Don’t get sucked in. Danger. She’ll destroy me, she’ll devour me. I know what I don’t want, but I don’t know how to get what I do want. Get out. Now. Run. Save my skin. Think later.
Filippo rises to his feet, his face inscrutable. He stammers: ‘Sorry, it’s late, I’m working tonight, I have to go.’
And he leaves her sitting there, dumbfounded, in front of the two vodkas that have barely been touched. In the background, Bécaud has given way to a double-bass duo.
It takes Cristina a few seconds to realise that Filippo has walked out, for good. Incredulity. She downs her vodka in one, to clear her mind and to try and regain her footing. I’ve just done him a huge favour, which he seemed to appreciate. Rude, really, very rude. Not surprising. Lout. No, not rude, ungrateful, that’s worse. Now he’s got what he wants, he dumps me.
Then, without seeing it coming, she is hit by a wave of despair. In her forties, loneliness. For ever? A life sentence? She drinks the vodka that Filippo barely touched.
I played the seductress, almost out of habit, and it didn’t work. I have to face facts, I’m no longer an attractive woman. What do I have left? A job that bores me…
She signals to the barman: another.
What was I expecting this evening? Hard to say, I don’t know. Romance, a young man to pamper, life, action, perhaps even a lover. An end to my loneliness. In any case, he owes me something.
She mulls over the evening to try and pinpoint the moment it had all gone wrong.
Arrival, Bécaud, he’d laughed, his account of the meeting with the publisher, so far so good. The publisher’s doubts as to whether Filippo could be the author of the book. But she had had no doubts, and told him so. No problem. And she placed her hand over his. Skin to skin. That was when everything fell apart. Filippo was profoundly disturbed. He lowered his head and jerked his hand away quite violently. And he departed. A doubt surfaces. So young, good-looking, prison, that passionate relationship with Carlo… He’s gay. Just my luck.
The barman brings her third vodka.
CHAPTER FIVE
Paris, 10 May
L’Univers des Livres, review by Jeanne Champaud
A few days ago, the publisher of Escape, the novel by Filippo Zuliani that will be appearing in bookshops this week, gave me a copy of the proofs saying, ‘Read these. I think you’ll be surprised.’ I was. And I’m prepared to bet that I won’t be the only one, and that we’ll be hearing about this novel when the literary prize season is upon us this autumn.
On first reading, this novel appears to tell a story that is not particularly originaclass="underline" a young hoodlum and a veteran terrorist, a survivor of the ‘Years of Lead’, meet by chance in prison and break out together. Then, as much out of choice as of necessity, they team up and organise a bank heist that turns into a bloodbath. The formula seems to be that of the traditional crime novel, but appearances can be deceptive. This novel overturns all the rules of the genre; it is a lot more and a lot better than a simple story of small-time crooks. The book has two plots that are inextricably interwoven, ultimately merging.
The sub-plot is that of the two protagonists’ escape from jail, the preparation of the heist, the heist itself and the resulting fiasco, against a background of gangland turf wars. It is the simple, effective storyline that hooks the reader from beginning to end, without allowing a pause for breath. Grafted on to that is the ‘main’ story, the one that the veteran terrorist tells his young companion, initially in prison, in the form of flashbacks, then during the run-up to the bank robbery. What the book reveals is both how the Italian left-wing extremist groups, born out of the widespread workers’ struggles of the 1970s, very quickly turned to violence and ended in gangsterism in the ’80s, and the extent to which that violence, perhaps because of its radical nature, was able to seduce our young hoodlum, and probably many other young Italians, to the point of binding him to his cellmate until death. When they are on the run, their shared love of violence inevitably leads to serious crime, into which the young hoodlum introduces his companion, then follows him, in a sort of mirror initiation novel. A classic path for an entire lost generation.
The narrative is raw, full of suspense, emotions, told with tremendous honesty. No caricatures, no stereotypes, the characters are all wonderfully alive. And the author has a definite, well-controlled sense of dramatic tension.
When I discovered that this is a debut novel by a very young Italian, who has been a refugee in France for the past few months, I naturally wanted to meet him to find out how much of this story was autobiographical, and how such a young man could have written something so accomplished.
We met in fairly conventional surroundings, near the publishing house, in the bar of a big Paris hotel with deep leather armchairs, coffee tables and a secluded atmosphere. The author arrived with an interpreter and the publisher’s publicist: they are keeping a close eye on their little prodigy. It soon turned out that we didn’t need the interpreter, since with a bit of effort we managed to understand one another. He is indeed very young, barely twenty-three, I’m told, but looks eighteen — a delicate figure, with the appearance of a teenage pop idol beneath a mop of black hair. He sits bolt upright, slightly rigid, self-conscious, in his blue jeans and white T-shirt. He rarely smiles and speaks very little. I could feel he was on the defensive, which is a very appealing admission of vulnerability. I tell him right away that I’m enchanted.
We get off to a rocky start. When I ask him how much of the book is autobiographical, he snaps back, ‘It’s a novel. That’s it.’ I press him a little, mentioning what I’ve read in the author biography provided by his publisher, plus my own research into his past life of crime, his spell in prison, his escape, the similarities between the episodes in his novel and recent events in Italy, and in which he himself was involved, directly or indirectly — that is for him to say. And lastly, I ask him about applying for political asylum in France, which he has apparently been given, or will be given shortly. That is certainly not an award for picking tourists’ pockets on the streets of Rome. If I want answers to those questions, he replies, I can talk to his lawyer, who is also the publisher’s lawyer.
So it’s back to talking about literature, nothing but literature. Very well. I get straight to the point. Given that he spent his youth in the streets and prisons of Rome, where did he learn to write in a language that is so simple, so effective and sometimes so moving? Was it in books, and if so, which ones? Which authors have influenced him? That earns me a wan smile.
In his family home, there were no books, so he didn’t read any, and still today, the sight of a well-stocked bookcase makes him feel anxious. He learned to write in prison, not in books. Learned to listen, first of all, he says, to listen to the political prisoners talking about their hopes, their exploits, their defeats. Learned also to love the language those men spoke, which was magnificent because it was resonant with passion and despair, and that is what made it absolutely fascinating. As a result of listening, he absorbed their way of telling a story. He thought about all those prisoners when he began to write. And it was easy. He insists, ‘The words came all by themselves.’ But why write? At this, Filippo Zuliani becomes animated, drops his aloof air. ‘Why? To allow those people an existence, a life.’ He hesitates, then continues, ‘And also to understand my own life. Maybe above all. Literature is life, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you often say in your articles?’