The Fugitive (5 page)

In a tone of growing ecstasy: “Matthew, I am the Apostle Matthew.”

The officer grabbed him by his long hair and barked out an order. Soldiers dogtrotted onto the bus and hustled the twelve North Americans down the aisle and onto the side of the road. The lieutenant came toward me, shaking his head in disbelief. “Do you know them?”

“Never seen them before!” I replied.

“Did you hear what they told me?”

“I did.”

“What am I supposed to put in my report? That I arrested the twelve Apostles because they were traveling without passports?”

I limp and lurch

down streets unknown

my pretender's identity

will cost me another dawn

 

 

 

 

The life of an accidental fugitive is exhausting.
The most nerve-racking aspect is security; you're constantly second-guessing yourself, wondering if what you're doing complies with the set of rules you established for yourself to avoid capture. As time passes, you come to understand that the more paranoid you become, the safer it makes you. Every detail of daily life becomes the focus of a hallucinatory succession of suspicions and concerns.

Acting out a reassuring-social-stereotype is already a drain, sapping your mental health. But there is more, and it's even worse.

The first rule for playing a part on the urban stage is always to convey the impression that you are on your way to some place specific. A fugitive can't afford to look as if he has time on his hands. He must walk quickly, eyes on the sidewalk ahead of him, as if in a hurry. He must travel only by public transportation. A car is far too dangerous. If he encounters a roadblock, or has even a minor fender-bender, his cover is blown. He must always remember to get rid of his bus ticket; if arrested, that ticket could give the police crucial information that might lead to his place of residence and his workplace. When traveling by train, bus, or subway, he must always study his fellow passengers to determine whether one of them is a plainclothes cop.

I was constantly noticing individuals who not only had the face of an undercover cop, but who stared at me incessantly. Probably it was because I had attracted their attention with all my discreet sidelong glances. Alarm bells ringing in my mind, I would get off at the next stop, and wait for another train or bus. Getting places took forever. If, by some coincidence, the supposed plainclothes cop got off at the same stop, I would panic, thinking to myself: “Oh, Jesus, now he's following me,” and I would begin to implement extremely intricate techniques to shake off anyone who might be trying to shadow me, such as running up a down escalator, or hopping onto another train heading who-knows-where, and then hopping back off just as the doors were closing. Having seen
The French Connection
four times helped me refine this particular routine.

I would carefully explore the topography and terrain of each city I lived in, making a list of all the cafés, bars, and shops with a rear exit; I designed ideal emergency routes. If I wanted to go and buy a newspaper, before committing to the newsstand, I would walk into a café and back out again, and do the same with a pharmacy and a department store.

In big cities, you need to be careful even when walking from one place to another; the police tend to keep a close eye on central and even outlying areas, wherever large numbers of people tend to come and go. Small teams of undercover agents monitor station entrances and exits, major department stores, and chokepoints in pedestrian traffic, combing the crowds for fugitives. Not only do they check the IDs of individuals who look suspicious or act in a questionable manner, but they also make a few random stops of completely respectable-looking people. This type of unpredictable questioning was especially common in Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona, and the police were well trained and skilled at their jobs. No matter how careful I might be, I was frequently caught up in these dragnets, fortunately without any negative consequences. At the time, I didn't know that no one was actually looking for me. I placed my trust in a litany of self-protection that, with the passage of time, I came to consider increasingly effective.

“I'm a good person, I'm a good person, I'm such a good person,” I would recite in my head as I walked past policemen, in an attempt to emanate positive energies. For a while, I tried to recommend the use of this mantra to others, but their response was a healthy skepticism that verged occasionally on scorn.

There were times, however, when the only safe thing to do was stay inside. A terrorist attack or an official visit by a head of state would put the representatives of the law into a state of tension and high alert that rendered impotent even my magic spells.

At times like these, I would make a strategic decision and move to some quiet out-of-the-way spot, say a small village on the Basque coast, where the Guardia Civil had abandoned even their local barracks, now a playground for the more reckless local youngsters. There I spent the most idyllic periods of my entire time as a fugitive; I would take long, relaxed strolls along the beach or in the forests. Even at times like these, however, I had regrets. I wished I was Basque, or Breton, or Corsican, or Irish. I wished I could lay claim to a larger identity—a people, a language, a tradition.

The locals were generally pretty nice, and as time passed they invited me to take part in big
fiestas
, which tended to involve serious drinking. At first, however, while treating me with unfailing courtesy, they kept me at arm's length. At the first fiesta I attended, I came with a camera; I found myself immediately surrounded by a cluster of men of all ages. They very politely relieved me of my camera, exposed the film that was in it, and only then handed it back to me. Then they asked me:

“¿Italiano?”

“Sí.”

“¿Fascista?”

“¡¡No!!”

“¿Sabes que es la Ikurriña?”

“Cierto, es la bandera del pueblo de Euskadi.”

“¿Te gusta?”

“¡Claro que sí, hombre!”

A glass miraculously appeared in my hand, and I stayed up late with them that first night (of many). One of our chief topics of conversation was
Ogro
, the movie that Gillo Pontecorvo made about the terrorist attack and assassination of the minister in the Franco regime, Carrero Blanco. The Basques didn't like the movie; they were offended at the conceit of a foreign director who claimed to have understood everything that happened. I had had some doubts about the movie myself, but I wasn't going to let them criticize my beloved Pontecorvo, if only because he had made
The Battle of Algiers
. We would argue for hours, sitting on benches in the square overlooking the harbor. Whenever our conversation died down, I started singing at the top of my lungs “Vuela, Carrero Blanco vuela . . . ” and then we would start drinking again.

They constantly asked me to tell them about the demonstrations held by the Italian protest movement against the execution of the anarchist Salvador Puig Antich, who was garroted in the final years of Franco's dictatorship. It had become a ritual. I would stand up, I would take a cane from one of the old men, and I would begin marking out a map on the ground, explaining as I went: “We were here, the police were there, and the Spanish embassy was in the middle, right here . . . ”

For years, I dreamed of moving back to this little town for good, once my troubles with the law had been resolved. I even liked the little cemetery, on a hillside midway between the sea and the mountains.

Last summer, I finally did go back, but everything had changed. The walls were covered with copies of a huge poster with an incredible number of little photographs: the faces of prisoners, new and old. The program of fiestas was devoted, by now, only to raising funds and gathering support for the campaign in favor of amnesty, and the people seemed listless, worn out by the daily effort to preserve the memory of their dream.

The romantic tranquility of the little graveyard that I had so loved was tainted by the recent death of a young man who had fallen out the window of a police station in Bilbao. The usual open window, the usual police detective who had been looking the other way.

I only stayed long enough to understand that I would never be coming back. I decided on cremation instead of burial.

 

The most dangerous place for a fugitive is the house where he's living. A slip up, a piece of poor judgment, or pure chance can bring it to the attention of the police. There are three possible scenarios for the ensuing arrest: in your apartment (the most dangerous time is in the early morning), at the main door as you leave, or along your route back home.

Choosing the right place to live isn't enough. You also need to know in considerable detail everything that goes on around it. This meant that once I had the keys to my new home, I spent the first week indoors, never going out, watching and making notes on everyone and everything, through the slits in my lowered blinds. Armed with a pair of binoculars, I spied on my neighbors, both in my own apartment building and in nearby buildings, as well as on the shops, the delivery men, the routine police patrols, the firemen, the private security guards and the street sweepers; recording schedules, habits, license plates, and vehicle models.

On one wall of my room, I tacked up big sheets of paper, which corresponded to sectors of the street. I wrote on them everything I saw. I would establish a “typical scenario” of what happened in the street, and then I classified it in terms of a standard number of time slots that covered a full twenty-four-hour day. This template allowed me to identify immediately any “false notes.” Alarm bells would go off every time I saw someone lingering outside an apartment building doorway, a car or a delivery truck that I had never seen before, a group of repairmen hard at work, and I had to go through a complicated procedure to check them out.

If the questionable element was a delivery truck (one of the most common vehicles used in capturing fugitives, because it is an ideal platform for the conveyance of a full-fledged and self-contained surveillance structure), and it failed to leave the neighborhood in a reasonable period of time, then I'd adopt the ploy of phoning the police:

“Yes, ahem, good evening. This is Mister . . . , and I live in . . . Street. This evening, I took my dog out for a walk, just like I normally do, and I noticed that a man who had just parked a delivery truck outside of number . . . on my street got out and ran over to a waiting car. The car took off in a hurry. Um, hum, that's right. It left so fast that it screeched its tires. I think they were both Arabs.”

Then I would hung up the phone, step out of the phone booth, and wait. If a patrol car arrived three minutes later, I would go back upstairs to my apartment, and make dinner. Otherwise, I would go spend the night at a friend's house.

The truly singular effect of spying on your neighbors is that it takes you into their lives; aside from their schedules and their habits, you learn lots of other things about them. People do the oddest things within the shelter of their own homes. There were times when I was drawn into genuine family dramas: married couples quarreling, parents fighting with their children, or even lovers' spats. And so it was often much more entertaining to track the saga of the family on the fifth floor than to watch television.

The thing that impressed me most was the time and energy that men and women devote to cheating on one another. I used to think that in our modern society consummating a betrayal in one's own home was something that belonged to the past. It is a perfectly normal thing, after all, to go to a hotel. But that's not the way things work. I have observed an incredible array of strategies for cheating, carried out with a cunning and cold determination that can only make us pray, devoutly, that none of these people ever takes up a life of crime.

In Mexico City, the only ironbound security rules were: avoid being noticed, to the extent that it is possible, and frequent only those neighborhoods that are compatible with your appearance and the social class that you are trying to depict. The only free zone was the university campus; there the police were forbidden entry, and campus security was the responsibility of the university's own security staff. I enrolled in school, taking classes in the history department, and I spent most of my time in that happy enclave.

Going unnoticed meant, in particular, avoiding robbery by the police. The police frequently used a routine identity check as an opportunity to demand your wallet and your watch. Not a day passed without some foreign student coming onto campus with a story about how they had been obliged to make an involuntary contribution to fatten up the meager salaries of the police force. It never happened to me because I had immediately learned to pay first. Whenever I was stopped by a cop, I would discreetly hand over one hundred pesos (the price of a Coca-Cola), and be on my way without a problem.

The most common victims were the Japanese students. That was not only because they had high-quality watches and because the exchange rate for the yen was so high, but also because of a deep-rooted and virulent hatred against the slant-eyed race in general. Around the turn of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese were led to flee the subhuman living conditions in their homeland with the lure of a guaranteed job in a Mexico that was about to erupt in full-fledged revolution. Some four thousand Chinese were murdered in the course of just a few years, largely because of resentment that they were taking jobs from
campesinos
who were only marginally less poor than they.

*

I lived in a little row house in the Colonia Roma neighborhood, founded by Italian emigrants and now occupied in part by the city's Jewish community. It was a safe neighborhood, patrolled 24-7 by vigilante-style security guards with itchy trigger fingers. In fact, aside from Colonia Roma and the university campus, there weren't many other neighborhoods that I could safely go, especially not the Zona Rosa (the downtown tourist area) and San Angel (the quarter frequented by intellectuals and artists).