The Unseen

by Nanni Balestrini

  the police load my entire archive on to the cars and when they’ve finished they tell me okay now we’re going into town to the judge as if they were sorry about it they were sorry about it for themselves because they kept going on about how long it would take about when they’d get back the lawyer says he can’t go into town and I don’t even insist better not to bother with that bastard my father and mother start asking the police anxious questions but where are you taking him when will he be back and so on they’re vague with their answers they don’t really say I’m under arrest and I reassure them too saying it’s likely I won’t be back for the night but not to worry and to pack a bag for me with a pair of underpants a vest toothpaste a toothbrush just like for my brother when he left for military service I joked with my mother

  then we go downstairs and when I turn and see them pale-faced at the top of the steps I feel guilty it occurs to me that they won’t get any sleep tonight I’m still thinking about this as the cars are driving through the village and I was thinking that later it would be even worse for I was sure that this time I’d end up inside that this time I’d really end up in gaol we’ve driven through more villages by the time we reach the motorway I looked out of the window at the houses the cars going by the people walking and riding bicycles people going about their lives that flow of people there in the streets so unexceptional that you never take any heed of it but at that moment I saw it as something beautiful I began to feel sad then on the motorway I saw the mountains in the distance the sun was going down I could see the mountains and the whiteness of the villages below further down as I’d always seen them and as maybe I’d not see them again for christ knows how long and I felt I was saying goodbye to them for ever

  18

  The village where I lived was a shit-hole and the people in it were shitty people too I didn’t like this village and I didn’t like these people but this village and these people were the same everywhere round here they were all villages like this all villages just like this one and all people just like these round here if you don’t know these villages if you don’t live in one of them you can get confused you can easily mistake one village for another they’re all alike in the middle there’s the square which always happens to be the church square and they’ve invariably got the same main street running through the village with a few shops and one or two bars the school and the municipal offices all built more or less identically and the main street crossing the square going in one direction to the cemetery and in the other to the little railway station that links up all the little villages to one another

  the railway is old and runs at a loss the carriages are dilapidated and look like something out of a western and in these carriages people travel between one or other of these villages all villages of two or three thousand inhabitants though some were even smaller people born here from families here are even fewer they’re half the population the other half are people who’ve come from elsewhere who came here in successive waves first people from the Veneto that came before my time then the terroni as they still call them here who settled here like flies whole families of them whole villages from the South I remember them coming here these people who look so different different with their darker complexions with a language different from our dialect but also different from Italian and almost impossible to understand and dressed differently too

  they came here and they found room to stay in the old half-ruined houses the big houses with the courtyards where the peasants used to live and that were now falling down and they moved into them all together in large numbers into small damp tumbledown rooms and they lived on top of one another there was the village priest who made an effort to find places for them and they queued up outside the priest’s door while the local people refused to accept them shunned them they looked too different from them they seemed by comparison bad mannered dirty but the men immediately found work in the numerous small factories that were sprouting up everywhere in the surrounding area they did the shittiest jobs of course and when they could they brought back homework for their families to do on the side

  and the whole family would get down to work in the kitchen and the bedroom and they would all work the children the aunts and uncles and the eighty-year-old grannies dressed in black all worked there together as a production line assembling toys topo gigio toys hairbands plastic spectacles electric torches and that kind of stuff the terroni lived on the margins of village life the village people didn’t want them they didn’t want them in the few village bars and there were the famous words spoken by an old woman who owned one of the bars when a southern boy came in and ordered a drink she’d told him I’ll give you a drink now and I won’t charge you for it you can have a drink free on the house but after that you’re not to come back ever again and so these words were quoted as if people were quoting the words of a heroine there you are that’s the way to do it in other words

  now and then fights broke out between locals and southerners but not so much among us younger ones because we went to school together and what we heard said in our families about the terroni was modified by the fact of living and playing together of being at school together for so much of the time and then at the church hall in the afternoon where we played together because here in this village the church ran everything the cinema where people queued up on Sunday afternoons belonged to the church and in order to go to the cinema we children had to go to the oratory and go to mass and there they stamped your little card that you had to show to the ticket seller who otherwise wouldn’t give you a ticket even the football ground the tennis court the basketball the volleyball court the gym all belong to the oratory and the library too and half the bars

  there the priest was very powerful and not much different from the local administration of the village who’d never been anything but Christian Democrats they were the powerful families of the village who’d always been wealthy first from the land and then in the economic boom of the sixties with the area’s proliferation of hundreds of small factories where people were working thirteen fourteen sometimes fifteen hours a day with overtime my father also worked in one of these small factories and did those long hours too and in our family too we did home-work like the terroni and we’d always done it like everyone in the village I grew up surrounded by big cardboard boxes containing parts of table lamps and moped ignitions to be assembled it was quite usual for a family to do this work they all did it all hours of the day and my parents did it all night too in the kitchen

  after supper the boxes would be brought out from under the kitchen table the hand-press would be assembled on the edge of the table it was a kind of rudimentary hand operated rivetting-gun and we’d start to assemble the parts we had a kind of production line somebody assembling and somebody else rivetting with the hand-press fitting the parts together with the aluminium screws the rivets so tiny that they always slipped out of your fingers and with the rivets you attached the switches for the light and the horn to the chromium-plated cover this work went on for hours and hours this idiotic work always the same thing had been done every day for years on end this work that was paid at a fraction of a lira for each piece but with all of us working together we could make thousands of pieces and then what you ended up with was the thousand lire that boosted the family income

  the assembly materials passed through various hands before they reached the families there were middlemen who were usually the factory foremen who put out the work to the families and who made money out of this simple transaction and who were also regarded as benefactors and then there could be other transactions because everyone was free to redistribute in turn to whomsoever they wished so that they could meet the delivery dates my father too passed on work to the southerners’ families and they came to our house to collect it he wasn’t a racist which is not to say he was fond of the southerners but he didn’t despise them either although the southerners were regarded as people who did the work badly and didn’t m
eet the delivery dates

  and so he guaranteed the deliveries for them and answered for the work even if of course he gained something by that transaction obviously in the small factories that manufactured the pieces it suited them to put them out for assembly it suited them to have the assembly done as homework because that way it worked out an awful lot cheaper and the whole economy of the village and of the surrounding villages was organized accordingly between work in the small factories and sweated home-work the one home-working hardest was of course my mother who’d being doing it for years who did it all day as soon as she’d finished her chores and her cooking then she got down to it at once and she was there for hours adjusting the screws fast with that dry clicking that you could hear in our house all the time at all hours and that nobody noticed any more

  in our family we all worked including my brother who’d left after primary school and gone to work too as a mechanic I was the only one who didn’t work because my folks got it into their heads from the time I was very young that I should study not study this or that to become this or that but simply that I should study followed by the old chestnut that it means you won’t have to work as hard as us and by dint of hearing this over and over again not even my brother got pissed off if he saw I was doing nothing while he worked hard I did nothing because I was destined to study and even if I was reading a comic book I was studying it was a big deal there for families like mine to have one of their children staying on at school it bred a kind of pride

  people lived there in this atmosphere resigned without even thinking that anything could be different only education it was perhaps the only thing that could change anyone’s life and in fact in the last few years something important had started changing from when more and more young people started going to the nearby town to study in the upper secondary schools it meant every morning getting on the train packed with people with students workers commuters it meant that half-hour journey where you met so many different people and it meant the city which though it wasn’t a big city seemed vast to us compared with the village the city with its traffic the busy centre the shops the offices and it also meant the school which was new and different with so many new people who came from backgrounds different from mine

  the city people were very different from the village people they were better I thought they were better because they weren’t always watching you spying on you like in the village in the city what you did didn’t at once become common knowledge it didn’t at once reach your parents’ ears your neighbours everybody you didn’t have to account to everybody for everything you did while in the village that’s just how it is everyone knows everyone they all know one another and the least thing you do at once becomes a subject for gossip and when you walk along the street you’re aware all eyes are on you everybody watching you and talking about you as soon as you’ve gone by I didn’t like the people in the village I didn’t like them because they were all sanctimonious bigots all priest-loving hypocrites and rotten all rotten inside

  after a year of going to the city I felt detached from this nonsense I didn’t give a damn any more and I was even less tolerant of the people in the village I couldn’t stand them at all any more and so I started taking the train into the city it took only half an hour to get there I’d go in the afternoon too when school was over and in the city I made friends with people of my own age with young people of fifteen or sixteen like me who lived in the city and I couldn’t have cared less about being in the village I was never there any more or I was there as little as possible of course there was a problem in the evening after supper when I couldn’t go to the city because there were no trains to get back and then I sank back into that village bar atmosphere into that void that I and also other young people of my age couldn’t stand any longer after we’d got to know the city because everything was different everything was better in the city

  19

  Meanwhile what had happened on the first floor was different altogether because instead of all getting into a big cell and doing what we’d done on the second floor some of the comrades put up a fight they tried to stop them from coming in and they flung the coffee machines at them that’s what they told us afterwards and then the carabinieri who came in up from the ground floor started firing non-stop I mean they were firing at random they were coming into the corridors they were firing inside the cells they fired inside all the cells and they started wounding people they wounded a guard who had obviously got free in that chaos nobody was holding him any more and he started yelling I’m a guard I’m a guard

  he got a spray of machine-gun fire that sliced him in two but he wasn’t dead and then another guy who was a non-political and he got two bullets in the femur he’s lame now he’s lame for the rest of his life and you can still see the bullet marks on the armoured sheeting you can see how many bullets they fired and at what height they fired them you can see from the holes left in the metal even though the newspapers later said they’d fired rubber bullets like hell those guys started throwing grenades right there in the corridors and going berserk shooting and then the situation was that instead of all gathering together in one big cell there the people split up between different cells each group taking a guard as hostage but even with the guard as hostage clearly everybody realized that given the stage things had got to the guard as hostage was no longer enough of a guarantee that they wouldn’t kill you on the spot then the carabinieri came along firing from cell to cell and saying either you come out right now or we’ll throw in a grenade and they came out but the strange thing was that the real carnage was carried out upstairs even though upstairs there was no resistance because in reality downstairs they didn’t touch anybody they didn’t beat anybody up whereas upstairs they pulverized them they beat everybody up they acted out all those mock dramas they fired they took aim at people they pressed the butt of the machine gun here against the temple then they fired that’s the kind of play-acting they did

  after this I thought that the worst that could happen had passed I naively thought that the worst was over they made us all put our hands up and since we were on the second floor they started making us go downstairs everyone in single file down the stairs of course it wasn’t a case of walking down they kicked you down kicking you hitting you in the back with the guns and you reeled down each flight of stairs caught in the thick of the beatings they came at you from every direction but the fact is that I personally didn’t feel those blows much I felt nothing as I reeled down the stairs lit by flashlight we could see nothing we were knocking into everything I felt nothing probably because the only reaction I had was the thought that they hadn’t killed me

  they didn’t kill me now I thought they didn’t kill any of us only I didn’t understand where they were taking us what they were doing what are these guys doing now what are they going to do now now that it’s all over now what are they doing where are they taking us I couldn’t make out what they were doing where they would take us and then when I finally reeled to the bottom in the ground floor rotunda at the end of the stairs and I went through the gate leading to the ground floor rotunda there the scene was very brightly lit there was plenty of light while where we’d come from upstairs was all in darkness there were only the bulbs of the flashlights while there when we arrived downstairs all the lights were on it was all dazzlingly bright

  and there but in a flash a split second the time it took to cross the rotunda in all that light there I glimpsed a lot of people in uniform and plain clothes there were the guards’ commanding officers sergeants and warrant-officers there were people who’d come in from outside and there they kicked me shoved me struck me and punched me in the direction of the open corridor leading to the exercise yards I saw they were herding us into the yards only the problem was as soon as I started down the three steps into this open corridor I realized I saw that that was where the punishment was because there lined up on both sides were all the guards masked in balaclavas t
hey were there in two rows in these big overcoats and with clubs and iron bars in their hands

  well since these guys were making us run down the open corridor with our hands behind our heads and you couldn’t shield yourself then clearly we were glad enough to have to keep our hands on our heads because the blows were being struck mainly at the head they were terrible blows these guys were striking with all their strength with the clubs and with the iron bars I’d hardly got down the first two steps when there was a guard trying to trip me up to make me fall right away because the thing there was to make you fall down and then hit you while you were on the ground but they didn’t manage to make me fall this corridor was very brightly lit on one side it was bounded by the dividing wall and on the other side there was a big wire mesh fence enclosing the exercise yards

  and then I saw ahead of me there was a comrade and I saw him take a terrible blow with an iron bar he took a terrible blow on his side and he doubled up and two or three guards jumped on him to give him a savage beating I managed to get clear of them to go forward still with my hands on my head with the blows coming from every direction it came into my mind that we had to go along the whole length of the corridor that would have been about thirty or forty yards it came to me that there was this whole long way to go where these two ranks of guards were lined up hitting out and I went all the way along running the gauntlet of the blows but without falling thinking if I get right to the end it’ll be over