What a place to be, this Florence in the one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-seventy-third year of Our Lord. I can work for two months in a factory or as a waiter in a tourist restaurant, and earn enough to go without a job for one. Not a bad ratio that. And though the hours are long, you can get work and leave it easily enough. Take the last job I had: throwing the smallest bits of leather into a huge press – quick, damn quick or your fingers will be as thin as a postage stamp. I never quite understood what it did to the leather. Makes it softer and smoother they said, but you didn’t have time to make the comparison, you just had to keep throwing them in and then getting them back, and all the time the huge German press just kept going at its own urgent rhythm. And all the time the old man who was working with me – Dario Chiappatopi was his name – was venting his spleen: “Are we so short of workers in Italy that we have to go and get some abroad? Of course not and some of our own boys still can’t find exmployment.” He was remarkably loquacious for a bigot; what was wrong with “Go home, you foreign scum!” He never worried me. In fact I rather liked him, and thought he might have a point. What am I doing in Florence? Can’t be bothered to move on, I suppose. Why should I? It’s not exactly cushy and you occasionally have to jump over a meal, as they say in Italy, but the company’s good and the times exciting. I’m sure that not every age would have found such a benign Florence: I wouldn’t have wanted to live here when those fanatical, finger-wagging, killjoy kids, the piagnoni, were running Savonarola’s religious revolution during a few years of the last decade of the fifteenth century – a bit like those youthful Red Guards and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, whose social hysteria has not entirely passed even now. No, Florence at the moment is not just as good as any other place; it is one of the best. The flood sent the bien pensants packing – for the moment at least – and it is a cosmopolitan little village of a city made up of students, foreign drifters, hardworking southerners with odd little businesses and the local lumpenproletariat which thrives on those petty and relatively innocuous crimes that blossom in a tourist town. Can you think of a nicer place to stay? I’m not talking about that moneyed cosmopolitanism that just makes everywhere look the same – InterContinental Hotels, dinner jackets and Anglo-American pop music – I’m talking about that old-fashioned cosmopolitanism that happens by some chaotic accident, and then just fades and fade it should. Nothing good ever lasts.
And what am I talking about? Dario Chiappatopi, of course. The leather factory was so good that I stayed for four months. The money on the factory floor was crap, but the owner would occasionally take me over to his office, and have me do a bit of correspondence in English, or even interpreting with visiting American buyers. Crafty bastard. Language services on the cheap, but he did pay me extra when I was there. So all in all, things were good, but Chiappatopi got it all wrong. Three weeks after leaving, I went back to the factory, drawn by an invisible thread of desire to the girl who works in the department where they glue and sew the various bits of the wallets and purses together. She turned me down. No surprise there. Why would a girl like her with a family, a culture and a network of friends want to hitch up with a ragged foreigner who can barely pay the rent for a shared room where the noise of the bars and the noise of the traffic mingle deliciously? Of course they make their own autonomous din, but together they find synergy: when people leave the bar, they leave slowly and this process usually involves sitting on a motorbike, scooter or moped, turning on the engine and occasionally opening the throttle as punctuation for a half-hour conversation before the eventual departure. There’s a verb for it; there would have to be, and it’s sgasare. The inventiveness of our languages: a word for aimlessly revving up and burdening the clear Mediterranean night with the howl of a mechanical beast.
I want to talk about Chiappatopi and keep getting distracted. But this story is not about Chiappatopi at all; it’s actually about Aras and the redistribution of wealth, but I don’t want to put you off. You might think that the redistribution of wealth is a not a fit subject. That’s for economists and politicians, and has nothing to do with Aras, because Aras doesn’t think along ideological lines with long words ending in “i-o-n”; he thinks in terms of right and wrong, which is very quaint, like the Geneva Convention. Anyway I went back to the factory and after getting the kiss-off from the nice girl with the tight faded jeans (and she did do it in the nicest possible way), I bumped into the foreman who greeted me like a long lost brother: “Garry,” he said, “promise me this, never stop moving around the world, just keep on drifting, while we just rot in this rotten factory making wallets and purses for the tourists.” This, of course, was from a guy who a few weeks earlier would have been complaining not too severely about my output. Now I had been promoted to “free spirit who shows us how to live, if only we had the courage”, and of course I felt a fraud, because I have stopped travelling. I hardly ever go beyond the city limits, and when I do it is usually in someone’s car on the way to one of those weekend parties in a casa colonica in just another pleasant valley surrounded by cypress trees and open fields. And then he told me about Dario Chiappatopi: it seems that the old man got angst-ridden over what he had said to me and thought that he had driven me away. “Not at all,” I said. “I never stay long.” “I know,” replied the foreman respectfully, now I was no longer under his charge, “I know that very well.” The old man wanted to contact me, but no one knew where I lived, not even in the office, as I was working without papers and the owner was paying me cash at the end of the week. I don’t have a phone. And in the end Chiappatopi could take the guilt no longer and left the factory, even though everyone was calling me a drifter with the hide of a rhinoceros. He’ll have come across a lot worse than that on his travels, they said. And they were right. How silly, he left for no reason. Besides I hadn’t been listening. I had been concentrating on two very important things: keeping my fingers in their present form and marvelling at the beauty of the lady with the tight, faded jeans. I didn’t have time for his mutterings.
But you have to admit that this Florence place is not at all bad. Even the xenophobes have half a conscience. That’s called landing on your feet.
So maybe Aras is right. He’s always singing the praises of this city. “I’ve lived in Paris and it’s shit. Either you live in the ghetto or you have to put up with the racist French all day. Here even the police leave you alone.” It does occur to me that it might not always be like this. Here in Florence, most foreigners have fat wallets and are just passing through. Here in Florence, Florentines are too busy feeling uncomfortable about all those other Italians who don’t know how to speak Italian, cook a meal or run a country. The Northerners are always putting on airs and the Southerners – well, they’re just Southerners. Who cares about the odd guest worker cleaning the windows and waiting in restaurants?
Aras and Krim are both short, wiry men with Mediterranean looks; they could easily be Sicilians, but equally they could come from almost anywhere in Europe. They are in fact Algerians, as is the third member of the group, Tufik, who is a tall handsome man with light brown skin, African features and a smile of friendly insouciance. But he is a Berber, which attracts a degree of ribbing, incredulity and admiration from his fellow countrymen. For me Tufik resembles the stereotyped portrayal of the genie in the lamp: strong, silent, a little inscrutable and glad that someone has finally released him from his millennial prison. For some months we have been sharing a dormitory, shall we call it – a room with nothing but a small wardrobe and four reti, as they call the utilitarian metal beds consisting of a metal mesh held in a metal frame with metal arches underneath to lift them slightly off the floor. To wash we have a basin in the same small room as the lavatory. They wash every day and are impeccably turned-out. I find the process of washing one part of the body at a time arduous and time-consuming; I am forever asking people for use of their shower, and when I succeed it is like a liberation.
Our common language is Italian, but they also speak French and Arabic ince
ssantly, switching mid-sentence between one and the other. Tufik, they tell me, also speaks Berber, which seems to Aras and Krim like a defiance of history: “They were in Algeria before us.” The prize possession in our room is Krim’s ghetto-blaster, which only has two tapes to blast – both of them by Fabrizio d’André, who fortunately I like. Aras works in a tavola calda in Piazza Santa Maria Novella. It is at the back of an upmarket Sicilian restaurant, and uses its left-over food. When the owner wants to throw people out of his restaurant, he takes them out through the tavola calda rather than the main entrance. He does this very politely, using the extremely decorous form of address, loro. He moves them forward by agreeing with their angry remonstrations and at the same keeping up the momentum towards the street door. Once they are out, he turns, allows himself a sigh of contempt and then gathers himself together for the rest of the battle fought with solicitousness, measured smiles and the merest suggestion of menace.
That is one world I inhabit. It is spartan, friendly and reliable. It relies on mutual help and an ability to cohabit in a very small space. I am probably the least comfortable in it because I am the double foreigner: not Italian, not Algerian. But at the same time, I like my not belonging – or rather I want to belong to this new place, because what I am supposed to belong to does not attract me.
The other world I inhabit is the world of revolutionary politics, which is actually rather staid and takes itself too seriously. Its activity principally consists of attending demonstrations and the weekly meetings in the sede, the headquarters of the Revolutionary Communist Groups, Italian Section of the Fourth International. The headquarters are in fact an abandoned shop complete with shutter but very little else. Inside there is a desk, a dozen chairs (more than sufficient) and the clutter of left-wing politics: old leaflets no one can be bothered to chuck, banners often with wonderful slogans, placards of course, and various oddities which someone sometime thought might come in handy.
Our meetings are always more or less the same. They start with Eugenio, who sits behind the desk. Perhaps that is the purpose of the desk, because I have never seen anyone writing at it. He takes out a Gauloise and licks the length of it on one side. This strange gesture has always intrigued me and I think it’s supposed to slow down the burning of the tobacco. He lights up, inhales, then looks at us fiercely and says, “Allora ’ompagni!” That is just, “Well, comrades!” but he aspirates the “c” forcefully in the manner of the Florentine working classes. For thirty years this former member of the Italian Communist Party has been working in one of the large industrial plants on the outskirts but not as a worker; he is in the sales department and travels the world. He has clear intelligent eyes, and can lead you on a wonderful path of logic and analysis towards the same inevitable truth: the imminent collapse of capitalism. His arguments might vary from one week to another, but the end result is unchanged. This speech, often delivered perfectly without notes, is then followed by open debate. I always feel tongue-tied because the excellence of his analysis appears wasted on us six or seven disparate members of his audience, many like me, just foreigners who have drifted in and will eventually drift out.
One is a Belgian woman, whose motives for living in Florence seem as elusive as my own: simply the joy of living in a place that is still itself and unselfconsciously beautiful, but for how long, no one can say. Every year the tourist buses find it more difficult to find a place to park in the cathedral square they clutter. Rents in the city centre are going up, although once a tenant, your rent is frozen. Those who have been renting from just after the war pay tuppence-ha’penny, and even those who have just started can still manage easily on a worker’s pay, if they’re willing to pile in. Michelle is perhaps just glad to be away from some damp industrial city of Flanders, and she is most earnest in her own tirades, which are as impenetrable as Eugenio’s are compellingly lucid. This is not because of her heavy accent, although that does not help. She speaks in jargon and appears to have swallowed Trotsky’s Transitional Programme and a do-it-yourself manual one after the other. Not that Michelle isn’t attractive in her vehemence, and after Eugenio it is good to have a chance to switch off and enjoy her Gallic stylishness, which could place her in a chic restaurant if it weren’t for her heavy boots – whose function, I suspect, is to remove all doubts about where her political loyalties lie.
Another is Gaetano, a heavily built young man with a bushy beard whose strands he twists incessantly throughout the meeting as though he intends to plait them. He looks like a pirate and possibly wants to give that impression. His obsession is with partisan warfare as fought in the Second World War, and his contributions to the discussions always contain that evocative phrase, “… when we go back into the mountains.” At that stage I always imagine all six or seven of us clambering up the wooded slopes of the Apennines in military fatigues and carrying rusty machine guns. Michelle will be berating us for not walking fast enough and Gaetano will be telling us how they did it in 1944. I don’t find the image very convincing – or attractive. Besides Eugenio would need lots of notice to arrange his holiday dates. Perhaps Gaetano’s dreams take him up the mountain every night to fight his brutish father; not to fight him with difference, but to fight fire with fire, machine gun against machine gun and knife against knife. Hatred can do that and in his case, his machismo reflects that of the father he detests. A fascist gang attacked and beat him to a pulp, and he believes that his father sent them, because they ignored the comrade he was with. His father, everyone knows, is a powerful figure in the city and never abjured his fascist credo. Gaetano ended up in hospital for several weeks, and has never been the same since. Of course the rift cannot be healed now, and to us he says, “You are all my family now.” Poor Gaetano.
Then there is Patrizia, a handsome, slightly masculine woman with leather jackets and military trousers. She is bright and well read, and her interests go far beyond her political activities. She and Pino are a couple. Pino too is an intellectual, but he has more flair for political discourse, negotiation and conspiracy, not so much against the state as against those who disagree with him within the “party”. He has a quick, incisive sense of humour which he uses to good effect, particularly against Eugenio, and he is the only one to challenge the leader, who might never have been elected, because for as long as I have been around Eugenio has been in control and behind that desk. Pino believes that Eugenio is guilty of economic determinism. He might be right, but Eugenio does whatever he does superbly – from the moment he licks a Gauloise and enunciates, “Allora, ’ompagni!”
Finally I should mention the most enigmatic figure of them all: Giancarlo. He is a tall youth with an already receding hairline, and the hair clearly allocated for early deforestation is of an anodyne brown. He speaks with a slight lisp and pronounces a French “r”. He wears a tweed jacket or sometimes even a suit. He never says anything in the meetings, and always remembers what everyone else has said. He treats his comrades with an air of condescension and in some meetings likes to read Goethe in the original German, presumably to fend off the boredom. Goethe doesn’t seem to impair his ability to remember our words and cast them up, usually with a sardonic grin. Some comrades, offended by his sarcasm, think he must be some kind of police spy. But what kind of police spy would so signally fail to fit in with the behaviour patterns of revolutionary life?
Today Aras and Krim are particularly excited. They have asked me if I would like to meet some Palestinians. Aras and Krim are not political, but they do follow events in the Holy Land. “You’re probably not interested,” they say questioningly – expecting me to support the Israelis. I certainly did, but I have become a little agnostic on this issue; there are so many conflicting versions. These are not just any Palestinians; these are young men who travel from city to city to speak to sympathisers, mainly Arabs as Palestine comes a long way behind Vietnam and Chile. Tufik is coming too, mainly for the company. He still wears his smiling features and talks of other matters. Aras and Krim are tense as
though attending a presidential visit. They dress smartly and comb their hair, but the venue for this meeting turns out to be the cathedral steps. There are about fifteen people waiting and the two Palestinians arrive on time. They are self-confident young men with stubbly beards, keffiyehs and black leather jackets. Aras introduces me to one of them and we shake hands.
“England?” he says in English.
I nod, having long ago given up the specifics of where I come from.
“Do your parents have a house in England?”
“Yes, they do.”
“What would you feel if people came in from another nation, took away your parents’ home and just started to treat it as their own?”
I take this to be a metaphor: they have been thrown out of their native land – displaced. “In war people get displaced. They will get compensation.”
“Compensation!” The idiocy of it makes him laugh, but good manners stop him short. “No, they don’t pay compensation; they just throw you out, and either destroy the house or start to live in it. No compensation.”
“I cannot believe that! That’s rubbish. Jews would never do that.”
“We’ve nothing against Jews, it’s the Israelis,” he pronounces the “a” and the “e” in the word Israeli separately, and the guttural tone seems to express all his anger. “We took in the Jews when they were escaping persecution in Europe. We have always respected them. You Europeans were the anti-Semites and you landed us with your problem, your inability to get on. We’re paying for your crimes.” He didn’t flinch when I challenged him, called him a liar in so many words. That means, I think, that he is used to Europeans turning a deaf ear. “You’re an intelligent young man,” he says on the basis of absolutely no evidence at all, “and I think you’ll discover one day that I am telling you the truth.” Fortunately Aras and Krim don’t understand English. Even if they did, they probably wouldn’t hold it against me. They know Europeans. Europeans are stubborn. Peel away one layer of prejudice and you discover another underneath. Pino comes to my door. I’m lying on my bed in the airless room on my own. I’m reading. Reading Federico Chabod’s book on the factory occupations. When I see his face, I slip it under the rete. Chabod was a liberal. Eugenio would not approve. Pino probably doesn’t care, but you never can tell.
Can the Gods Cry? Page 2