The Fugitive (7 page)

As seems to be practically routine with me—finding myself in the wrong place at the wrong time—I got out at Notre Dame de Lorette, two stops short of Pigalle, and I began to wend my way through the narrow streets with only one thing in mind—getting home and going to sleep. I immediately noticed that something wasn't right. The street corners were empty and the shutters of the clubs were all pulled down. Just as I walked into the Place Saint-Georges, I saw a fleet of police vans from the Gendarmerie coming up behind me.

I started walking faster, but by the time I reached the Rue Condorcet I saw some men in dark-blue uniforms coming toward me and stopping everyone they met. I turned on my heel and started looking around for an unguarded cross street to dart down when I saw one of the girls opening the street door of an apartment building.

I walked over to her: “Let me in, please!”

“I'm not working tonight,” she said, and closed the door in my face.

But the patron saint of fugitives whispered in her ear that that was a day for good deeds, and a few seconds later she opened the door again. “What do you want?” she asked.

“There's a police sweep, I don't have my documents, and I don't want to be arrested. Please, please let me in.”

She read the fear on my face: “All right, come on in.”

I followed her to a studio apartment that reeked vaguely of humanity and stale smoke. “This is where I work; I live in Clignancourt. You live in the neighborhood, don't you?”

I smiled at her, I offered her a cigarette, but didn't say a word. Shaking her head, she said: “I didn't mean to be nosy.”

“And I didn't mean to be rude,” I answered. “Thanks for the hospitality, but I'd rather talk about generalities.”

“Hey, you know, everybody here knows that I'm a girl you can trust. Felix cares about those things.”

“Who's Felix?” I asked.

“My man.”

“Would he get mad if he came in and found me here?”

“No, he never comes in here. He never leaves the bar, except to go to sleep.”

“By the way, why is the police out in force tonight?”

“Two assholes shot each other in a bar. I don't know exactly what happened; the cops showed up and I scrammed. I hope Felix doesn't get in trouble. He's already been in prison twice.”

“Is he your pimp?”

“Yes.”

That was all we had to say to one another, and we spent the rest of the time smoking cigarettes and looking at our watches. When “radio Pigalle” reported that the alert was over and the shooter had been arrested, I thanked her and went home. From that day on, I greeted the girls without embarrassment, and every so often my savior would stop me and ask me to give her a cigarette.

Sometimes though,

maybe because I'm young

I have no reason why

 

 

 

 

 

I never really know what to say when someone asks me what my everyday life on the run was like. Whenever I could, I worked—in Mexico I even enrolled in the university—but the main focus of my days was food. And in fact I was a bulimic fugitive.

I immediately developed a compulsive eating disorder, bulimia, and after just a couple of months I had already gained about sixty-five pounds.
Bernard el gordo
(Fat Bernard) is what my South American friends called me.

 

My bulimia came in the aftermath of an old trauma. In August of 1977 the Italian special prisons had just been inaugurated; because the bureaucracy of the penitentiary system was unable to distinguish between Lotta Continua and the Red Brigades, they decided that I was a dangerous terrorist, a menace to society, and sent me to the “superprison” in Cuneo. I was one of the first twenty “new arrivals.” They locked us up in a huge room and, one at a time, clubbed us bloody. I lived in a constant state of terror. Every morning at five they would take one of us away, down into a basement room, and beat him bloody all over again.

The purpose behind this treatment was to strip us of all vestiges of human dignity, in order to create the conditions most favorable for ratting out the others. It was impossible to sleep. At night they would walk through the cell block, doing the head count, shining a spotlight in our faces each time they passed. By day, they kept the radio and the television turned on, with the volume as high as possible. When the mess cart came through, the guards would dare us to eat, assuring us they had just pissed in the food. The weekly shower offered them a chance to play hilarious pranks. One of their favorite tricks was to let us get all soaped up and then turn off the water, announcing that our allotted shower time had expired. The visiting hall seemed felt like a giant fish bowl; I had to meet my family locked up in a bulletproof glass cage. Our conversations were recorded.

We decided to rebel. And we succeeded—despite the thousand obstacles thrown in our path—in establishing a constructive debate with the inmates of the other “special prisons” scattered across Italy. The delegation of inmates held in the “kamp” of Favignana was in favor of suicide, others advocated open revolt. We decided to start an all-out hunger strike, and the others followed our lead. After we refused all food for ten days, drinking only water, the warden decided to negotiate. We managed to obtain a few minor concessions from the prison board, and in particular, a promise that there would be no more beatings.

I was the youngest, and I experienced those days of desperate struggle as a living nightmare. I suddenly began to devour food like a crazy man; I didn't stop until they transferred me to a “normal” prison.

 

During my life on the run, my uncontrollable obesity did give an extra dimension of credibility to my characters. And that was my standard argument whenever my girlfriend would lower the discussion to the mere plane of physical attraction.

“Why don't you pretend you're a cop,” I would say to her, “and you're trying to decide which of two people to stop and question. One of them is slender, athletic, and vigorous, and the other one looks like Oliver Hardy: which one would you stop?” I gradually won her over, and when we were in bed together, she would call me “my little quarter-ton.”

It wasn't until the end of my time in Mexico that I managed to lose some weight. Aside from the poor quality of the food and the beverages, I was deeply shaken by the poverty and the ancestral hunger that afflicted more than half the population there. If I went out into the street to buy food at the butchers or to have something to eat in a restaurant, the sight of all that suffering, starving humanity left me without appetite, and most of the time the money I had planned to spend on the pleasures of my gullet would end up dropping into those grimy, perennially outstretched hands. My sense of guilt at being a gringo was more effective than any Weight Watchers program.

 

When I got back to Italy and the national prison system, my bulimia returned with a vengeance, and it ravaged my metabolism.

“The fats in his circulatory system are roughly equivalent to 400 grams of butter per liter of blood,” my lawyers would thunder at press conferences and during the hearings of the Supervisory Court that had to decide on my request for release on account of poor health. The prison authorities were also in favor of a conditional release, probably encouraged in that direction by the fact that I constantly carried under one arm a copy of the book,
A History of Cannibalism in Europe
.

 

During that period, I wasn't the only one worrying the warden. A fellow Paduan, imprisoned for armed robbery, decided that he didn't want to spend any more time in prison. He decided that his way out was neither through the courts nor by escaping. He wanted them to kick him out of jail, and he succeeded. He would shuffle around the prison wearing a red plastic colander on his head, eyes cast downward, taking short, nervous steps. In one hand he carried a rectangular piece of cardboard, with “KGB identity card” written in large, clear letters. Every day, for months, he managed to make his way into the offices of the warden, the Carabiniere commander, the registry office, the chaplain, and the prison physician, asking them all, “Has the order for my transfer to Moscow come in yet?”

They did everything they could to get rid of him, but his reputation had spread through the prison system and all the other penitentiaries refused to accept him as a prisoner. They tried to cajole him, bribe him, they even tried beating him, but he toughed it out. In the end, in total exasperation, they got rid of him by having a doctor issue a scientific finding that he was incompatible with the prison environment.

And he stayed in character right up to the end. As he walked past the last guard opening the last gate that stood between him and freedom, red colander still on his head, he held up his identity card as a secret agent and whispered: “I'm on a mission for the KGB.”

 

If you have to become bulimic, Paris is the right place for it. Age-old culinary wisdom teaches the importance of quality in quantity. I grasped this fundamental concept immediately: I learned to dine in the right places and to avoid places like McDonald's. With a careful cross-referenced exploration of a number of tour and culinary guides, I soon narrowed down my selections to the best that the market had to offer.

I started my days with a magnificent breakfast in a pastry shop not far from the Boulevard des Italiens: a lukewarm cappuccino sprinkled with cocoa powder and sugar, followed by three cream-filled brioches, and a glass of Perrier to cleanse my palate before I sank my delicate little dessert spoon into an exquisite kiwi mousse. Around mid-morning, I would head over to the Rue de Rivoli, where there was a bistro that proffered a Côtes du Rhône and a paté de foie gras worthy of the names. At lunchtime, unless I was eating at home, I could select from a vast array of brasseries, depending on the whims of the day. My afternoon snack, usually consisting of a sandwich (you shouldn't overdo it with the sugar), was usually consumed in the neighborhood around the Madeleine, where there was an Alsatian who was a master of the difficult art of coordinating and balancing the type of bread, sauce, and meat. I would give the guy four stars for his beers as well.

Choosing the restaurant for my evening meal was generally the cause of some anxiety, so I started to consider my options from early morning. I tended to prefer French regional restaurants, but I couldn't allow myself to neglect the canon of gastronomic internationalism, which demanded frequent encounters with exotic cultures. I devoted a couple of evenings every week to that pursuit, by geographic zone: Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Pakistani, Afghan, Cuban, Mexican, Argentine, and so on.

One of the fundamental security rules for a fugitive is never to frequent the same restaurants; I followed that rule only for restaurants where the food was disappointing. I feel certain that the rule applies only to skinny fugitives. An obese customer who eats like a wolf is definitely not one that a restaurateur would risk losing.

Since I couldn't eat in a restaurant every day, and because I was developing an increasingly discerning palate, I learned to cook. Before I became a fugitive, my mother had done all the cooking (she was a talented and versatile cook); in culinary terms, on the other hand, my time with the Boy Scouts had taught me only how to make pasta and grill sausages.

I decided to take a scientific approach. I began by studying the sacred texts, and then explored the various schools of culinary thought (I became a bitter adversary of nouvelle cuisine, primarily because of the tiny portions); once I had equipped myself with the necessary utensils, I began to create casseroles, roasts, stews, and pastries. To serve at least four. I couldn't help it if the recipes unfailingly listed quantities of ingredients sufficient to feed from four to six persons, and once I had cooked it, I couldn't throw all that good food away. Security considerations generally kept me from inviting my friends over to my house for dinner and so, unless Alessandra was visiting me, I usually sat down to dinner alone. And, to tell the truth, my friends invited me to dinner only rarely; when they did, they would ask me to contribute some money. All things considered, they preferred to get together at a restaurant, where everybody paid their own check. When you're fat, you tend to become the butt of jokes like “I'd rather buy you a new suit than treat you to dinner,” and other oh-so-funny witticisms.

I would spend three or four hours a day preparing dishes intended to delight my palate and placate my insatiable appetite. Some days I would spend the entire morning in the finest food stores shopping for the right ingredients. I spent nearly half of every Sunday rolling out the pasta dough for tortelli, ravioli, and cappellacci. I also set the table with care, from the tablecloth to the glasses and silverware. Since I have always found flowers depressing, instead of the more conventional vase of flowers, I had a centerpiece that consisted of a little doll figure of Popeye's bulimic buddy, Wimpy.

I graduated to culinary adulthood by creating my own recipes, testing them over and over before adding them to my own personal cookbook, and giving them names that sprang from various personages and episodes of my own judicial soap opera. I have no intention of printing them in this book. I've spent enough time in jail already.

I had been born into a culture of fine wine, so it wasn't much of a leap for me to begin exploring the magical enological realm of France. Every meal was unfailingly irrigated with excellent wines; I never drank to excess, always limiting myself to a reasonable proportion with the quantity of food. Sufficient wine for six guests, never more. And to top it off, I never denied myself a good cognac or a calvados.

My digestion was a thorny problem at first. The tension of living in hiding was constantly giving me heartburn and bloating. But I soon figured out a remedy. The ideal way to ensure a healthy digestion is to go to the movies. The movie house is a place of truce, a non-combat area where, once the lights are dimmed and the film is running, the only reality is the movie itself. All the little realities of the individuals in the audience are canceled.