The Unseen (16 page)

they took the television sets and hurled them to the ground they took all the objects all the boxes all the bottles and smashed them to smithereens and trampled them underfoot they broke up stools and tables they broke up everything they tore the books to shreds they took the clothes and pulled them apart and threw them on the ground and pissed on them they yanked out the radiators and the water flooded out over the entire floor they wrecked the entire prison they made it unusable they were the ones who wrecked it not us for half an hour they took it out on our belongings on the prison shouting screaming they were in a frenzy then they calmed down also because probably some news had reached them the kidnapped guards had talked about how things had been that they hadn't been injured by the prisoners that it had been the
carabinieri
who'd injured them

while those guys were demolishing the prison people had calmed down a bit because as long as they were destroying things it meant they were leaving us alone then it was clear that the worst was over when the guards came back down and they weren't masked any more they weren't wearing the balaclavas any more and that was when we realized they wouldn't be beating people up any more because their faces were uncovered and the sergeants started saying if anyone's sick we'll take him to hospital but nobody wanted to leave the yards because they didn't trust them not even the worst cases not even the ones who were really in a bad way and had broken bones and the sergeants started giving reassurances no we won't do a thing to you we'll take you to hospital and we'll take the ones who're not so bad into the infirmary here

well there was a comrade who was in a particularly bad way because they'd hit him in the throat and he couldn't breathe this guy kept fainting he was wheezing as if he was going to suffocate so we'd had to take turns at putting a finger in his mouth because this guy's tongue kept twisting backwards and into his throat he wasn't breathing and he was going blue in the face he was close to suffocating so we had to keep him sitting up with his back against the wall and put our fingers in his mouth me and another comrade took turns at it we took turns at putting our fingers in his throat we held his tongue with our fingers trying to flatten his tongue to keep it still so that some air could get into his throat but it was hard because the guy wouldn't keep his head still

it went on like this for an hour and whenever we managed to get him breathing a bit easier the guy would say his voice really faint I don't want to go to the hospital because I heard a guard who was beating me up say that they want to kill me then we had to reassure him because the way he was he was really in danger of dying meanwhile other comrades started going out to be taken to hospital then there was a stream of people all through the night going to hospital or to the infirmary and the ones with broken bones had plaster-casts put on the ones with cuts had them sewn up had stitches and so on but this guy who couldn't breathe was still there half the night not wanting to go out and we thought he was dying then around four or five in the morning we made up our minds and we took him to the gate because he really couldn't stay there like that any longer

from that point when they started taking people to hospital and to the infirmary the guards no longer made threats and they stopped being violent this freezing cold night passed maybe it was Christmas night I don't remember now just imagine if it mattered at all to anyone there that it was Christmas the temperature was below zero and we didn't have a thing at dawn the guards turned up with milk we couldn't believe it with bread and hot milk and blankets people were still there in a lot of pain but with plaster-casts on now fear had subsided and so there was the first sound of voices people started to talk to one another inside each of the yards and then there was the first sound of voices resounding from yard to yard because there were walls between them and you couldn't see either side how's x how's y we were glad that no one had died and then the main thing was that they weren't beating us any more

for the whole day we all lay there stretched out on the blankets on the ground because all the pains the bruises the blows were coming out now at noon they brought us sausages cooked food bread as well then the darkness came down again and that night was splendid because the sky was clear as can be and there were oh so many stars the air was extremely cold and then very slowly one by one they started taking us out of the yard and they took us into the ground floor cells they'd taken everything away and they'd only left the beds the ground floor hadn't been involved in the revolt they couldn't put us upstairs because everything had been wrecked and so they'd taken the working prisoners and they'd put them somewhere else for the time being

they'd taken everything away from inside the cells they'd taken away the little wardrobes the tables the stools anything there was nothing left in the cells there were only the bed frames attached to the floor and the usual foam rubber mattresses which were plain blocks of foam rubber and nothing more and they started taking us out one at a time and they put us in groups in these cells they put me in a small dormitory cell with five beds there were ten of us and by the time we'd all stretched out there was no room to walk about and we were there like that ten of us with no belongings with blankets with the clothes we'd been wearing because there was no way we could change our things were upstairs on the floor that was wrecked we still had on the same torn dirty bloodstained clothes and we stayed there in these conditions for three weeks

25

It was a lovely day and the weather was mild in the courtyard at police headquarters there was a great to-ing and fro-ing of people in uniform and in plain clothes blue and white cars driving in and out very fast they made me get into an unmarked car me in the back seat with the guy carrying my bag next to me the other young one was driving and in the passenger seat the oldest guy with the fatherly look about him we drove off and as soon as we were outside I looked at myself in the rearview mirror my face looked dreadful my eyes red and swollen my hair dishevelled and lank my hands so blackened that I couldn't even touch myself but more than anything I felt as if I had a layer of filthy slippery grease all over me on my skin on my clothes on my hair like the guards in that sewer down there I'd just come from

now I'm going to prison I wonder what prison is like I have no clear idea I ransack my memory for whatever I've read in the movement literature or the stories I've heard from those who'd been there but nothing much came back to me to help me imagine what was in store we came up to a red light the driver brakes through the window I can see a girl on a bicycle alongside the car one foot on a pedal the other resting on the ground I'd like to be riding around on a bicycle now too if I'd thought about it yesterday I wouldn't have cared less I'd have thought that riding a bicycle isn't that much fun in fact it's extra work for nothing whereas now I was thinking it's a lovely thing to do

then the light changes to green and the car drives straight on while the girl is still there stationary with one foot on a pedal and the other resting on the ground I'd have liked to turn round but I don't I'm stuck between two policemen and my role is to be someone who's going to gaol I can hardly turn to look at girls riding bicycles the oldest guy turns and asks me in a fatherly tone of voice if it's the first time I'm going inside yes I tell him and he makes an apologetic face and asks me how old I am you're young it's a nasty thing to go through and shakes his head they're always like that the older ones the younger ones are hard tight-lipped they don't say a word to you if they talk to you at all it's to give you orders you can sense the hatred and contempt but the old ones too they're all the same thing they're all the same at heart they all do the same things the same job

my role is to be someone who's going to gaol now I was thinking about the comrades and this consoled me because I was thinking that now they would all be rallying round busy making efforts on my behalf they wouldn't leave me to fend for myself and I was proud of the fact that I had all these comrades this big family that was taking responsibility for my situation and my problems that would think of everything a lawyer money all the other things that for now I couldn't imagine I felt that I wasn't on my own I was part of a collective strength and this made me feel very strong I would bravely bear everything that lay ahead of me and I was thinking that now I had to behave as if the comrades could see me I wasn't on my own they were with me always there whatever happened

we reach the prison for a bit the car drives round the outer wall with the guard towers then it stops in front of a big gateway that's closed in front of it there's a stationary squad car and round it are four policemen in uniform with submachine guns under their arms and bullet-proof vests on they're looking about anxiously and they're looking inside the cars that go by slowly the gateway inches open and a grey uniform leans halfway out also wearing a bullet-proof vest and carrying a sub-machine gun with the barrel pointing up a bit the oldest guy in my escort gets out of the car goes up to him speaks to him and hands him some sheets of paper the grey uniform takes them studies them for a moment then goes back inside the gateway and the gate is closed again

after a while the gateway opens again just enough to let our car through it comes to a halt in front of a second gateway just as the first gate is being shut inside it's dark in the entrance yard there's only the light from two dim bulbs on the right there's a guard-room with bullet-proof glass its door closed and more armed grey uniforms inside the police escort gets out of the car and they hand over their pistols then they get back in meanwhile I stay put in the back seat the second gate is opened and the car slowly drives on thirty or forty yards along an asphalt path and stops again we all get out and another grey figure opens a gate for us that leads to a long narrow corridor then on the left a door with the notice registration office

we go into a big room full of shelves stacked higgledy-piggledy with registers and big tables in cracked green formica and grey uniforms that look as if they're working as clerks among the papers that are scattered about there's a high counter dividing the whole length of the room in two the escort trio take off my handcuffs they have a hurried word with the one that looks like the office supervisor there they hand him some papers and my bag and they leave without even a look at me the office supervisor motions me to sit down on a bench and goes back to the work he was doing when we came in he takes a pile of papers from one table and moves them on to another table then he takes another pile of papers from another table and moves it on to the first table but he doesn't seem satisfied and shaking his head he shifts it all back the way it was before

after a while he waves me forward to the counter he brings out a big register and an inking pad and he takes my fingerprints all over again my hands get even dirtier from the ink by now they're quite black by now I know how it's done and I try to impress my fingers on the sheet all by myself for I don't want that guy to take hold of my hands but he does it just the same obviously because he's used to doing it then he takes down my particulars too he writes them down underneath the fingerprints and he adds the charge and I can read subversive association armed band and possession of arms then he measures my height with a rickety old ruler like the ones they use in a military-service medical and he writes that in the register too and puts it away

finally he makes me hand over my wallet with my money and my identity card and he makes me hand over my watch and my belt and everything I had in my pocket my lighter and my keys and he puts them on the counter beside my bag he summons two guards and says take him to the cells he's in judicial isolation they don't call you by your name here among themselves the guards always call you him and I go with the two guards we go through an awful lot of gates always with a guard at each one to open and shut it in the corridors we meet other guards who go past singly or in groups or escorting prisoners then eventually we reach a small door that a guard opens for us and we go down the stairs that lead underground to the isolation cells

at the bottom of the stairs there's another small door that's opened for us from inside there's a wide corridor thirty or forty yards long and on each side of the corridor every two or three yards there's a locked grey metal door with a closed spy-hole and at the end of the corridor there's a wall with no windows and a small locked door everything is lit with fluorescent strip-lights the two guards accompanying me go up to one of the guards in the corridor addressing him as sergeant of the guard the sergeant has a big bunch of keys attached to his belt he takes one of them and opens the armoured door of cell number twenty-seven then with the same key he opens a gate that's behind the armoured door

before taking me inside one of the guards escorting me pins a card with my name and number on the wall beside the door a five-figure number then they wave me in I go inside they come in behind me and they tell me to undress naked one more time I undress naked one more time and they go through a whole new search looking thoroughly through all my clothes where by now there's nothing left at all then they go out and the sergeant closes the gate he turns the key in the lock then takes two steps back and pushes the door and the door closes with a dull thud I can hear the key turning and I'm left standing there naked with my hands all black in isolation cell number twenty-seven

Part Three

26

And now here I've lost track of where I left off with this whole story also because there are loads of things I can't remember that I've no clear memory of how they happened and there are also loads of things that can't be remembered but can only be forgotten it's not as if I want to tell the whole story of my life nor do I want to tell everything that happened during this time when so many different contradictory things of all kinds happened that to put them all together and try to make sense of them seems to me quite impossible but what concerns me right now is just to speak about those things that happened to me but from my point of view of course just because maybe now it's worthwhile speaking about it

at school what happened was that after we'd got him on the run the headmaster Mastino left and the teachers had had to adjust their power had crumbled we'd won the right to mass meetings we'd got everything no more oral tests no more registers suspensions excuses and so on the school had erupted in a short time it had become an open school people of all kinds came friends and students from other schools workers who weren't at work unemployed people came instead of hanging around the bars and assorted marginals came instead of just wandering about we called all these people non-residents and so the school became a fair a bazaar where we played chess and we played cards and we brought things to drink and joints and the teachers stood by powerless without daring to lift a finger as everything went to rack and ruin

one of these non-residents was Nocciola who by now was coming to our school every day Nocciola got by with a bit of shoplifting in the supermarkets and the shops he thieved all kinds of things even stuff he didn't need because then he'd resell it the school had kind of become his market in fact there were people who'd order things from him in advance moccassin shoes or a record player and then us too because we didn't have any money and now we were fed up with asking for it at home luckily Nocciola was there teaching us a thousand and one ways to get by with not much money and how to find it we did a bit of mass shoplifting in the bookshops and then we sold the books to stall-holders we forged canteen vouchers Nocciola knew how to get telephone coin boxes open and he always went round with tons of tokens in his pockets he paid for everything with telephone tokens he went to the cinema and paid with telephone tokens

bit by bit we started selling off the school we started taking it apart really taking it apart and selling the stuff piece by piece light-fittings typewriters chairs stools encyclopaedias from the library materials from the chemistry and physics laboratory the glass cases and the cupboards there was nothing left in the school then they bought everything brand new again but we sold it all all over again and so they gave up the teachers didn't even leave their cars in the car park otherwise the tyres would disappear on them the school had now become an empty space quite void of interest too nothing to do with us at all at a certain point we realized we had to leave and go and clean somewhere else out and so we didn't go there any more and we started living at the centre

when we took over the centre what happened was that we'd gone to the centre of a Marxist-Leninist group to ask if there was any chance of using it for our meetings it was a very big centre five or six rooms it was on the ground floor of an old building in the centre of town it was very well kept the parquet floor was polished everything was very neat and tidy with red curtains but at the same time it was very gloomy those big empty rooms and the smell of a locked-up church there were huge Chinese posters framed under glass posters with Chinese workers and peasants very muscular and always smiling with fists raised and great big banners hanging the whole length of the walls long live the heroic victory of the Cambodian people there was one room turned into a cultural centre the Antonio Gramsci Cultural Centre it said on a polished plate on the door

when we rang the bell there was only one comrade there arranging the library books nearly all Chinese editions of the works of Mao and Stalin and other things like that and he announced us to the comrade secretary who was in his office behind a polished desk with a telephone on it the secretary was a diminutive individual with a big belly very earnest all the time with a big grey overcoat that was never taken off we told him what we wanted but he started talking about political lines giving us a long tirade about the political line of his party he was looking for a bit of political confrontation but we couldn't have cared less about political confrontation at that time there were loads of struggles going on and it was the first we'd ever seen of this lot and now here he was asking us to take up a position on the political line of their party

we couldn't have cared less but we had to listen to the whole of his triumphalist tirade about his party we kept looking at the telephone hoping it would ring and interrupt him it never rang though but then he tells us that in that particular conjuncture however the party presence in town had been weakened by the expulsion of some militants for right-wing or left-wing deviationism though they did have three workers functioning as a party cell inside two factories and one student but lately this student had been going around with a bad crowd people who hung about at the station and they even suspected him of being on drugs and in the end the comrade secretary let himself go and said that they didn't have any more money to pay the rent and even the telephone had been cut off and the three workers had it up to here with taking a cut out of their wages every month to pay for the centre so we reached an agreement that they would transfer all the rooms but one to us and that was that

three or four of them put up a partition to separate their room from the others and they made a separate entrance but after all this work we never saw or heard from them again until we realized that they'd stopped coming and then we pulled down the partition and we used their room too immediately within just a few days there was a great convergence of people all the dispersed people of the movement began to pour in all kinds turned up workers students unemployed people women drop-outs old people comrades from the extra-parliamentary groups anarchists it was a different place from the usual sort of centre the groups had it was a movement centre and since it was big there was plenty of room there for all these differences

we'd inherited all the MLs' furnishings their chairs their bookshelves their cupboards though the comrade secretary had taken away the telephone we'd inherited the big framed Chinese posters with Mao strolling around the middle of the countryside smiling followed by squads of peasants holding sickles or pitchforks or rifles and we left them as they were the centre was always open we made a show of closing it in the evening shutting the door but the fact was that there were no keys there were people coming and going all the time there were meetings of workers of students of casual workers of hospital workers of women but also groups that turned up there with guitars flutes and so on to play to smoke joints to fix up dates for the evening it had become everybody's regular drop-in place

of course the comrades also used the centre as a place for working out the various systems for not paying electricity bills gas bills telephone bills systems for not paying for transport for sabotaging the ticket machines on the buses for forging train tickets for sabotaging the electricity meters and so on they were things that started spontaneously with individuals or small groups and that by word of mouth would then lead to the organization of real mass struggles around these things for instance we'd started going to the cinema on Sundays for free fifty or sixty of us would push our way in or at a pinch if it was clear that they'd call the police we'd throw down a derisory sum that was no more than token

the same thing went for the fancy shops in the centre of town for thirty or forty of us to go into a really smart shop was in itself already pretty intimidating and even without having to hurry much it was really easy to make off with a stereo deck a leather jacket a camera and so on the same thing went for the transport struggles we'd travel in large groups and we'd say we weren't paying then we'd give out leaflets to the rest of the passengers to encourage them to do the same thing until it became routine and the conductor didn't even ask the comrades for tickets not even when they were on their own in the early days the bus company had the idea of putting guards on the buses but then it had to give this up because along with this it had to budget for the cost of wrecked bus stations and even a pair of buses that went up in smoke one night our centre was right in the middle of town and the whole surrounding area was in fact occupied by us movement people came and went groups of comrades would hang out all day sitting outside on benches in the small park about two hundred yards away there was a big department store that was visited daily by groups of comrades at one point the management of the department store decided to tackle these brazen daily raids and they installed a large number of security guards one day they started chasing some comrades who'd stolen some food they ran after them even once they were outside the store and then the comrades started running in the direction of our centre and they started shouting and in no time there was a general alert everyone outside with the banners which were just pickaxe handles with a strip of red cloth attached

the security guards weren't expecting this they stopped short a few yards away from the first banners about-turn and away they went but they knew one of our comrades by name and they reported her to the police and for fear of some retaliation by us they asked for two cars full of cops to be stationed in front of the entrance then the women comrades came up with a nice move and twenty or thirty of them went into the department store and once inside they started making the rounds of the fashion department with razor blades and that was that jackets sweaters skirts trousers raincoats dresses overcoats a real disaster damage to the tune of millions of lire and then they just left calm as you please nobody noticed a thing the police cars stayed on guard for another two weeks and meanwhile people went and did their thieving in another supermarket then they went back there and started all over again

in the early days the centre was used by the movement as a whole mainly for activities like these some even used the centre as a temporary lodging those who'd maybe left home the day before it became their berth for the night they'd pull their sleeping bags out of the cupboard then in the morning they'd roll them up again and store them back in the cupboard there were washing facilities and there was heating and in one room we'd even come up with a bar the gathering point for everybody was the general meeting that was held in the biggest room roughly once a week all packed together in there we'd discuss all the things that the different collectives planned to do or had done during the week and we'd tackle the problem of how to use the strength that we'd built so as to generalize the offensive to the factories to the schools to the hospitals to the local districts to the squares and we'd get leaflets ready

to generalize the offensive means to radicalize disaffection with whichever hierarchy you choose to exercise our destructive creativity against the society of the spectacle to sabotage the machines and goods that sabotage our lives to promote indefinite wildcat general strikes always to have mass meetings in all the separate factories to elect delegates who can be recalled by the base to keep continuous links between all the places of struggle to overlook no useful technical means of free communication to give a direct use value to everything that has an exchange value to occupy permanently the factories and the public buildings to organize self-defence of the conquered territories and on with the music

27

The isolation cell was six feet by nine an iron bedstead fixed to the floor a foam rubber mattress a foam rubber pillow two sheets a pillow-slip a brown blanket a dirty white ceramic washbasin and that was all and on the far wall across from the door there was a barred window some wire netting behind the window which looks on to a passageway that's hardly wide enough for one person to go through it but judging by the accumulation of dust dirt and cobwebs it must have been a long time since anyone had gone through it the cell is lit by a very bright light that comes from a bulb that's out of sight but which must be in the corridor above the door and the light filters in through an iron grating about a foot square

the floor is poured concrete furrowed with cracks of assorted sizes the cracks are full of dust dirty cigarette ends bits of plaster the walls that once must have been white are a dirty yellow colour and here and there all over the place bits of plaster are coming away after having first formed bubbles on account of the damp the bubbles swell up then they break then the bits of plaster start to come away and fall on the floor they are also coming off the low uneven ceiling and falling in the middle of the cell on the walls all kinds of writing dug into the plaster with fingernails or burned in with cigarettes the writing is prolific intricate with some things written over others half crossed out so that it's all muddled up

low down on the left at floor level a small iron door about a foot high not quite closed I open it there's a small opening and inside there's a metal bucket covered in rust which gives off a nauseating stink inside it there are still traces of shit and piss cockroaches foul insects I close the door with a kick I'll never have a shit in there no way right now I don't need to shit but I need to piss I go and piss in the washbasin even that's pretty foul all scummy and full of cracks it's ready to split right open I run the water for a long time there's a stink coming from the little door that almost makes me vomit but maybe the stink was there before and I didn't notice it it's the stink of that subterranean place

a nauseating stink of piss of shit of vomit of enclosure I try to hold my breath for a few seconds but it's just the same it changes nothing in fact when I breathe out again it's worse I look around but there's nothing to look at I sit down on the bed and I listen I can hear only the slow dragging tread of a guard up and down the corridor unlike the cell at police headquarters there's silence here but maybe the silence is worse I look at my hands black with ink I try to wash them with water from the washbasin but there isn't even a scrap of soap and the water runs off the impermeable ink then I think of scraping it off with one of the bits of plaster that's coming off the walls but it's futile I give up and I sit down again on the bed what do I do now I wonder and now what do I do