* * *
—
Shortly after they confirmed the old woman’s death, the doctors made T. and his grandfather leave the room; they needed the bed for someone else, they said. They carried his grandmother out under a blanket to someplace he and his grandfather weren’t allowed to enter, and he had to cry in the hallway, in front of everyone, including a family entering what had been his grandmother’s room behind a similar woman, intubated, convinced like them—like T. and his grandfather had been—that it was nothing serious. Then a nurse had come over and handed them a garbage bag: it contained his grandmother’s medicines, some dried flowers, and a book T. had been reading. The book was about a family that had overcome all their difficulties. T. tossed everything into the trash when he left the hospital.
* * *
—
At first his grandfather refused to leave the house, just wandered around as if in each room he might, somehow, find his dead wife; later, however, and without any change in the situation, at least none T. could perceive, his grandfather began to spend more and more time out of the house: when he came back, he always brought something with him, which he would place in piles that soon reached T.’s height and then his grandfather’s and finally were bigger than both of them. The old man would go out onto the street and come back with old magazines, newspapers abandoned at bus stops, shoes, screws, books, and bits of books, used clothing, bottles, signs, animal cages, a fish tank, useless broom handles and rags, pieces of rubber, boxes, a taxidermied shrew that had been partially eaten by insects, bags, chairs, broken toys, a supermarket cart that he’d bought from an Ethiopian family. He used the cart fairly regularly on his excursions; in his mind, he would say, he was setting up a business; sometimes he would talk about the fact that there were “better objects” in other places, in parts of the city that weren’t as poor as Quarto Oggiaro: if he had a small van, he would say, he could extend his excursions to the city center, which he imagined as a place—thought T.—with more and better old magazines, newspapers, shoes, screws, bottles. Sometimes he returned battered and T. had to attend to his wounds; he had fought with a band of Romanian scavengers, he would say, who’d invaded his “territory.” T. tried to dissuade him from continuing to go out on these excursions, but his grandfather insisted that it was a business with endless possibilities, though he never made any effort to sell what he’d gathered. He lost many of his teeth in those fights and on at least two occasions T. had to go through the neighborhood at night to pick him up and take him home to dress his wounds; on another occasion, two young men who were beating up his grandfather in a park, claiming he’d insulted them, laid into T. when he tried to defend him. Of all that, he only remembers sliding through the young men’s arms, a completely painless slipping to the ground in which pain protected him from pain, and later the difficult return home carrying the old man. Around that same time, T. had started to listen to A/Political and Kronstadt Uprising: a dozen young squatters had been kicked out of a building in Cimitero Monumentale and had ended up in an abandoned factory between Quarto Oggiaro and Vialba. Naturally, T. had found out about that from his grandfather, who maintained that the squatters were trying to horn in on the objects he gathered in his territory, which he considered his property, even though it was clear, as was said around the neighborhood, that the squatters never left the house. One night T. dropped in and felt immediately attracted to the offhand chaos, which evoked his grandfather’s apartment yet lacked its implications, where the loss of his grandmother was projected onto the accumulation and chaos. He was soon spending more time there than in his own home, where it didn’t seem his grandfather was spending much time anymore either. T. was impressed by the speed with which he’d been accepted into the squat house and how quickly time passed there despite it being obvious that none of them did much; he was also impressed how quickly his grandmother’s death and his grandfather’s delusional accumulation took up less and less space in his life, as if they were missteps in a territory he was quickly moving away from. For the first time, he understood his mother, though their reasons for turning their backs on the past were diametrically opposed: for his mother, it was a voyage “in search of herself”; for him, on the other hand, it was a flight from himself, or from what he’d been up to that point. He took part in the repairs of the building, which were constant, as if the squat swallowed up each new repair; they let him sleep on the mattresses they’d laid out in the basement, next to the old boiler, which they fed with pieces of wood and cardboard they found on the street, in open competition with his grandfather. T. went to visit him sometimes, at night, and one day he discovered his electricity had been cut off. His grandfather gave him a flashlight, and he had to use it to light his path to his room through the piles of objects; when he lay down in bed he understood that his grandfather had created a labyrinth he would never find his way out of, no matter how hard he tried.
* * *
—
When T.’s father learned, on his next visit, of T.’s grandmother’s death, he offered to go with him to the cemetery where they’d buried her, but it seemed unnecessary. His father wasn’t aware of T.’s grandfather’s situation and T. didn’t want to alarm him. Nor did T. think it necessary to inform him that he no longer went to school. He had plans to go to university, at some point, but he still didn’t know exactly what he would study. Admitting that he’d already read the book his father brought him as a gift also seemed unnecessary. T. had no desire to talk about himself, but he wanted to know everything about his father. Initially, his request was met with suspicion but then his father acquiesced and, finally and for the first time, spoke at length.
* * *
—
There were some versions of the story of T.’s father and what led him to prison that T. had put together as soon as he could, with his father already far away. His father had been part of an organization that had believed it necessary to respond violently to another type of violence that could be called, as he said, “structural.” On March 16, 1978, that organization kidnapped a very important politician on Via Fani, in Rome, after killing his five bodyguards. His father had been told in Turin that something big was in the works and that, as a result, everyone not involved in the action should remain far from the scene, but no one had told him that the scene was Rome, though they’d suggested he not go to that city: nevertheless, his father was there. He was arrested that same day. Initially his father believed an old fascist writer (he said, with perhaps excessive emphasis on the word “old”), whom he’d been talking to and in whose doorway he was captured, had ratted him out. But it was, mainly, random chance, as his arrest had no relationship to the investigation going on and was just one of the many desperate acts carried out by the government that day in order to find the kidnapped politician. His father was interrogated for hours about “Maurizio,” “Luigi,” and “Monica,” three names he was unfamiliar with, and they demanded he confess the whereabouts of Aldo Moro, which he didn’t know. His father didn’t say this, but years later T. will think they tortured him; if that was the case, the interrogation likely didn’t aid the investigation in the slightest, because his father had truly not taken part in the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, whose lifeless body was found on May 9. In the months following, T.’s father was paraded through jails in Asinara, Sardinia, Turin, Voghera, and Bologna, almost always housed in the blocks for political prisoners, where the security measures were greater but, on the other hand, he was safe. On one occasion his father had recognized “Mauro,” his superior in Turin, in a newspaper: his real name was Patrizio Peci, and soon after that he would give up his comrades, including T.’s father. By that time, however, his father had already been sentenced to eight years in prison: he did four before being released for good behavior. He didn’t remember anything about them, he said, maybe because the adoption of an imposed routine was designed, successfully, to suspend individual life; if you didn’t want to go crazy, said T.
’s father, you had to mostly forget about yourself, cease to exist, so that your time locked up would be just a parenthesis. He had pulled that off, at least partially, though all those years he’d wondered who could’ve ratted him out, and how they’d found him. Despite that, the answer was obvious, so simple and easy to determine that he didn’t understand how it hadn’t occurred to him before: he had been betrayed by a man T. didn’t know, he said, a different fascist writer he’d visited in Genoa a few days earlier, who’d given him the address of the fascist writer whose house he’d been arrested in front of shortly after. There wasn’t a single day after that—not even when he was falling in love with T.’s mother and making his first efforts to keep her by his side and try to be a father for T.—when he hadn’t thought about it: that his arrest had been simply a twist of fate, that he wasn’t their target. Perhaps it all could have been different if he hadn’t gotten caught up in a strange investigation—incomprehensible even to him—into art and crime. Not even he could reliably express what it was he’d been searching for.
* * *
—
He listens to Blackbird Raum, the Hope Bombs, Culture Shock. Sometimes he gets the songs’ lyrics and sometimes he doesn’t, but he understands their underlying anguish; on occasions it seems that, despite their brevity, those songs make up a dark, violent tunnel at the end of which, however, he sees something like a light; in other words, a different sort of darkness. He doesn’t know who to tell this to and he keeps it to himself. With the other squatters he talks only about music, and he pretends not to be interested in their political discussions: he doesn’t have any expectations of those discussions and he doesn’t like the invitation to violence they often conclude with. He doesn’t think he knows more than the others, but he knows—from his father’s experience, what he can understand of it—that if someone suffers, we all suffer; if someone kills, we are all murderers. He also knows, of course, that anything else they could do is worthless because freedom and justice are never given to the oppressed by an unjust government; he knows the oppressed have to fight for them, but even still he resists. Sometimes he looks at a poster for the Red Brigades that someone has put up on a wall, expressing a sympathy that everyone in the house shares. But he doesn’t speak about his father’s experience and he never listens. For a while he thinks he’s in love with a young man from Viareggio who moves into the house for a while; they make love one night out on one of the factory’s terraces, in the summertime; he goes with the flow and likes what he sees and does, but he decides that he isn’t in love and isn’t going to be. Later that young man, who is also named Pietro, like his father, leaves.
* * *
—
Now it is December 2014, the twelfth of the month, and the unions have called for a general strike: they are demanding the government not make firing people any cheaper. T. left the squat early that morning and headed to the city center to join the protesters. He only did so out of some vague sense of solidarity perhaps tied to the fact that his father and grandfather had been fired countless times throughout his life, under circumstances in which, unlike how he usually portrays it to the other squatters, their work was the only available way for them to be something or someone: when they couldn’t continue doing it, their certainties about themselves, the identities they’d articulated around that work, vanished, leaving them empty. His father at least had his history, though it was incomplete because of his prison experience and perhaps other reasons, perhaps something analogous to regret. His grandfather had nothing except his confusion and the impossibility of conveying rationally, of verbalizing, what was happening to him; in the end, he’d only been able to express it through the accumulation of objects that, like he himself, had been cast off. T. had had to let him go, to distance himself, in order to not get dragged along. T. had also had to distance himself from his mother; he hadn’t given her the address of the house, which, in any case, was temporary, and it was possible that, if his mother was still writing him, the letters were piling up in his grandparents’ apartment or being returned by the postman. As the demonstration advanced through the streets of Milan, T. struggled to get caught up in the general enthusiasm, or even feel a part of the crowd: in some sense, the experiences of his father and his grandparents, to the extent he’d been able to know them, had taught him not to expect anything of others and to distrust ideas that enjoyed prominence; on the other hand, he believed he’d escaped from whatever bound him to a place and a time period. In some sense, he was clean, he thought, absorbed in the novelty of his individuality and only willing to lend it out—to drown his individuality in the river of people around him—briefly and conditionally. Around him swirled young people like him who carried flags he was unfamiliar with, and older people and senior citizens, men and women, who bore the insignias of their professions. Those were, of course, just symbolic, since most contemporary professions lack visibility and consist of the completion of procedures that are impossible to denote, actions done in front of a computer, in an aseptic, ahistorical space. T. could also see in that, if he so desired, a dissolution of the identity markers of the working class, if words like “working,” “class,” or “identity” meant anything to him: they would eventually mean something to him, including in a way that was hard to pinpoint, over the coming years, but T. doesn’t yet know that. Nor does he know that his life will be more similar to his father’s and his paternal grandfather’s than he can imagine, as if the three were linked by something more than blood ties and family history, by an uncomfortable awareness of history and the place of individuals (even those who, like them, are completely irrelevant) within it. The marching stops, the people around him are no longer shouting slogans, and now, instead, the crowd issues a more frightening sound, loud and unclear, like some sort of roar that emerges from every throat and none, speaking in an incomprehensible language. T. hears shots and sees hundreds of pigeons take flight from the balconies and roofs of the buildings the crowd marches past, creating a dark cloud that looks alive and heads toward the Duomo, some hundred yards away. Then there is a moment of expectant silence and the crowd—which until now was some sort of living organism slithering through the streets—fractures: those in the front start backing up while those in the rear, who still don’t understand what’s going on, push them forward. The crowd, like a river when you try to contain it, overflows, and the currents that make it up, which up until now had converged, break into rows of people who, with more or less urgency, try to access the side streets, or search for refuge in the doorways of buildings lining the main street, or move along it toward the services and equipment. In the confusion, T. can’t see beyond the relatively small circle he finds himself in: around him are the faces of older people, of women, people of various ages muttering and occasionally yelling that they have to go back. T., however, finds himself dragged forward by a row of young people who are making their way in a wedge through the protesters; their faces are covered with bandannas and their hair by black hoods and—T. sees it immediately—they’re carrying sticks and shields and shouting “Come on, let’s go” as if he were one of them. T. tries to get away, but the people fleeing the front of the demonstration keep pushing him back; in the air is something that T. recognizes immediately, and it’s fear. Someone hands him a bandanna, and T. covers his face with it. Soon the river of people swimming upstream stops: he is in the front row, some ten or fifteen yards from a line of police shields; the policemen are also provoking them from behind. Someone drags a dumpster and sets it aflame with a bottle of gasoline and a lighter. The row of shields opens and from it emerges a man who throws a tear-gas bomb at them and one of the young men picks it up and tosses it back behind the line of shields: this seems to be a signal, because then the police charge. T. sees them coming closer and sees that, absurdly, the young men in hoods are running to meet them, and then he sees one of those young men on the ground, bleeding. A policeman is stomping his boot on the young man’s head and it bounces ag
ainst the ground again and again, leaving a bloodstain that grows and grows without anyone doing anything to stop the policeman. In that moment, T. feels responsible for what he’s seeing and also for not preventing it; and he feels, for the first time, that he is the fallen young man and the policeman, both at the same time. T. thinks what he’s going to do will come back to haunt him and that the damage he inflicts, if he manages to cause any, will be first of all against himself, and not exactly against his beliefs (which aren’t much and never will be: just a handful of vague ideas about dignity and a nebulous notion of what, for lack of a better name, because the word often seems devoid of meaning, he will call “justice” always very regretfully, because of the echoes of his father he will recognize in it long after his father is dead), but against the very idea of believing in something, which is in opposition, he will always think, with the idea of doing. His father and his grandfather, he will think in the future, remain trapped by the contradictions inherent in doing and believing, in large part due to the fact that believing equals doing in every case, a very specific type of doing that also inhibits all possibility of doing anything. He will also think, throughout his life, that the lives of all these people—about which he knows everything and at the same time nothing—could be told as the story of how art always becomes politics and how politics, no matter what stripe, becomes crime. And he will think that there is a purpose for people like him: to inhibit the criminal elements in politics and turn politics into something like art, an activity that says something significant about being here, whatever “here” means: the world or society. He will learn all this over the course of a life that, like all lives lived with the desire to be politically and emotionally alive, is not very long or very easy. Of course, his life won’t be short on situations that, for lack of a better term, people will call “art” or “artistic production,” nor will it lack what those same people and others like them call “crime.” T. finds both expressions superfluous, to the extent that he thinks of everything he does and has ever done as politics—even if unwittingly—because all that requires is the attempt to be coherent, and to leave a mark, no matter how small. Sometime in the future he’ll think of that demonstration in Milan in December 2014 as the start of something, something vague he won’t bother trying to put a name to. Right now it would be impossible and unnecessary for him to name it; even the mere fact of thinking about it seems absurd. T. doesn’t think about it, just as he doesn’t think about the asymmetries of violence, or its real or imagined legitimacy. In fact, he isn’t thinking about anything: he picks up a cane he finds at his feet and rushes toward the policeman.
Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets Page 25
