The Unseen

by Nanni Balestrini

  and the protests succeeded because they were solid everybody joined in right away without even thinking about it by now the guards no longer took any responsibility the guards reacted on every occasion by passing on decisions to their superior who in turn dumped them on his superior and so on up to the prison governor and he’d take it to the minister which meant whatever you did inside the prison you were never confronting the guards but the strength of your position was such that you ended up dealing directly with the minister with every protest you made and since by now what was at stake was by now always the trigger for a sequence of events leading to taking guards hostage perhaps proceeding merely from the fact that you wanted a blue felt tip pen it was their policy to give way over everything

  also because the minister’s strategy centred as always on the distinction making that special prison a cooling-down prison let’s say at the positive end of the special spectrum while at the other end was a maximum security prison the prison regime is entirely based on this strategy of differentiation with its potential to blackmail you with the threat of a worsening of your conditions with its potential to warn you if you protest watch out or I’ll send you to a prison worse than the one you’re in now and so the comrades’ argument was just because we’re well off here it doesn’t mean we don’t have to make demands but we have to make demands just the same here as well so as to break this blackmail situation that threatens us all with ending up in a prison where we’re worse off

  8

  The first time I met China was during the Cantinone occupation that’s where I first saw her China had come round there I’m not sure when and she was helping Gelso with the mural that Gelso had decided to do on the biggest wall she had a big brush and she was dipping it in a bucket of white paint but she was dipping it in too much and the paint was spattering all over the place and it was running down on to the floor I saw what a mess it was and I went over to show her how it should be done but also because I thought she was very pretty and I remember that there’s where she gave me that scarf it was that time when I first met her because when I went up to her of course I got a good splash here on my front and she made up for it then by putting her red scarf round my neck it was a really long scarf ankle-length and she told me keep it I’m giving it to you it’ll hide the stain

  to see how little need there was you only had to look at how I dressed in those days the battle-dress shirt with baggy sweater threadbare at the elbows riddled with holes and with loose unravelled ends the jeans frayed at the hem with a safety pin in place of the zip broken months ago one shoe split at the seams that let the water in when it rained the other had no lace but it held with a permanent knot odd socks one black and one grey and most of all the off-white raincoat that’s my second skin all scruffy and dirty so many buttons missing that I always leave it open a tear under the armpit holes in the pockets but stuff always ending up in the lining newspapers leaflets felt-tip pens always the same old rags until they fall apart because it’s part of the gamble because we’re staking everything and how do you think about clothes when you’re betting everything you’ve got

  the morning we occupied the Cantinone we’d got there very early we’d got there very early in the morning it was Saturday morning and the night before while Valeriana and Nocciola were keeping an eye on both ends of the street Cotogno Ortica and I used a hand drill to drill through the big padlock from underneath where the lock is we sprang the chambers and the padlock fell open so that by the following morning it would be all ready and we’d only need to undo the chain then all along the ditch on the other side of the road we placed plastic bags hidden in the brushwood with stones ballbearings and catapults in them not too much because inside the Cantinone there was all kinds of stuff we could use to defend ourselves in case of immediate attack

  in the morning at seven prompt as can be we five met at the station and with Ortica’s car we drove round the streets where the groups of comrades who were to do the break-in were to be ready and waiting they were all there as planned all armed to the teeth like for demonstrations where you know trouble might flare up scarves gloves berets and everything we undid the chain and we went inside and right behind us came groups of comrades we made a quick inspection inside it was still nearly pitch dark there was no electricity shining a torch inside we saw piles of timber of every size piles of planks and beams it was so big an area the torchlight couldn’t reach the far wall but we thought it was lovely

  the Cantinone was one wing of an old castle belonging to the Curia the other bits of the castle were occupied by a nursery school run by nuns and an old people’s home also run by nuns the wing we were interested in was used at the time by a construction firm to store materials it was a big rectangular building on the ground floor was a single vast hall that was now full of beams and timber on the upper floor there were rooms on the ground floor two rows of columns ran its whole length supporting two high crossed vaults in the centre there was a big main door between two rows of big windows running right along the facade protected by grilles but with no glass and no frames

  since everything had gone according to plan one comrade went out to go and give the signal to another group waiting outside that went off to put up posters and hand out the leaflets we’d done to announce the occupation while we inside started forming a chain to clear the Cantinone of the building lumber we carried out everything through the door leading to the yard and we heaped it up there outside the nuns and the old people from the home started looking out of the windows more and more of them they were looking at us in amazement and disbelief perhaps at first they thought we were building workers but they must have doubted it for they saw that there were girls at work there too

  nearly an hour goes by then those on guard outside sound the alarm that they’re on their way and we all rush out into the street the carabinieri are driving up in their two minibuses in no hurry at all and once they pull up opposite the door they stop and get out there would have been ten or so in no hurry and empty-handed the maresciallo comes towards us he looks puzzled and Valeriana takes a few steps towards him and tells him it’s an occupation and she gives him the leaflet and tells him it’s all explained here the maresciallo glances at it quickly but then he says he wants to come in and see and he points to the door and makes a move in that direction but at once all the comrades who’d gone outside spontaneously form a tight human barrier we form a wall between him and the main door of the Cantinone

  the maresciallo looks at us in astonishment more than anything else then he says but you know what you’re doing is illegal Cotogno answers yes but there’s a lot of us doing it and we’re not the only ones occupying round here the maresciallo shakes his head and asks and who’s in charge here and we answer all of us all of us are in charge here rather abashed the maresciallo waves his men away but we don’t budge we stay there waiting for them to leave in earnest they all get back on their minibuses they go into reverse and pull away slowly but when they get to the junction one of the two minibuses stays there while the other vanishes then we go back inside and Scilla gets busy setting up a defence team it’s sickening what we need is petrol bombs because those guys can come back any moment now and there’d be a slaughter

  all this time new people were starting to turn up they came in groups the students who knew all about it already and then the first ones to come out of curiosity workers and unemployed people came who’d seen our posters and the leaflets word had got round and people turned up came in and hung about the place taking a good look round we were explaining why we’d occupied what we wanted to do now and people were talking asking questions more and more people were turning up people I’d never seen before there were children running about the hall and going into the rooms upstairs it was total chaos everywhere then standing to one side we notice three well-dressed guys we hadn’t seen coming in grim-faced looking around anxiously and keeping their voices down the word gets round at once the mayor�
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  the three come towards us the mayor in the lead a big tall heavy man with a long camel coat nearly down to his ankles and when the mayor opens his mouth the deafening racket stops only the children go on running about the room he comes straight out and asks abruptly who’s in charge here you know what you’re doing is illegal immediately we all burst out laughing they look around at a loss to understand then the vice-mayor a thin old man with a red face who’s also the party secretary lays into us you’re provocateurs you’ve done this tomfoolery to undermine the new left administration this is a provocation there’s a whole crowd of people who’re not from round here who’ve come from outside it’s a deliberate provocation I’ve been in politics for forty years and I know provocateurs when I see them

  but the mayor takes over again listen kids we’ve come here to tell you that charges have already been filed against you and legal proceedings are already under way to have you forcibly evicted we promise you we’ll withdraw the charge but you must clear out right now and put everything back just as it was and we guarantee that there won’t be any legal consequences everybody’s jeering and Nocciola steps forward turning to the three of them look there’s no question of us leaving here not for a minute the only thing we want here is to go on with this occupation and to achieve what we set out to do which is something you aren’t even bothering to find out I don’t know if you’ve got the point the mayor makes a gesture of annoyance he turns round and leaves followed by his retinue

  then I don’t remember what else happened in the afternoon we also had a visit from the extra-parliamentarians who’d just founded their own party and so had stopped wearing their jeans and anoraks they turned up with the party newspaper sticking out of the pockets of their grey lodens they came up to Cotogno and me their leader got straight to the point what you need to do right away is call a mass meeting to discuss what’s to be done this spontaneous movement has to have political leadership first of all we’ll have a closed meeting between us and the occupation leaders to decide on the programme we’ll get the mass meeting to approve and so on finally they left none too happy but their leader threatened us all mass struggles are doomed if there’s no vanguard to lead them you’ve got no political line and you’re dragging the masses to defeat and blablabla and blablabla

  9

  Well right at the start of the revolt there was pandemonium in the sense that the first word going round was that there are nineteen guards taken hostage and this provoked outright amazement there was incredulity fear and amazement but then at once the general mood rapidly became a mood of great excitement probably because what everyone felt most of all at that moment was the fact of being in control of this space the fact of freedom of movement all over this space and just the simple fact of free movement in a space bigger than the cell you were confined to released this whole general excitement

  then what happened was that those prisoners who’d planned the whole thing who’d organized it immediately set in motion all the organizational functions of the revolt these comrades assigned themselves roles precise tasks which involved guarding and surveying the most likely points where a break-in could be made from outside because the guards could always try a break-in even if the hostages we were holding meant it wasn’t so simple and then somebody had to attend to guarding the hostages and all this took place in great haste the whole organizational machine was quickly set in motion despite the great amount of confusion because obviously it had all been decided in advance and these roles had all been assigned well ahead

  there were comrades with a weapon made from those coffee-makers they were moka coffee-makers later on in fact they were banned from being used in cells the fuse came out of the coffee-maker there was the detonator and inside was the explosive and these coffee-makers functioned as grenades the explosive had been hidden in the cells and it was this the guards were looking for when they’d carried out that peculiar search they’d searched in all the boxes and bottles because that’s where people hide explosives they hadn’t found any but they’d left them all on the tables to make it clear that they knew there were explosives in the prison that they’d got wind that something was going to happen

  the guards were all put in a dormitory cell and there began the whole ritual of the search and so on the guards weren’t molested nobody harmed them only some comrades began to mimic though without any malice very ironically it looked like the kind of thing the indians* did in ’77 they started mimicking the whole ritual of the guard towards the prisoner and then they were all searched like that exactly the way they searched the prisoners every day they were made to stand there with their legs slightly apart their arms raised and then they were searched in the routine way as they did to us day in day out whenever we went out and whenever we returned to our cells

  first the head was searched fingers through the hair under the hair then down the back of the head on the neck down on to the shoulders and under the armpits and then going right down the back under the bum the legs the backs of the legs and down the legs to the feet and then back up again up the legs the thighs the inner thighs the stomach and then all the way up the trunk back to the neck and then making them undo their trousers pull down the zip feeling the waistband feeling the balls and then making them take off their shoes hand them over and turn them upside down to look inside them all this with the guards there waiting one after the other like our routine with arms raised legs slightly apart

  but what we all confirmed after these searches carried out on all the guards was that among the nineteen guards taken hostage there wasn’t even one non-commissioned officer just some poor wretch of a lance-corporal who obviously just happened to be there and this fact that there wasn’t even one non-commissioned officer there made us all think that the non-commissioned officers had got wind of something going on they had a good idea what was going to happen because it had never ever come about that there wasn’t at least one non-commissioned officer on the floor there wasn’t a single non-commissioned officer not even a sergeant and just by a complete coincidence on the whole floor no on both floors the first and second floor in every wing there wasn’t a single sergeant

  then later they made them take off their uniforms too they stripped them and they brought them clothes the prisoners wore and they made them put on these clothes because they were hostages and so if they were wearing their uniforms if there was a break-in they would immediately be identifiable by whoever was breaking in police carabinieri or guards themselves to free them so that they could carry out on-the-spot reprisals against the prisoners without running the risk of endangering the lives of their guards if instead they were dressed like the prisoners it would all be more difficult

  but there was no violence directed at the guards everyone I remember was concerned about this and they kept on saying that in any case nothing should be done to the guards because that was our insurance that things would turn out all right the hostage guards were all put in a big cell and watched from outside they were always well treated they even ate the same as us what we ate during the revolt was spaghetti which there was plenty of in the cells there were comrades who cooked spaghetti for all the rest of us and they came to take orders three alla matriciana four alla carbonara five with tomato sauce everywhere spaghetti was being cooked on the camping-gas rings and the hostage guards got their spaghetti too

  and the rest of the prisoners the ones that weren’t involved in starting the revolt right away they got themselves organized too to deal with taking on the guards in the likely event of an attack so a whole machinery was set in motion with everyone very involved basically people started arming themselves they started pulling down the window frames to make blades bars and things like that out of them they started making skewers by sharpening the points of the metal fittings of the camping-gas rings they started breaking off table-legs to make clubs and things like that then the armoured doors were pulled off their hinges and placed ag
ainst the big windows at the end of the corridors because from outside they could fire in at us and so on

  in the process of taking over the entire prison people had also got hold of some tools and machinery too for instance they’d taken an electric grindstone and used it to cut through the iron slats of the beds and so with those slats blades could be made they could be made in quantity and there was also an electric welding machine that was used to weld the gates of the rotunda and so block the possibility of a break-in from below and also a break-in from above because from the second floor there was a spiral stair leading up to the roof and then we were also able to make use of the guard-post telephone on the second floor and on this telephone we communicated with the prison administration and this was the medium of communication for negotiations

  and then there was the television because another peculiar thing was that when there’s a revolt they usually cut off all the electricity and this time instead they hadn’t cut off the electricity and they’d left the television working as if to let us stay in touch with the news from outside they could easily have pulled the plug on the lot but instead they left the electricity on they left the telephone working they left the television working and on the television we got news about the negotiations all the televisions in the cells were on all the time with the sound turned right up especially when the news was on and the news of the revolt was always the lead item

  inside the cells weren’t damaged in any way everything was turned into a huge bivouac in the sense that all people did was go up and down the whole length of the corridors which would be about fifty or sixty yards everyone was walking up and down the whole time some disguised with just a scarf or a handkerchief around their faces while others were unrecognizable hooded in a pillow-case with two holes for their eyes a blanket like a poncho over their shoulders and these were obviously non-politicals because the non-politicals had their own way of doing things in a revolt so that they wouldn’t be recognized as you always see in photographs of a rooftop revolt they always have their faces hidden so they won’t be recognized so as to avoid any bad consequences