The Unseen (29 page)

he'd asked his parents not to let anyone into his room and he himself never left his room he also had his food brought to his room and within a few days he turned the room into a cell he took out all the furniture he only wanted to keep a bedstead a table and a chair he always kept the window closed and the light on even during the day and he started fixing it up like a cell with the same things prisoners use cardboard boxes that had contained detergent or pasta hung on the walls to make do as shelves and then one evening he acted out an escape he tied the sheets together and dropped down from the window they found him in the yard with a sprained ankle

he spent a month without once leaving his room he lived like people in prison and he had no wish to see anyone and if he saw someone he didn't recognize them he hardly even recognized his parents who of course were in despair they were at their wits' end but they preferred to keep him there even like that since it meant that at least they could keep him out of a criminal asylum and a month later one day they found him hanged in his cell which was his bedroom one morning they found him there he'd hanged himself with the sheets tied together that he'd used to act out the escape that he'd always had on his mind and that even now had failed him

Malva's letter ended by saying that we had to realize how things had changed now outside and that we had no idea how different things had become outside like everything outside the air had changed the atmosphere the mood how people talked we weren't to imagine that things had stayed the same now the great fear had passed the bosses had regained their confidence they were flaunting their money again their Rolls Royces in the streets their furs their jewels at La Scala and now everybody including many old comrades thought only about working to make money forgetting everything that had happened before when they thought that maybe everything was going to change

in the evenings after supper there's a strange silence we no longer call to one another from our cells you can see the blue rectangles of the spy-holes uniformly lit up by the reflections from the television sets you can only ever hear the same monotonous rise and fall of music mingled with voices the ceiling is patterned with the beams of the yellow floodlights cutting through the huge window grid pinning you to your bed you're inside an enormous tin of sardines squashed pressed together you're inside a sealed tin hermetically soldered shut what is there outside this tin who is there outside what are they doing what are they doing now why do they go on doing things doing all the things they're doing without me where am I what am I which is my face now that all I have left is my face here crushed flattened squashed

I broke the mirror with a leg of the stool I threw all the pieces down the toilet I flushed it I flushed it five six seven times I kept on flushing it staring at the black hole of the toilet that black circle where the water rushed down I put my hand inside it then deeper down to feel the bottom I put my head in it I pushed my head down but it wouldn't fit it wouldn't go through the hole to come out somewhere else to see out to see where I am where you are when we were a thousand ten thousand a hundred thousand it can't be true that there's no one outside it can't be true that I feel nothing any more that I no longer hear any voice any sound any breath it can't be true that outside there's only a vast cemetery where you are can you hear me I can't hear I can't hear you I can't hear anything any more suddenly the floodlights cut through the darkness they fill the cell with light

when the opaque morning light slid through the bars and the window grids things in the cell regained their usual banal ordinary appearance we began again to think and imagine how we could see how we could make ourselves seen outside that prison that was becoming a cemetery the place of greatest silence where no message no voice no sound passes in or out any longer we looked at the problem of how to regain communication with the outside world and we decided to launch new protests to break that deadly silence we began by beating the bars during the night we'd agree on the time for this at exercise we had no watches we had no alarm clocks but we could see what time it was on the television sets that were kept on all night

and so simultaneously in the middle of the night all of us together started beating on the bars with wooden ladles with broom handles with stools most of all with pots and pans and pandemonium broke out because everybody was beating harder and harder even people on the other floors who heard our battering started battering too along with us and in that closed place all the cells all the corridors reverberated in the night it was as if the prison would explode it was as if everything would come down but in the end when gradually the blows died away a great sadness came because we all realized that we were only beating for ourselves and for the guards because the prison was in the middle of the countryside lost in a great expanse of boundless emptiness with no one around who could hear us

then we thought that maybe we could attract more attention by making torches but it was more complicated to make torches there were greater problems because there were the grids on the windows there were the iron grids they'd put outside the bars to prevent anything being passed from one floor to another and so we had to make holes in the grids we broke the stools and we made pieces of wood with sharp points and with these pieces of wood slowly and with difficulty we managed to widen the mesh and make holes in it and then make the hole bigger until we could pass the torches through the hole

we made holes in all the wire mesh grilles and then we made the torches the torches were made with bits of sheets tied tightly together and then soaked in oil and for this too we agreed a time in the middle of the night we all lit the oil of the torches and we pushed these brands through the holes in the grilles but there was no one there to see this either the torches burned for a long time it must have been a beautiful sight from outside all those torches flickering against the black wall of the prison in the middle of that boundless plain but the only ones who could see the torchlight were those few people driving their cars that sped like tiny darts in the distance on that black ribbon of the motorway several kilometres from the prison or maybe an aeroplane flying above but they fly very high up there in the silent black sky and they see nothing