Folio 96
Good, so the decision has been taken – I am to leave even before we know the results of the voting. Pointless risking further delay. My exit route has been arranged by sea, assuming that the weather doesn’t turn bad. So in the course of the day we need to check out a land route as well. Splendid friends, they take on this task immediately. Also, as regards organizing an easy and safe return in the (impossible?) event that things turn out all right in Parliament, everything has been arranged. It is evening. I’ve had a hellish day. Paola is in a state of total nervousness. The children are very sweet and strong and decisive. I see Maryse and Christian, and many other brothers and sisters. I see Giuliano S., in fact I’ve just seen him off. It’s the middle of the night. We talk of Spinoza and communism – a maximum of tension, but also a very strong sense of the values of life and liberty. Communism – the necessity of resuming the struggle. And then the timings of the struggle, unavoidably tied to, and necessary to be detached from, those of the institution. The dilemma, the mystery of this antagonistic temporality. It is a wound that begins to open in my consciousness – and the pain is strong. But so is my critical ability. This house – maybe I shall not see it again – I never particularly loved it, except from prison, when Paola and the children came to live here. Now even the dog is gone – it was always present in the photos they used to send me. And the trees of Piazza Vetra, which came in through the windows and spread over the terrace, seem to have dried up. They’re calling me. I have to leave. It is hard. Will I have to start a new life? Caught in this necessity I find myself – for the first time since my release from prison – hoping that the vote in Parliament will turn out in my favour. And that this horrible separation from too many things that I love will not be definitive. The trees of Piazza Vetra are not dry now, but laden with night-time dew. They’re calling me, I’m leaving. I’ll have to change cars a couple of times, to make sure that I’m not being followed. What a business. Then the goodbye, which may or may not turn out to be definitive. Goodbye everyone. They’re calling me … (Milan – 17 September)
Folio 97
I am in Rome, in a small apartment in the suburbs. I travelled down last night in a state of extreme calm – sleeping in the car for a couple of hours, in the light of a Tuscan dawn. A strange calmness of my heart and in my veins. Maybe I am getting old. Minimal excitement. I am not representing the future to myself. It is flattened on the present instant. I’m imagining nothing. This morning they had me doing a very fast run-around on a motorbike – to be absolutely sure that we’d shaken off anybody who could have been trailing us. Is this a foretaste of what life is going to be like for me in the future? In front of me I have one of the books in this apartment, a copy of Lucretius. Avia Pieridum peragro loca, nullius ante / trita solo. Iuvat integros accedere fontis / atque haurire, iuvat novos decerpere flores. I snooze for a bit, waiting for the friends to come. The word arrives: the comrades are waiting for me in a boat at Punta Ala. So it’s all working out. The weather is excellent and the sea is good. (Rome – 18 September)
Folio 98
Monday morning. Somewhere near Punta Ala. A pleasant little house. Friends of friends are putting me up. Everything is very simple and natural. I read the papers while I wait. In La Repubblica, Arbasino rants against me. Insults, pure and simple. This rosy Spadolinian is so vain that I cannot prevent a feeling of revulsion. I remember him dancing with Letizia’s tutu. Firpo writes in La Stampa, attacking my La forma stato and Il dominio e il sabotaggio. Describes it as oppositional thinking which finds no possibilities of mediation – because the thinking in them is so maniacal, etc. All of them weighing in with their two pennyworth. However, unlike Arbasino, he is against the idea of my re-arrest. In this very brief stopover I run through the problems one last time. It seems to me that my leaving is necessary, accepting all the risks involved in the decision. This is not only a generic choice of liberty – it is also the choice of a particular kind of freedom, which escape can construct. Maintaining the symbolic value of liberation. Certainly the dialectic I am living is without mediation. But at this point it is the crisis of capitalism and the degeneration of its state that are devoid of mediation. Maybe the only problem is how to lessen the values of death that this negative exit implies – not out of a dialectical moment but out of an entire historical episode. It is not by denying the nature of the crisis and its horizons that we shall succeed in bringing about any kind of future at all. I have lived the experience of the Palace. I have seen at first hand its irreducible perversity and the impossibility of opening, within its space, any discourse which is other than tactical. Certainly tactics does not mean simply political cunning, and many discussions of political solutions have been powerfully posed within a tactics – à la Machiavelli, or rather à la Baltazar Garcian. But tactics in itself does not suffice. Here we have a world that has become separated. A revolution has already taken place. This particular power is wallowing in perversion. Is it the case that, with my exit from Italy, I am perhaps giving value to an objective scenario and, when all is said and done, to those same unjust accusations that are being levelled against me? No. Rather I am revealing and confirming a truth. Inasmuch as they don’t want to leave me in Italy, to fight my battle for the justice to which I have a right, they are saying not only that every strategy of liberation must be repressed, but that every tactic of liberty is burned out. Soon they will have terrorism on their backs again, and these signori of the Palace will each come to feel the terrible precariousness of their own lives. Why should they be so stupid as not to negotiate peacefully over their own euthanasia? This was what I was offering them; and it is something preferable to the slow revelation of functions which by now are only destructive and degrading. They have not seen fit to rise to my suggestion. So, this morning, in the midst of these merry discourses – the pitiful obscenity of Arbasino and the funereal incomprehension of Firpo – I wait. It is a long wait. The weather is beautiful, and from here the sea seems very calm. My internal weather is also excellent. (Punta Ala – 19 September)
4
Freedom
19 September to 30 November 1983: Folios 99–135
Folio 99
So everything began yesterday, at about half past one in the afternoon. Two friends came, very happy, to collect me from the comrade’s house where I was staying.
I went down to the port with them, and then boarded the boat. Worried that someone might recognize me. On the boat we waited for half an hour, then the skippers arrived and we set off. A splendid sea. A calm crossing. The sun shining, and then a full moon. The sharp profile of Elba, then the deserted profile of Pianosa. The happiness of love and the formidable complexity of the unexpected. With a bit of luck (fingers crossed!) I am on my way to freedom. Goodbye semi-liberty, hello freedom. Last night I slept happily in Corsica. This morning, with a crazy driver in a very fast taxi, we raced down to Île Rousse – and then the hydrofoil to Nice. I’m on board now, and the sea is still flat. I get the feeling that freedom is beginning. I don’t know – or I pretend not to know – what it means. It must be a fine thing. In my body I have an immense happiness. Here are spaces of liberty, of joy, of alternatives. In addition to this short and pungent time of the experience of freedom, there is space and broadness of horizons, spaces capable of being defined and circumscribed the same way you would describe the alternative time. (But I don’t know – in front of Pianosa, at the point where Italian territorial waters come to an end, there time stopped and it seemed that the boat was immobile, that we were not going to be able to get past that last obstacle.) Next to me, as I write, some children are playing with little toy lorries – they’re having fun embarking them onto tiny ferryboats. They believe in their make-believe. The youngest one is towing a little train of overloaded ferryboats, taking care that they don’t tip over. The children are transforming reality into illusion. I, on the other hand, am already living an illusion which is reality.
I pinch myself. No, I am not dreaming
. I am happy for the freshness of my attentiveness to the real. My voyage towards freedom continues. Our train of hope rattles along. What an effort – but at the same time we can increase the speed of our hope and raise our sights enormously. Aiming at freedom and happiness. Meanwhile, in Parliament, the debate continues. I listen on the radio. Really incredible how distant I am from all that. This ship and that sea of yesterday have opened a deep caesura in my life and have brought hope seeping into my tiredness.
Yesterday evening I was watching with the soul of a Renzo Tramaglino as the coast of Tuscany and the profile of the islands went by. A new life is beginning, heightened by the joy of escape. Time presents itself to me as liberty. For sure, there is a huge task awaiting me and a terrible amount of work to be done. But my consciousness is now illuminated by the sun of this Mediterranean September. Why did I not have equally positive and powerful emotions when I came out of prison? On that night too there was a full moon. Why? Why is it that this experience of yesterday and today fills me with such happy eagerness for projects? Why do I finally feel myself to be a whole person? Perhaps because when I came out of prison it was an event overfilled with the past, whereas this is an experience of the future. That must be it. It is a choice which is beginning to be concrete and operative. There are ontological differences between the two situations – I am living a humour of liberty and the warmth of hope. Escape means rebuilding a free body. A renaissance. I experience the moving mass of the ship and the quiet throb of its engines as spatial–temporal signs of a future which is approaching. I have an incredible enthusiasm inside me. I exchange smiles with the comrades who are accompanying me, intense smiles, of great freshness and love. I feel again the spray of the ship in my face – and once again a sunset, this time behind the mountains of Corsica, and the appearance of the first lights in the night. Right then, the skipper brought me hot chocolate: it’s been at least thirty years since I last drank hot chocolate. I experience my tiredness with the soul of a teenager and am looking beyond the edges of life. Once again I hear, with joy, people’s encouragements that I escape, extract myself from the perversion of Italic justice. I am living an illusion which is real – it does not have many differences with reality. I am fascinated with freedom. (Punta Ala/Nice – 19–20 September)
Folio 100
Yesterday I was in Aix, staying at Morgan’s. On the radio I heard the result of the vote on the deferral of my imprisonment. The unbelievable has happened. On the proposition put forward by the socialists and communists there were 293 votes in favour, 300 against. The radicals did not vote. If they had voted, I would now be able to go back to Italy. A crazy situation. I listened to three radio news programmes in a row – I could not believe it.
This morning, despite the abstention of the socialists and communists, there were seventy-five votes against my arrest. Between abstentions and votes against my arrest, the total number is favourable to me. A broad majority, in short. Yesterday, after the vote, it seems that somebody spat in the face of Marco P. They did well.
What scum, that Marco. What a vile mystifier of the popular will! How dare he assume the right to decide against my freedom? How dare he, with his short-sighted party-political interests, come out against the desires of so many people to see me free? Cowardice – a stab in the back. So three cheers for desertion, and down with Parliament! Long live my escape. I’m in another world now. Tonight is the night of the autumn equinox – there ought to be portents. They are happening in my conscience. Not even the drab realities of Italic politicking can spoil my sense of serenity. Today we left Aix, after my long conversation with Morgan and the joy of seeing the life he has built for himself there. We set off for Paris. A big car, a long journey, and all the most beautiful skies of France open to my frenetic attention. I am browsing through Heidegger – Gelassenheit – serenity? – I hate his permanent, fabulous ability to manipulate the truth – but he has great strength when, from within being, he counterposes the various figures of existence. I too live his Offenheit für das Geheimnis – this sense, not of mystery but of discovery. This evening, a long discussion with some very dear friends in Paris. They have started immediately preparing a document to legalize my situation in France and to get me granted asylum. There will be difficulties, for sure, but they have good hopes of overcoming them. I am staying in an apartment in Place Monge – in the Latin Quarter, a place I have known for twenty years. I feel good here. I feel at home. Then I phone Italy. Long calls, to argue, already this evening, with certain unfaithful friends. Anyway, they tell me that there is a determined drive under way to destroy my political image. This job has been left to the pentiti – it seems that Barbone and Coniglio have already started. Pentiti sounding off about my escape. How much longer do I have to put up with the moralistic invective of the likes of Fioroni, the murderer? I am expecting the worst, but I no longer care. I am calmer than I have been for very many years. I think of the comrades with the greatest of affection. Thoughtfully I summon up their faces, one by one. Equinox: mystery and discovery divide the night between them. And remembrance and hope. I shall need to start work again, immediately, and continue in my newfound freedom the battle that has been started. And yet, even in the quiet of this night, I find myself unable to lay to rest my anger at what has happened in Parliament. Every now and then I get up from the table where I sit writing and curse loudly. The friends chatting sleepily in the next room smile at me sympathetically. They are foreigners who cannot understand what a tragic overturning of the real happens when you have to deal with the vanity and cowardice of Italian politicians. They don’t understand the grinding lack of civilization – for them this is all, in some sense, comical. As for me and the excited state in which they see me, perhaps they think that this will pass? The first question they put to me to me was: ‘And what are you going to do now?’ I replied cautiously that I’d have to think about that. They replied: ‘It seems to us that there’s not much to think about – you can’t return to that world of mad people.’ They are probably right. But I have to wait and see. My life is not only my own, and my present freedom is the fruit of a collective work. We shall see. (Aix/Paris – 20–21 September)
Folio 101
A day of prison today. We are waiting for news from the government. So far the only news to arrive has been advice to proceed with caution. Don’t make waves! Don’t move, don’t make a fuss, don’t publicize your presence here. All of a sudden, the right of asylum seems to bring with it an obligation of passivity: control on their side and silence on my side. Is the République maybe a remnant of the past? Certainly – but why is it that this remnant lacks the powers to defend liberty, immediately and with vigour? Anyway, I am waiting with caution. I read the newspapers of the last few days, with the description of what has been happening in Parliament. It must really have been a major fuss. What strikes me most is the quantity of ambiguity in the conduct of all the politicians – from the mealy-mouthed ambiguity of Marco P. and his media-directed opportunism to the cynical ambiguity of the communists. It is beyond doubt, as the newspapers have said after examining the voting figures, that the communists did not apply the party whip. In fact this is exactly what must have happened: from non-left sectors there must have come a lot more votes in favour of my freedom than was expected – in any case, they outnumber the ones from members of the PCI who voted against me. It is probable that Pannella did not understand this; and, because of his short-sighted stupidity, he ended up being the decisive element in my re-incarceration. But, whether this was cynicism or stupidity, we can no longer rely on him – if it was stupidity, it’s even worse than if it was cynicism. As for the newspapers, they really don’t know what to say. They must be saying to themselves: ‘OK, we need to be against Negri, but this time the operation to put him back behind bars seems a bit too dirty.’ So they are taking their time. Their attacks are not particularly hard-hitting. But I ask myself in exasperation, is it possible to continue having a relationship with that world? Is it maybe the
case that, during the period when I was out of prison and in Parliament, I made such mistakes as to make possible this reproduction of persecution, be it even among all this ambiguity and filth? I don’t think so. Actually, at this moment I am unable to fix a terrain of self-criticism which is sufficiently articulated – maybe I have made mistakes, but those mistakes were contained and integrated along a firm line – that of not selling myself to anybody, of preserving my integrity and of keeping intact my capacity for struggle and choice. Transparency instead of ambiguity. A powerful transparency. Even if only from this point of view, I feel that I have held my ground. Succeeding, perhaps, in dealing with some of the problems that the antagonism of the media has thrown up. In other words, despite everything, I have succeeded in upholding the figure of the immediacy of liberty, of the significance of escape, against the flattening and erosion operated by the media. So I don’t deserve the perverse ambiguity of these operations in Parliament. Maybe I brought this about as a perverse, destructive and inimical effect of my transparency. But that is a paradox. What should the comrades and our friends do now? They should press again and again the image of freedom; it would be good for them to speak of my decision to leave Italy as a continuation of my release from prison, which was achieved through the popular vote. I have respected the will of my electors. Only if the comrades and our friends keep up this level of attack shall we be able to do something and to continue and enlarge the battle. We have to give technical form to the intensity of my choice of freedom. Probably the fundamental point, as of now, is to come out directly with an attack on the court, pointing out how it is utterly complicit with a perverse political class, within a perverse framework of repression. The social force of my liberty, however pre-served, has to be transferred to the political level and made to work. The real antagonism which I represent cannot be forgotten – it has to be insisted upon – it is strong. Only through ambiguity and illegality can they succeed in denying it. This is exactly what happened in Parliament – they never actually won a majority vote against me, only a vote which was valid according to illiberal and partitocratic rules. Thought a lot about prison today. I am a bit alarmed at the situation which seems to have come about: a vertical split in the defence lobby as a result of Pannella’s cheapskate operation. Surely Rossana will not want to see him again. The Democrazia Proletaria, the PdUP and the independent Left have spat in his face. And what about the comrades – what will they do? Will they have the strength to sustain yet another betrayal? Today there absolutely has to be a project of attack, of forward response, solid and unwavering. But with what forces? If I made one mistake during the period of my parliamentary bail, it was that of not having prepared my escape from a political point of view. An error of generosity, as usual: I was so tied up in building the conditions for a debate on a political solution and on prison reform. But – maybe – my escape is a different kind of problem from that? (Paris – 22 September)
Diary of an Escape Page 27