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.