The Fugitive (6 page)

The main risk was an encounter with a gang of
panchitos
, young men from the worst neighborhoods and the
ciudades perdidas
, favelas that were themselves the size of an ordinary city, and which did not officially exist. With no running water, no sewer systems, no electricity, they are home to the poor who have escaped from the countryside. Every so often, the
panchitos
chose a wealthy neighborhood to raid. They'd hijack a few city buses and arrive two hundred strong, operating with military precision; while one group of the attackers provided cover, engaging in fierce firefights with the police, the rest of the
panchitos
looted stores.

I had only one minor brush with the
panchitos
. I was invited to a party at the home of a noted Communist labor organizer, to celebrate his sister's
quinceanera
(the most important celebration for a Mexican woman, because it constitutes her entry into society). The labor organizer lived near the airport, in a quarter that might have been described as “working-class” back in the sixties but that unemployment in the decades since then had transformed into something indescribable. I had gone to the party with friends, in a car, because if I had tried to go alone, by bus, I would certainly have been beaten up. The party was held on the large, flat roof of the house; it was lovely and cheerful. There were professional, choreographed dancers celebrating with the guest of honor.

Midway through the party, I ran out of cigarettes, and I asked where I could go to buy a pack in the neighborhood. There was immediately a palpable sense of tension in the air, and the other guests all began pressing their own packs of cigarettes upon me. The sight of their dignified poverty made it impossible for me to accept their gifts, and I headed for the door, ready to find a smoke shop myself; they blocked my way, in an openly friendly manner. As I usually do, I had completely misconstrued the situation; I assumed that they had taken offense at my refusal. But considering the rate I was smoking, I was afraid that I would finish off everyone else's supply. At that point, the labor organizer ordered a group of people to accompany me to buy cigarettes. There were at least fifteen guys, and they formed a moving barrier around me as we walked. I still hadn't figured out the situation, but as soon as I entered the first bar, I began to curse my weakness for cigarettes. The bar was teeming with
panchitos
, and as soon as they laid eyes on me they started negotiating with my friends to determine how much money the gringo would need to pay in order to be left in peace. The two groups faced off in the proverbial Mexican standoff, with yours truly dying of terror between them. I recovered my senses after a while, and, waving a handful of money over my head, I began to shout that it was a day of celebration and that I was happy, indeed, delighted, to pay for a round for everyone in the bar. That defused the situation, but that pack of cigarettes cost me a fortune. I was invited to other parties in that same neighborhood, but I always had unavoidable prior obligations.

 

In short, it was exhausting and draining to follow security rules in that deranged and bloodthirsty megalopolis. I wasn't sure how to behave in the various situations I encountered and I could never relax. I was constantly tense and wary. It was probably because I was so anxious to extricate myself from this state of incessant anxiety that I fell, plump and unsuspecting prey, into the trap of Melvin Cervera Sanchez. His courteous manners and the possibility of being reborn with a new identity made me overlook the obvious rule that when someone insists on seeing a fugitive home, no matter how inconvenient the kindly gesture, his actions are certainly not prompted by the milk of human kindness.

 

And yet they saw him

skating in the moonlight

singing and laughing

without making a sound

 

 

 

 

Even though the Vatican has never acknowledged his existence, I feel certain that there is a patron saint of accidental fugitives. He's not as efficient as his patron-saintly colleagues because, like those he protects, he is forced to operate undercover. He does what he can. More than once, I have been the beneficiary of his benevolence.

 

One morning, in Paris, I woke up with a terrible toothache. I absolutely needed to see a dentist, and a Chilean friend let me borrow his health insurance card. I went to a public health clinic and, after filling out a number of forms, and patiently waiting my turn, I finally sat down in the dentist's chair.

I have never really thought much of dentists, but that day I loved every one of them, even the dentists that had tortured me when I was a child. Fear of the dentist's drill is an inherited trait in my family, and our dentist knows it perfectly well. Whenever one of us comes into his office, he locks the door and pockets the key to ensure that we can't escape. The wiliest patient is my brother, who has achieved the inconceivable in his efforts to avoid having a filling. Now, as soon as he enters the dentist's office, they take away his car keys and impound his shoes.

The dentist in whose hands I was placing my pain and my mouth was about thirty-five; he had a little blond goatee tacked onto an impertinent French face. He began to explore my oral cavity. Even though I kept trying to indicate the tooth that was causing the pain, mumbling explanations and pointing with my index finger, he was interested in something else in there.

“Oh, no,” I thought to myself, “an idiot dentist.”

But that wasn't it. In fact, he was the dentist-nephew of Sherlock Holmes.

“Are you Chilean?” he asked, as he continued to root around with his probe.

“Of course,” I managed to say.

“And you had these fillings done in Chile?”

“Right.”

“How long have you lived in France?”

I did my best to remember the issue date of my friend's health insurance card: “Let's see . . . um, yes, three years,” I answered, pushing his hand away from my mouth.

“And have you ever lived in other countries?”

“No but, excuse me, why are you asking all these questions?” I ventured to query, in an attempt to understand what he was driving at.

“Because you aren't Chilean. Your health card is a fake or else it belongs to someone else; by now we know all the tricks that you immigrants use to exploit our health system.”

This wasn't going well, and I played one of the few cards left me—indignation:

“Why how dare you? This is a perfectly valid health card. Of all things to have happen. I'm suffering from a toothache, I go to see a dentist, and instead of treating my toothache he tries to tell me I'm not Chilean. How on earth could you say such a thing?”

“These fillings were done in Europe, my dear sir, and many years ago, when you were just a child. Are you Spanish? Italian?”

“I am Chilean, how many times do I have to tell you?”

“Don't insult my intelligence,” he shouted. “You're Chilean? Then tell me the word that you normally use to describe tartar in Chile.”

“I can't remember,” I mumbled.

“Then I'm calling the police.”

I stared into the abyss. Faced with the apocalyptic prospect of winding up in prison with a toothache, I made a last-ditch attempt: “Please, don't call the police. You're right, I'm not Chilean, I'm Italian. But I'm not an immigrant, the police are looking for me. I'm facing a jail term of fifteen years if they send me back; I've already spent three years in prison. And I'm innocent. I've been charged with a crime I never committed; the whole story is a mess that I won't even bore you with. If you call the police, you'd be sending an innocent man to prison, believe me.”

My heart was in my throat. All I could do was wait to see what he would do next, as I lay, tilted back in the dentist's chair, my neck wrapped in a white towel, like a gag. I stared at him in despair. Suddenly I saw a light all around him. My eyes widened in astonishment. Yes, I had seen it. Just for a second.

The saint without a name had touched his heart, and suddenly he was kindly and gentle. After administering anesthesia, he picked up the drill and used it with a delicate, almost tender touch. I felt no pain.

“You'll need to come back next week to have the medication removed; make an appointment with my nurse,” he said, turning his back to me as he put his instruments away. I waited in the room for a while, trying to understand if it was a con, and I finally decided that it wasn't.

“Thanks for everything, doctor.” I went back, despite the advice of all my friends, who told me in every language spoken on earth that I was crazy, and that if I went, the police would be waiting to greet me. I had an instinct that the dentist would not betray me. And I was right: nothing bad happened. In fact, he cleaned my teeth. As I was about to leave, I gave in to my curiosity:

“Listen, doctor, could you tell me something? Would any dentist have noticed?”

“No. I worked in Chile for a couple of years.”

I started laughing:

“You mean to say that out of the hundreds of dentists in Paris, I ran into the only one that could cause me problems?”

He was laughing too. “That's probably right.”

“So long, doctor. You're a good man.”

 

Another time, our patron saint intervened with a taxi driver. I was with Alessandra and we had stayed out late at a party. The Metro had stopped running some time earlier and we lived on the other side of the city. As a basic security precaution, we walked about ten blocks away from our friend's house before starting to look around for a taxi. After a while we found one. I can't remember what the driver looked like, because I couldn't take my eyes off the German shepherd sitting next to the driver and eyeing us in an unsettling way.

Taxi drivers in Paris are convinced that every one of their fares is a potential mugger, and they've outfitted themselves accordingly. They travel with ferocious dogs; they carry electric cattle prods or cans of pepper spray. Urban legends tell of rear seats that trap the passenger and other diabolical gadgets. I have always been afraid of taxi drivers and, aware of the fact that I am not exactly the most fortunate person on earth—in fact, I am particularly prone to the worst kinds of trouble—I have always avoided doing anything that might make my driver suspicious. Such as putting my hand into my pocket a little too quickly, or looking around nervously.

Despite the late hour, we ran into a line of cars leading into an underpass along the Seine. A few hundred yards ahead, I could see the unmistakable lights of a police car, and I assumed that there had been an accident.

Wrong. It was one of those really nasty roadblocks, where they stopped everyone and checked everyone's documents very carefully. I might look like Gustave, but all I had in my pocket was my Italian identity card. I never would have carried it off. The minutes ticked by, and slowly but inexorably we drew closer to the police barriers blocking the road. I didn't know what to do; getting out of the cab and running was not an option. They would have caught me immediately.

I was just resigning myself to the worst when Alessandra burst into tears, weeping bitterly, which in turn caused the dog to bark and attracted the taxi driver's attention. An odd conversation sprang up between them. She in Italian, he in French, the dog in German Shepherd.

And that was when the saint placed his hand on the taxi driver's conscience and made a charitable man of him. He stepped out of the taxi and began to shout at the police: “This city is a disaster, we can never work in peace. The traffic jams during the day aren't enough already. Now the police want to block traffic at night too. I've got a family to feed. If I have to sit here all night like some jerk-off, how am I supposed to work?” His outburst caught everybody's attention. When I saw a police officer walking aggressively toward us, I sank back into my seat, doing my best to blend into the upholstery.

“What is all this noise?” demanded the
flic
. “There is a police operation going on, and citizens need to cooperate.” He clearly didn't know much about Parisian taxi drivers, if he thought he could appeal to their sense of civic duty. In fact, the cab driver began to show off all his inborn talent at quarreling, and just five minutes later the police officer was throwing in the towel: “You, down there!” he yelled to the policemen manning the traffic barrier. “Move that out of the way before I arrest this pain-in-the-ass.”

We drove through the checkpoint under the astonished eyes of all the other drivers. The cabbie roared through the streets like a madman until we reached the destination I'd given him, grunted his refusal of the generous tip I offered, and pulled out, tires squealing, cursing Italians and the police with equal venom.

*

When I lived in Pigalle, at my Peruvian friend's house, I used to avoid the Metro station because there was a little group of intelligent-looking undercover policemen there. I would enter and leave the neighborhood by making my way through a network of narrow lanes and winding streets lined with seedy bars and night clubs. At every corner, there were girls of all races and colors, day and night.

Everyone who lives in Pigalle knows everybody else. After awhile I became a familiar face, and no one tried to sell me cheap thrills anymore. The girls called out greetings to me whenever they saw me, and it was a source of some embarrassment. I always felt a little vulnerable and exposed, because the profession they practice endows them with a special gift for seeing through people.

One evening two pimps decided that the best thing to do with their time was to shoot one another in a bar. The one with the slow draw and the unsteady aim wound up dead on the floor, side-by-side with a chance victim, a customer who'd picked the wrong bar that night. The other pimp got away but the police were sure that he was still in the neighborhood and began a full-fledged sweep.