The Unseen. Nanni Balestrini
it was a special prison but you could move around there just as you wanted
nor were the cell searches properly seen to the more stuff there is in a cell the harder it is to search it all well the difference from the normal prison that I’d just come from was that here they did one search a week where there they did one a month but here the way things were with the guards meant that if a ballpoint pen went missing during a search there was an outbreak of hammering on the bars in every cell so that right away this guy would come back with the pen and apologize and here the way things were with the guards meant that they put up with the worst insults and the worst threats and if you called a guard at midnight to get him to take cigarettes or a newspaper or wine or a plate of pasta to someone in another cell even if it wasn’t his job he’d do it right away all the same and in double-quick time this was the way things were with the guards
if one day during a search you told him no don’t you lay a hand on me he’d even stop searching you and if while they were searching the cells they found knives they didn’t even say a word they didn’t even give you a hard time about it any more they’d got used to finding knives in the cells they confiscated them and that was all that was the atmosphere there was there before the revolt there were visits without glass screens the rules said they were to be an hour but they were always two hours to the minute and sometimes even longer if you pushed it and you could have four visits a month plus a special visit that you could have on top and if you didn’t have a visit you could make a ten-minute phone call instead
the non-politicals in the specials aren’t the non-politicals of the normal prisons they’re people who in prison have tried at least once to escape they’re all people from the world of big-time crime or important gangs and there you could associate with the non-politicals too you could exercise with them and go and eat with them too all you had to do was apply to go and see them so this amounted to a situation of progressive extension of areas inside the prison there was a state of permanent protest that had its effects on the regulatory structure because the prison is this it’s a structure that elaborates the regulation of the body to the maximum and so the fact that this regulation is rearranged corresponds to a shift in the balance of power between prisoners and custody
I soon became aware of the strained and tense atmosphere arising from this situation and underlying the fairground appearance that had been my first impression there’d been a whole series of protests there were protests to stop the guards doing searches every time cells were left for exercise or demands about going to eat in another cell or demands about visits or meetings with lawyers and so on when you mount a protest and for instance when you refuse to be searched there are two outcomes either the administration gives way and as a result you wind up in a much stronger position and that’s that or else the administration reacts and then the struggle goes on and the tension rises until there’s a confrontation
so there were constant disruptions at exercise people would refuse to go back to the cells and there’d be concerted hammering on the bars of the cell gates and things like that there’s always a ceiling when a protest begins if the administration doesn’t give in right away you trigger the mechanism of mounting conflict but then there’s a ceiling and this ceiling measures the balance of power for example if the prisoners are in the position of power to threaten to take guards hostage then of course the administration yields first because it knows that the prisoners can go as far as taking hostages and the administration usually always yielded there because it was afraid of this that the prisoners would take guards hostage of course you couldn’t ask the impossible you couldn’t ask them to unlock the cells for you and let you go home but you could push all the time to extend social spaces
and the protests succeeded because they were solid everybody joined in right away without even thinking about it by now the guards no longer took any responsibility the guards reacted on every occasion by passing on decisions to their superior who in turn dumped them on his superior and so on up to the prison governor and he’d take it to the minister which meant whatever you did inside the prison you were never confronting the guards but the strength of your position was such that you ended up dealing directly with the minister with every protest you made and since by now what was at stake was by now always the trigger for a sequence of events leading to taking guards hostage perhaps proceeding merely from the fact that you wanted a blue felt tip pen it was their policy to give way over everything
also because the minister’s strategy centred as always on the distinction making that special prison a cooling-down prison let’s say at the positive end of the special spectrum while at the other end was a maximum security prison the prison regime is entirely based on this strategy of differentiation with its potential to blackmail you with the threat of a worsening of your conditions with its potential to warn you if you protest watch out or I’ll send you to a prison worse than the one you’re in now and so the comrades’ argument was just because we’re well off here it doesn’t mean we don’t have to make demands but we have to make demands just the same here as well so as to break this blackmail situation that threatens us all with ending up in a prison where we’re worse off
8
The first time I met China was during the Cantinone occupation that’s where I first saw her China had come round there I’m not sure when and she was helping Gelso with the mural that Gelso had decided to do on the biggest wall she had a big brush and she was dipping it in a bucket of white paint but she was dipping it in too much and the paint was spattering all over the place and it was running down on to the floor I saw what a mess it was and I went over to show her how it should be done but also because I thought she was very pretty and I remember that there’s where she gave me that scarf it was that time when I first met her because when I went up to her of course I got a good splash here on my front and she made up for it then by putting her red scarf round my neck it was a really long scarf ankle-length and she told me keep it I’m giving it to you it’ll hide the stain
to see how little need there was you only had to look at how I dressed in those days the battle-dress shirt with baggy sweater threadbare at the elbows riddled with holes and with loose unravelled ends the jeans frayed at the hem with a safety pin in place of the zip broken months ago one shoe split at the seams that let the water in when it rained the other had no lace but it held with a permanent knot odd socks one black and one grey and most of all the off-white raincoat that’s my second skin all scruffy and dirty so many buttons missing that I always leave it open a tear under the armpit holes in the pockets but stuff always ending up in the lining newspapers leaflets felt-tip pens always the same old rags until they fall apart because it’s part of the gamble because we’re staking everything and how do you think about clothes when you’re betting everything you’ve got
the morning we occupied the Cantinone we’d got there very early we’d got there very early in the morning it was Saturday morning and the night before while Valeriana and Nocciola were keeping an eye on both ends of the street Cotogno Ortica and I used a hand drill to drill through the big padlock from underneath where the lock is we sprang the chambers and the padlock fell open so that by the following morning it would be all ready and we’d only need to undo the chain then all along the ditch on the other side of the road we placed plastic bags hidden in the brushwood with stones ballbearings and catapults in them not too much because inside the Cantinone there was all kinds of stuff we could use to defend ourselves in case of immediate attack
in the morning at seven prompt as can be we five met at the station and with Ortica’s car we drove round the streets where the groups of comrades who were to do the break-in were to be ready and waiting they were all there as planned all armed to the teeth like for demonstrations where you know trouble might flare up scarves gloves berets and everything we undid the chain and we went inside and right behind us came groups of comrades we made a quick inspection inside it was still nearly pitch dark there was no electricity shining a torch inside we saw piles of timber of every size piles of planks and beams it was so big an area the torchlight couldn’t reach the far wall but we thought it was lovely
the Cantinone was one wing of an old castle belonging to the Curia the other bits of the castle were occupied by a nursery school run by nuns and an old people’s home also run by nuns the wing we were interested in was used at the time by a construction firm to store materials it was a big