Escape (12 page)
The publicist smiles.
‘Any other questions? My current job? Night watchman. No, I don’t read when I’m on duty. I didn’t read in prison, I listened and now, at night, I don’t read, I write. In prison, I heard stories, complaints, flights of fancy, fragments of broken stories. The transition to writing wasn’t easy. We can talk about that, if you like, about the process of writing rather than my life story.’
At this point, the interview abruptly ends. As the publicist had warned him, writing is a subject that very few literary critics want to explore, over and above a few well-worn clichés and a handful of adjectives.
Adèle discreetly mimes her silent applause. He is happy and thanks her with a smile. He is grateful to this woman who never uses her female charms. She does her job. He is aware how much he owes her, although he does not feel in any way obligated to her.
First radio interview, flawless. The interviewer finds his Italian accent charming.
His first TV appearance is arranged. He turns out to be very telegenic. Make-up and lighting: without losing that pop idol look, his face is sharper, more forceful.
The publicist has organised a book signing in a major bookshop on Boulevard Saint-Germain. When she talks to him about it (‘meet your readers’), he panics. He doesn’t know anything about readers. Neither his family, nor his Rome gang, his fellow prisoners, his colleague at the Tour Albassur, nor he himself were readers. He had wanted to write for Lisa and Cristina, women he knew, and he’d had a very specific purpose. But readers?
‘Will there be a lot of people?’
‘I hope so. I’ll do my utmost to ensure there are.’
He pictures himself surrounded by strangers calling him
a liar and an imposter, and proposes they avoid such a confrontation. But Adèle is adamant. It is a must and there is no getting away from it.
Given her efficiency, the date and the venue of the signing are announced in all the major newspapers and on some radio stations. The book has garnered a great deal of critical attention and aroused people’s curiosity, so there is a big turnout.
The bookshop’s layout makes it difficult and slow to move around. On the ground floor, the publisher has laid on a buffet around which the regulars cluster, blocking access to the staircase and the mezzanine where the signing table is set up. Some people are coming up, others going down, it is all a bit chaotic. Small groups stand around, halfway up, deep in conversation, before jostling their way to the buffet. There is a sense of success in such a crush of fans.
Sitting at a table in one corner of the mezzanine, Filippo begins signing with a trembling hand, not daring to look up from the flyleaves on which he scrawls his name. Adèle, sitting behind him, is chatting with a friend. Before him, he is aware of a wall of bodies all merged together; without looking up he takes the proffered books and asks the person’s name, signs, hands the book back and takes the next. This task absorbs him and gradually he relaxes. He is not conscious of any hostility in the atmosphere. He straightens up. He sees a moving mass, mainly women, and just in front of him, leaning slightly towards the table, clutching their books, two girls stand smiling at him. They are blonde and fresh, and he finds them beautiful. He feels flattered. One of them says: ‘Thank you for your book.’
He grows flustered. His shyness delights the reader, who adds: ‘You’re just like your characters.’
The other girl continues: ‘You write about the world of male violence with sympathetic characters who appeal to women like us.’
‘Yes, we want to hug them.’
‘You too, by the way.’
Giggles.
Filippo is at a loss, out of his depth. What are they talking about? His book? Impossible… He checks the title of the book in his hand.
Escape
. Oh yes they are, no question. On autopilot, he writes on the flyleaf, ‘Thank you for being so beautiful’, and signs. He watches them walk off, elbowing their way through the crowd, their books under their arms.
Adèle comes over to him, then whispers in his ear:
‘Chatting up the girls, are we?’ Filippo stutters. ‘Don’t panic, you’re not the first.’
While he tries to think of an answer, the throng swells even more. It is becoming a hand-to-hand battle with a seething mass of bodies. He is inundated, thrilled, exhausted. An hour later, the crowd ebbs away, leaving him feeling faintly nauseous.
When the bookshop closes, Adèle kisses him – a new experience – and sends him home in a taxi. A hot bath, then he lies down, closes his eyes and pictures the crowd, hears it again, with its disjointed words and snatches of conversation. His first physical contact with his readers. Disorienting. A whole mass of readers. Readers who look at him, but he cannot recognise himself in their eyes. He feels as if he is living a thousand fragmented, atomised existences, outside his control. But it is his book, his signature. No doubt about that. Beleaguered by the flood of sensations, he gives up trying to order them.
I’ll think about it all later
. And falls asleep.
By the end of May, Filippo Zuliani has become media savvy and is able to play the role of writer to perfection when faced with the press, readers, or booksellers. He has mastered every nuance, every inflection and become the darling of the Paris literary scene. A representative of the ‘dangerous’ classes, a ‘raw artist’ who’s been tamed, a handsome young man with brown eyes. But deep down, without ever talking to anyone
about it, he knows it is a made-up part, a usurper’s role maybe, and doubt lurks inside him like a shadow. He is constantly anxious that his mind will go blank, or that he’ll perform badly and disappoint. It is hugely stressful, but he carries it off. And that almost imperceptible little hint of underlying anxiety only adds to his charm.
Escape
makes it into the week’s top-ten bestseller list. It reaches tenth place in the first week, up to seventh the following week. The publisher is optimistic about the future – things have taken off fast, and should get even better. Filippo isn’t informed of the sales figures, Adèle doesn’t think it necessary, it might make their relations difficult if he gets big-headed. Better to wait till the trend is confirmed, and besides, he doesn’t seem bothered for the time being, he never asks how well the book is selling.
Each afternoon, after the round of press interviews, Filippo goes back to his studio flat in Neuilly. He changes his clothes, eats a sandwich, drinks a coffee, and fantasises about Cristina. Impossible to stop thinking about her. She fills his mind the minute he stops performing in front of his audience. He is tormented by his inability to penetrate her world and by his aching wish to erase his frantic flight from the Café Pouchkine. He dreams of finding someone to hold his hand and tell him what to do down to the last detail, as Adèle does in his life as a writer, so that he can rewind their disastrous encounter and give it a different outcome. But there are no candidates for the job. Invent a future with Cristina? His imagination fails him. He cannot even replay the scene that has begun to take shape, the two of them sitting at the same desk, working together on the same text, a paradise lost. He feels nothing but empty longing. Every day, he veers between desire and the fear of running into her in the downstairs lobby or the apartment entrance, but he never does. Maybe she is avoiding him. Holding his breath, he listens out for movements, for sounds
from her apartment, but there are few signs of life on the other side of the wall.
While waiting for something to happen that will kickstart his life back into motion, he occasionally (when he has the time and before going on to La Défense) makes a detour via the nearby Bois de Boulogne where love can be bought. Without shame and almost without desire, a basic hygienic procedure. An impoverished sex life without illusions, not so different from his practice in Rome, when his little gang ran a dozen or so completely lost girls, supplying them with dope, passing them around among themselves, and using them sometimes as bait to attract lonely tourists.
Then, at 10 p.m., he begins his second life. Security guard at the Tour Albassur. The corridors and offices are empty of their ghosts now that the book is finished, and he and Antoine have got into the habit of playing endless games of draughts. Here he unwinds, breathes freely, de-stresses, purges his anxiety, his mind empty and calm. A sort of intermission, an in-between time of blessed relaxation. One day, perhaps, he might feel like writing again. He has no idea whether or not he will, and there is no rush. For the time being, he tries not to think about it.
CHAPTER SIX
10 June
La Repubblica
publishes an opinion piece by Romano Sebastiani, one of the foremost public prosecutors of the Milan counter-terrorist section.
Two months ago to the day, our very dear friend Roberto Ruffili died. A renowned international constitutionalist, he was assassinated by the Red Brigades PCC, the notorious splinter group that emerged from the break-up of the murderous Red Brigades. It is clear that Italy is not finished with ‘red’ terrorism, and the tragic legacy of the Years of Lead. At this same moment the French literary establishment chooses to crown a young Italian writer, Filippo Zuliani and his novel
Escape
, with critical and commercial success. We might be delighted at the Paris intelligentsia’s sudden interest in Italian culture, if this book did not pose a serious moral and political problem. Let’s take a closer look.
With considerable skill, the novel recounts a tragic event: two men break out of jail together, a former Red Brigades leader and a young Roman hoodlum. The two men linked by a close ‘masculine friendship’, decide to make their living by robbing banks. Devilishly romantic … but you don’t become a bank robber overnight, and their first hold-up of a big Milan bank ends in disaster. The Red Brigades veteran is shot dead, and one of his accomplices assassinates a
carabiniere
and a security guard while making his getaway. A
dubious tale, verging on a glorification of the criminals, but that is not the issue here. The novel’s plot depicts precisely, down to the last detail, Carlo Fedeli’s escape from his Rome prison in February 1987, and how the Red Brigades’ former head of logistics turned gangster. It also describes the heist, based on that of the Piemonte-Sardegna bank in Milan three weeks later, during which Fedeli was shot dead, as reconstructed in the police investigation. Only the names of the characters, the date and place of the robbery have been changed. The moral problem, as I was saying, is that this is a shameless commercial exploitation of a very recent, and still unsolved criminal case, since the accomplices remain unidentified. It demonstrates no consideration for the victims’ families, but there is worse to come.
The novel’s author, Filippo Zuliani, is clearly the young hoodlum who broke out of jail with Carlo Fedeli. Could he also be the accomplice in the robbery, as the novel implies? If he has information on these events, and from reading his novel it would seem that he does, then Filippo Zuliani should return and disclose it before an Italian court, and not in a novel, in which he plays on every possible form of ambiguity.
The matter also presents a political problem, and a sizeable one. Just when things are so precarious here in Italy, President Mitterrand feels that France should offer asylum to certain Italian political refugees. That is his choice, not ours. But how can he justify the fact that this asylum extends to a petty crook, a criminal on the run, who, we are told, has apparently been granted refugee status as well? But perhaps our information is wrong, for we have received no official notification on this matter.
In any case, Filippo Zuliani’s place, novelist or otherwise, is not in the salons of Paris. Instead it is plainly here in Italy, where he must come and face the courts over his escape, and in addition hand over any information he has on the robbery of the Piemonte-Sardegna bank and on the relations that
have been forged between the ultra-leftist groups and the gangsterism now rife in Italy.
The boss of the publishing house has read
La Repubblica
, which the publicist passed on to him, and is worried. He asks the in-house lawyer and the publicist to come and confer with him in his office.
‘Are we not allowing ourselves to get drawn into a very nasty business?’ he demands to know.
The lawyer seeks to temper the discussion.
‘It is true that in Italy Romano Sebastiani is an influential public prosecutor, with close ties to the Italian Communist Party, or what’s left of it, and we certainly shouldn’t take his words lightly. At the same time, like all communist sympathisers, he’s innately hostile to the Red Brigades, one of whose former leaders apparently appears and is treated sympathetically in the novel,
Escape
. This perhaps explains his annoyance. But what is clear from this opinion piece is that the Italian courts have no evidence against our author. Filippo Zuliani’s jailbreak is the one established fact, but it’s not a big deal when set against the bank robbery and the assassinations. And when it comes to the shootings, Sebastiani clearly has nothing to go on. A novel is not proof that can be used as evidence in court. As long as it is nothing but a moralising diatribe, no one’s in any real danger.’
The boss remains cautious.
‘I’d like to think this is the case, but as I see it, someone in Italy is firing a warning shot. Public prosecutors don’t, on the whole, amuse themselves by writing gratuitous opinion pieces, and they don’t tend to open hostilities unless armed. I fear what is in store.’
Adèle is much more upbeat: ‘The book’s doing well, very well. Sales are still growing and I’ve been assured that it will be shortlisted for the Goncourt and Renaudot prizes this autumn. The literary establishment’s recognition of a book
that is controversial is a real
tour de force
. It gives us the opportunity to launch an autumn sales drive and get it back into all the bookshops. This was undreamt-of – it’s a title we published too close to summer, a bit haphazardly, and we’ve already sold 70,000 copies. If we win a prize, we’ll top 200,000. Now is not the time to stop pushing. If our lawyer gives us the green light, I can circulate Sebastiani’s piece, very discreetly, of course, invoking the defence of freedom of artistic expression, that sort of thing…’
