Set Me Free
‘Most welcome, bondage; for thou art a way, I think, to liberty’
Posthumus Leonatus in Cymbeline Act V, Scene IV
PROLOGUE
‘Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows!’
Trinculo in The Tempest
Act II, Scene II
Now what?
Monica is the one who sees them coming. She is looking out the window.
What’s going to happen to me? What lies ahead?
‘Everybody out! Come out with your hands up!’
Where to from here? From this enormous waiting room full of people going back and forth?
I have just enough time to take my identity card out of its plastic cover, tear off the photo, and swallow the rest. Yes, swallow it. In Spain, if they catch you with false identity papers you get sentenced to several more years. Better to eat a bit of cellulose.
This place has such a familiar feeling to it. It’s a place for waiting, where lives pass by quickly. I look around and I can almost hear the announcements: arrivals, departures, as though I’m waiting for the umpteenth train, the umpteenth escape.
I come out of the house with my hands up. From behind me I sense Monica’s anguish. It’s all over.
It seems like it might be the platform of a train station, but it’s actually the reception area of a prison.
‘Salvatore Striano, you’re under arrest.’
So here I am, sitting and waiting to find out my destiny. Where will it take me? What land of troubles is it coming from, and what other darkness will it lead to?
What other evil?
CONTENTS
Cover
Prologue
Set Me Free
About the Author and Translator
Copyright
1
‘Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides, Who covert faults at last with shame derides.’
Cordelia in King Lear
Act I, Scene I
When you know trouble is brewing, and it finally comes, it’s at once both a bad moment and a good moment.
This is true for everybody, and it was true when they came to get me. That was the end of my brief period as a fugitive. But it was also the end of a nightmare.
11 January 2000, Valdemoro Prison, Madrid. After I spent three years in hiding in Spain, they found me. It was probably a tip-off. But from who? I don’t know, I don’t want to think about it and, in a way, I don’t care. I’m done with the Hotheads, done with gang life.
In truth, I’m done with a lot of things, now that I’m in prison. I’m done with the sky, which from today will be just a square of fresh air. I’m done being on the run; instead it’ll be steps in the exercise yard. I’m done with my wife’s laugh, which will become a forced smile across the table in the visiting room.
I think of my mother, who is sick. Will I be able to find out how she’s doing, to get news of her? Maybe. As always, she’ll be less worried knowing I’m in prison rather than out causing trouble and risking getting killed. But now that I’m in here I won’t be able to go and visit her back in Italy…I start wondering whether it’s worth trying to escape. I realise it’s in my interests to serve out my sentence. I don’t want to be on the run for the rest of my life. I go over the different possibilities and scenarios in my head, just to kill time, the only thing left worth killing.
‘Do you speak Spanish?’ The guard’s voice rouses me from my thoughts.
I look up slowly—no need to jump to attention. I’m thinking, Of course I speak Spanish, I’ve been in this country for three years, it’s not like it’s a difficult language.
But I say, ‘No comprendo,’ with an intentionally blank look.
The guard stares at me; he’s not convinced.
‘Follow me,’ he says in Spanish, and off he goes.
I sit there motionless. No way I’m getting shafted by a little trick like that. I won’t admit I speak Spanish, not for anything. I want an interpreter with me when they take me into one of these little white rooms. Someone from outside, who will see if they beat me or shove me around. Who will understand if they threaten me. I might be a criminal but I demand my rights. All of them.
The guard turns around and sees that I haven’t followed him. He gives up.
‘We’ll get an interpreter,’ he says, talking slowly because he has his doubts now, and is starting to think maybe I really don’t understand Spanish.
The reception area is a bit like the lobby of the prison, the first gate you pass through once you lose your freedom. It’s where they fingerprint you, take photos and give you clothes if the ones you have are no good, because it could be that when they picked you up you were wearing a hoodie with drawstrings. No drawstrings in prison: they’re a weapon.
I huddle into my leather jacket. This place is full of draughts. It wouldn’t even enter my head to hang myself, not with hoodie strings, not with anything. I’ll serve my time with my head held high. So far the guards have been polite to me. They haven’t beaten me or restrained me, they’ve let me smoke. It’s a good sign. Maybe too good. What’s the catch?
This big room, with its vaulted ceiling, is divided into lots of little rooms, each one closed off like a horse stable, and the grey and white walls also have a good deal of red on them. Blood that spurted from someone who was then taken away. I stare at one long stain, broken up by what could be scratch marks. I try to see a message in it, like you do with clouds. That’s another thing I’m done with. Clouds.
They call my name and I throw my cigarette on the ground. The interpreter has arrived and it’s a young woman. Her hair is in a ponytail and she looks too neat and clean for a place like this. She accompanies me into one of the ‘stables’, where there’s a guard sitting at a desk, who will tell me how things work in here.
‘You have the right to one phone call a day of ten minutes in length. To this end, you have the right to purchase a telephone card from the commissary. You have the right to one meeting a week with relatives and friends,’ he begins, breaking off every so often for the interpreter to translate. ‘You have the right to a four-hour conjugal visit from your wife or partner, in a bedroom made available for that purpose.’ I’m keeping a blank face until she has translated each bit into Italian, to hide the fact that I can actually understand him, but it’s hard not to give the game away when he says that. A bedroom?
‘You are not allowed in your cell between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.,’ he goes on. ‘You must spend these hours in the common room or outdoors.’
I can hardly wait for the girl to translate this piece of information so I can ask the obvious question bouncing around in my head.
‘I can’t stay in my cell all day, I get to use the phone and I have the right to make love to my wife. Sorry, guard, but are you sure I’m in jail?’
Maybe he can understand a bit of my Italian, or maybe he just picks up my tone of voice—the fact is, he almost smiles.
‘I’m not your guard. Call me don Pedro,’ is all he says, in a serious tone. ‘Yes. You are in jail. Welcome to Valdemoro Prison.’
I get a sudden flash of inspiration. When I arrived, I saw some men in the corridor who weren’t in uniform but weren’t accompanied by guards, either.
‘Does this mean that those men I saw outside weren’t guards?’ I ask.
‘They’re inmates, just like you,’ he replies.
‘And the guards?’
‘Why the fixation on guards? There are no guards here.’
To understand why I leave the little stable feeling like I’ve won the lottery, you have to know what prison is like in Italy. I know all too well. My mother’s been inside. So have most my friends back home in Naples, and so have I. The first time was when I was fourteen years old and sent to juvenile detention.
But in Italy, your life is less at risk than here in Spain.
This is something I’ll only come to understand later.
The guard taking me up the stairs looks like Zorro—tall, dark, thin, with a little black moustache. Suddenly he turns and takes me by the wrist.
‘It’s best if you take this off,’ he says, tugging at my gold bracelet with ‘New Millennium’ engraved on it. The millennium is only eleven days old and I’m already in prison. That doesn’t seem like a great start.
I stop, immediately on the alert. We’re alone, having left the interpreter downstairs.
‘This too,’ the guard adds, pointing to the chain around my neck, also gold.
It had to happen sooner or later. This prison was too good to be true…I get ready for a fight. There’s no way I’m letting him take my chain. It’s got a locket with a photo of my father. He’s only been dead a few months.
These bastards. The rage rises up from my stomach like acid.
But what can I do to defend myself? The guy’s armed. Sure, I can shout. But they’re all deafer here than in a nursing home.
‘You get what I’m saying?’ he presses me.
What’s to get? You’re trying to rob me. I’d like to tell him I understand perfectly, that this is my father’s locket, that he’s a bastard. But I’m pretending not to know Spanish, and if they realise I was lying about that I’ll be in real trouble.
The guard shrugs.
‘I’d take off your jewellery if I were you. It’s not like in Italy. In here, you’re on your own. And they’ll end up stealing it off you.’ He’s speaking slowly, looking me right in the eye. ‘You get it?’
So he was just warning me?
‘No comprendo,’ is all I say, trying to hide the relief in my voice. He wasn’t trying to rob me, he was just trying to tell me there are some bad eggs in here.
Who’d have thought?
Zorro shrugs again and keeps heading up the stairs.
It seems like a million steps but it’s just a few flights and then we arrive at a fork with an arrow. To the right: ‘Units 1–5’. To the left: ‘Units 6–10’. Two long corridors, lit just enough to look tragic, with arched ceilings, like an infinite series of tunnels with no way out.
We take a right. I’m not afraid, but in these tunnels there’s a silence full of echoes that’s making my head pound. To distract myself, I look at the drawings that break up the grey from time to time, evidently done by inmates. I stop in front of one: it’s a view from above of a courtyard surrounded by huge walls. The perspective is dizzying, as though you’re really up the top looking down. Black and brown birds are flying across the little square of sky in the foreground, their wings spread wide and their feet stretching down towards the ground. Each one holds in its claws a man’s head, which hangs above the void.
It’s a strange, ambiguous image. You can’t tell if it’s about freedom or fear. If these men have been rescued, or if they’re prey.
Outside this big grey rectangle is the world, but the world is not necessarily a nice place. Everybody on the inside knows that.
‘Are you coming?’ I hear the guard’s voice at the same time as I hear the sound of a gate opening. We’ve arrived at the end of the tunnel. I’m so struck by the drawing that I hurry through as though I’m heading to safety.
But beyond the gate is just more tunnel, with no end in sight.
The guard keeps talking but I’m no longer listening. I start thinking of the alleyways of the Quartieri Spagnoli, back in Naples. Some of them seem like tunnels, too, so narrow that it looks like the tops of the houses are touching. Suddenly I long for any place with light, colour, noise. In those alleys, though they’re devoid of light, there’s no shortage of noise and colour. The tunnel I’m walking down starts throbbing with the hum of motorbikes, like when the whole gang would take to the streets to show everyone that the Hotheads were fighting right alongside ordinary people. It resounds with the exploding tongue of fire coming from that one bazooka shot out to the sea the time we got our hands on enough weapons to destroy half the city. It fills with the soft rustle of money. And my friends’ cries as the bullet arrives. Just like the bullet that, back home in Naples, has my name on it.
We pass through no less than four of these gates. At each one there’s a sentry box made of bulletproof glass, surrounded by CCTV cameras, with a guard inside. A bright, clean little cage that looks like a hotel lobby. I’m starting to think these tunnels will never end, that I’ve been sentenced to walk up and down forever, like in a nightmare, my head pounding with memories. But then at the fifth sentry box, after the fifth gate, we stop.
‘Quién eres?’ the guard asks from behind the glass.
‘No habla español,’ Zorro informs him, explaining who I am.
They talk for a bit and I realise they’re not going to put me in a cell on my own. It sounds like there will only be two of us. Could be worse.
Or at least that’s what I think.
‘Hey, Toc-toc! I mean…Michele! I’d forgotten you were in here too!’
While I wait until it’s time to go into the cell that I’ve been assigned—they won’t take you at just any hour of the day, you have to wait until 8 p.m., when everybody goes back in—I’m sitting in the common room of my unit, Unit 5. It’s another big room—just for a change—full of men talking, wandering around, playing games. I’m keeping to myself. I don’t yet know how things work here. It’s not like the school canteen. If you sit at the wrong table in a prison, it can cost you your life.
That’s when I see Toc-toc.
Michele is from Naples, like me, but that’s where the similarity ends. He’s a chubby, thickset, bald young fellow, so switched on that he earned himself the nickname Toc-toc, because you have to thump him on the back before he’ll notice that you’re talking to him, like knocking to see if anybody’s home. Sometimes it’s as though his brain is uninhabited.
But he’s been in here three months, so he must have some clue about the place.
‘Hey, what’s all this about phone calls, conjugal visits, a common room—is this even a prison?’
‘Sasà, it’s a jungle,’ he says, shaking his head.
‘But there aren’t even any guards in here.’ I gesture around the room. There are just a whole lot of ugly faces, including our own. You can spot the guards on a glassed-in upper level. They watch us from there, but we can do what we like down here. ‘We’re even allowed to wander up and down the corridors by ourselves,’ I add.
‘Yeah, sure, there are no guards.’ But his tone is not happy in the least.
He’s the slow one, not me, so I cotton on at once. Of course. I should have thought of it earlier. No guards means you have to sort everything out yourself. Once you’ve sorted it out, the guards arrive. But there’s no guarantee they’ll find you alive.
I look at the faces around the room again, and this time they look even uglier than before. And now it feels like they’re all looking at me. The way you’d look at your prey.
‘Come to the Italian table,’ Toc-toc says, with the air of someone who knows the ropes.
Now let me be clear—Toc-toc has never known any ropes in all his life. He’s inside because he got picked up with five hundred kilos of hashish—need I say more? He’s one of those guys dealers get to deliver stuff, knowing it’ll only last so l
ong because he wasn’t born smart and he’s not about to become smart. Yet right now he’s strutting around like he owns the place.
When I get to the table and say hello to everybody they’re playing poker. Anyone not playing is following the game, so most of them barely look up, a couple give me a nod. I take the opportunity to study them carefully.
So this is why Toc-toc fancies himself some kind of emperor. He’s with this lot. He thinks he’s invincible. Some people wear a mask and some people wear their face. With the Italians Toc-toc wears his face, but with everyone else he wears a mask. He cloaks himself in other people’s power.
I knew there were some big shots in prison in Spain, but actually finding yourself among them is a whole other thing. You could go a long way with the experience you racked up in here. I relax a little. If I’m with these guys, maybe I’ll get through without any broken bones.
‘Which cell are you in?’ Toc-toc asks softly, so as not to disturb the others.
‘Twenty-eight.’
One of the men watching the game spins around and stares at me.
‘They’ve put you with the HIV guy.’
Put me with what? My blood runs cold. I’m sharing a cell with someone who has a contagious disease and the guards didn’t even warn me? What if he infects me? What if he uses the threat of his blood to steal from me? What if he’s crazy? Why was he in a cell on his own before? What happened to his last cellmate? A hundred scenarios run through my head and none of them end well.
‘He won’t tell you he’s HIV-positive,’ the guy adds. ‘The guards put you in there on purpose, to see how you react.’
So much for ‘There are no guards here’ and ‘Call me don Pedro’; so much for friendly warnings on the stairs. They are guards, and they’re bastards just like all the others. That’s real nice, putting you in with someone who’s got HIV to see what kind of an inmate you’re going to be. Are you the kind who can solve his problems on his own, or the kind who creates them? If you kick up a stink they target you and make sure your stay in prison is terrible. I’m going to have to manage this on my own without any nonsense.