Escape

by Dominique Manotti

  A murmur ripples through the gathering. Clearly opinion is extremely divided. Lisa continues in the same vein: ‘I’m looking for all the information we can find on this Lucio Renzi, Carlo’s killer. Ask around, ask any journalists you know, any contacts you still have in Italy. Who is he, where does he come from? I’m sure we’ll find something. Thank you, all of you, for your help.’

  Lisa pauses for a moment, people are growing restless, some go over and pour themselves a drink or start chatting to their neighbours. When the hubbub dies down, Lisa takes the floor again: ‘There’s something I must tell you. A week after Carlo was killed, his cellmate, the criminal who escaped with him, turned up at my place.’ She has the audience’s attention again. ‘Apparently Carlo gave him my address. I say “apparently”, because, instinctively, I distrust him, but I have no concrete reason to. Everything he’s told me so far fits with what I know from other sources. I’ve put his case in the hands of our lawyers.’ The audience turns to the lawyer, who nods. ‘I’ve found him a job as a night watchman and a studio flat that he’s subletting from a work colleague of mine. I owe it to Carlo’s memory to help him, and I feel I’ve done all I can. I’m quits. Let me know if you’d like him to come to our Sunday meetings, and I’ll give you his contact details. I repeat, I’m not keen, I don’t trust this guy, but it’s up to you. That’s all from me, thank you for being here, and for your support and help.’

  Lisa sits down, suddenly exhausted, her gaze vacant. People avoid her, forming little knots again by the buffet. There are heated arguments in hushed voices. The lawyer pours himself a glass of fruit juice and leans over to Roberto: ‘Do you believe this business about Carlo being set up?’

  ‘No, but I believe that Lisa needs to believe in it to cope with Carlo’s death. She’s never stopped waiting for him.’

  A woman called Chiara sidles up to Roberto, leans close to him and murmurs with pinched lips: ‘Lisa’s the only person here who believes her story. That arsehole was capable of wrecking our lives singlehandedly. He didn’t need anyone’s help. And you know it as well as I do.’

  Roberto turns his back on her, without replying.

  Further away Giovanni, a stocky man in his fifties, is holding forth, surrounded by three women who are lapping up his words, spoken in a half-tone: ‘I’ve had enough of her noble widow act, her scout-leader airs, the way she flaunts her generosity, her posturing, as if she were the custodian of the memory of all the radical struggles in Italy. We know as much as she does about all that, if not more. And her ridiculous stories. She’s been in France for too long. Exile creates fantasists and paranoia.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARCH 1987–FEBRUARY 1988,

  LA DÉFENSE, PARIS

  Night watchman at the Tour Albassur, at La Défense. The walk from the Métro exit to the staff entrance is an ordeal repeated nightly. Filippo strides across the deserted concourse, his head down. Aim: to avoid being crushed by the office blocks lined up like soldiers, dizzyingly high, threatening, blocking out the sky. Blasts of freezing or scorching-hot air. The few grey shapes scuttling soundlessly in various directions no longer seem human.

  Ten p.m. Filippo begins his shift. He checks in at the security guards’ office, a long, narrow, windowless room on the ground floor, crammed with machines and CCTV screens, just behind the magnificent reception desks in the foyer. He picks up his badge and greets his colleague, his sole companion for the entire night, an elderly man who’s been given this job by Albassur so they won’t have to fire him three years before he is due to retire. He’s a sociable type and seems genuinely sorry not to be able to communicate with Filippo, who doesn’t yet speak a word of French.

  Then Filippo sets off on his evening tour to inspect all the floors. The same ritual every night. Lift. Stop at the first floor. The light timer switches on, Filippo exits the lift and scans his fob into a little device on the wall. Three sets of double doors, one to his left, one to his right and one straight ahead of him. Start with the doors on the right, according to his instructions. He pushes them open. A long corridor, wanly lit by the glow from the luminous emergency exit signs. He advances slowly along the corridor, on thick carpet, not a sound, not a living soul, the sensation of walking on cotton wool. Office doors to his left, office doors to his right, all identical. He opens them, closes them, repetitive actions. A lounge area with vending machines, a coffee machine, and two imitation-leather armchairs. Deserted, sinister. At the far end of the corridor, a large boardroom, and the scanner. He swipes his fob. Return to the lifts. Swing doors, left-hand corridor, scanner, return, central corridor, scanner, back again. Lift, second floor. Each floor, one after another. There are thirty-two floors in this block. Sometimes a floor of offices with a view, less claustrophobic perhaps than the long corridors, but the loneliness there is overwhelming, chilling.

  Thirty-second floor, the last. The space is designed in a much less regular fashion, the offices are much bigger, but there is still a scanner, and the loneliness. Filippo goes into the boardroom. A dim light, like everywhere else. He skirts the oval table in the centre of the room, hemmed with wood-and-leather chairs, and stops in front of the vast bay window that runs the entire length of the room. He stands stock still, digesting the shock he feels every night. He is mesmerised, overcome by the view, as he had been by the white rocky ridge, the blue lake and the immense sky in the mountains when he was on the run. On either side, within touching distance, at the same height as him, loom the dark shapes of the neighbouring towers, punctuated by a few lines and pinpoints of light, and just opposite him, a large gap affording a view of Paris. The lines and shapes are clear and sharp – the deep, dark course of the Seine, the lighter black mass of the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower with its coppery outline, the epitome of elegance, standing out against the sovereign midnight-blue sky, and the light at the top, its powerful revolving beam mechanically sweeping space. Seen from here, the hasty, oppressive walk across the concourse each night feels like an initiation test before entering dreamland. And each night, confronted with this magnificent landscape built by men but devoid of any trace of life, in solitude and silence, he listens to the words going round and round in his head, the sentences that form all by themselves. He waits patiently for the memory of Guidoriccio to return and haunt him, and each night the warlord turns up. This landscape suits him. He would gladly make it his. Who is Guidoriccio? wonders Filippo. The triumphant warrior in flesh and blood, astride his horse, challenging stone-built cities and deserted fortifications in glorious defiance of all the gods and all men, of whom he dreamed in his childhood. Or the lone horseman, playing at war, without enemies, and therefore without pleasure and without any possibility of victory, whom he had met during his long trek over the Italian mountains? Or is he a lifeless equestrian statue on a stage set? What is this knight’s message? Is it that the tempting but fatal combination of solitude and dreams are both his destiny and mine? The presence of this enigmatic character at his side stops Filippo from becoming lost.

  The walkie-talkie on his belt crackles. ‘Everything OK?’ asks a tinny voice. His round is finished, the moment of reverie too; it’s time to go back down to the ground floor, to the duty office of the Tour Albassur security team, where the longest part of the night is about to commence.

  Night after night, between the evening round after the departure of the last employees and the morning round before the arrival of the ‘office cleaning operatives’, Filippo finds himself shut up with his colleague in the security guards’ office. They sit back-to-back in comfortable swivel armchairs, and they each keep an eye on thirty or so monitors on the opposite wall that relay footage from the CCTV cameras in the offices, the control panels of the alarm systems of the high-security offices, while still others ensure that all the utilities and technical systems are functioning correctly – heating, water pressure, power circuits, along with a dozen telephones. Each guard has a logbook on his desk to report any incidents. Which never occur. Stuck in fr
ont of the still, flat, ugly images of the screens blinking and flickering in the emptiness, Filippo feels giddy. Like many night watchmen probably, he fantasises about a disaster that would blur all the screens, set off all the alarms and create a reassuring chaos justifying, for a few minutes, the existence of his job. The temptation to provoke such an incident preys on him briefly before evaporating. His colleague Antoine, on the other hand, keeps himself busy. Unable to converse with Filippo, he flicks through old magazines, does crosswords, eats cake and snoozes.

  Filippo soon realises that he needs to find a way of filling his time, otherwise he’ll get depressed. Learn French? He tries for a while with an old Assimil method. And discovers that he has no incentive. Who does he want to speak French with? And what for? Because my future is in France? What future? Before thinking about my future, I’d do better to try and get a grip on my present. The burning question: what am I doing here, far away from everything I know? I’m here because I jumped into that skip. I escaped, without planning to. Why did I jump? What made me do such a senseless thing?

  While his thoughts wander, he has got into the habit of doodling the leaves and scrolls of the acanthus fern – in black pencil, on white sheets of paper. In the near-contemplative silence, his hand is as free as his mind, and his doodles mingle with the rhythm of words. He’d jumped because he’d followed Carlo, like iron filings to a magnet. His thoughts always returned to Carlo. His form, so clear, so close, within reach, a warm glow – Filippo closes his eyes and holds out his hand, as he used to do in their cell, but only encounters emptiness. He hunches over his sheet of paper; his drawings overlap. Above all, Carlo is a voice, a language, and stories. The memories of never-ending nights spent listening to him flood back powerfully, overwhelming him, those memories that he’d tried to bury, to destroy because he felt abandoned, betrayed. Carlo had the words to talk about the struggle of those heady years, the passion, the battle against slave labour, the thrill of the fight, the euphoria of victory, the agony of defeat and the joy of freedom, jubilant violence. Being prepared to put your life at risk, every day. For a while I wanted to forget everything about him. Betrayal. Impossible. Filippo is suffocating. The sheet of paper is now covered in black. He screws it into a ball, throws it into the waste-paper bin and picks up another.

  Gradually, the words in his head become sentences that fit together. On the page, a series of almost perfect circles overlap, intersect and reinforce one another. I was blown away by everything Carlo told me; his passion, his hunger for freedom and his violence were the very stuff of my life in Rome, before jail. My horror of my mother’s exhausting, humdrum existence, my hatred of my father’s submissive, mediocre life, which he blotted out with alcohol to the point where he despised himself, my rebellion against the cops and my teachers, the crushing boredom of village life, and the feeling of not having a grip on anything, not counting for anything or for anyone, drove me to look for adventure among Rome’s squats. I wanted to live, but I didn’t know it, I’d never had the words to express all that. Never even the desire to express it. Carlo taught me that if I couldn’t find the right words to say who I am, I wouldn’t exist, not even in my own eyes. With his words, he justified my rebellion and salvaged my Rome years from being no more than a defeat. So naturally I followed him, I jumped into the skip. It was a free and necessary act.

  Filippo stops scribbling, sits up, relaxes, breathes and drinks a glass of water. He has just struck a blow against despair. The overlapping circles covering the entire surface of the page in front of him take on the shape of a crowd of faceless heads. A crowd with no voice. He doesn’t throw this sheet away, but puts it carefully to one side for the time being.

  After his leap into the skip came separation. At this point, his voice becomes husky, the words stop flowing. A complex tangle of confused feelings. No desire to try and unravel them. Filippo puts it all to the back of his mind. I’ll think about it later. Then Carlo’s death, his own escape, Paris. He recalls his meeting with Lisa, then Cristina. Looking for a shoulder to cry on. A little love. Didn’t find it. Lisa’s fury. Hatred, the word forms, imposes itself. She hates me. Why? She told me. Because I’m to blame for Carlo’s death, I put the idea into his head and gave him the means to escape. Harsh words. But now, I understand them, I accept them. To blame for his death, OK. What about Cristina? She doesn’t hate me, she doesn’t even know I exist. For those two women, Carlo’s a prince and I’m a piece of shit. They helped me because Carlo asked them to. Fair enough. But Carlo doesn’t belong to them. They don’t know him. The closeness of being in jail, the breakout, the dangers, the ordeal we went through together, that’s our story, Carlo’s and mine, not theirs.

  He picks up the sheet of paper with the anonymous crowd on it. With a few pencil strokes he adds Lisa’s dark hair, Cristina’s chignon, here a look, there a mouth, and their faces emerge and replicate. Before Carlo died, as he set off for his final battle, he said to me, ‘Tell Lisa.’ I’ve got to tell it. How? Put my trust in Carlo, listen to my memories, let his words come out. And when I have my whole story nice and tight … he hunches over the sheet of paper and contemplates the faces. Those two will come to understand that Carlo is mine, not theirs, and that he never did belong to them. A story of men.

  The time for tears is over. He dreams of conquering the two women, the way you conquer a land, for the pleasure of conquering, and then leaving for pastures new.

  That day, I went into the bin room to clean it, as I did every day. And I knew that today was the day. The screw who opened the door for me didn’t notice that the skip was full, whereas usually it was empty, and he locked the door behind me, as he did every day. I was breathing fast and my hands were clammy. I waited, straining my ears, counting the seconds by my heartbeat. According to our calculations, we had thirty minutes before the alarm would be raised.

  After one minute, or a bit more – the minute went on so long – I heard the sound of an engine in the yard. It was the truck come to pick up the skip and take it to the dump. I gave five sharp knocks on the rubbish chute. Carlo was on dishwashing detail in the canteen, on the floor above. He heard the signal that we’d rehearsed over the last few days. He sneaked over to the mouth of the rubbish chute and jumped in. He shot out into the skip like a cannon ball and plunged down, swimming his way to the bottom. Then I jumped too. I grabbed the top of the skip wall, steadied myself and dived in after him. As I jumped, the metal shutter that closed off the bin room from the yard began to open. The guards checked that the room was empty, the truck was about to load the skip. I slid down among the plastic bags, the pressure was crushing, I couldn’t tell which way was up or down, and some of the bags had split. I felt something slimy and rough against my face, I wanted to throw up, I could hardly breathe, and I began to panic and choke. Drowning in a sea of rubbish. Carlo’s hand grabbed my arm, he brought his face very close to mine, pushed a bag out of the way to give me some air, and whispered, ‘Protect your face with your T-shirt, everything’s fine.’ Then a crash to make us shudder: the skip had been loaded on to the truck. ‘Good news,’ murmured Carlo, ‘we’re going to make it.’ I got my breath back. We began to manoeuvre ourselves very slowly into an upright position, trying to clear an air pocket around our heads. Carlo guided me.

  We had to control our breathing, we knew it was vital otherwise we’d suffocate to death amid the rubbish. The truck started up. Our hands fumbled and found each other, locked. A stop: exit checks, signature of the paperwork, and inspection of the skip by the screws. We knew that it would be cursory, but what if, that day… Hearts thumping. The truck was on its way, we squeezed hands. We waited a few minutes, counting slowly, then bit by bit we fought our way to the surface. When we were able to come up for air, I took a deep breath, despite the smell, then threw up. Carlo was kneeling, he held on to the wall of the skip with one hand, very much in control. I thought how he’d saved my life, in those first few minutes after I’d jumped in. I didn’t say anything because Carlo didn’t l
ike shows of emotion. But he knew.

  The truck slowed down. The driver was Marco, the leader of my gang when I was a thief in Rome, before my arrest. Using a false name, he’d got himself a job as a driver for the subcontractor who handled the prison’s rubbish, and the whole operation had been coordinated by his sister Luciana, who often used to come and visit me in jail. We’d been in love, before I got banged up. Or rather, we thought we were. But we were very young. In other words, we used to fuck each other. And she was a great help in planning our escape. It was agreed that we’d jump out when Marco braked three times in quick succession. He couldn’t stop because he wasn’t alone in the cab. We felt him brake three times, we shot up together, grabbed the side of the skip, heaved ourselves over the edge, hung there for a second, then we let go, throwing ourselves out as far as possible, clear of the truck. We hit the ground hard, but we were ready for it. We both tucked ourselves up into a ball and rolled on to the asphalt. We watched the truck drive off, then we stood up. The place was empty. Good choice. About five hundred metres away were some apartment blocks, one of those suburban housing estates plonked down in the middle of the countryside. We had to hope that no one had seen us jump off the truck, and we still needed a bit of luck. Carlo said to me, ‘By my reckoning, we’ve got ten minutes left before the alarm’s raised in the prison.’ We had to get away from the route taken by the refuse truck as fast as possible. Ten minutes just might be enough. We crossed the fields very quickly, heading for the apartment block. We kept calm, didn’t run, brushing ourselves down to get rid of the rubbish clinging to our hair and our clothes as we went. We walked round the first building and found ourselves in a huge car park between two apartment blocks. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, there weren’t many people about. A few days earlier I’d hidden a piece of wire in my pocket, which I unrolled. I chose a Fiat model that I knew well. Within twenty seconds, I’d opened the door, and thirty seconds later I had the steering lock deactivated and the engine running, and we drove out of the car park. Carlo looked at his watch. ‘The alarm’s been raised,’ he said. We drove away from Rome. We left the stolen car in a supermarket car park around twenty kilometres away, where we waited for Luciana, Marco’s sister. She was standing next to her car, against the sunlight, her mass of copper-blond hair glinting in the sun. I found her stunning, but she had eyes only for Carlo. I’d already lost that game.