We Want Everything

by Nanni Balestrini

  I went up by train. The train was so crowded I wanted to get off after only thirty kilometres. I did the whole journey standing up. Drunk people with pieces of bread this big eating in the passageways. Babies crying, shitting. Suitcases, packages, boxes everywhere. An incredible thing, and these people had already been travelling for ten hours. I got on at Salerno and they were coming from Sicily. They’d already been travelling since morning: they were totally pissed off. It was April. Down south the custom is to leave in spring, because everyone knows that before that it’s cold up north. So people all leave in spring.

  In Torino I worked as a metal polisher. A Fiat is nothing more than so many parts, so many accessories that someone makes. Actually no one makes them. For example, the handles on the 500 and the 600 are all made of aluminium; there’s all this stuff made out of aluminium. Various foundries make them, then the foundries subcontract out the finishing. There’s the clean-up at the foundry. You need to do a rough clean-up of the part, then you polish it with another buffer. There’s a buffer for cleaning it up and a buffer that polishes it, with steel fibres. You polish the handle and it gets shiny and smooth. That was the job. They gave me the qualification of metal polisher.

  There you had to finish two thousand units a day. I didn’t have time to blow my nose. I was always black with dirt. I was a metal polisher. But I didn’t like being a metal polisher and after a month I took off. I made back the money I’d spent that spring. But this time, the second time I went up north, I did it differently. I saw it wasn’t true any more that you needed less money to get by in the south, that things cost less, the things that by now everybody was used to; a TV set or packaged meat cost the same in Salerno as in Torino. Petrol cost the same, a scooter cost the same, the train cost the same.

  In the south the things that you needed were no longer cheaper. Yeah, up until five or six years ago you managed to get garlic, onions, chickens, fruit easily enough. You went into a field and took fruit, basil, onions. But now the fields were all fenced in and there were guards behind the fences. There were produce sellers who sold the produce, and if you went and stole it you ended up inside. And people were ashamed to show they were poor, so now you had to buy the fruit and vegetables that, one way or another, you used to get for free. It might have cost a bit less than in Milano or Torino. But there wasn’t any money, there was much less money. So I decided to go up north because you really earned more money there.

  I knew families up north. Whole families had left: one that lived right next door to me had all gone. The father had been a tomato farmer, he planted tomatoes at Versecca, an area on the Sele plain. The sons were called Angelo, Rocco, Andrea, Armando, Carmine, Giovanni. They all worked together with their father on the tomatoes. All of them cutting reeds, all of them making ties; they used broom shoots to tie the tomato plants to the reeds so they’d grow up.

  Then there was the custom of taking the tomatoes, cutting them in half and leaving them to dry in the sun. Then you pressed them through a copper sieve and out came the sauce, the concentrate, which you put into clay jars with fig leaves on top. That’s how you made tomato paste, you made bottled tomatoes, too. Everyone made bottles. At lunch you ate tomato salad. In the evening, tomato salad; in the morning, tomato salad. Wine and that hard-baked bread they make there.

  My father, on the other hand, was a casual worker. He made stakes out on the plain: he cut reeds in the meadows and sold them. You needed two or three hundred bundles of reeds a week. He sold them to the pasta factories for thirty thousand lire: the pasta factories put pasta to dry on the reeds; it was an ancient occupation that has disappeared now. My father did a bit of that, a bit of labouring on building sites. He turned his hand to all types of work. Quite often he was a carter, because he had a horse and cart. He got by however he could, but there was no way he would work as a farm hand, he wouldn’t pick tomatoes: that was a terrible job.

  Sometimes I used to help that neighbouring family with their tomatoes. My mother would say: Don’t go — do you want to get mixed up with tomato growers? By now that family had all migrated, but they didn’t go all together at the same time. The first to go was the second oldest brother, Andrea, who was the black sheep of the family. He was the kind of guy who always dodged work; out in the fields he’d find a nice cool spot, the type who didn’t like work. He was illiterate, he hadn’t wanted to go to school either. He left to do his military service and then never came back down.

  Every so often a letter came. And then he turned up in the village, all smooth and with plenty of money. He said he sold flowers, because people bought flowers up north. To us that seemed crazy, people buying flowers. He said he sold flowers, and that on the day of the dead he made seventy or eighty thousand lire. We thought it was unbelievable. Now he was trying to open a flower shop. He was getting a drivers licence, he wanted to buy a van to get flowers from San Remo and bring them to Milano: things that were like fairy tales to his brothers and his friends.

  He told us these stories too; in the evenings we used to sit outside our houses, under a grapevine. Now they’ve paved it all over, there’s no grass there now. Sitting there of an evening we used to talk. So Andrea told us these stories about what he’d got up to up north. About three or four years after Andrea had gone away and been back a couple of times to visit his family, another brother, Rocco, left. This guy Rocco was one of the youngsters that everybody in the village talked about. He was the type who gave the finger to the landowners. He was the type that landowners don’t like, the type who bought new clothes, too. At that time, if someone bought new clothes, the bosses and the landowners looked on it badly. They gave you a hard time because you had new clothes.

  This guy Rocco was sick of life in the fields with his father, and he took off as well, to Milano. When he gets there they are building the Metro and he gets a job driving an excavator. Every now and again he wrote. When a letter came from someone who was away, the first thing you did was read it to the family. Then you let all the neighbouring families who knew the guy read it. It became a thing in the village: what he had written, what he said, what was new. You knew the postman had been with a letter: Who’s it from, your son? What’s he say? What’s new?

  There wasn’t TV or movies like today or a newspaper with all the news in it. Before, letters were the most important way of getting news around. You would talk about a letter for a week or more. Then another one would arrive and on you’d go. That’s how I heard that Rocco was driving an excavator in Milano. And I couldn’t imagine what the fuck this excavator was. It must have been a really fine thing to drive an excavator. In a rural village the only thing you knew about were hoes and oxen.

  Rocco wrote that he was working twelve hours a day, which didn’t impress anyone because in the fields you worked maybe fourteen; there was no work schedule. And he was making, I don’t know, some fantastic sum. Naturally his father was happy. Rocco was engaged to a girl from a nearby village and after a year and a half he comes back to get married. He shows up in the village wearing a black suit, with a white shirt, a black tie, black shoes. He turns up looking really smart, and everyone was looking at him. He had a suitcase too, not the usual box tied up with a bit of string that you took up north. And the landlord of the building where he lived, and where we lived too, called him over. He says: How are you, how are things going. He gave him a dirty look, from head to toe.

  Then all the landlords and landowners were talking about him in the evening when they went to the barbers for their shave. In the village, labourers and farmhands who were at the barber’s had to make way if a landlord or landowner arrived for a shave. The barber took out a new, clean towel, whereas for everyone else he used the same towel all day. They changed them the next day, because they were filthy. But for the landlords they got a clean towel. And the beauty of it is that the landlords didn’t even pay for a shave, while everyone else had to pay.

  The landlords talked in the barber shop: Have you seen Rocco, he’s back. Yeah
, he’s doing well, why don’t you all go away too? And the labourers said: Come on, up there you don’t live so well. There’s fog, the air is bad. We’re not going, only fools go. That guy thinks he’s something, with his clean clothes. That is to say, the landlords didn’t make these landlord-type judgements, the others did, the ones who stayed behind. The landlords only stoked the fires. They were checking to see how it went down, a country boy coming home got up like that, when they didn’t even have clothes like that. It bothered them, this fact; it spoiled things. The only thing the landowners said was: But he’s a good type, he’s got it right. There’s no doubt about that, the labourers said.

  When he got married Rocco brought a suit for his father and clothes for his mother and brothers. All of them with new clothes, everyone looking at this family with new clothes. It was stuff that you couldn’t get in the village, only in the city. There were waiters at the wedding who brought around sweets, champagne, the lot. And music. But a wedding in the south, for peasants, has always been a big deal, a mark of having arrived. People went into debt to get married, and spent the rest of their lives paying it off.

  As things got worse for this family, they went away one after the other. All the brothers went, and Rocco found them jobs. Up north they did well, they got married and all the rest of it. In the end they all left, including the parents. There were lots of families that did the same; this is the family I remember best because I knew them. They were our neighbours, they lived right next door to us. And I decided to go up north too, because there was money up there.

  Third chapter The north

  Anyway, I took off up north. In Milano the first thing was to go and find this guy Rocco, because he was a reference point for me, something secure. Rocco was 20 years older than me. I remember that he was already a man when I was a little kid. He was the kind of guy people were always talking about. He was a stirrer, they said, someone who wanted to see himself as equal to the bosses and the landlords. He’d come from nowhere and gone up north, and he’d made it there. He was a role model for any youngster who wanted to leave the village. He lived in Corsico, a town near Milano. When he saw me he asked how my mother was and how my sisters were. He opened the fridge and got a couple of beers. He asked me a heap of questions; he was offering me drinks, really happy to see me.

  Then he says to his wife: make some steaks. He asks me: how much will you eat, a little or a lot. He was a healthy type, he liked to eat and drink. He liked to have whatever he wanted, and now he had it. He started to talk about when he was down south. He says: We had it tough down there, because the landowners are all ignorant. Who knows who the fuck they think they are just because they have a little bit of land. They don’t understand that it’s us workers who make everything. If it wasn’t for us they’d starve. Now they’re finished, they’re bums, because they didn’t want to do the right thing by the people.

  He went on like that. Here, on the other hand, he said, when I arrived the bosses put themselves at my service. They let me stay in the hut, eating and sleeping for free. I worked on the excavator and they paid me as a jobber: you know, the more I worked, the more they gave me. Down south, however much you worked they still only gave you what they wanted to, you never knew what you were getting. They had it all worked out, the bastards. Southerners are stupid, they don’t understand anything. Here everyone’s equal, boss and workers. Sure, there’s the difference that he has more money and that he’s in charge in his factory.

  But I eat, too, I have a house, too. You see this house — it’s mine; I’ve got a car, a truck, the excavator. What I mean is, I’m a boss too. Everyone is a boss at his own level here. Of course there’s the worker who doesn’t have anything, who works in a factory. But he has rights, he gets holidays, insurance and all of that. The thing is, it’s not as if you’re badly off here. As long as you have a job, you’re all right. You don’t have to worry about anything. Rocco made this big argument in favour of Milano and the north.

  I stayed there a while talking to Rocco, then I asked about his younger brother Giovanni, the one who was three years older then me; we were almost the same age. He works in a factory nearby, he said. He hasn’t knocked off yet, but he’ll be here around nine. He’s a bit of a slacker, Rocco said. He must have the same mentality as you. You’ve all got the same mentality, you guys. He’s already quit three jobs. He doesn’t get it: here you have to stick at one job. You need to figure out where you can work to get ahead. Changing jobs all the time isn’t the way to get ahead. I’ve always been with the same firm and I work for myself. For myself, but always with the same firm.

  Anyway, I said, I really have to get a job. I need a job right away. I’m not thinking of making a career or anything at the moment. So what do you want to do, he said, what would you like to do? You need to get a job in a factory, you need to try and make a bit of money. Without changing jobs all the time, otherwise you’ll never make anything. Then Giovanni turned up, we said hello, talked about Fuorni, Salerno, Pontecagnano. About friends we knew, about girls and all that. And then he says: sleep here. Come to work with me tomorrow, and tomorrow night we’ll find a pensione for you.

  The next day Giovanni took me to work. The factory was near Zingone8 and they made this stuff called celegno. They made all these cut-out pieces that were stuck to furniture as ornaments. They look carved, but they’re actually a composite of sawdust and PVA. It looks like real wood, but they call it celegno. I started working at this craft kind of thing, and I was staying in a pensione with a couple of other migrants. They were all immigrants in this town, there wasn’t anyone from there. Even the northerners were immigrants, some from Brescia, some from Bergamo and so on.

  There was a Lucanian9 in this pensione who worked twelve hours a day on a building site. He cooked for himself at night, spent fifty lire a day tops but earned about seven or eight thousand. He was always economising, he never went out at night or on holidays. After three or four months this guy had six or seven hundred thousand lire in the bank. He showed me his bank book and said he wanted to buy a car. When spring came I started to be late every morning. I was pissed off with it, I wanted to get back down south and go to the beach. I figured out that I’d worked the whole winter, and I’d be owed thirty or forty or maybe even fifty thousand lire in severance pay, plus eight days notice, a week’s pay that I’d worked, all up around a hundred thousand lire if they fired me. With that I’d be able to go back down south and stay a while without doing anything.

  I started coming late every morning. At a certain point they get pissed off and threaten to fire me if I’m late the next day. I’m late again and they fire me. They give me the severance pay, the eight days in lieu of notice, the week I’ve worked and I go back down to go to the beach. Then summer came but the money ran out after the first month. It was the end of April when I went down, in May the money was already gone. June, July, August and September I stayed down there. At first I worked a little in a place where they carved wood for coffins. Then I spent the summer months working as a lifeguard. There are these beach setups where you help with painting and setting up the cabins. When it’s set up you put the umbrellas up every morning, rake the beach, that kind of thing.

  That’s how I spent the whole summer. At the end of summer I went back up to Milano. But this time I didn’t want to stay out in the suburbs. Staying in the suburbs I spent even more money, because every night I’d go into Milano. Between transport and other things I’d spend a lot more, and I wouldn’t enjoy myself at all out in the suburbs. So I decided to stay right in Milano. As soon as I got to Milano I left my suitcases at the station and looked for a pensione downtown. I found one in via Pontaccio, right near Brera, via Solferino, via Fatebenefratelli, that neighbourhood.

  That was the centre of town. You could stay in the bars until three or four in the morning; all up, it was a lot of fun. And you could eat in the bars. There’s one called Gran Bar and you can eat there too. Instead of eating in a restaurant and spending mo
ney, and spending more money to go to a bar, I ate a plate of pasta or a fior di latte or something at Gran Bar. I spent seven or eight hundred lire and stayed all night. There was some fantastic pussy hanging around that part of town. Fags, pimps, junkies, black marketeers, hippies; a great environment.

  Then I decided to get some qualifications. I said, fuck it, I have to study, there’s work here, there’s schools. And I wanted to study, I was obsessed with studying, I wanted to go to art school. At the Castello Sforzesco there were evening art classes. I went to enrol; you paid a hundred and fifty lire to apply. I went to do the exams, which took three days. There were prisms, cubes, spheres, that kind of thing. You had to draw them, then they assessed you on the drawings.

  But actually they assessed you on other things. They asked what you did for work, if you lived in Milano with your family and so on. And in effect they took people who didn’t know how to draw at all, but who were young and lived with their families or who worked. But seeing I didn’t have a job, they didn’t take me, because they thought I wouldn’t finish the course, or that there was no point in me doing it, or something like that. It wasn’t lack of ability, that I didn’t know how to draw, because I’d shown them that I knew how to draw. So given that I didn’t manage to get into school to get a diploma, I decided that the only worthwhile thing was living the life.