The Fugitive by Massimo Carlotto, Anthony Shugaar

place on the Eiffel Tower that shows the direction and the distance to every country on earth. My mother put her arm around mine and led me to the display, and asked:
    â€œShow me where Mexico is.”
    I pointed in the general direction, and she bent over the plaque to read the distance. Then she turned to me and said:
    â€œWe’ll never see you again.”
    â€œSure we’ll see each other,
mamma
; maybe less often, but we’ll never stop seeing one another,” I lied.
    In the few days that remained to us, time went galloping past. The hours flew by too fast for us to say everything we were feeling. My efforts to leaven the sadness were awkward, and only sharpened the sense of bewilderment that was slowly taking hold of us all.
    The train for Italy left the station at eight in the evening. I couldn’t go to see them off. We had already been silent for a while, waiting for the moment when we would have to say goodbye. I burst into tears. My father stepped close to me, took my hands in his, and started crying too.
    â€œMassimo, I don’t know what more I can do to help you,” he said.
    â€œYou’ve always done your best,
papà
; this is just how it went.”
    He kept on crying, gripping both my hands in his. My mother was sitting down, staring at the wall. I called to her. She turned to look at me, her face streaked with tears, and she came over to my father and me, wrapping her arms around us both. I walked them to the door. My mother went out first, stroking my hair the way she did when I was a little boy. My
papà
couldn’t seem to let go of my hands, he continued to look at them and weep.
    â€œMy poor boy, I don’t know what else I can do to help you.”
    â€œGoodbye,
papà
.”
    He kissed me on the forehead and caught up with my mother, who was already going down the stairs.
    Â 
    Twenty days later, in a port in Galicia, I boarded a ship bound for Veracruz.

We will glow like lanterns
    bright fireflies in July night skies
    and we’ll live on silk and pearls
    pale Ulysses on eclipsed seas
    Â 
    Â 
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    The decision to go to Mexico, as I mentioned before, was fairly haphazard: a book, Alessandra’s baseless enthusiasm, and a vague notion of its history and traditions, derived entirely from movies I had seen. I had seen all of the classics: from Eisenstein’s
¡Que viva Mexico!
to Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
, from Sergio Leone’s
A Fistful of Dynamite
to Marlon Brando in
The Appaloosa
. I also knew that Mexico had offered refuge to Trotsky, Vittorio Vidali, and Tina Modotti. In short, compared with the dictatorships and the horrors of the other countries in Central America, it seemed like the least of the possible evils.
    The love and the allegiance that I felt toward Cuba and Nicaragua had obliged me to rule them out in my planning from the very first, because I was afraid that I might damage their image if I were arrested there by the Italian police. In reality, for an accidental fugitive, without well-placed government supporters or the money to pay for them, the world is pretty much all the same. If I hadn’t stumbled into the lawyer Melvin’s trap, I would have been arrested pretty soon anyway, because I was circulating in the most pathetically wrong circles imaginable for a fugitive. I might, perhaps, have managed to stay at liberty for a little longer if I had holed up in some pleasant tourist resort and devoted myself to studying the Maya, Aztec, and Olmec civilizations. But even though I traveled extensively throughout Mexico, exploring the country, I could never manage to break away from Mexico City.
    Which is not really Mexico (and I even wonder if it’s actually part of the planet Earth); more like an episode from
The Twilight Zone
, where everything conceivable happens, amidst the most complete indifference. This lunatic megalopolis dealt such a violent blow to my awareness and my imagination that I fell