We Want Everything

by Nanni Balestrini

  I waited outside for the manager to come in so I could make him give me my money. But while I was there I needed a shit, so I went to have a shit and the engineer went past. To cut a long story short, I didn’t get there in time to grab him. So then I went to the camera del lavoro6 and I told them that they’d sacked me for these reasons. Ah, don’t worry, we’ll take care of it. We’ll bring a nice little case. They’ll have to give you everything. Anyway, they asked me if I’d joined the union. I said I’d signed up during the strike, I’d coughed up a thousand lire. OK, so they get me to do a letter to Ideal Standard. They get me to send it express and registered, I spend another two or three hundred lire. I wait about a fortnight: more than two weeks I waited for something to happen. I went to them and I said: Listen, I haven’t heard anything more, and I need the money.

  Well, you’ve got to be patient, don’t worry. If they don’t pay we’ll bring a case against them and they’ll give you everything. I got really jacked off with waiting. One morning I went and waited for the engineer to arrive at the factory. When he got there I jumped in front of his car. He stopped, I opened the door and slipped in as he tried to lock it. I put a hand on his shoulder and threw the letter in his face. I said: Why didn’t I get the eight days’ in lieu of notice? You fired me and now I want to be paid. Not just the eight days, but the month of work I’ve missed, too.

  I want everything, everything that’s owed to me. Nothing more and nothing less, because you don’t mess with me. He said: Listen, I wasn’t there when you were fired. If it were up to me I wouldn’t have fired you. You’re a good lad, I would have moved you. If you want to come back to work I’ll give you a better job, a job where you won’t be like the others, a job just for you. I said positions at Ideal Standard didn’t interest me any more. I’ve had it, I want my money right now, immediately. No more and no less than I’m owed. He says: Yes, don’t worry. He takes me to the office, calls the clerks. He says: Work it out for him. Work what out? Everything, all of it. Really? Yes, everything, he says.

  They work it out and I’m owed one hundred and twenty thousand lire. He calls me and says: Is one hundred and twenty thousand lire OK? I say: No. Then he says: Listen, with the accounts as they are, that’s all I can give you. This is what we’ll do: I’ll get the supervisor to punch your timecard for the month of November. I’ll get it punched for you so that next month you can come and collect your wages without working. OK, I say, that’s OK by me. But no messing around. Next month I’ll be back. I see you going by Fuorni every morning; I know where you live. So let’s not mess around. The engineer says: OK, but I want to tell you something. Get your head straight and I can find you another job.

  He was from Brescia; he’d been transferred to Salerno. He didn’t want to make too many enemies, apparently. He didn’t want to lose sleep over thirty or forty thousand or a hundred thousand lire that wasn’t his. What the fuck did he care about it? He even said he wanted to help me: I’ll find you another job, he said. No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to work any more. I want to do nothing. And so I went and collected the money the month after and that was the end of the Ideal Standard story. I was unemployed for a while, but I bought nice shoes, an overcoat, some clothes. I spent all the money in less than a fortnight. I spent it all. I didn’t have a single lira.

  I didn’t get unemployment benefit because I didn’t have two years’ worth of work stamps. But in the south the employment office was running building site schools — which was just a way to distribute money to people. They give you seven hundred lire a day. You go to the building site, which is not even a building site: it’s an empty field where someone calls a roll. You say, Here, he marks the day down and you take off. Then on Saturday you go and collect the money, four thousand two hundred lire. And with that I could buy cigarettes, go to the movies, more or less manage to get by. As for whatever else I needed, I was living with my family.

  One day I decide that was no good. I did the last of the summer work at Florio. There are lots of canneries there, mostly tomatoes. The work is seasonal. In the past this seasonal work lasted maybe three or four months. Now it’s barely a month because there are fewer tomatoes. Anyway, I got a month at Florio, doing twelve hours a day, working Sundays. I made a hundred and fifty, a hundred and sixty thousand lire. I didn’t even sign up for benefits because I decided I should go to Milano. Usually people who do the seasonal summer work get two or three or four months, even six months of benefits. They get fifteen hundred or two thousand lire a day. That’s what they do when there’s no work. They go on the dole.

  Second chapter Work

  I’m from Fuorni, which is a village near Salerno. There’s Giovi, Caserosse, Mariconda, Pastena, Mercatello and so on. At the end of primary school my father and my mother were thinking of getting me to continue so they got some advice from the teachers. These teachers buttered up my father and mother. All parents should do this, they told them. They gave them some advice. It’s better if he doesn’t go to middle school. Apart from anything else, you have to pass the entrance exam. And you study more, the load is heavier. You need more books, it costs more. And then maybe he won’t be able to finish, because it costs so much.

  Your son can go to a trade school and then he’ll be able to get a job in a factory. Be a foreman, a section head. The words foreman, section head sounded like a fairy tale, you didn’t even really know what the fuck it was. How could we know, when there weren’t any factories there yet? My father’d done a thousand different jobs. As the son of a peasant he had done everything, from smuggler after the war to labourer on building sites as he was now. And so it was decided that I should keep going to school. I was scared of going to high school, as it was called. Luckily I had friends from Fuorni who were going too.

  We had to buy a bus pass, from Fuorni to the city. Right from the beginning there were divisions in the class, between the kids from the city and the kids from out of town. We came from Pontecagnano, from Battipaglia, from Baronissi, from Giffoni, from Nocera. The kids from the provinces were the so-called cafoni, hicks, the others were town kids. Some kids got used to this condition of inferiority. They tried to win over the kids from Salerno with ice cream, sweets, by lending a pen or a notebook.

  Me and a friend from Pontecagnano preferred to meet this problem head-on. We went right at it with the kids from Salerno. We earned those kids’ respect with our fists. Often when school got out there were punch ups, terrible battles. This went on for the whole first year of trade school. The second and third year were different. The difference wasn’t between cafoni and town kids but between the smart kids and the dorks. We made fun of the dorks, we swiped their lunch and their money.

  Next it was the discovery of the city, comparing life in the village with life in the city. I saw all these windows full of stuff. Trousers, bags, shoes, furniture, radios. I saw more stuff to eat in the grocers. On the newsstands I saw magazines with women on the covers: when I went back to the village I saw women with skirts down to their ankles. In the city I saw posters with women who were so different. I saw them in the street, going to the movies. They were all new things that stimulated my imagination. I felt like I was beginning to understand something. And then I discovered a basic thing: to dress well, to eat well, to live well, you needed money.

  All this new stuff I saw in the city had a price on it, from the newspapers to the meat to the shoes; everything had a price. It wasn’t like fruit on the trees in the village that we used to go and get of an evening, or the fish that we caught in the river. They weren’t the clothes that our mothers gave us, which they made themselves or that came from who knew where — pants or shoes that we put on without even knowing what colour they were because we didn’t give a fuck. There was a huge difference between the upbringing we’d had up to now in the village with our families, our peasant environment, and this city environment.

  I discovered the importance of money then and began to ask for more money at home on Sundays. But bloody he
ll, they couldn’t give it to me. They gave me a hundred or a hundred and fifty lire a week. And that was a lot, there really wasn’t any money at home. Then I noticed something else. I saw all my friends, the ones who hadn’t stayed at school. They weren’t going into the fields with their parents to plant tomatoes, the way things had been since I was born. I had broken with the way we did things by going to school, but I saw that these guys had broken with it another way. Instead of going into the fields they went to work on building sites, and they made more money in two months than their parents made with a year’s harvest.

  They made more money than their parents and they wore jeans. At that time jeans were the most fashionable thing. They were the years when you saw movies like Poveri ma belli.7 But if you went to school you didn’t have a thousand or two thousand lire to buy jeans. The guys who had jeans also had pullovers, but not those pullovers that the shepherds wore up in the Apennines, in Irpinia, the hand-knitted ones. A pullover from a shop, lovely, in any colour. Then you bought a record player and records. Rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, all of that. And you danced like an American.

  But you always needed money. Guys were already thinking of buying Lambrettas. This was exceptional, it broke with all the traditions of village life. Landowners had a horse and trap for going out on Sundays or going to town, or a bicycle, the type with high handlebars, and always black. And here were the sons of tomato farmers buying Lambrettas and all this other stuff.

  That was when I started to say to my mother: Listen, I don’t want to go to school any more, because I want jeans; I want to go to the movies, I want to go out for pizza. I want to go out and to do that you need money. If not, what am I going to do. I study, but then I’m stuck here wanting everything. It’s no good living and wanting everything. I wanted to live immediately, right then. We were at the age when you start to have girlfriends and every Sunday we went dancing. My mother said: Listen, I’ll tell you something. You’re better, you’re superior, because you go to school, you study. But I didn’t listen, I didn’t feel superior, I never had.

  I judged superiority on the basis of things, on the basis of jeans, pullovers, record players, period. I didn’t judge it on the basis of the bullshit they taught me at school, because look, that bullshit was no use at all for dancing, for going out, for eating pizza. So when my mother told me that I was superior, I didn’t get it. I felt like it wasn’t true at all.

  One time we talk about it and my father is there, too. My father hesitates a bit. He thought that by sending me to school I would have a better life than his. Now that he saw that I wasn’t a kid any more, that I was becoming a young man and had certain desires, he understood. But watch out, work’s a bad thing, he told me. You have to get up early, you have to listen to the boss all the time. If there’s no work you don’t eat, if there is work you have to work hard. Work is never good. Work seems good to you because it will let you to go out for pizza, go dancing, go to the movies. But when you have a family you won’t be going out for pizza, you won’t be going dancing. You’ll have to feed your family and then you’ll see how tough work is.

  This is why you have to think hard about it. I’m not telling you to go to school or to get a job. I’m only telling you one thing: work is bad, so try to avoid it. I send you to school because I think that’s one way to avoid work. I felt this explanation, that work was a horrible thing, made more sense than what my mother had told me, that I was better. And I began to think that what my friends who’d gone to work in the building sites understood wasn’t true, either: that money equals work, and that therefore work equals happiness. I began to have doubts about my discovery that happiness meant going to work on a building site.

  It was as if, with this perspective on work and on his life, my father had said: See this family, see me, see yourself? Is this a happy family, your mother and I and your sisters? Poor, deprived, wretched, that’s what we are. And then I understood that work is a fraud and nothing more, because in my family I didn’t see any jeans, I didn’t see any pullovers, I didn’t see any record players. My father said: Here’s a family, and here there’s also work. Don’t you think I work? And you can see what the result is.

  I started to waver, I couldn’t decide. Go to school or get a job? I’ll get the record player and the pullover by working, but I’ll end up like my father. Or go to school, which you could say might make me happier, in the sense that I wouldn’t lead the life that I was leading with my family, the same life as my father and my mother and my sisters. And that was what made me keep going to school. I went to technical college because there were lower fees and fewer books, and the load was lighter: pretty much non-existent.

  I did a three-year course in auto-electrics, a stupid thing because that’s a trade you learn in the workshop. Young kids learned it by unscrewing globes and distributors. You need to know all the types of cars. But we learnt it all, you know, from books. We never saw the different types of batteries or distributors, ever. We learnt abstract things that were only useful for passing tests. But if a car blew a globe, a twelve-year-old kid from an auto-electrician knew how to fix it right away, and you didn’t.

  The only point of these technical schools was to give jobs to caretakers, headmasters and unemployed teachers. They were no use to us, spending money on textbooks and notebooks and lunches to go to school: they were expenses we couldn’t afford. All that mattered was to know how to talk about the battery, the distributor, the dynamo, the starter motor. If you could talk about them, if you could remember what was in the book, you passed your tests. By then everyone was convinced that the fucking school was of no use at all, but if you talked to a teacher about it, naturally he denied it.

  No, he’d say, that’s ignorant. They’re kids who only know how to do straightforward things. They do it but they don’t understand why they do it. But you know what an electric current is, how it’s created, how it flows. This is a superior fact. You’ll go on to be foremen in the factories. They threw that in your face again, that you’d become a foreman. All of us, foremen, fifty or sixty of us, and all the technical schools in Italy turning out thousands of foremen every year. How many foremen did Italian industry need?

  Finally I finished at this school where you didn’t learn anything useful. And the teachers knew it too; no one failed the exams. When tech finished we all looked for jobs. We presented ourselves to the FIAT dealers, who had workshops. We spoke to them: What do you do? I’m an auto-electrician. But have you ever worked at it? No, but I studied it at tech. They never took us on. We went to Officine Mecchaniche, to Autobianchi, to Alfa, to Lancia. They didn’t take us on; they didn’t need us. They needed their youngsters who learnt everything there and who knew how to do everything. So we all went our separate ways, we never saw each other again. I don’t think any of us ever worked as an auto-electrician or a foreman.

  That summer I went to work in the tomato canneries. I worked twelve hours a day; I worked on Sundays too. I worked for two months and made nearly two hundred and fifty thousand lire. And with that money I bought an overcoat and other gear to get through the winter, though that wasn’t enough. But I didn’t go to work on the building sites like I had thought three years before. I saw the guys who had gone to work there and who were now turning eighteen and nineteen. Once you had the scooter, you stopped. Then you crashed the scooter, and you needed money to fix it. And for fines, and for petrol. And then the problem of getting engaged and married came up. You needed loads of money.

  A whole lot of problems came up, and those guys didn’t think too much about dancing and jeans then: they began to seem like second order problems. Sometimes they got fired. Work got tough. They started the piecework system. And then there was the fact that everyone was earning money. It was no longer the exception, a privilege like four or five years before. It was a need that became the same for everybody.

  There was also a fixation: What’s all this? You’ve been to school and now you want to be a worker? And so I couldn�
��t do it. It was really a point of honour to not do certain work if you’d been a student. Then my parents had to support me so that I wouldn’t have to go and work on a building site. When I worked in the tomato cannery they tried to keep it quiet, and so did I.

  It was in those years that industrialisation started. The era of the development of the south started, partly to stop the labourers and the field hands rebelling because they weren’t earning enough money to get by. So some industry started up. You could pay lower wages; there were no unions. People started working in the factories. But not too many, because they wanted most of them to leave for the north, to emigrate. But a little bit of money started to go around.

  You saw cars, you saw fridges, television sets in people’s houses. And I went to work in a factory for the first time, too. I went to Ideal Standard. And I discovered that what my father had told me was true: that work was just toil. It’s a drag and that’s all. So I was fired from Ideal Standard. And I thought about the avenue that was open to all southerners: that is, to emigrate, to go to Milano. To get myself up north, too, up where all these people were headed en masse: packed trains carrying away whole villages from the hinterland and the Apennines.

  That wasn’t the first time I’d been up north. I’d been there once before, straight after I finished tech, before Ideal Standard at Brescia. I went to Torino; I only stayed for a month. My married sister was there, the one who came back down every year for the holidays in a car. I was knocked sideways by that vast plain, by the work, by the mentality. And I came back in a hurry to go to the beach, to hang around with my friends. I went to my married sister’s place in Torino and saw that they lived in a flat worse than ours in Salerno, a flat off the entranceway on the ground floor. One room where they slept and they ate. But they came down in a car, the jerks.