The Fugitive (8 page)

Choosing what movie to see wasn't much of an issue; I would just go to the nearest theater. I watched a freakish number of unbelievably bad movies; some of the really bad ones I would sit through more than once. I watched a Norwegian horror-crime flick three times. (The
elevator
did it.)

When I stayed home, I would make myself comfortable in front of the television set, a bottle of hard liquor and a pack of cigarettes within easy reach. And to top things off, in the complicated equilibrium of my bulimia, smoking soon took on a crucial role: it filled in the intervals between one feeding and the next.

A fugitive, a bulimic, and a nicotine addict.

The most painful period in terms of the quality of the cuisine was certainly the time I spent as José. Confined to that horrible neighborhood by security concerns, my bulimia was obliged to settle for a sharp step down from the customary refined flavors and ingredients. It had to make do with couscous, merguez, and cheap Algerian wine.

 

Nowadays bulimia is fashionable. The mass media feature it frequently, and theories swarm like flies. I'm not trying to boast, here, but ten years ago I had already reached the conclusion that the overweight sector of the population is oppressed and under attack. The skinnier segment of the population cannot tolerate the diversity of their heftier fellow-humans, and live for nothing so much as to force the chunky among us to slim down.

Thin people are crafty and relentless. First of all, not only do thin people have all the diets known to man at their fingertips, but they have always developed a diet of their own, which they try to foist off on every fatty they meet. And if a thin person encounters an unreceptive fat person, he is capable of anything. The thin know how to shift at lightning speed from the soft-sell to outright threats.

In desperate cases, thin-man dietologists turn into shrinks. With the same professional tone they use to recommend breakfasts of coffee with Nutrasweet, Bulgarian yogurt, and whole-wheat zwieback toast (never more than two pieces), they start accusing the unfortunate fatty of having “problems.” Unresolved relationships with his elementary school teacher or with the milkman, anxieties, insecurities, complexes—anything can be used as a weapon, a tool in the campaign to demonize the extra layer of adipose tissue of the unfortunate target of their diatribe. (All this in the distant hope that the fatty will remember their words just as he's biting into a fragrant cream-filled puff pastry, and that he'll choke on it as he is furrowing his brow in the effort to unearth, once and for all, every last issue left unresolved in connection with the milkman).

Now, if even this last-ditch effort fails, matters become still more dire. It will be necessary to dig deeper, until we identify the roots of that unholy appetite. Inevitably, the skinny guy will manage to discover, buried deep in all the fat, a death wish. This marks the beginning of the “you're trying to hurt yourself” and “this is attempted suicide, you know that don't you?” phase. Every bite of puff pastry is just another step closer to death. When confronted with a really stubborn case, the skinny guy, self-anointed dietician and psychiatrist, will quickly reveal his third specialty—cardiologist and internist. He will produce a list, worthy of a medical encyclopedia, of the forms of damage caused by triglicerides and cholesterol, and he will then proceed to a solemn description of the symptoms and course of various cardiovascular diseases. Culminating, of course, in death.

The fat man who hears all this is frightened, of course. He thinks he can feel the first pains in his chest, he envisions himself in a wheelchair, stricken with a devastating paralysis and . . . he gets hungry! He can't wait to get rid of this peevish party-pooper so that he can relax and chow down on a nice puff pastry. And if the fatty is also a smoker, the skinny guy will skip all the preliminaries and talk only about death, as if there were only minutes to go.

In any case, my weight problem immediately became a subject of discussion and concern, and after a while everybody was bothering me about it. All the same, I could consider myself fortunate: I didn't have any unresolved issues with the milkman. There was no question about the cause of my bulimia.

I have had to defend myself against skinny folk for many long years now. With any means necessary. I have gone so far as to lie, to eat and smoke in secret. Sometimes, at night, when everyone else is asleep. I have had to stop frequenting people who had managed to extort the promise that I would go on a diet, “starting next Monday . . .”

Unfortunately, my bulimia also tended to produce symptoms of gout, making me a fugitive who was both overweight and lame. Whenever that happened, I became a man on the run from my well-meaning friends as well. Gout is a disease that runs a slow and painful course; all I needed was somebody lecturing me about it.

In Mexico City, I met another bulimic. He was a Guatemalan singer-songwriter. The military death squads had tortured and murdered his whole family. He no longer sang, but he carried his guitar with him everywhere he went. Some Mexican artists I knew had played me tapes of a few of his old concerts; I have to say, he was really good.

I would run into him often at friends' houses, sitting in a chair, his guitar resting on his knees, his hands slowly but systematically lifting food to his mouth. I would always sit next to him; together we looked like a pair of characters out of a Botero painting. People assumed that we were close friends, as they saw us talking in quiet undertones for hours at a time.

With roughly the same passion as a pair of junkies remembering a trip taken years ago to the Golden Triangle, we would talk about food. We would recount to one another family lunches and dinners, the smells, the flavors, and the atmosphere from times when we had been happy.

He died in 1990 in a forest in northern Guatemala, near the Mexican border. He died fighting. He had set aside his guitar and joined the ranks of the guerrillas who were defending the Indios from genocide.

In Paris, the exile community had long ago grasped the scale of the psychic and physical devastation caused by exile, torture, and imprisonment. The struggle to keep from crossing over the razor thin barrier dividing psychological discomfort from full-blown pathology was a very common problem in their circles.

The South American community in Paris, in particular, was ravaged by suicides and alcoholism. The intellectual class was able to fit into this alien society and, albeit with great difficulty, to overcome their traumas. But the Indios, with ancestral ties to their land, whether they were
mineros
or
campesinos
, experienced their state of exile as if they had been herded onto a reservation.

The debate caught the interest of a great many people; an extensive and articulated medical and human support network was created for those who fell ill, and I turned to that network more than once. Each community had cases of its own, but everyone knew about them through a sort of transverse jungle telegraph that served as a sort of medical update. One of the best known cases was that of my friend Lolo.

Lolo was Chilean. His real name was Jorge. Jorge Saball Astaburuaga. The son of Catalonian anarchists who fled Spain after Franco's victory, he had grown up in the Chilean left wing, working as an activist in the ranks of the United Popular Action Movement (Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario—MAPU). He was clear-eyed and ironic, free of ideological hobgoblins, probably because of the rich mix of libertarian blood flowing in his veins.

The day of the anti-Allende coup, September 11, 1973, his father pulled an old German pistol out of a trunk—a relic of the Spanish Civil War—and handed it to him, urging him to escape. He was eighteen years old. There were road blocks everywhere in Santiago. Lolo and a friend of his, a policeman who had remained loyal to Allende, decided to take their fate into their own hands when they found themselves looking down yet another road with a checkpoint. They were separated in the firefight. Lolo made it to Paris still certain that his friend had died in the exchange of fire. He was wrong: his comrade had managed to survive and had gone into exile in Rome. For years, they mourned one another reciprocally, until they met again during a conference of Chilean exiles in Frankfurt.

In the meantime, Lolo had already contracted cancer. The horrors of the Pinochet regime lived on in his body in the form of a tumor that was gradually eating him alive. Chilean exiles all over Europe knew about Lolo and his cancer. He had become a symbol of their suffering. And of their resistance. It seemed as if he had no purpose in life other than politics, enjoying the beauty of music, his relationship with his partner in life, Vicky, and his friendships. I was one of those friends. He protected me and coddled me, between operations and cycles of chemotherapy. He taught me the secret of self-deprecating humor as a way of warding off the brutality of life, and he taught me to love music. He always used to tell me that I was a young barbarian. And he was certainly right about that. In fact, my musical appreciation was limited to songs I'd learned in the Boy Scouts or in the protest movement. I would go to see him, and he would have me listen to one record after another, leading me by the hand through the world of great music.

He was the last person I saw before leaving Paris. He arrived late and out of breath, just in time to give me the last cassette he had made for me. I never saw him again. After I returned to Italy, Lolo was one of the founders and one of the most active members of the “Comité International Justice pour Massimo Carlotto.”

In that period, the first cracks in the wall of the Pinochet dictatorship were allowing many exiles to return to Chile. Lolo was one of those who could have gone home immediately. But he stayed in Paris for a long time to work for the Comité. When he left, it was already too late. He only had time to make it back to Chile and realize that the cancer had unleashed its final, victorious offensive.

Checho, a close friend to both of us, kept me posted on his lingering agony; one day he told me that he would soon slip into a coma and that this was my last chance to to bid him farewell. I called him on the phone, but when I heard his voice, distant and a little remote, I could think of nothing to say but banalities. Afterwards, I wept with shame at having failed to express to him what I truly felt.

He died in slow motion. Vicky, Checho, and other comrades stayed with him until the end, for every minute of his death throes. They held his hand; he would squeeze their fingers from time to time to show that he was still there. They washed him and made sure his headphones were in place and the tape recorder was still working. Lolo wanted die in the company of his beloved music.

He died listening to the Italian singer-songwriter, Francesco De Gregori. The news of his death was reported around the world. It was December 2, 1991. Everyone who could went back to Santiago to bid him farewell.

Checho eulogized Lolo at a gathering of hundreds, and scattered his ashes in the square while street musicians, shivering with grief, performed
Viatge a Itaca
by the Catalonian songwriter Lluís Llach: “ . . . Buen viaje a los guerreros si a son pueblo son fieles, el velamen de su bajel favorezca el dios de los vientos.” A short while later, I received a transcript of Checho's eulogy, with a letter from Lolo's parents.

“Dear Lolo, I have the unhappy task of bidding you a last farewell. We know that if by some miracle you were able to see us and hear us, you would just scoff at us, because ceremonies, speeches, and commemorations were so distant from your way of thinking and the essence of who you were. But that doesn't matter. These words are for you, but they are for us too . . . ”

I, too, believe that that day Lolo must have been bored, and he probably told everyone to go fuck themselves, in a spectral voice. Whenever we talked about it, he would say that death is no reason to be in a bad mood.

When he was in exile, he had abandoned the MAPU and embraced once and for all anarchy. He detested every aspect of Communist “ceremonial,” but the Communists loved Lolo and, in respect for diversity, they commemorated him as well.

As a child of the Seventies, I grew up thinking that death could be as light as a feather or as heavy as a mountain. Lolo's death sailed over the rooftop of the world.

He stayed in France for me, despite his love for his homeland. He burnt up his last living energy crying out to the world that I was innocent. And now I can only wonder if my cause was worth it. I know what he would have said, but it's not enough to chase away the sadness.

*

Exile, the torment of homesickness, the desperate longing to return to one's homeland, death.

Lolo returned home and died surrounded by the love of friends and family. Other exiles were less fortunate, and still others went home knowing that death awaited them. Other sharp-peaked mountains, marking a savage border between our hearts and our memories. First Tomás. Then Xavier, shot down in the front door of his house. He had failed to understood that it was not yet time to go back to Honduras. Belinda, my Peruvian friend from Pigalle, who died while fighting in the ranks of Tupac Amaru. And Carmen the nurse, killed by a mortar shell in El Salvador, together with the two children that she was hurrying to safety. Rumpled letters, carried in too many pockets, or voices distorted by the weird echoes of intercontinental phone calls: a date, the cause of death. But it is the why that tends to elude me. The why behind those decisions, decisions that ripened in exile. Decisions that were so terrible, so courageous, and perhaps so terribly mistaken. I suspect that often those decisions were dictated by the destiny of mere survival, the fact that they had reached safety over roads paved with blood, torture, jail, errors, and betrayals. To go back, perhaps, was the only way of settling accounts with the past. I can't say anything more. I prefer to remember them the way they were in Paris, when they called me “el gordo” and taught me how to face life with dignity.