Sitting at a table in one corner of the mezzanine, Filippo begins signing with a trembling hand, not daring to look up from the flyleaves on which he scrawls his name. Adèle, sitting behind him, is chatting with a friend. Before him, he is aware of a wall of bodies all merged together; without looking up he takes the proffered books and asks the person’s name, signs, hands the book back and takes the next. This task absorbs him and gradually he relaxes. He is not conscious of any hostility in the atmosphere. He straightens up. He sees a moving mass, mainly women, and just in front of him, leaning slightly towards the table, clutching their books, two girls stand smiling at him. They are blonde and fresh, and he finds them beautiful. He feels flattered. One of them says: ‘Thank you for your book.’
He grows flustered. His shyness delights the reader, who adds: ‘You’re just like your characters.’
The other girl continues: ‘You write about the world of male violence with sympathetic characters who appeal to women like us.’
‘Yes, we want to hug them.’
‘You too, by the way.’
Giggles.
Filippo is at a loss, out of his depth. What are they talking about? His book? Impossible… He checks the title of the book in his hand. Escape. Oh yes they are, no question. On autopilot, he writes on the flyleaf, ‘Thank you for being so beautiful’, and signs. He watches them walk off, elbowing their way through the crowd, their books under their arms.
Adèle comes over to him, then whispers in his ear:
‘Chatting up the girls, are we?’ Filippo stutters. ‘Don’t panic, you’re not the first.’
While he tries to think of an answer, the throng swells even more. It is becoming a hand-to-hand battle with a seething mass of bodies. He is inundated, thrilled, exhausted. An hour later, the crowd ebbs away, leaving him feeling faintly nauseous.
When the bookshop closes, Adèle kisses him — a new experience — and sends him home in a taxi. A hot bath, then he lies down, closes his eyes and pictures the crowd, hears it again, with its disjointed words and snatches of conversation. His first physical contact with his readers. Disorienting. A whole mass of readers. Readers who look at him, but he cannot recognise himself in their eyes. He feels as if he is living a thousand fragmented, atomised existences, outside his control. But it is his book, his signature. No doubt about that. Beleaguered by the flood of sensations, he gives up trying to order them. I’ll think about it all later. And falls asleep.
By the end of May, Filippo Zuliani has become media savvy and is able to play the role of writer to perfection when faced with the press, readers, or booksellers. He has mastered every nuance, every inflection and become the darling of the Paris literary scene. A representative of the ‘dangerous’ classes, a ‘raw artist’ who’s been tamed, a handsome young man with brown eyes. But deep down, without ever talking to anyone about it, he knows it is a made-up part, a usurper’s role maybe, and doubt lurks inside him like a shadow. He is constantly anxious that his mind will go blank, or that he’ll perform badly and disappoint. It is hugely stressful, but he carries it off. And that almost imperceptible little hint of underlying anxiety only adds to his charm.
Escape makes it into the week’s top-ten bestseller list. It reaches tenth place in the first week, up to seventh the following week. The publisher is optimistic about the future — things have taken off fast, and should get even better. Filippo isn’t informed of the sales figures, Adèle doesn’t think it necessary, it might make their relations difficult if he gets big-headed. Better to wait till the trend is confirmed, and besides, he doesn’t seem bothered for the time being, he never asks how well the book is selling.
Each afternoon, after the round of press interviews, Filippo goes back to his studio flat in Neuilly. He changes his clothes, eats a sandwich, drinks a coffee, and fantasises about Cristina. Impossible to stop thinking about her. She fills his mind the minute he stops performing in front of his audience. He is tormented by his inability to penetrate her world and by his aching wish to erase his frantic flight from the Café Pouchkine. He dreams of finding someone to hold his hand and tell him what to do down to the last detail, as Adèle does in his life as a writer, so that he can rewind their disastrous encounter and give it a different outcome. But there are no candidates for the job. Invent a future with Cristina? His imagination fails him. He cannot even replay the scene that has begun to take shape, the two of them sitting at the same desk, working together on the same text, a paradise lost. He feels nothing but empty longing. Every day, he veers between desire and the fear of running into her in the downstairs lobby or the apartment entrance, but he never does. Maybe she is avoiding him. Holding his breath, he listens out for movements, for sounds from her apartment, but there are few signs of life on the other side of the wall.
While waiting for something to happen that will kickstart his life back into motion, he occasionally (when he has the time and before going on to La Défense) makes a detour via the nearby Bois de Boulogne where love can be bought. Without shame and almost without desire, a basic hygienic procedure. An impoverished sex life without illusions, not so different from his practice in Rome, when his little gang ran a dozen or so completely lost girls, supplying them with dope, passing them around among themselves, and using them sometimes as bait to attract lonely tourists.
Then, at 10 p.m., he begins his second life. Security guard at the Tour Albassur. The corridors and offices are empty of their ghosts now that the book is finished, and he and Antoine have got into the habit of playing endless games of draughts. Here he unwinds, breathes freely, de-stresses, purges his anxiety, his mind empty and calm. A sort of intermission, an in-between time of blessed relaxation. One day, perhaps, he might feel like writing again. He has no idea whether or not he will, and there is no rush. For the time being, he tries not to think about it.
CHAPTER SIX
10 June
La Repubblica publishes an opinion piece by Romano Sebastiani, one of the foremost public prosecutors of the Milan counter-terrorist section.
Two months ago to the day, our very dear friend Roberto Ruffili died. A renowned international constitutionalist, he was assassinated by the Red Brigades PCC, the notorious splinter group that emerged from the break-up of the murderous Red Brigades. It is clear that Italy is not finished with ‘red’ terrorism, and the tragic legacy of the Years of Lead. At this same moment the French literary establishment chooses to crown a young Italian writer, Filippo Zuliani and his novel Escape, with critical and commercial success. We might be delighted at the Paris intelligentsia’s sudden interest in Italian culture, if this book did not pose a serious moral and political problem. Let’s take a closer look.
With considerable skill, the novel recounts a tragic event: two men break out of jail together, a former Red Brigades leader and a young Roman hoodlum. The two men linked by a close ‘masculine friendship’, decide to make their living by robbing banks. Devilishly romantic … but you don’t become a bank robber overnight, and their first hold-up of a big Milan bank ends in disaster. The Red Brigades veteran is shot dead, and one of his accomplices assassinates a carabiniere and a security guard while making his getaway. A dubious tale, verging on a glorification of the criminals, but that is not the issue here. The novel’s plot depicts precisely, down to the last detail, Carlo Fedeli’s escape from his Rome prison in February 1987, and how the Red Brigades’ former head of logistics turned gangster. It also describes the heist, based on that of the Piemonte-Sardegna bank in Milan three weeks later, during which Fedeli was shot dead, as reconstructed in the police investigation. Only the names of the characters, the date and place of the robbery have been changed. The moral problem, as I was saying, is that this is a shameless commercial exploitation of a very recent, and still unsolved criminal case, since the accomplices remain unidentified. It demonstrates no consideration for the victims’ families, but there is worse to come.