Free The Fugitive by Massimo Carlotto, Anthony Shugaar Page B

articulated medical and human support network was created for those who fell ill, and I turned to that network more than once. Each community had cases of its own, but everyone knew about them through a sort of transverse jungle telegraph that served as a sort of medical update. One of the best known cases was that of my friend Lolo.
    Lolo was Chilean. His real name was Jorge. Jorge Saball Astaburuaga. The son of Catalonian anarchists who fled Spain after Franco’s victory, he had grown up in the Chilean left wing, working as an activist in the ranks of the United Popular Action Movement (Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario—MAPU). He was clear-eyed and ironic, free of ideological hobgoblins, probably because of the rich mix of libertarian blood flowing in his veins.
    The day of the anti-Allende coup, September 11, 1973, his father pulled an old German pistol out of a trunk—a relic of the Spanish Civil War—and handed it to him, urging him to escape. He was eighteen years old. There were road blocks everywhere in Santiago. Lolo and a friend of his, a policeman who had remained loyal to Allende, decided to take their fate into their own hands when they found themselves looking down yet another road with a checkpoint. They were separated in the firefight. Lolo made it to Paris still certain that his friend had died in the exchange of fire. He was wrong: his comrade had managed to survive and had gone into exile in Rome. For years, they mourned one another reciprocally, until they met again during a conference of Chilean exiles in Frankfurt.
    In the meantime, Lolo had already contracted cancer. The horrors of the Pinochet regime lived on in his body in the form of a tumor that was gradually eating him alive. Chilean exiles all over Europe knew about Lolo and his cancer. He had become a symbol of their suffering. And of their resistance. It seemed as if he had no purpose in life other than politics, enjoying the beauty of music, his relationship with his partner in life, Vicky, and his friendships. I was one of those friends. He protected me and coddled me, between operations and cycles of chemotherapy. He taught me the secret of self-deprecating humor as a way of warding off the brutality of life, and he taught me to love music. He always used to tell me that I was a young barbarian. And he was certainly right about that. In fact, my musical appreciation was limited to songs I’d learned in the Boy Scouts or in the protest movement. I would go to see him, and he would have me listen to one record after another, leading me by the hand through the world of great music.
    He was the last person I saw before leaving Paris. He arrived late and out of breath, just in time to give me the last cassette he had made for me. I never saw him again. After I returned to Italy, Lolo was one of the founders and one of the most active members of the “Comité International Justice pour Massimo Carlotto.”
    In that period, the first cracks in the wall of the Pinochet dictatorship were allowing many exiles to return to Chile. Lolo was one of those who could have gone home immediately. But he stayed in Paris for a long time to work for the Comité. When he left, it was already too late. He only had time to make it back to Chile and realize that the cancer had unleashed its final, victorious offensive.
    Checho, a close friend to both of us, kept me posted on his lingering agony; one day he told me that he would soon slip into a coma and that this was my last chance to to bid him farewell. I called him on the phone, but when I heard his voice, distant and a little remote, I could think of nothing to say but banalities. Afterwards, I wept with shame at having failed to express to him what I truly felt.
    He died in slow motion. Vicky, Checho, and other comrades stayed with him until the end, for every minute of his death throes. They held his hand; he would squeeze their fingers from time to time to show that he was