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In the isolation cells people often just can’t stand it and so they injure themselves because once you’ve been shoved in there alone inside that hole injuring yourself giving yourself injuries becomes the only weapon you have to attract attention to yourself to protest against the long term of isolation so as to get the judge to carry out the interrogation some people manage to get razor blades and cut themselves with them some swallow bits of glass bits of iron some break their own fingers and things like that the forms self-injury takes are varied and inventive everyone has to make do with what he has or what he can manage to get hold of some bang their heads against the wall it seems incredible but there was even someone who took a run at the wall and smashed his head against it splitting his head because it’s the only way some injure themselves because they’re depressed or also often just to get treatment if they’re ill and they’re not being treated
or else some injure themselves to avoid a beating from the guards some do themselves damage in advance to limit the number of blows from the guards they turn up to beat the hell out of you and see you there covered in blood so they control themselves because they’re afraid that somebody who’s already injured might not recover if they pulverize him and then there’d be no way of avoiding enquiries and there could be trouble I’m reminded of the stories people used to tell to get a few days off sick Pepe got Olivo to slam one of the doors of his cinquecento on his hand and Ortica too used to talk about how he’d broken a little finger with the classic system used by conscripts numbing the finger with gas from a lighter and then sticking it in the neck of a Coca Cola bottle you take the bottle in your other hand and you twist it back in one clean movement that way the finger breaks and it doesn’t hurt then you go to the doctor and you get time off
these struck me as crazy stories but then I too realized when I went to work in a factory how things were I’d never had a job before but now in our affinity group the only one still working was Valeriana and the money wasn’t enough to keep the house going Cotogno had lost his job he was working as an electrician but he didn’t get on with his boss because the guy thought he should always be available even for small jobs outside working hours in the evening and on Saturdays too then the problem had got worse when Cotogno had brought home a colour television while he was working on a job in an electrical goods shop the owner of the shop had no proof but he talked to Cotogno’s boss about it and he found an excuse to fire him
Valeriana had been working in the hospital for two years now when she’d finished secondary school she hadn’t been able to find anything else but hospital work as a nurse though in reality they got her to do cleaning they made her wash the floors and do the laundry she’d enrolled in the arts faculty at the university but she’d never attended or taken any exams she was fed up to the teeth with doing that job and she couldn’t wait to give it up but China was still going to secondary school and so it was up to me and Gelso to sort things out we started delivering advertising bills for an estate agent we should have covered whole districts putting the bills through the letterboxes shit wages we spent half an hour delivering and then we threw the still unwrapped parcels into rubbish bags then in the evening we went to the company’s offices to collect our money
after a few days they noticed that we weren’t delivering any and they didn’t give us any more work they did checks they sent someone round to check on whether the bills had been delivered and they made random telephone calls to people for proof we couldn’t have cared less after us there’d be others and they’d do the same thing then I got a chance of a job in the celluloid factory because I had a relative who’d worked there until retirement and they took people on there on the basis of family recommendations the management only took on people who had a relative who’d worked there for years usually it was the father who’d already been working there all his life and then they took on the son that way it was more reliable easier to keep checks easier to put pressure on people
but this rule of thumb for taking people on didn’t apply to every section of the factory the management used this rule of thumb only in what it regarded as the central sections then there was the ordinary production sector which was the most shattering work where they took for granted a high turnover and so in these sections they took on an unskilled labour force particularly young southerners who they knew would take it on for a few months and then leave because it was an intolerable job very unhealthy and with productivity targets that were impossible to maintain and it was the work they did on the calenders which were huge machines consisting of a kind of big tall funnel that conveyed the blocks of celluloid heated up to high temperatures between two huge steel rollers that rotated inwards and brought out the sheets of celluloid at the bottom
the section where I worked though was the research department that’s what it was called and in a way it was the heart of the factory where new products were tested where proto-types were made well there they made combs and spectacle frames the research was to do with the different colours of celluloid for the combs and the spectacle frames it was regarded as a prestige section to work in not only because the speed of the work wasn’t shattering like it was in production but most of all because you worked alongside technicians and engineers and this was something to be proud of for those old workers who believed in the work and all worked hard like imbeciles the workers in that department were all old there were only two as young as me
I didn’t have any really clear idea about that factory I saw it from outside as a vast dirty monstrosity that disgorged fumes into the air and stinking liquids into the river that ran alongside it the impression I got on the first morning of work was a grim one there was this business of getting up while it was still dark because it was winter taking the bus that goes through the small villages to pick up the workers and then stopping in front of the gates the line that went in through a kind of tunnel and then punching my card and when they showed me where I had to go there and then I already felt like leaving turning my back and away getting out of there and taking off when I saw my section a kind of long narrow corridor without windows there were only big skylights way up high and a terrible stink of solvents methylated spirits petrol and so on
the workers were all in black overalls except the foreman who had a white overall and who was in his office at the end of the corridor behind the glass screen from where he could keep an eye on the whole section the foreman showed me the machines he told me to buy myself a black overall and to watch what the other workers did for the first few days to give me an idea of the work and so I started looking about making the most of every chance I had to leave the department to go and collect material and so on and see the layout of the factory there were these big dark corridors that branched out in different directions suddenly opening on to the production sections where the noise was deafening where the atmosphere was suffocating where the heat and the stink were unbearable I felt sorry for the people who worked there
I also discovered that there was an interior courtyard with a door that led on to a little hall no bigger than twelve feet by twelve where the workers went to have a smoke because the materials used were highly inflammable and so the management allowed the workers to go there occasionally to smoke a cigarette it was an area with not even a single window and it filled up with cigarette smoke so that you couldn’t even see people’s faces there was only a bench or two against the peeling walls it was mainly the older workers that went there with their worn out resigned faces not a word passed between them they’d smoke their cigarettes in that posionous smoke-filled hall and then they’d go back to the sections which were extremely unhealthy because the substances used were all carcinogenic especially the colourants and in that place after they retired they all died of cancer within a year or so
after the probationary period the work that they gave me to do along with the two other young guys was just insane they took us into an area where the
re was a big tub against one of the walls the iron tub was full of boiling water heated by gas ovens that ran under the tub over the tub there were iron rings where you had to place the glass flasks containing the solvent and the powdered colour prepared by the technicians running from the cork-stoppered flask was a rubber tube that ended up in a glass coil they gave us elbow-length rubber gloves because every so often we had to shake the flask over the tub of boiling water to help the colour get well mixed
the wall behind the tub was all red and the old workman who took us there hooted with laughter when he told us that one of the flasks had exploded a few months before and the guy who was holding it is still going round now in a shade of red because the colour is indelible I took the glass flask in my hand and I had to be careful not to knock it against the iron ring and I also had to be careful not to bend the rubber tube otherwise the pressure of the liquid would build up and it would all explode and every time I took out a flask to shake it I’d break into a cold sweat as soon as I shook it the liquid would spurt up the tube and fill the whole coil up to the maximum level and if it went any higher the whole lot would just explode
after a few days I made up my mind to finish with the whole business we got hold of some colourant and we added it to every formula they gave us and so in the end the colours came out all wrong and the damage was substantial because every wrong formula meant a lot of money down the drain at that time it was wholesale chaos everywhere in the factories and outside in the city whole streets were erupting as demonstrations of tens of thousands of people went by extremely violent clashes with the police armouries broken into factories and universities occupied trade-union leaders thrown out it was clear that the least we could do in that factory of zombies was a bit of sabotage and then get out and so one morning we stopped going and in no time all the young people who worked in that factory also left one after the other they preferred unemployment to a slow death there like their fathers
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After I’d been ten days in isolation a sergeant arrived and told me to get my things together because they were transferring me to the wing upstairs and as soon as I’d been taken upstairs and they opened this big door leading on to the corridor of the wing I immediately realized that there in the wing the situation was completely different I heard an incredible din all the armour-plated doors of the cells were open or rather I should say they weren’t even armour-plated they were just heavy wooden doors the wooden doors were open and only the cell gates were closed there was a lot of movement a lot of noise and behind the gates I could see people cooking and playing cards so there was lots of movement lots of noise and this was the thing that struck me most after ten days in isolation
there was the sound of prisoners’ voices and there was television all the televisions turned on in all the cells with the volume up really high I could hear the shoot-outs in the spaghetti westerns that the private stations put out at all hours of the day and night one characteristic of the non-politicals that I found out right away is that they lived by night because they were awake all night playing cards they played for money and the debts were later settled outside by friends and relatives because in prison you can’t have money they were awake all night playing for money with the televisions turned on at top volume and then they slept in the daytime they taped newspapers over the windows and they put blankets over them and so there was never daylight in their cells if they needed light they switched on the electric bulbs
they were real old lags in prison this term old lag is used to define this kind of behaviour this way of living your imprisonment this style that’s also expressed through dress the classic old lag is always in his dressing-gown or dungarees or pyjamas no in fact dungarees are already a good bit smarter these guys were always in pyjamas and dressing-gowns they always went down to exercise like that pyjama trousers with a dressing-gown over them slippers and socks never shaving while on visiting days they’d undergo a transformation perfectly shaved shampoo cologne and after-shave smart suit white shirt and tie even one or two in double-breasted pin-stripes patent leather shoes polished till they shone that’s how they got dressed for visits from their wives their families while the rest of the week they were in pyjamas
I was taken to this wing they took me right up to the gate of my cell which was a big cell where there were three comrades already three politicals while in the next cell there were two other comrades in all there were six of us politicals in that wing of non-politicals but we didn’t have exercise together we had our exercise time on a different timetable from the non-politicals as soon as I got into the cell the thing that struck me was the amount of stuff piled up in the cell which unlike the isolation cell was a furnished cell and there were groceries and clothes piled up everywhere it was a very colourful cell the walls were blue they’d painted them blue which seemed to me a very odd colour for a prison cell
I went into this cell where there were these comrades who saw I looked a bit lost right away they made me some coffee and then right away they got some food ready in the cell ravioli in broth for virtually ten days I’d been eating only the disgusting prison food and I thought the ravioli were delicious the comrades wanted to know what had happened to me and they gave me some legal advice they gave me the impression that they knew loads of things that I knew nothing about at all in the cell they also had a copy of the penal code and sometimes they’d look it up when they disagreed about something and gradually they helped me to understand how the prison apparatus worked they showed me which were the softest guards and which were the meanest shits and how to behave accordingly
in that wing I also began to understand what kind of relationship there is between us and the non-politicals or at least the non-politicals of that wing because it’s not as if all non-politicals are the same and with the demands they made of us through the working prisoner or shouting to us from their cells they never stopped asking us for things they asked us for food cigarettes everything all the time and the comrades in my cell explained that these non-politicals were convinced we had more money than them because for them we were like a big family for their reasoning was I’m a small-time criminal with no money and here in prison I’ve maybe got to go to incredible lengths to eat and to get hold of money for the family and for the lawyer and so on
whereas you are one big family you have the solidarity and the material support of so many people outside because when they arrest you people protest on your behalf they sign petitions they make a lot of fuss they collect money for you and they send it to you in prison and you have lawyers who are your friends that cost you very little or even cost you nothing at all and all these things are things we don’t have and you’re never short of money and so if we ask you for cigarettes it should be easy to let us have them in short what they were asking for was an indirect share for them too in this solidarity that they saw we had they were asking for some sign of a bit of this solidarity coming their way too
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
The Unseen Page 17