The Fugitive (17 page)

Around the middle of February, just three months away from the deadline of May 13th, the slowness of the bureaucratic labyrinth forced me to make a reality check. Based on my own personal experience of seventeen years of dealing with the “pace” of justice, I felt certain that my request would never make it to the desk of the Minister of Justice in time, much less to the desk of the President of the Republic. The general political climate of Italy at that juncture was also less than promising, and I couldn't envision the Minister and the President finding the time to sit down and study such a complex case.

It was different now, admittedly. There had been an unprecedented mobilization of public opinion, and there could be no mistaking the fact that my case was unique. I thought the odds were a little better, but time was still against me. I thought things over carefully, and came to the conclusion that I could not change my stance. I would refuse to run away, and I would refuse to go back to prison.

Neither escape nor prison. What else was to be done?

I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier. I saw that once again nothing but an act of stark refusal could make it unmistakably clear that I would never, never accept “that judgment” and “that sentence,” handed down by “that system of justice.”

A justice made up of “ifs.” If the trial hadn't begun four days before the new code of criminal procedure came into effect, if the court hadn't been plagued by doubts, if the judges had been properly informed about the transitory provisions and their proper interpretation (they should have been; it was their duty to be), if the chief justice hadn't retired . . . if only all these things, then I wouldn't have been found guilty, I wouldn't have been sentenced to prison; I would have been acquitted and set free.

A prominent and respected magistrate of the Italian Republic said, in this connection, that this was a case of “jinxed justice.” He was probably right, but how can justice be jinxed?

And that wasn't all. Because the Chief Justice of the Appeals Court had retired, I had been subjected to two different trials at the same level of appeals. A unique case, never to be repeated—but doesn't it say in every courtroom in Italy that the law is equal for all?

And, again, is it acceptable or even conceivable that a trial that stretched on for fourteen full months, with the examination and cross-examination of witnesses and the careful sifting and investigation of expert analyses, counted for less than another trial that was over after a few hearings, and which consisted of a simple reading of the minutes and documents? There might be a technical explanation for it, but how does it square with the most elementary concept of justice?

Eight judges—two magistrates and six civilian members of the panel, roughly speaking, jurors—had read the court documents and handed down a judgment of guilty; five more judges—all magistrates—said that there were no legal defects in their verdict, and the case was closed, once and for all.

Dozens of jurists and many, many magistrates had looked at the same documents, and they had all concurred that I was innocent and that there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice. So where, then, was the certain proof of my guilt, in the face of such conflicting judgments? And that's leaving aside the mistaken expert witnesses, the blundered investigations, the missing evidence, the length of the preventive detention, the arbitrary nature of the special prison, and the illness caused by incarceration.

“Enough,” I thought to myself, “no more.” I decided that the time had come to take arms against the slings and arrows of an inhuman system of justice. The only tool left to me, the only form of rebellion against the enormity of the injustices being visited up me, was my own life. So if a pardon wasn't issued by May 13th, I would renounce that life.

I had never considered suicide before; in fact, my human and ideological belief system led me to consider it as a form of surrender. But it was the only option left open to me as a way of preserving the last shreds of my personal dignity, the only handle on my own life that justice had not been able to snatch away. I had no desire to end my life. But suicide, in that context, had the value of an act of war against my judges—magistrates and jurors of the Venice Appeals Court—whom I blamed as the chief villains behind everything that had happened to me.

“They behaved like a firing squad; let them be a firing squad then,” I said to myself. I resented them for finding me guilty, but especially for my absolute certainty that they were only superficially familiar with the documents of the case. I was devastated when I read their opinion and found an astonishing number of errors and inaccuracies. But the straw that broke the camel's back was in the last lines of the verdict. It was this phrase: “with this judgment of conviction, the Court wishes to make the ‘Carlotto case' a worthy episode in Italian judicial history.”

I had no other option. There were no more legal tools to challenge their truth. I needed to up the ante, and this time the bet was going to be my life.

In this perspective, I believed that a pardon, if it were granted before May 13th, would acquire the unmistakable stamp of an act of justice and humanity, arriving as it would in so timely and unusual a manner. Especially because the Venice Court of Appeals had expressed the opposite view. A pardon, then, was still within the realm of hope, and I clutched desperately at that elusive hope. Still, I had to have the tough-minded, clear-eyed discipline to face the likelihood of suicide.

And so I set off for another brisk hike through the landscape of madness, a trek that would last ninety days or so. In fact, from the point of view of everyday logic, the reasoning that had led me to such a radical, uncompromising decision absolutely shattered into a thousand pieces; but within the framework of the whole experience, it looked rigorous and unassailable.

The thing that, more than anything else, convinced me to overcome my hesitations and set busily about organizing the “event” was the mental picture of me emerging from prison at the ripe old age of forty-eight and saying to myself: “All right then, time to rebuild my life.”

Convinced that suicide can't be improvised (the world is teeming with pitiful dilettantes who annoy their fellow humans with tiresome explanations of why they failed in the attempt), I took pen and paper and set down a list of problems to be resolved.

Problem number one: the means. Of course, I wanted it to be quick and painless. Leafing through books of forensic medicine and asking, with a totally apathetic, clueless air, extremely specific questions of the people I considered to be experts in the field, I soon came to prefer a massive and carefully blended dose of drugs. I soon had all the fixings.

I divided them into two boxes. One box contained the drugs that would cause my death. I would take them first, and so, to avoid any confusion, I marked the box with a large number “1.” The other box, it goes without saying, was marked with a number “2”—written in indelible marker—and it contained the drugs I would gulp down immediately after the lethal dose. They would render me unconscious just long enough for the first dose of drugs to do its work. It seemed like a lot of pills, and I was concerned that I might not manage to get them all down. I certainly didn't want my suicide attempt to fail because I had overlooked any minor details, so I went to a candy store and bought a bag of sweets that were about the same shape and size as the pills I would be taking. I ran a couple of test sessions and determined that I would have no problem swallowing that number of capsules, as long as I took care to avoid washing them down with a carbonated beverage.

Which brought me to the second problem: the place. It took more time and effort to solve that one than I expected. The most important determining factor was this: I didn't want it to happen in the jurisdiction of the Padua Coroner's Office. To put it in stark terms, the last thing that I wanted was to be brought face to face, especially when I was dead, with the physical remains and other evidence that had vanished so mysteriously during the trial. It would have been too much for me.

Of course, since I didn't want to cause my relatives and my friends any extra pain, I ruled out their houses from the very start. I also excluded hotels and public places in general, out of a sense of etiquette and good taste. There were a few places that met all my requirements, but which just might lead the usual boneheads into a series of elaborate theories in search of some deep hidden meaning. After time-consuming scouting expeditions, I finally found a lovely place in the mountains that was perfect. I traveled the route several times, and explored and identified a few alternative routes, just in case the road was blocked that day by a wreck or a repair crew.

Then I went on to plan the trickiest part: making sure that the timing of the “event” and its subsequent discovery would match up with the timing of the mass media. I didn't want the news of my suicide to get out before the press got its hands on the forty-page document that I had written to explain the reasons for my act.

This forced me to move my planning ahead by two days, because I didn't feel that I could rely on the reckoning of dates by the person issuing the arrest warrant. The way I figured it, if I began my count on the 14th, the one year would be up on May 13th; but the court officer might begin on May 13th, which would mean that the year expired on the 12th. And so, in order to make sure that the news of the warrant for my arrest and the reports of my demise would coincide, I decided to add a margin of safety.

Since, as the saying goes, hope springs eternal, I'll admit that I wasn't happy about moving up the date; I knew that fate liked to bedevil me, and I was worried that I might kill myself on the 11th and then find myself, a stupefied invisible spirit (I couldn't get the angels from
Wings of Desire
out of my head), standing beside the President of the Republic on the 12th as he signed the request for a pardon, unable to tell him that he really needn't bother.

To make things worse, I had plenty of experience with the justice system's grasp of basic arithmetic; I wasn't wrong to worry. Here's just one example (I could think of plenty more): my height. According to the city hall of records, according to me, and according to the many physicians who have measured my height, I am 186 centimeters tall. The justice system, on the other hand, says I am 182 centimeters tall, and there was nothing that I could do to persuade them otherwise. Once, a group of six experts measured me in every way imaginable, and when I realized that they had me down as four centimeters shorter than my actual height, I pointed out their error. They just looked at me with an incinerating glare. And ever since that day, if someone asks me how tall I am, I have to give a two-part answer: “Well, according to the hall of records, six foot one, but forensically, five eleven and a half because, you see . . . ”

To come back to the media, what mattered most to me was to ensure that, by the time the news of my death was reported, the press had all had time to read my forty-page document, so that nobody would be left in doubt or be able to put a self-interested spin on my suicide.

I wished I could have made it shorter but, aside from the fact that I've never been good at being brief, it really wasn't easy to condense more than seventeen years of events, along with accompanying explanations and legal arguments. Moreover, I wanted to take full advantage of my impending status as a newsworthy dead person to write all the things that I'd never been able to say while alive, for fear of ruining my chances in court. And it had taken a few pages.

When a person decides to commit suicide, he should start by calculating exactly how many personal letters he'll have to write in order to give an explanation of his “act of tragic desperation.” If I had realized I would have to write one hundred seventy-three letters, I would probably have lost heart and just decided to make it look like an accident. But by now, the planning had gone too far.

Still, I have a lot of friends, and I wanted to bid a proper farewell to each of them. It was quite a task, especially during a period of feverish activity on behalf of the pardon. It forced me into a sort of clandestine world, because I had to write in secret and then skillfully conceal the letters in the oddest places imaginable.

There was another, not inconsequential aspect of this period: I was already basically dying anyway because of how far out of whack my metabolism had gone; all of my readings were off the charts. I was constantly on the brink of a stroke or a myocardial infarction, and angina attacks were daily occurrences. My bodily organs were all grinding to a halt, day by day. I could distinctly feel the sensation of my organs losing touch with one another. It was a weird feeling, as if I had suddenly grown old. An infinite weariness was bringing me to my knees and even the smallest task took an enormous effort.

One evening, an attack that persisted despite the Diltrate that I gulped down threw me into a state of panic; I hurried to the hospital, afraid I was about to die. I couldn't let that happen, because I wasn't ready yet, and it was the wrong day.

Back at home the next day, my mother looked oddly at me and said: “Son, when you were in the hospital, you said a series of things I didn't understand. You talked about an ‘event,' a document for the press that you needed to finish, eighty letters left to write. What were you talking about?”

Here was a whole new problem: I might simply drop dead before the 11th, and there was nothing I could do about that. But according to my doctors, the brain damage caused by a stroke could result in paralysis. I could wind up in a wheelchair or even worse, lying in a bed somewhere, in a coma, my tongue dangling out of the side of my mouth.

The idea of facing trial in a wheelchair, glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, was the most frightening thing I could imagine. I decided to speak to an ex-con with whom for a long time I had shared a 120-square foot cell, toilet and sink included. He was a good friend, a tough guy who had seen it all. I went to see him and I said: “You need to swear that if I ever have a stroke and turn into a zombie and can't even wipe my ass, you'll help me kill myself.” He looked at me with the detached interest you might expect from an entomologist: “Let me see if I understand you here. You're asking me to swear that, if you have a stroke and go into a coma or whatever, I'll ice you. Have you lost it?”