches, where entire families paid rents of a thousand francs a month to live in crowded squalor. I was the white tenant in the building. Gaining acceptance from my neighbors wasn't easy, nor was finding a character who would fit in with the location. A Bernard wouldn't live in a neighborhood like that one. I selected a “mask” that would work only there, and that forced me to stay in the neighborhood for months: José, a Spaniard, who wore
camperos
boots and blue jeans, a leather jacket and a dark-blue sailor's cap. He worked at the movie house, but he gave the impression that he was involved in something shady. That was to keep the neighborhood kids from robbing me every night.

I was coming home from work one night when I heard some young guys who lived in the building talking in the courtyard about teaching the punks a lesson. I was in favor of it myself; I couldn't stand the punks. I walked over and told them not to do it outside of the Gibus Club; those of us who worked at the movie house would necessarily be dragged into it, and we didn't want the police snooping around, asking questions, or even worse, a permanent police guard outside of the club. We got to talking, and a little while later I was lending them the benefit of my experience of fighting the local fascists back in the streets of Padua, laying out scenarios for potential campaigns of urban guerrilla warfare. The boys liked my ideas, and in the end we came up with a plan. In order to get the punks away from the Gibus, a small group of the fastest kids would provoke them, and then cut and run. They would draw the punks out to an isolated square, ideal for our purposes. The conditions that I had imposed—no weapons, and especially no punk “hamburgers”—were finally agreed to, however reluctantly.

The following evening, when I got home from work, I found the courtyard filled with kids, many of them accompanied by older brothers. We shook hands all around, and then moved out to our various positions. What I was doing violated all the rules of clandestine security, but I was going to have to live in that neighborhood for who knows how much longer and I wanted to be accepted. Everything went according to plan, and the enemy went down in painful defeat. As long as I lived in that neighborhood, there were no more attacks against North Africans.

When I became Jason, an English computer expert, I returned to a calmer and far more comfortable lifestyle. The cover verged on perfection; the one tiny defect was my complete ignorance of the English language and computers.

There was a real Jason, who had rented the house, through an agency, from England. One of his secretaries, who was also perfectly English, had gone to pick up the keys. No one had ever seen him (fortunately! He was short, painfully skinny, and a redhead. I could never have pretended to be him), so when I moved into the apartment, everyone immediately assumed I was him.

In order to get through my first meeting with the concierge—concierges tend to be nosy, gossipy, and duplicitous—I showed up in the company of my supposed secretary, who served as interpreter during our initial introduction. In order to limit my contacts with the concierge to hellos and goodbyes, we had decided that Jason, newly arrived from the far side of the English Channel, did not know a word of French. For the entire time that I lived in that apartment building, I said
bonjour
and
bon soir
in an accent that I had adopted from the French renditions of Laurel and Hardy. The concierge must have been about forty. When I noticed the wedding band on her finger, I wondered what her husband did for a living. He was a cop, naturally, as I deduced from his uniform. Luckily, he was a laid-back cop. Once he got home, he forgot about his work and minded his own business. The tenants were his wife's concern.

The time came to leave Paris and Europe. To get across the borders that awaited me, I went back to the guise of an Italian tourist. I didn't need a place of my own anymore, so I moved to Pigalle, where I stayed with a friend, a woman from Peru. Though the neighborhood was quite seamy, it was a perfect backdrop for the tourist disguise; there was a never-ending supply of tourists, at all hours of the day and night. There was one pitfall, however. I had to avoid bumping into tourists from Padua; before my stay in Pigalle, I had no idea of the uncontrolled passion that my fellow Paduans seemed to have for Pigalle and its sinful nightclubs, all sex and sequins. The Paduans arrived by the busload. I even ran into a high school science teacher of mine, a notorious ballbreaking prude—but now he was tipsy and giddy. Our paths crossed as I was stepping out of a smoke shop; the only reason he failed to recognize me is that he was too busy nudging his friends, excitedly calling their attention to a little cluster of whores.

The presence of Paduans around the world got me to thinking to the point of formulating the theory that wherever you go you'll find one. One who knows you well enough to recognize you. In the most godforsaken places on earth, places where a fugitive had every right to be able to relax, I was constantly falling into frenzies of panic because I had just spotted someone who could get me into trouble. Maybe not right then and there, but back home, watching the movies, my fellow Paduan might exclaim, “Hey, I know that guy!” And Paduans always seem to own the most up-to-date video equipment; after a while, I became an expert at jabbing a finger up my nose, because, as we all know, nobody wants the embarrassment of showing their friends movies of some guy picking his nose.

 

In Mexico I became Max, the tourist/student. It wasn't much as covers go, but there I couldn't find any other characters to play. First of all, because my physical presence and facial features were too distinct, and also because it seemed too risky to try to play a role I doubted I could impersonate very well.

Acting is a fundamental skill for a fugitive, as much as for any stage actor. When an actor is unable to inhabit his role, when he fails to bring a relaxed and natural presence to the stage, he triggers a sense of cringe-provoking embarrassment in his audience. This is true of a fugitive as well. He must inhabit his character in a relaxed and natural way; otherwise anyone who spends time with him will begin to suspect that something isn't right.

Max gave the impression that he was European, more northern than southern; because of his size and his light blue eyes, he was taken for German, Dutch, Norwegian, or French, but never for Italian. He wore casually elegant designer clothing, to distinguish him from the hippies who were generally disliked in Mexico, and in order to give the idea that he had the financial resources to deal with any unexpected development. I had to have clothing shipped to me from Europe, because I couldn't find clothes that fit me. There were no “big and large” stores at all. If Melvin hadn't betrayed me, if I had succeeded in becoming a Mexican citizen, I would have been obliged to go on a drastic diet in order to wear the costume that went with my new character. He was a university student and, at the same time, a tourist, because I was old enough to be a graduate; it was therefore fundamental to make Max look like somebody with plenty of money, someone who could afford to enjoy life in an exotic locale. In Europe, this persona wouldn't have lasted ten days, but in Central America, if you were careful, it could last for twenty years, because people are used to gringo eccentricities. The stereotype of the tourist, however, requires that the look you adopt should convey a certain prosperity, otherwise people tend to be far less tolerant.

I have frequently found myself in potentially dangerous situations, say, when the police were doing a routine ID check, and been waved through without a glance because the authorities chose to focus on those foreigners who looked like they had made the unforgivable gaffe of not bringing large amounts of prized European currency.

One time I was heading for Mexico City, traveling by bus through the Oaxaca region. Most of the passengers were locals, except for yours truly and twelve North Americans. The North Americans were barefoot, dressed in white monk's habits cinched tight at the waist with gold cords; they had long hair, and each wore a plastic crown of thorns. I was intrigued, so I asked them why they were dressed that way; they explained that they were the sect of the twelve apostles. They had left Belize and were traveling to the Mexican capital to announce some revelation or other.

The bus was pulled over at a checkpoint; an army lieutenant who boarded the bus to check the passengers' documents took one look at them and his face turned bright red. He marched with a brisk military step over to the nearest member of the sect and demanded:

“Passport!”

“We have none,” he replied seraphically. “We are the twelve apostles; we don't need them.”

“What's your name?” the officer shouted.