Escape (2 page)

A little later Filippo hears the sound of an engine coming from behind the ruined barn. He sits rigid for what feels like ages. Then he sees a car driving alongside the lake, down below. It looks tiny, out of place in this wilderness. Carlo is inside, for sure. The car disappears behind the rocky ridge. Agony. The sun is setting behind Filippo and the rock face opposite turns pink, then grey. It is dark. Filippo is exhausted. He feels bereft, lost, helpless. Orphaned. Unable to pursue a coherent train of thought, he simply lets time flow past. When he starts to shiver with cold, he gets up, returns to the dilapidated barn
and finds the car that brought them there, hidden under a half-collapsed roof. He lifts the bonnet – the spark plugs have been removed and wires ripped out. He slides under the rear seat, wraps himself in a blanket lying on the floor and falls asleep, his head resting on the canvas bag.

When he wakens, the sun has just risen behind the white rocks. The light is sharp, pitiless. Filippo changes into clean clothes. He feels relaxed. He goes out and sits facing the sun, slowly eating a sandwich and drinking some fresh water.
Where the hell am I? Lost. Jumping into that skip was a bad move. Serves me right. I thought that my cellmate –
working-class
and proud of it, a political prisoner, educated, a smooth talker and avid reader – was my friend, a friend to the street kid who can barely read, incapable of stringing together three sentences. Idiot. In your dreams. Dumped like a girl.
Bitterness and resentment.
OK, so I don’t know where I am, but do I know where I’m going?
A vision of the car, the previous evening, driving away along the lakeshore.
I know where I’m heading, the exit’s that way. Then what? Rome? My family? I’ve slammed the door, I’m not going home a loser. And the cops will get there before me. Go back to my Termini station gang, back to fleecing tourists and selling contraband cigarettes? Endlessly fighting over cash, a girl, a carton of fags, the cops who’ll pay off anyone willing to snitch on their mates, sit next to the guy who might have been the one who grassed on me and shake his hand. The filth, the violence, permanently stoned. I’ve had enough. When I was inside, I dreamed of something different.

They used to sit side by side on the narrow lower bunk, passing a joint back and forth cupped in their palms, and Carlo would talk nonstop, very quietly in the dark, occasionally punctuated by desperate howls, muffled thumping on the walls, the screws on their rounds. He recounted his memories to Filippo, at first grim, of going to work in the Milan factories as a very young man, bewildered by the brutality of a factory
worker’s life. Then, very soon, the workers’ protests of the late sixties began. Carlo told him about the meetings in his workshop, in his factory, which soon became a daily event. Each person took the floor, and each person’s view was given equal weight. There was an initial forging of collective thinking and a collective will. Carlo would grow excited as he recalled the euphoria of discovering the strength of men acting in unison, all equal, of workers’ marches through the factory that started spontaneously after the meetings, going from workshop to workshop, discovering a world that, until then, had been mysterious and threatening, where the men were not permitted to move around freely. In a great burst of elation, solidarity and hope, they had believed that the factory belonged to them, that it had become their territory. He and his comrades, along with so many others, had tied red scarves around their necks to demonstrate their pride and their determination. They had driven out the hated bosses, had begun to reorganise their workload and the production process. Carlo still talked about the outbursts of wild joy, like that night in Milan when he and his friends set fire to all the bosses’ cars at the same time. It made for an enthralling fireworks display and was a way of taking power over the city, a sacred revenge. It hadn’t lasted long, but to experience that, at least once in a lifetime … Filippo listened, rapt. He felt every word resonate in his body. The factory had never been what he wanted, working as slave labour, for so little return. But the tightly knit group, standing together for better or for worse, collective struggle and violence as a way of life, the hope of overturning everything one day – that was something he had always dreamed of. Among Rome’s street gangs, he had never found more than a distant, distorted echo of his dreams and his desperation, the battle for survival of all against all, without ever having the words to express it.

Today he could see it all very clearly; he envied Carlo and the Milan workers.

Carlo went on, ‘The old world was fracturing, it was the dawn of a new era, but we couldn’t find the right words to describe the world we were in the process of inventing, and to carry an entire people along with us. We spoke a turgid, outdated language, one we had inherited, the language of the old world that we wanted to bury. Naturally, no one understood us, any better than I think we did ourselves. If only there’d been a modern Victor Hugo in our factories to tell our story, just think … our fate might have been different. Who knows? There are moments like that when worlds can be turned upside down.’ And on that note he fell silent, absorbed in his memories and his dreams. Filippo, sitting beside him in the dark, feeling the warmth of his body, carried on listening to his silences, moved to tears, without trying to understand why. Victor Hugo, no, he couldn’t think like that. He didn’t know who Hugo was, but he told himself that one day, perhaps, he would.

Carlo resumed, on a more sombre, despairing note, ‘History very soon abandoned us, we’d probably got it all wrong, probably realised too late. The bosses reshaped the economic order. A globalised market – that was the watchword. It felt as though the factory, our world, the only world we knew, the focus of all our struggles, our pride and even our lives, was slipping through our fingers. Plants were relocated, we didn’t know where, the machinery changed, and with it, the way production was organised. Power was vested in the white-collar workers, the teams of shop-floor workers were broken up, we felt the need to expand the battlefield, come out of the factory so we weren’t suffocated to death inside. In December ’69, the henchmen of the neo-fascists, the Italian secret service and the CIA, exploded a bomb in a Milan bank, Piazza Fontana. It left seventeen dead, dozens injured. Do you remember, Filippo?’

‘Vaguely. I wasn’t really interested. Milan was a long way north.’

‘After that, there were more bomb explosions. Brescia, the
Italicus
train. The Italian secret service was murdering its own
people. They were using chaos and terror to fight us, to rebuild a major anti-Communist, anti-red front. Whenever we demonstrated, there were tens of thousands of us in the streets. We thought we were the people. We believed we were strong enough to follow them and fight them on the battleground they’d chosen, outside the factory, weapons in hand. And besides, we were the sons of the 1917 Russian revolution, of the Turin workers’ councils, of the Italian Communist Party and of the Italian Resistance. Memories of violent struggle were still so vivid, so close, in our families and in the factories.’

After a lengthy hesitation, Carlo said, ‘I’m going to tell you a childhood memory.’ Filippo was surprised, childhood memories were not part of Carlo’s usual repertoire, but he waited, in silence. ‘When I was a kid, I used to spend my holidays with my grandparents, farmers in the Bologna region. Once a year, on the 5th of August, always on the same date, probably some anniversary, my grandfather would take me down to the bottom of the vegetable garden, behind a hedge. We’d dig up a metal case and he’d open it. It contained two guns wrapped in rags. Each year, he would say solemnly, “Walther P38 pistols, captured from the Germans.” He’d take them apart on a blanket, oil them very carefully, making me touch the metal and inhale the smell of oil, then he’d reassemble them and pack them away, and we’d bury the case again, always in the same place. “So there’s no risk of making a mistake when we need to dig them up. Sometimes you have to act fast,” he’d say. “They’re my weapons from when I was in the Resistance. You never know.” When I went to look for them years later, my grandfather already long since dead, I couldn’t find them.’ Carlo had a lump in his throat. He was silent for a while. Then he continued in a hoarse voice. ‘So we took up arms. We risked our lives, we risked death each day, but that’s not what is so terrible, the terrible thing is killing. And we killed. I killed. And our fathers cursed us.’ There followed a long silence. In Carlo’s life, the intensity of conviction and the violence of hope had
swept everything away, smashed everything. And Filippo contemplated the wreckage, fascinated.

Then Carlo would say, ‘Those were different times. My grandfather never knew about all that. Just as well. I couldn’t have stood it if he’d cursed me. Go to sleep, Filippo, we’ll still be here tomorrow and we can carry on talking.’ And Filippo would clamber into the top bunk and fall asleep, happy, his head full of confused dreams.

I listened, every night for six months. Thinking it over now, alone in the mountains, abandoned and betrayed, it just sounds weird
.

Forget all that, otherwise I’m stuffed
.

Filippo gets up, stretches, grabs the bag, slings it over his shoulder and begins the descent towards the lake. His mind is made up. It will be Milan.

Lisa Biaggi leads a well-ordered life. Every morning she leaves her little apartment in Rue de Belleville early, takes the Métro from Belleville and commutes to La Défense where she works as a medical secretary in an occupational health centre. On the way to l’Étoile, she stops to buy the previous day’s Italian newspapers from a kiosk that stocks a good range of international papers for the tourists. She doesn’t open them straight away but lingers for a moment, her mind free. Today it is sunny and bright, like a promise of spring. She sits on a café terrace at the top of the Champs-Élysées, the sun shining on her face, and orders a cappuccino and croissants. This is the best part of the day, and she relishes it. She has been a political refugee in France since 1980 and has found a steady job that enables her to live in relative comfort, but somehow she still cannot resign herself to making her life here. She has turned forty. She can feel her body, her face, and her mind wither as she waits to return, but there is nothing to be done, and each day the news from home reawakens the ache of exile. She
contemplates the swelling crowds walking past and sighs. Her cappuccino drunk, nearly time to resume her commute, and she opens the
Corriere della Sera
and begins to flick through it. A shock. On the inside pages, a photo of Carlo. Carlo, her man, the love of her life. Headline: Spectacular jailbreak … Her heart thumping, blurred vision, her eyes jump from one line to the next.

In a refuse truck … with his cellmate, Filippo Zuliani, a small-time crook … accomplices among the truck drivers. The police are actively looking for the two fugitives … Photos of the two men. The small-time crook has the mug of a
small-time
crook. What the hell was Carlo doing with him? It is worrying.

She folds the newspaper and tries to convince herself that Carlo will be all right, that he isn’t dead, but it is no good, she can visualise him dead. She picks up her belongings and heads for the Métro, towards La Défense and her office. It is too soon or too late to cry.

At La Vielleuse, Rue de Belleville, Lisa is playing pool, seemingly absorbed in the game, her long, slim form leaning over the baize, her face masked by her shoulder-length black hair, her movements precise. A habit that goes back more than eight years, to the time of her first clandestine missions in Paris, when Carlo was the main contact for the organisation back in Milan. Playing pool occupies both hands and mind when you’re waiting for a phone call, night after night, at a set time. Lisa has come to enjoy the game, and she has carried on playing since Carlo’s arrest, even though there is no longer anything to wait for. She is even considered to be a good player by the little group of regulars who are very respectful of her. You don’t often find a woman who plays well. But today, as in the old days, she is playing to kill time. Carlo is free again … the old underground habits, why not? The phone rings for the third time that evening. Each time she jumps, just as before. The owner picks up the phone, looks over and signals to her,
this time it is for her. She dashes over to the old phone booth, closed off, discreet, right at the back of the room, as before.

‘Lisa, it’s me.’

Despite the overwhelming emotion, hearing his voice live for the first time in seven years makes her want to laugh. Who else could it be? A telephone date that has been on hold for seven years…

‘I know.’

‘I knew I’d find you. I love you.’

‘I’m frightened, Carlo.’

‘Everything’s OK. I don’t have much time. Listen carefully. The leadership of our organisation has declared that they’re laying down their arms, they’ve admitted defeat.’

‘I know, I still read the papers.’

‘They’re doing the right thing, I agree, even though I would like to have been consulted. But this changes things. I continued the struggle for seven years in jail, without letting up, I carried out all my instructions. But now we’re laying down our arms, it makes no sense to stay banged up. I have no liking for long, drawn-out, tragic deaths.’

‘So?’

‘So I’m leaving.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Yes, just like that. You remember? We used to call that “practising the objective”. When we consider a demand to be right and necessary, we enact it, we don’t wait for it to be handed to us. I’ve seized my freedom.’

‘That’s crazy, now the Red Brigades are announcing they’re laying down their arms, you’ll be released within a few months. And perhaps the rest of us will be able to come back home.’

‘Never. You’re talking as if you don’t know how the government works. They hate us because we exposed their rotten schemes and we frightened them, really frightened them. They found out that perhaps they were mortal. Now that they’ve won, they’re going to make us pay for it, they’re taking
their revenge and will continue to do so, there’ll never be an amnesty, they’ll let us rot in jail or in exile until the end of time…’