We Want Everything

by Nanni Balestrini

  Anyway I had got to the point of suffering from hunger in Milano, and I also had a load of debts to friends and people from back home. And then there was the thing with my Sicilian friend’s wife where I was living. So I didn’t want to stay in Milano any more and I decided I needed a change of scene. I applied to Fiat, and then a letter came calling me in so I went off to Torino. Everyone had told me that at Fiat you did well, there were holidays, all kinds of things. I didn’t care so much about that, it was because I’d burnt all my friends in Milano, all my connections. I thought that by going to Fiat and earning a salary I could get myself straight, then I’d see.

  And in Torino I could stay at my sister’s place. Lots of other migrants who came straight from the south stayed with friends or relatives, or they had the address of some pensione or little hotel. But there were some unlucky ones who spent a few days in the station, and lots even a month, in the second-class waiting room at Porta Nuova. It was patrolled by police who made sure that journalists didn’t get near it. To get into the second-class waiting room at Porta Nuova at night you had to show your Fiat ID card if you were already working there, or the letter from Fiat that said you should come for an interview. Without it the police wouldn’t let anyone into this dormitory that Fiat had, for free, at Torino station.

  Fourth chapter Fiat

  Before Fiat, politically I was a qualunquista,12 cynical about politics. Now I saw these students handing out leaflets at the gates of Fiat, wanting to talk to the workers. This seemed a bit strange. I asked myself, Why is this, they’re free to sleep around and enjoy themselves. They come to the gates of a factory, which is the most disgusting thing there is: a factory, which really is the most absurd and disgusting thing there is. They come out the front here, what are they doing? This fact made me a little curious. Then in the end I thought they were crazy, dickheads, missionaries, and I didn’t take any interest in what they said.

  This was in the spring, in April. I’d never been to the meetings with the students. One time I went to May Day. I had never got May Day — la festa del lavoro: what a joke, the festival of work. The workers’ festival, the workers who celebrate a festival. I didn’t get what the festival of workers, or the festival of work, meant. I didn’t get why work should be celebrated. It’s like, when I didn’t work I didn’t know what the fuck to do, because I was a worker, that is, someone who spent the greater part of his day in the factory, and with what was left all I could do was rest up for the next day. But that holiday I went to May Day on a whim, to listen to a rally of I don’t know who.

  And I saw all these people with red scarves and flags. I heard them saying things I already knew. It’s not like I was from Mars. I knew them even if I didn’t understand them. And out in front of the smart bars in the piazza were the bourgeoisie. And there was the petite bourgeoisie, the peasants, the merchants, the priests, the savers, the students, the intellectuals, the speculators, the clerks and the various arselickers. Listening to the union officials’ speeches. And there between the unionists in the middle of the piazza and the bourgeoisie out the front of the bars, there was this mass of workers, another race. And between the bourgeoisie and the workers there was this big display of Fiat cars.

  A festival, that is, a fair. I listened to the union officials. Comrades, we can’t just say these things today in the piazza. We have to say them and do them tomorrow in the factory. And I thought, yeah, this guy is right. It’s useless celebrating, only acting up when they let us into the piazza with the red flags. We have to do it in the factory, too.

  Then I went off and saw another demonstration where they were chanting Mao Tse Tung Ho Chi Minh. I asked myself, who are these guys. More red flags, more signs. But I didn’t know anything about that then. I was in the dark. Some weeks later I stumbled on a meeting of these students at a bar near Mirafiori. Anyway it had been a few days since I started to stir things up in the factory. I was in workshop 54 of the body plant, on the 500 line. I’d been there for a month, since the day after the interview I did to get into Fiat.

  At the interview there were two thousand of us; everyone got a number and they asked us these bullshit questions. Proforma questions, the same for everyone. As there were so many of us, the poor clerks who asked the questions went through us fast. They looked you in the eye and fired off a couple of quick questions. You answered something and they said: Go to the next room. And everyone went to the next room. In the next room a guard with a list called us out twenty at a time and took us to another room where they did the medicals.

  First there was an eye test. Look here, close your eye, look up, read there, all that kind of thing. Then hearing, whether you could hear properly. Lift your right leg, lift your left leg. They checked your teeth, nose, eyes, ears, throat. And between one examination and the next it was two o’clock. At two o’clock they told us we could go and eat. For this first day’s physical we had to go on an empty stomach. Nothing to drink, nothing to eat, because we had to have a blood test. Some managed to have the blood test done before two o’clock, others didn’t. The guys who had to go back in the afternoon for their blood test didn’t eat at two. They’d been fasting from the night before.

  At the blood tests there was a stench you could smell from outside the door. Inside were thousands of vials of blood. Blood-soaked cotton balls everywhere. On one side a heap a metre-and-a-half high of cotton, red with blood. They took blood, and it hurt because they weren’t bothering where they stuck the needle. They stuck the needle in wherever and drew. Then they put the vial to one side and threw the bloodstained cotton ball onto the heap on the other.

  From there we went to another room where a nurse handed us a jar. There were only two booths for pissing. We got into a circle and set about pissing in our jars. We said we were making beer and had a laugh. Then we put our jars up on top and the nurse asked us our names and wrote them on a sheet of paper under the number of each jar.

  The next day was the general physical. You had to lift weights. There was this machinery with weights attached. They were checking how strong we were. This physical took two hours because there were two thousand of us and all two thousand of us had to take it. Not everyone got through it that day and they had to come back the next day, six or seven hours for this physical. After you had passed it you had to wait for the general medical. You stripped naked.

  You were standing there naked in front of this quack. He’s sitting in a white smock, asking you questions. What’s your name, how old are you, if you’d done your military service, if you had a girlfriend. Then he made you march, forward, turn around, raise your arms, lower your arms, get down on the floor, show your hands, show your feet, the soles of your feet. Then he looked at your balls, whether you had any, all that kind of thing. Say thirty-three, cough, inhale, all of this bullshit. A whole day to do this physical, because it took a quarter of an hour each to do it and there were two thousand of us.

  Then the quack says to me: Have you had any surgical procedures? You could see very well that I had never had any surgical procedures, because, thank God, I didn’t have a mark on me. Yeah, yeah, I go, on my left ball. How did it happen? This guy was unhappy because he hadn’t noticed it before. I said to myself, now I’m going to make this doctor look stupid. I was playing soccer, I replied, and I got a kick in the balls and they had to operate on me.

  Really? OK, you’ll have to come for a check-up tomorrow. Another guy said he’d had a broken arm and he had to come the next day too. The point of this, as I see it, was to get into the worker’s head that he had to be healthy, whole and so on. I don’t know what the fucking point of it was: they took us all anyway. Even guys who couldn’t hear, who wore glasses, who were lame or who had an arm in plaster. Everyone, absolutely everyone down to the last man; maybe they wouldn’t have taken a paraplegic.

  We went in again the next day for the check-up. They sent me to a room where there was a quack who didn’t even have a white smock on. He only had a lovely blonde secretary who waggl
ed her arse back and forth around the room. She brought him my file and he sat himself down on a stool. He made me drop my pants and then he felt my balls. Where did you have the operation? On this one here. Get dressed. I pulled my pants up and he didn’t say anything. The lovely secretary gave me some papers saying I should report to Fiat in two days.

  Everyone who passed the physical was at Fiat two days later. That is, all of us. Someone from the hiring office came right away. Or from public relations, a psychologist or a social worker, who knows who the fuck it was. He arrives and says: Friends. I welcome you to Fiat on my own behalf and on behalf of the management who have taken you on. Good, well done. All of us clapping. The personnel department, he says, is open to Fiat employees who have children, who have personal problems, social problems to resolve, all that type of thing. If you need money, ask us for it. Ah, says some Neapolitan or other, I need ten thousand lire. No, not like that, you can ask for a loan when you’re working, if you have real needs. For now you have to sort these things out yourselves. When you’re working you can ask for a loan.

  Then they turned us out of the offices into the actual Fiat factory. Another character, an office worker, took our numbers and gave us other numbers. Locker room number, corridor number, locker number, workshop number, line number. To do all this they had us for half the day. Then we went into the big boss’s office, the chief engineer of the body plant. We went in a few at a time; apparently he asked everyone the same questions, made the same speech, the same words for everybody.

  I welcome you all to Fiat. You know what Fiat is, Fiat is everything in Italy. If you have read anything bad in the communist press about the assembly line, that’s all lies. Because here the only workers who aren’t happy are the slackers, those who don’t want to work. The rest all work and are happy to work and lead good lives. They all own cars, and Fiat has creches for our workers’ children. And there are discounts in some shops if you’re a Fiat employee. He gave us this whole spiel.

  Like the others, he didn’t ask any exact questions at first. He didn’t say anything that related to any of us as an individual, as a person. That type of thing they evidently do with the office workers, because they have more time, there are fewer of them. But we were a mass, a great tide. It wasn’t just two thousand, there were twenty thousand new hires. The monsters were coming, the horrible workers. They’d been at it for two months, asking everyone the same questions, the same work.

  It pissed them off, too, the people who had to do this work. This mass of workers who were coming into Fiat had proletarianised those office workers, those doctors. It wasn’t about selection; it served simply to promote a concept of organisation, of subordination, of discipline. In fact, if not, they wouldn’t have taken guys who couldn’t see, who really were in fact sick, who had a belly this big. They took them all, because they needed them all. Everyone was good for that kind of work.

  And this guy, the chief engineer, says: I am your colonel. You’re my men, and we have to respect one another. I have always defended my workers. Fiat workers are the best, the most productive, and all this bullshit. It was all getting up my nose and I was thinking: You know, this is going to end badly, me and this colonel. Then he explained that we shouldn’t get involved in sabotaging production because as well as getting fired we could be reported to the police. He read out an article from the penal code that said you could be charged. You were turning yourself into a terrorist. And I started to think: a nice lesson would do this colonel good.

  Then they introduced us to our foremen. They’d divided us up. We had been a mass up to that moment, then they divided us, four or five to every line. I was going to the 500 line, so they introduced my boss to me, the line foreman. Then my boss introduced the leading hand to me. The leading hand is the worker who knows how to do all the tasks on the line. If you have to go for a piss or a shit, when they let you go — because you need permission — he steps in and substitutes for you. Or if you feel sick, or get something wrong. The leading hand steps in, the joker, the guy who can do everything.

  They introduced these guys to me and they got me beside the line. There was two hours of work left and the line boss got me to do some little jobs, meaningless tasks. Looking at the assembly line, it seemed like light work. How this line ran, all these workers, how they worked. It seemed like there almost wasn’t any effort. The next day they took me to my station, another station on another line. And they introduced me to another line boss the next day when I had to start work. This guy gets a leading hand and tells him: Take him over there. Anyway I was at a station where I put the piece with the fenders on the Fiat 500. I had to place it in front of the engine, put two bolts on and tighten it with this thing.

  I grabbed this part with the fenders; above me was the body of a 500 coming along, the engine was coming in from somewhere else, I placed this part with the fenders, which weighed around ten kilos. I got it from another station where someone else made it up, I put it over the engine, put the bolts on. I tightened it with this pneumatic driver, quick, trrr trrr two bolts, and the whole thing went off as another one arrived. Twenty seconds I had. I had to get the rhythm. The first few days I couldn’t keep up and the leading hand helped me. For three days he helped me.

  On the Fiat line it’s not a question of learning but of getting your muscles used to it, of getting used to the force of those movements and the rhythm. Having to place a whatchamacallit every twenty seconds meant you had movements quicker than a heartbeat. That is a finger, your eye, any part was forced to move in tenths of a second: forced actions in fractions of a second. The action of choosing the two washers, the action of choosing the two bolts, those movements were actions your muscles and your eyes had to make by themselves, without you deciding anything. I just had to keep up the rhythm of all those movements, repeated in order and equally. Without three or four days to get used to the rhythm, you couldn’t do it.

  As I started to get used to doing it on my own the guy helping left me. I knew it was in their interests to speed up the operations. Lots of newly arrived workers only did half a day, a day, three days, some a week’s work, then left. Especially a lot of the young ones, after seeing what shitty work it was. Who the fuck would want to stay here, and they took off. Then a load of others went on sick leave every day. So given there were fewer workers on the line, they needed each of us to do a lot more processes. Because if not, they would have had to keep a lot of the personnel on who weren’t any use because they were never there. They stuck me with an extra process. So I started to get pissed off and I hurt one of my fingers a bit.

  I crushed my nail, but not so that I hurt myself too much. I put grease on my finger so it looked all black with dried blood. My nail was black, my finger was black and I called the leading hand and told him that I had to go to the infirmary. The line boss comes and he says: You want to go to the infirmary? Yeah, I’ve hurt my finger. No, you can’t go to the infirmary for a finger like that. Well, I’m going. You’re not going. Another supervisor arrives, the head of the 500. I mean, there’s the head of the body plant, then there’s the head of the 500, a head of the 850, a head of the 124. And whether it’s the 124 or the 500 or the 850, they all have several lines. The 850 has three or four lines, the 500 has six or seven lines, the 124 has two or three lines.

  The head of the 500 arrives and he says to me: Listen, I’ll make you a proposal. You choose whether you go to the doctor, whether you go to the infirmary with that finger, or whether you want to stay here. If you want to stay here I’ll give you a lighter job. If you want to go to the doctor and the doctor doesn’t admit you I’ll put you onto the heaviest job there is; in fact, I’ll suspend you from work. So I accepted the challenge and said: I want to go to the doctor. He writes me out the slip, because you have to have a slip from him to go up to the infirmary. He warns me: Now we’ll see. And I went to the infirmary. Going into the infirmary I saw a worker coming back who had one arm bandaged who’d cut himself. Are you going home? I say
to him. No, they haven’t admitted me. What, with that cut arm they haven’t admitted you? No.

  Right away I got pissed off and I said to myself: Then with this finger, even if it’s nothing, I’ll get them to give me ten days off. Because the guy had really hurt himself and they tell him: No, you have to work. What, are we crazy, is it war, are we in Vietnam here? With all these bloodied, injured people who absolutely have to work? I went into the infirmary and some other injured workers arrived. The infirmary was full all the time, it really seemed like a field hospital, with all these workers coming constantly, with a crushed hand, with a cut somewhere, with something broken. A guy who had a hernia came in yelling with pain. They took him to the first aid station and called an ambulance.

  I turned up and started the bluff. I checked it all out, touching my finger so I knew when I had to yell. When they touched my finger I started to swear in Neapolitan dialect. The guy who was treating me was from Torino and it had a real effect on him. If I swore in Italian it would seem like I was acting, but swearing in Neapolitan, the guy didn’t know if I was acting or not. Mannaggia ’a maronna, me stai cacando ’o cazzo, statte fermo porco dio,13 that kind of thing. But I have to check you, the guy said. Hold still, please. What do you mean hold still. I’ve hurt my finger, here, it’s broken. And he goes: I want to see if it’s broken, I don’t know if it is broken. But I know, I can feel it’s broken. I can’t move it at all.

  A doctor comes in, the one who had looked at the other guy’s hernia: All right, give him a slip, six days. Six days, he says, then if it’s still bad we’ll send him to hospital. He gives me the slip and I get out of there. I go to the head and say: He gave me six days. The guy goes black with rage, thinking: This dickhead has screwed me, he’ll have six days off on Fiat. It was MALF14 that had to pay me. It wasn’t the scheme that we have now, INAM.15 MALF, Fiat’s own insurance scheme, paid more. INAM didn’t pay for the first three days off sick, but with MALF you were paid from the first day. It was a nice scam with Fiat having that scheme, which they dropped later.