Escape by Dominique Manotti Page A

sensation of walking on cotton wool. Office doors to his left, office doors to his right, all identical. He opens them, closes them, repetitive actions. A lounge area with vending machines, a coffee machine, and two imitation-leather armchairs. Deserted, sinister. At the far end of the corridor, a large boardroom, and the scanner. He swipes his fob. Return to the lifts. Swing doors, left-hand corridor, scanner, return, central corridor, scanner, back again. Lift, second floor. Each floor, one after another. There are thirty-two floors in this block. Sometimes a floor of offices with a view, less claustrophobic perhaps than the long corridors, but the loneliness there is overwhelming, chilling.
    Thirty-second floor, the last. The space is designed in a much less regular fashion, the offices are much bigger, but there is still a scanner, and the loneliness. Filippo goes into the boardroom. A dim light, like everywhere else. He skirts the oval table in the centre of the room, hemmed with wood-and -leather chairs, and stops in front of the vast bay window that runs the entire length of the room. He stands stock still, digesting the shock he feels every night. He is mesmerised, overcome by the view, as he had been by the white rocky ridge, the blue lake and the immense sky in the mountains when he was on the run. On either side, within touching distance, at the same height as him, loom the dark shapes of the neighbouring towers, punctuated by a few lines and pinpoints of light, and just opposite him, a large gap affording a view of Paris. The lines and shapes are clear and sharp – the deep, dark course of the Seine, the lighter black mass of the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower with its coppery outline, the epitome of elegance, standing out against the sovereign midnight-blue sky, and the light at the top, its powerful revolving beam mechanically sweeping space. Seen from here, the hasty, oppressive walk across the concourse each night feels like aninitiation test before entering dreamland. And each night, confronted with this magnificent landscape built by men but devoid of any trace of life, in solitude and silence, he listens to the words going round and round in his head, the sentences that form all by themselves. He waits patiently for the memory of Guidoriccio to return and haunt him, and each night the warlord turns up. This landscape suits him. He would gladly make it his. Who is Guidoriccio? wonders Filippo. The triumphant warrior in flesh and blood, astride his horse, challenging stone-built cities and deserted fortifications in glorious defiance of all the gods and all men, of whom he dreamed in his childhood. Or the lone horseman, playing at war, without enemies, and therefore without pleasure and without any possibility of victory, whom he had met during his long trek over the Italian mountains? Or is he a lifeless equestrian statue on a stage set? What is this knight’s message? Is it that the tempting but fatal combination of solitude and dreams are both his destiny and mine? The presence of this enigmatic character at his side stops Filippo from becoming lost.
     
    The walkie-talkie on his belt crackles. ‘Everything OK?’ asks a tinny voice. His round is finished, the moment of reverie too; it’s time to go back down to the ground floor, to the duty office of the Tour Albassur security team, where the longest part of the night is about to commence.
     
    Night after night, between the evening round after the departure of the last employees and the morning round before the arrival of the ‘office cleaning operatives’, Filippo finds himself shut up with his colleague in the security guards’ office. They sit back-to-back in comfortable swivel armchairs, and they each keep an eye on thirty or so monitors on the opposite wall that relay footage from the CCTV cameras in the offices, the control panels of the alarm systems of the high-security offices, while still others ensure that all the utilities and