The Fugitive

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Authors: Massimo Carlotto, Anthony Shugaar
Tags: Fiction, Literary
attempted suicide, you know that don’t you?” phase. Every bite of puff pastry is just another step closer to death. When confronted with a really stubborn case, the skinny guy, self-anointed dietician and psychiatrist, will quickly reveal his third specialty—cardiologist and internist. He will produce a list, worthy of a medical encyclopedia, of the forms of damage caused by triglicerides and cholesterol, and he will then proceed to a solemn description of the symptoms and course of various cardiovascular diseases. Culminating, of course, in death.
    The fat man who hears all this is frightened, of course. He thinks he can feel the first pains in his chest, he envisions himself in a wheelchair, stricken with a devastating paralysis and . . . he gets hungry! He can’t wait to get rid of this peevish party-pooper so that he can relax and chow down on a nice puff pastry. And if the fatty is also a smoker, the skinny guy will skip all the preliminaries and talk only about death, as if there were only minutes to go.
    In any case, my weight problem immediately became a subject of discussion and concern, and after a while everybody was bothering me about it. All the same, I could consider myself fortunate: I didn’t have any unresolved issues with the milkman. There was no question about the cause of my bulimia.
    I have had to defend myself against skinny folk for many long years now. With any means necessary. I have gone so far as to lie, to eat and smoke in secret. Sometimes, at night, when everyone else is asleep. I have had to stop frequenting people who had managed to extort the promise that I would go on a diet, “starting next Monday . . .”
    Unfortunately, my bulimia also tended to produce symptoms of gout, making me a fugitive who was both overweight and lame. Whenever that happened, I became a man on the run from my well-meaning friends as well. Gout is a disease that runs a slow and painful course; all I needed was somebody lecturing me about it.
    In Mexico City, I met another bulimic. He was a Guatemalan singer-songwriter. The military death squads had tortured and murdered his whole family. He no longer sang, but he carried his guitar with him everywhere he went. Some Mexican artists I knew had played me tapes of a few of his old concerts; I have to say, he was really good.
    I would run into him often at friends’ houses, sitting in a chair, his guitar resting on his knees, his hands slowly but systematically lifting food to his mouth. I would always sit next to him; together we looked like a pair of characters out of a Botero painting. People assumed that we were close friends, as they saw us talking in quiet undertones for hours at a time.
    With roughly the same passion as a pair of junkies remembering a trip taken years ago to the Golden Triangle, we would talk about food. We would recount to one another family lunches and dinners, the smells, the flavors, and the atmosphere from times when we had been happy.
    He died in 1990 in a forest in northern Guatemala, near the Mexican border. He died fighting. He had set aside his guitar and joined the ranks of the guerrillas who were defending the Indios from genocide.
    In Paris, the exile community had long ago grasped the scale of the psychic and physical devastation caused by exile, torture, and imprisonment. The struggle to keep from crossing over the razor thin barrier dividing psychological discomfort from full-blown pathology was a very common problem in their circles.
    The South American community in Paris, in particular, was ravaged by suicides and alcoholism. The intellectual class was able to fit into this alien society and, albeit with great difficulty, to overcome their traumas. But the Indios, with ancestral ties to their land, whether they were
mineros
or
campesinos
, experienced their state of exile as if they had been herded onto a reservation.
    The debate caught the interest of a great many people; an extensive and

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