The Unseen (21 page)

something else they asked us to do was the writing involved in filling in application forms for visits for transfers for remission for parole applications of all kinds that they kept on sending to the magistrates to the judges to the courts to the lawyers to the prison administration to the ministry etcetera and they also asked us to write letters to their wives and girlfriends maybe not whole letters but at any rate suggestions or nice ways of putting things poems because we were educated we were people who'd studied here in prison I became aware of the importance of writing I'd hardly ever written letters before I'd never regarded it as a means of communication whereas now besides weekly visits it was the only way if you want to maintain relationships if you want to keep them going

it happened to me once there that a guy asked me to write to women for him he'd found addresses in the classifieds of some magazine in this wing there were also pimps who kept their work going from inside trying to set up new connections and they wrote to women with the aim of meeting them later outside they'd ask the governor's permission to have themselves photographed wearing their double-breasted pinstripes or they'd have a photograph sent from home that showed them posing dressed in the height of style with one foot resting on the wheel of a big bright red car so as to send it with the letter and then they'd ask us to make up some story about their lives a biography full of excitement however we never complied with requests of this kind

another thing for example was that the working prisoners inside showered us politicals with favours there was the laundry worker who offered to wash our things personally because he too regarded us as privileged prisoners who should be given favours then there was the one who worked as the baker who made disgusting bread always either overdone or underdone but as an extra he gave us pizza and
focaccia
that he cooked separately for the sergeants, and the warrant-officers too so as to get on the right side of them or in exchange for favours because he thought in terms of hierarchies and he'd picked out us politicals as the most important in our wing and he gave us the pizzas however people like that more often than not are bastards they're people that the administration uses to get information they're scum pimps surly slippery bastards

but what struck me most of all in those first days in this world of the prison I was discovering was television it was years since I'd watched television except for the news while there I started enduring television because it really is a case of enduring it of swallowing it the whole twenty-four hours out of twenty-four hours a day and to begin with you just let it happen to you with no standard of choice you watch it all indiscriminately because it gives you the illusion of being less aware of time of taking your mind off it after a while though you find yourself sucked into it like an idiot you find yourself completely cretinized and then if you turn off the television you feel worse because you've no longer got a clue what to do to pass the time

34

At the centre the pickets against Saturday overtime had become a routine and it wasn't only the workers directly involved who went on them but to some extent everybody did and the first few times everybody enjoyed it too there in front of the factories at six in the morning with grappa music and bonfires of rubber tyres but then after the first few months the first contradictions erupted we started wondering why we were doing it standing there talking to these shits who've been made apathetic by work and who only listen to us because they're more scared of the picket than of the boss and who go back to doing overtime again the next time if you're not there you can't keep going forever explaining to them that if they do overtime they're doing the dirty on the unemployed that they're opening the door for restructuring the decentralization of production repeating everything over and over again like a broken-down record

so in the end we stopped getting up at six in the morning to go on the pickets in the end four or five car loads of us would go at ten or eleven o'clock and go round the factories and if we saw people were working we'd immediately start knocking out all the window panes from close range and then it was even better if we managed to get our hands on the cars belonging to those shits who were working or the factory lorries it was quicker to do and more fun and did more damage and the workers and the employers had to calculate whether they earned more with their Saturday overtime than what we took away from them then of course the union made its statements of condemnation and the
carabinieri
started going round on the lookout for us except that they could only bring in a single bus load in an area where there are two hundred factories and so within a month overtime working comes to a halt in that area

the news of the struggles reaching us from the cities in the south where the unemployed have organized gives rise to a new collective in the centre made up of unemployed people the majority of the collective doesn't consist of people who are strictly unemployed it's more a case of casual workers who work on and off or work off-the-books in workshops or at home there are many who've deliberately chosen not to have permanent jobs and to work only the absolute minimum to live on and then of course there are also people with qualifications and even the odd graduate I'm a member of the unemployed collective too because I've been genuinely unemployed since I left the celluloid factory the first meetings we hold are really chaotic because it's difficult to have a definite identity given that there are so many differences

and then we get the idea of starting an investigation into the organization of production in the region we gather information through the comrades in the factories we collate the data and at the same time a comrade who works in the town hall gets us a huge heliographed map of the area which we hang on one wall of the centre and on it we colour-code the different links in production connecting the big multinationals with the small factories with the warrens of the black economy and with the network of middlemen who organize it who hand out the work to the families and home-workers and who enable the bosses to make a huge saving on labour costs making it possible for them to pay for the work at a tenth of the rate with the added advantage of easy restructuring by cutting down on jobs and still being able to continue production whenever there's a strike

we launch a propaganda campaign in all the villages of the area we vilify the middlemen attacking them by name on posters and then we decide to do the rounds against the organization of sweat-shops in the same way as we did against overtime the first time about twenty of us went to one of these basement sweat-shops with our red kerchiefs round our faces and one or two sticks because you never knew China took the aerosol and wrote on the wall close down the sweat-shops you felt sorry for the people working there they were terrified except for an old pensioner who wasn't in the least perturbed he sat where he was without moving as if nothing was happening not put out at all

there was a pregnant woman though who started screaming because she thought we'd come to rob the place Valeriana and China tried to explain to her what we were doing and what we wanted but she didn't understand a thing she nodded her head but she didn't understand a thing you could tell from how pale she was and the way her eyes stared there were two young kids who caught on right away they didn't mind us and they said that the boss wasn't there that he was always out and about to do with work Nocciola and I slashed open the big boxes containing the plastic materials and we threw them all over the place switches screws and plastic sockets then we told the kids to tell the boss to put a stop to the sweated labour or the next time the basement would go up in smoke and so we started our rounds against the sweat shops

but meanwhile there was another problem hitting us all of a sudden this was the heroin which was spreading like wildfire and even in the movement it was starting to get people we discussed it over and over for days on end clearly this situation is quite convenient for those in power there's already a big toll of dead and zombies who drag themselves around the fountains in the squares with their syringes and their little spoons it's clear that heroin in general messes up the most rebellious and the most dissatisfied people those who are most disaffected with this system and can't cope with it any more with heroin they're simply offered a personal and self-destructive way out of the wish to change things out of the anger that we have inside

the fact that heroin is spreading rapidly among young working-class people represents a potential defeat because it's spreading on that same ground of people's needs of the will to change life the addicts are living through exactly the same problems as us someone's an addict because he can't cope any more and because he doesn't believe any longer that you can struggle for a different life for this reason we must in no way marginalize addicts nor should we hand over the problem to the institutions it would be a mistake and it would give them a pretext to increase control over us to repress us all the more the greatest weapon we have is solidarity and we must make all the more use of it when it comes to those who are worse off

but at the same time we also decided that it was worthwhile starting to make the rounds against the drug hang-outs we picked out a bar where they pushed heroin and where we knew that the owner of this bar was also tied up in the business because he also extracted a nice fat cut from the deals and so one night China and I Nocciola and Ortica went to set fire to that bar we'd got four petrol bombs ready we'd made them very carefully because we were determined that the whole thing should burn down we'd dissolved expanded polystyrene into saltpetre solvent and we'd added it to the petrol with over-heated oil this way it doesn't burn instantly but it forms a sludge that sticks to things to walls too and it burns for a very long time wherever it sticks

we got to the place at one a.m. the bar was closed using a builder's sledgehammer Ortica battered into the glass frontage and we heard a shattering noise like nothing on earth and from the force of it Ortica ended up inside the bar with all the glass falling down on him but he didn't get cut China told him to get back outside come on come on hurry up and she lit the fuse of her bottle Ortica leapt outside and China threw it there was a muffled thud a blaze that lit up the whole interior of the bar we threw the other bottles without even lighting the fuses everything went red then a big cloud of black smoke started drifting slowly out of the broken shop-front we ran away everything in that bar was burned there was nothing left not even a single glass nothing

meanwhile summer had come and plans were underway for going on holiday we were heading for the south for the coast in groups of cars we'd make haphazard stops and stay as long as we felt like it and then we'd take off again for somewhere else we'd get to know other people like us other comrades who do the same things who also talk about the movement nobody went away on their own nobody was on their own any more even couples weren't on their own any more it had become the normal thing to travel in caravans all together even just to go out to the country on Sundays and every evening we all met together in the centre the majority turned up after dinner and when you arrived outside the centre there was always the same scene the great beam of light crossing the street the comrades' cars motor-bikes mopeds filling the whole roadway people in groups in the street and around the benches

a continual coming and going a great bustle the noise of cars coming and going the music from the car radios parked outside and the music coming out of the centre the twanging music of guitars the sweet sounds of flutes the whistling of pipes the rhythmic drumming of bongos every evening there are new faces every evening new things to see to hear to do greeting all the people you know going round all the rooms the new posters and leaflets to read the sharing out of news information opinions the meetings to be held the mass gatherings the posters to be put up in convoy the debating and joking the awkwardness and shyness of newcomers the self-assurance of the old comrades the arrival of some weirdo or drunk

all round the centre the streets are busy all the time with groups of comrades the evenings are high-spirited lively noisy with our sounds shouts songs music they're made colourful by our jackets scarves skirts hats the walls are one long stretch of graffiti drawings writing all muddled together all with slogans one on top of the other against the bosses against sweated labour against all work against the ghettos against the clergy against the mayor against the trade unions against the parties against the city council against men against heroin against fascists against cops against judges against the state against poverty against repression against prison against the family against school against sacrifices against boredom

35

A few days after my arrival I had my first visit from relatives my brother and my mother came because my father was ill my brother had a message from China who'd told him to tell me the lawyer was optimistic because it could be proved it was a long time since I or China either had really lived in that house belonging to the solicitor and in fact China hadn't been bothered at all and so what it all came down to was the question of the lease that had stayed in my name the lawyer said he'd asked for bail for me and that he thought I'd be out of there in a few weeks so he was optimistic and then there was news of the comrades who all sent me regards and of the centre and so on

my mother was very upset and she kept asking me how I was whether I was eating and telling me that she'd brought parcels with food and clothes however I was only interested in what my brother had to say I asked him things to give me an idea of how the situation was outside what the comrades' state of mind was like the visit took place in a long narrow room with a long marble table down the middle the length of the whole room we had our visiting time along with the non-politicals there was a terrible racket about fifteen prisoners on one side of the marble table and at least three times that number of relatives on the other side mothers grandmothers aunts children a deafening babble screams shouts of joy weeping hysterics rage desperation abuse for the wives suspected of infidelity slaps scenes