History (71 page)

Otherwise, his relations with his companions in the shed were limited,

354 H I S T O R Y
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.
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as far as I know, to a few casual and ephemeral exchanges. I have heard about a Saturday evening when he found himself eating with some of them. They were in a crowded place near the factory (portraits of the Duce, bellicose slogans, and the presence-all around-of plainclothes police, informers, and Blackshirts ), and at table they talked exclusively of sports, movies, and women. Their language, or rather their allusive slang, was limited to a minimum vocabulary; and, in particular on the subject of women, it was reduced to a comical-obscene entertainment. Davide real ized that to the machines' convicts such wretched evasions are the only allowed repose; and with a feeling which to him seemed
charity
(but was, really, far more his own need of being liked ) he ea set out to tell a dirty story, which didn't then enjoy much success. It was a complicated anecdote, about a guy who for a costume party had decided to go dressed as a prick; but in the end, unable to fi a suitable headcovering, he resigned himself to going as an ass, etc., etc. Now, the others present ( without his suspecting, in his ingenuousness ) looked around alarmed, imagining, in the climate of fear of those times, that the character in the anecdote referred to the Duce, or the Fuhrer, or to Marshal Goering . . . That evening, Davide had a bandaged fi (in the shed he had squashed the pad of a fi ip ) which was infected and was hurting him. Moreover, contrary to his habits at that period, out of friendliness towards his companions he had drunk some wine. And during the night-perhaps as he was running a slight fever-he had a nightmare. He dreamed that, in the place of his fi he had heavy bolts screwed too tightly into the nut, and around him, in the shed, there were no longer men or machines, but only some amphibians, half-man and half-machine, with trolleys from the waist down instead of legs, and drills or pulleys for arms, and so forth. They, and he with them, had to run and run without stopping in a clammy, boiling mist. And running, they had to emit screams and deafening laughter, because this, too, was part of the job. They all wore huge, thick green eyeglasses, since they were all nearly blind from certain acids in the foundry, and they spat out a dark, dense saliva, like black blood . . . For that matter, Davide had been having for some time, if not nightmares, kindred dreams. There were always drills in them, pulleys, vises, cauldrons, and screws . . . Or else there were complex ca of speeds and pieces, which he had to make and remake constantly, quarreling with someone who insisted that his pay, in all, came to two lire and forty centesimi . . . and so on. Even in his dreams, obviously, he now wanted to avoid any temptation to happiness.

That famous Saturday evening supper was, according to my informa tion, the only occasion when Davide met his companions outside the factory. And here it must be stated that Davide-already misanthropic by

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nature-with the workers became more shy and glum than ever. And as he grew worse, the more, in his heart, he really longed to be the opposite. He would have liked to address them in the locker room, pursue them outside the gates, embrace them, tell them all sorts of things meant specifi for them; but more than
good morning
and
good night
would never come from his mouth.

Though nobody in the factory knew his real class and identity, he stiJI felt himself treated as an outsider among the workers. And, for him, worse than an outsider, he felt repugnant to them, knowing that for him this factory work was only a temporary experience, an intellectual adventure after all, while for them, it was their whole life. Tomorrow, and the day after, and in ten years' time: always the shed and the racket and the pace and the pieces and the foremen's reproaches and the terror of being fi

. . . with never an end, until the moment of the defi disease, or old age, when you're cast away as useless junk. To this end their mothers had borne them : men sound in mind and body, no less than he! men, or rather "the elect sea of conscience," in every way equal to him! To escape the burden of such an injustice, the only remedy seemed to him then to become a worker like them for the rest of his life. That way, at least, he would be able to call them brothers without remorse. And thinking about it, at times, he made up his mind, in earnest. But a moment later, he could glimpse the happiness that beckoned to him from a hundred thousand little open windows, saying to him : What!? you want to betray me?! In fact, Davide, as we have always mentioned, was a devotee of happiness, in which, he felt, man's true destiny resided. And even if his personal destiny announced itself to him, in those days, as hostile and threatening, we have seen that certain threats didn't weigh on him. Davide Segre's happiness, really, despite everything, could be sung in three words : HE WAS EIGHTEEN.

Meanwhile, he dedicated himself to his position as a worker beyond the confi of the possible. According to him, in fact, what he chiefl lacked was experience and training, so to train himself, he not only has tened to all his shifts, but also sought to work overtime, including Sundays : he was so suspicious of parentheses. And though that damned vomiting was repeated every evening, and every day his body lost weight and he was more and more enerv he was convinced he could make it physically (his morale depended on his will ). Was he perhaps Jess strong than the other workers in the shed?! There, in the factory, you could fi men of fi and women, and little boys who looked consumptive . . . His body was healthy and strong; in the past he had even won athletic competitions, and very few could beat him at Indian wrestling. For him, to survive the

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test
physically
at least to the time he himself had fi ( that is, till sum mer-it was then February ) was not only a pledge, but a question of honor. And instead, it was his body that betrayed him. It happened on the Monday of the third week. Saturday had gone badly for him : he had produced I don't know how many hundreds of defective pieces (he had been distracted by an unforeseen resurgence of jealousy concerning a little girl friend of his in Mantua ), and the foreman, a new one, had called him, among other things :
balosso, maroc,
and
romanso gialo
( all truly incom prehensible terms to me, but they were apparently serious insults ). In the evening, he skipped supper; and yet, on coming in, he vomited twice as much as the other evenings : a gray vomit, all dirty water, soot, and dust, and with even some sawdust and shavings in it! Then, in bed, he couldn't get to sleep. Always that itching everywhere, and those hateful pliers at his head, and in his brain, instead of thoughts, nothing but nuts and bolts, screws, pieces, and bolts and screws . . . Suddenly, like a searing whiplash, there fl ed up in his head this sole, frightening thought:

As long as men, or even a single man on the earth, is forced to live such an existence, all talk of freedom and beauty and revolution is a fraud.

Now, such a thought made him draw back, worse than a ghostly or demoniacal temptation; for to heed it would mean, for him, the end of his IDEAL, and therefore of every vital hope.

The next day, Sunday, he stayed in bed, feverish, and he slept almost the whole day. He also had some dreams, of which he remembered nothing precise; but certainly they had been dreams of happiness, because they left him with a sense of healing and also of extreme weakness (as in convales cences ). Also the thought of the previous evening, which had seemed so terrifying to him, now came to him, instead, with the air of a promise and a stimulus : "In the face of the obvious
impossibility
of certain human damnations," he told himself, in fact, "you have to dedicate yourself more than ever to the IDEAL which, alone, acting mysteriously, like miracles, can free the earth from the monsters of the absurd . . ." That evening, as usual, he set the alarm; and in the morning he rose with frenzied urgency to return to the job. But then, as he was going off at the thought of himself marching towards the shed, standing at the machine, etc., etc., he felt those fatal pliers fall on his head with an echoing thud, squeezing so fi he had to stop, at the stairs, his legs paralyzed! He was overcome with seasickness, he saw fl heard whistling-and, worst of all, he was fi through all the channels of his will, with intentions which were resolute but, on the other hand, decidedly to be rejected : not only because they were contrary to his present commitment, and-beyond a certain

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point-also to the very IDEAL; but because they were foolish in practice, negative in tactic; and such that, in reality, in the present political and social situation, even a Bakunin ( who was anything but nonviolent) would have repudiated them contemptuously! And yet, they were the only imag inings capable, at least
physically,
of giving him a certain impulse in the legs, and a little shiver, if not of joy, surely of gaiety . . . They were, actually, variations on the same theme, such as, for example, hitting the foreman who had called him
balosso
and the other things, jumping onto the machinery waving any old black-and-red rag and singing the "Interna tionale"; shouting to all present: STOP! in a voice of invincible volume, such as to silence all the notorious clangor of the shed; still shouting, and in increasing volume : "Let's run away from here! Let's tear down the whole place!! Set fi to the factories! Murder the machines! Dance in a universal ring around the owners!!" etc., etc. At heart, he was undoubtedly determined to resist such aleatory stimuli, with a
moral
force of his will; however, a physical CERTAINTY, like a cry from his bowels, warned him that perhaps no will of his would avail against another sti : the urge to VOMIT! He felt, in short, that as soon as he was back at his place, intent on counting the pieces produced and on suppressing the other stimuli, that famous vomit, which usually came to him in the evening, would pour out there, in broad daylight, and while he was at w:J sham ing him, like a kid, in front of everybody!

But, in any case, this didn't make him give up; he was determined to march on, all the same, as usual, towards the shed. But unfortunately, of all the long stairway from his lodging ( five fl ) he was unable to de scend even the fi steps! At the simple, imminent prospect of the shed, the eff of his paralysis followed immediately. His
moral will,
in short, was to go there; but his legs did NOT want to go there any more.

(It was-as he himself later explained to Ninnuzzu-the
paralysis of unhappiness.
For any real action, no matter whether toilsome or danger ous, movement is a phenomenon of nature; but at the unnatural unreality of a total unhappiness, monotonous, wearing, stupefi without any re sponse, even the constellations-he thought-would stop . . . )

And so, Davide Segre's experience as a worker, which according to his plan was to last, in the minimum hypothesis, fi or six months (and in the maximum hypothesis, his whole lifetime! ), was miserably concluded in the space of nineteen days nineteen ! Luckily, his IDEAL had not emerged from it destroyed; but rather, on the contrary, enlightened and strength ened (he had already counted on this ). Still, it can't be denied that, at least
physically,
his attempt had ended in defeat, so afterwards, when he encountered any workers, Davide felt a sense of shame and guilt that made him so misanthropic that he kept silent.

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Obviously-Ninnuzzu admitted-today Davide was no longer the same boy; maybe at that time he was still a bit spoiled . . . Nevertheless, his present insistence on repeating that enterprise, destined to fail, made his friend laugh, as if at a child's whim. But while he laughed, Ninnuzzu always spoke with supreme respect of his Comrade Davide; for, since the fi days of their life together in the Castelli, he had considered him not only a hero by nature, but a thinker, surely meant for some glorious achievement: a great man, in other words, from every point of view.

Some of the present letters from Mantua were long, well-written (with a real Author's style!) and they discussed learned subjects-art, phi losophy, history-so Ninnuzzu showed them off with a certain honor, though inevitably, when reading them, he skipped at least half. Others, instead, were convulsed and confusing, scrawled in big letters, crooked, almost illegible. Davide said he couldn't stand it up there, and he felt he had fallen into a trap.

Towards the end of August, he announced that in a couple of weeks at most, he would be back, with the intention of staying in Rome.

4

On the Ferragosto holiday, the fi of the month, while Davide was still in the North, down here, in our parts, there was a crime, at the Portuense. Santina, the elderly streetwalker, was murdered by her pimp. A few hours later, he turn himself in