Story of My People by Edoardo Nesi

Author:Edoardo Nesi [Nesi, Edoardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-555-6
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2013-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Immediately

You showed up and rang the front doorbell, and they immediately opened the door to you. They immediately let you into the darker recesses of this filthy old decaying industrial shed, with its grayish plastered walls, the scratched linoleum flooring, flaking and patched, the air stale with smoke and breath. An industrial shed divided in two by plasterboard partition walls, filthy and collapsing, brightly lit up by fluorescent tubes dangling from the ceiling, crudely wired to black cables as thick as fingers that cluster into bundles the size of pythons and snake along on plastic platforms that loom off-kilter above rows of brand-new sewing machines that are somehow already filthy, besieged by half-open cartons, scraps of fabric of all colors, ashtrays overflowing with stubbed-out butts, cans of Red Bull crushed in anger and half-empty bottles of water.

You’re the state police, you’re the firemen, you’re the city constables, you’re the local health department. You are traveling in your own city, but it’s actually the city of the Chinese. Next to you, the last in a line of twenty-year-olds, a young man, motionless, eyes glistening, hunches his diminutive shoulders inside a short-sleeve, pea-green knit shirt, with TONY MONTANA printed on the back in gothic letters. He’s wearing slim, dark jeans, decorated with gilt stripes that run down his skinny legs, thin as chopsticks, and a pair of phosphorescent Nikes. There’s just a haze of whiskers on his face, and smooth, raven-black hair, short and stiff on top of his head, long and lank, dangling over his ears, in a bizarre and vaguely canine hairstyle unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. He’s had his hands in his pockets the whole time since you came in. He doesn’t know a word of Italian. He won’t look at you, he won’t look at anyone, with his glazed, glistening eyes. His gaze is fixed on the floor, staring down into the void, and he complies immediately when the policeman walks over to him and gestures to him to spread his arms so he can be searched, but with the first cautious palpations, he starts to look over at his friends and he smiles, and you feel a strange sense of relief. His eyes aren’t glazed, then, after all. He just has the watery eyes of so many young men his age. He’s not upset, he’s not despairing. He’s not about to cry. And why should he, for that matter?

Nothing’s happening, and they all know it. You are the one who does not know. You, who would fall to your knees in tears if the police raided your business and put judicial seals everywhere, confiscating your industrial shed and your company, if by some chance you still owned them. You, who are on the verge of tears just at the sight of this happening to other people. You, who don’t understand, who may be unable to understand.

There might be twenty or so of them, though it’s hard to say the exact number. Aside from the five or

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