History (70 page)

Moreover, Ninnuzzu was informed (having learned it, at one time, from Comrade Pyotr) that in the past, Davide had already attempted once to be a worker; but, in the event, he had failed the test. It had been about

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six years earlier, when Davide was just emerging from adolescence. His offi status was unemployed student-banned, for racial reasons, from the public schools of the Realm-but, in reality, for him, this was the precise beginning of his period of greatest excitement, as outside school a new and fresh, though risky, freedom opened before him. For some time, in fact, Davide had been secretly pledged to his revolutionary choice, meditated, and now defi ( rather than betray it, he would have chopped off his hands! ). And fi the time to keep that pledge was announced to him.

By now, he considered himself grown up. And for his real initiation, he felt his fi duty was to undergo directly and physically-he, born of the bourgeois class-the experience of the wage-earning factory worker. In fact, his IDEAL, as is well known, excluded, as an absolute principle-for the true anarchist revolution-any form of power and violence. And only at the price of personal experience, could he-in his opinion-feel himself the
neighbor
of that part of mankind which, in today's industrial society, is born already subjected by fate to power and to organized violence : namely, the working class!

So, that same year, he had managed, through some acquaintances of his, to get himself hired as an unskilled worker in an industry in the North (it is no longer known whether in Genoa or Brescia or Turin or else where). It was the period of the Nazis' total victories; and we can imagine that, even in factories, this wasn't the happiest moment for Anarchism. Davide Segre, however, laughed at the Axis victories, convinced, indeed, they were traps prepared by destiny to send the Nazi-Fascists ( that is to say, the bourgeoisie ) to defi and inevitable ruin : from which the song of revolutions could rise freely across the earth!

Actually, Davide Segre, the adolescent (and such, in reality, he was ), saw all mankind as a single living body; and just as he felt every cell of his own body tending towards happiness, so he believed all mankind tended towards it, as its destiny. And thus, sooner or later, that happy destiny had to be fulfi

How that little runaway Jewish student then managed, when hired, to produce suitable documents, I couldn't say. However, I have been assured that ( thanks to some clandestine intrigue) in the factory his real identity was unknown; nor did anyone, for that matter (not even his family), even fi out about this worker's experience of his, which he kept secret from all, except a very few of his accomplices and confi For myself, the scant and fragmentary information I have been able to gather came, to a large extent, from Ninnuzzu; and he, for that matter, gave it a comic interp ( even if, for Davide, it had been a real tragedy). And so my present memoir of the event remains rather patchy and approximate.

350 H I S T O R Y
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The place where he was sent the very fi day was a hangar with a roof of sheet-metal, vast as a city square and crammed, for three-quarters of its volume, with monstrous machinery in operation_ Davide crossed its threshold with the respect due a holy enclosure, because what had been for him a free choice was an imposed sentence for the other humans en closed there_ And in fact, inside him, with his sense of rebellion, there was also an exalted emotion, since he was fi penetrating-not as a simple visitor but as a true participant-into the
eye of the cyclone,
that is, into the lacerated heart of existence.

Since they put him immediately at the machine, he had at fi only a confused and swirling view of the place. Above all, the huge room re sounded incessantly with such a din that after a little while it made the eardrums ache, and a human voice, even shouting, was lost there. More over, the place couldn't remain still, but shook as if in an uninterrupted chronic quake, causing a faint seasickness, worsened by the eff of the dust and of certain caustic, piercing odors, he couldn't say from where, but which Davide, in his corner, felt constantly in his saliva, in his nostrils, mingled with every breath. In that vast space with few apertures, daylight entered murkily, scantily; and the electric illumination, in some points, was so blinding it pierced the eyes, as in third-degree interrogations. Of the few, narrow windows-all set high up, just under the roof-the closed ones had panes covered with a blackish crust; and through the open ones came damp, icy drafts (it was winter ), clashing with the searing vapors which burned the air inside and created a weakness in the bones like a fever of a hundred and four. From somewhere in the back, through the dusty smoke, you could glimpse tongues of fl and incandescent streams; and around these, the human presences seemed not real, but the eff of nocturnal delirium. Inside there, the outside world, from which every now and then half-buried echoes arrived ( voices, the clanging of a tram ), became an improbable region, an Ultima Thule at the end of a trans-polar passage.

Davide, however, felt prepared for all this; indeed, he faced it fear lessly, like a raw recruit eager to prove himself in his
baptism of fz
One fact, on the other hand, was new to him (although, really, it was a neces sary consequence of all the rest) , and this was the lack of any possible communication among the human subjects of the shed.

In here, the men ( there were hundreds ) couldn't even be counted as
souls,
as they used to be in the days of serfdom. In the service of the machines, whose monstrous bodies confi and almost swallowed the little human bodies, they were reduced to fragments of a cheap material, distinguished from the machinery's metal only by its poor fragility and its capacity for suff The frantic, iron organism that enslaved them re mained for them a meaningless enigma, as was the direct aim of their own

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function. To them, in fact, no explanations were given, and they them selves asked none, for that matter, knowing questions were useless. In fact, for the maximum ma terial output (which was all that was required of them, imposed like a life-and-death pact) , their only defense was obtuse ness, to the point of stupor. Their daily law was the extreme necessity of survival. And in the world, they bore their body like a brand of this unconditional law, which denies room even to the animal instincts of pleasure, still more to human demands. The existence of such States within the State was, of course, already well known to Davide Segre; and yet, till now, he had perceived it through a sooty mist, as if confounded in a cloud . . .

His precise job in the factory is not recorded in my information : however, from the same I can infer that, as a novice worker and without skills, he was at fi put at a press, with the later possible alternative of a milling-machine or something else. But from one machine to the other, his fortune changed little; indeed, certain insignifi variations, within the same order of eternal monotony, confused him uselessly instead of giving him relief.

In any case, for him, it was always a question of repeating at dizzying speed some elementary operation of the usual sort (e.g. pushing a bar into a slot, stepping on a pedal at the same time . . . ) , exact and identical, with a minimum average of fi or six thousand pieces in a day-at a pace measured in seconds-and never stopping (except to go to the latrine, but this parenthesis was also clocked ). Nor was any relationship allowed him, in all that time, except with his press, or his milling-machine.

And so, fi there to his automaton-demiurge, from the fi day Davide found himself plunged into a total solitude, which isolated him not only from all the living people outside, but also from his companions in the hangar, all of them abstracted as he was, like somnambulists, in their frenzied work and in their incessant obligatory gesticulation, all of them subjected to his same undifferentiated fate. It was like being in a peniten tiary where solitary confi is the rule, and where, moreover, each convict is given the bare minimum for survival at the pri of spinning without respite, and with the extreme number of turns, around a point of incomprehensible torture. Under the torment of this leech, which drains from within, every other interest is thrust aside like an enemy snare, or like a sinful and disastrous luxury which must later be paid for with hunger.

This unexpected solitude was a new experience for Davide, too differ ent from that other solitude-known to him-of contemplation and medi tation, which, on the contrary, gives the sense of communicating in unison with all the creatures of the universe. Here, imprisoned within a mecha nism that locked him to passive obedience-and always intent on the

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same, uninterrupted pursuit, foolish and sterile-Davide felt overwhelmed by the double horror of a crushing bulk and an absurd abstraction. And the annihilation didn't leave him even at the exit, where his temporary free
dom
resembled that of a prisoner, taking his hour of fresh air, with irons on his feet. For a long while, beyond the factory gates, he still had the impression that everything around him and the earth beneath him, was vibrating disgustingly, the way you feel after a rough crossing, nauseated. And until he fl himself on his bed, the machines' daily siege continued to clench him, concentrated in a kind of invisible pliers that held his head in their jaws, with piercing pain� and a horrible sizzling. He felt his cere bral matter being deformed, and every concept or thought that came to him, in those hours, irked him, and he wanted to drive it away immedi ately, like a parasite. From the fi evening on, at the moment of retiring, the eff of Davide Segre's working day had been to make him vomit there, as soon as he had set foot in his little room-all the scant food he had eaten and the great amount of water he had drunk ( in that period he still drank only water, or, on occasion, orangeade and nonalcoholic bever ages, when his fi permitted ) .

And every evening after that, punctually, when he came in, the same vomiting phenomenon recurred, which he found himself unable to resist, against all his will (besides, it made him angry thus to waste his dinner, which he had earn with such suff . . . ) . Nor was he spared, every morning, a certain struggle, at the sound of the alarm calling him for his shift at the factory. Suddenly, in fact, with this announcement of his new day, the thousands and thousands of "operations" of his quota lay before him like an immense advance of black ants over his body; and he felt an itching everywhere, so his fi gymnastics, to wake himself, were to scratch desperately. He had the strange, twofold feeling of heading for a sacred duty which nevertheless involved him in a kind of crime against nature, demented and perverse. And such an abnormal law irked his conscience, at the same moment that it summoned him with total fervor, like a voice from on high! In reality, Davide told himself, the true meaning of his present act lay precisely in his subjecting himself voluntarily to such an aberrant misdeed. This, in fact, was his pledge : to write the infamy of the worker's experience not on paper, but on his own body, like a bloodstained text: in which his IDEAL would become living, to cry the Revolution and to liberate the world!! Now, such faith suffi to make the boy Davide gallop towards the factory shed, like a front-line fi enamored of his fl

The fi days, during the usual labor, he consoled himself occasionally by directing his imagination-or rather, the last thread of it left to him intact-towards some refreshing visions : young girls of his acquaintance,

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mountain trails, the sea's waves . . . But these momentary vacations, alas, regularly ended in minor disasters or accidents, earning him reproaches (and threats of discharge) from the foreman, who wasn't the type for niceti (his most usual compliments were
pirla,
prick, and
vincens
a dialect term that means idiot there ). On these occasions, Davide was im mediately seized with a desire to use his fi or at least to drop everything, give the box with the fi pieces a kick, and clear out. And naturally, with his willpower, he managed to suppress his temptation; however, it made his viscera roil with nausea, and always brought a return of his usual morning itch, as if he had nests of ants beneath his clothes, or an invasion of lice.

In any case, even those threadlike reserves of imagination were soon consumed. In the brief course of a week, for him the earth already existed no longer, with its woods and shores and meadows, nor the sky with its stars : because these things no longer gave him any desire or pleasure; indeed he didn't see them any more. Even girls, when he left the factory in the evening, didn't attract him. The universe, for him, had shrunk to that shed; and he was even afraid of escaping its prison coils, suspecting it would perhaps be impossible for him, afterwards, to go back in, if he were to look directly at the joy of living. Even his pleasure in art (he particularly loved painting and music, especially Bach ) -and poetry-and his studies, his reading ( not excluding the texts of his political masters ) now teetered in the distance, like alien figures, expelled to an Eden beyond time. On occasion he had to snicker, thinking of Socrates of Athens, accustomed to arguing with his aristocratic fri in some luminous room, or seated at a banquet . . . and of Aristotle, who taught logic while strolling on the banks of the Ilissus . . . Here, among his companions in the shed, com municating the IDEAL (apart from the objective impossibility) would have been like talking about mothers in a desperate foundling asylum. A grim feeling of fraternal modesty, and also of bitter ethics, denied him such a right, like a forbidden luxury. And so, also certain propaganda aims of his (no secondary motive in his present enterprise) became another, constant frustrati for him, as he continually postponed them. Only on one of the last evenings, as far as I know, was he inspired to distribute stealthily a little clandestine pamphlet to three of his companions, just outside the gates, though he had no further word from them later. Per haps, in that atmosphere (with the Nazi-Fascist terror triumphant), this silence on their part represented the only possible sign of complicity to wards him; but for him ( who in his heedlessness didn't even consider the risks ) it meant that his intentions of an anarchist apostolate in the factory had failed, without response.