My bird, I’m expecting you,
I’m always watching the roads.
A few kilometres from the Elysian Fields, in the suburbs of Paris, there is one of the concentration camps for foreign workers. The friend with the car remembers his own problems, when he lived here and he used to eat boiled cats. “Thank goodness I’m past that,” he sighs upon the wheel unable to recognise anything all around, so much have the newly built apartment blocks transformed the place. And memory isn’t helping him, because memory wants to forget. All he has is a distant memory of a way up that should lead to a way down, and there… Two peasants, looking Yugoslavian, with their pouches on their shoulders, point him to a vague direction in the night… They leave the car at a square and go on on foot. “Didn’t I tell you? We’re here. This is the camp of SIMCA.”
The camp looks like an army training camp. Instead of buildings, there are metal containers, like oblong wagons with built-in wheels and floors covered with cement to prevent them from absorbing the humidity of the earth. In old containers there are four beds per chamber. In the new ones, two. A shared toilet, kitchen and bathroom. Doors, so to speak, are not there. You come in from the night, you go out into the night. They call the way between a “corridor”. Walking in the corridor, you hear, behind the closed doors, transistor music and voices – Spanish, Algerian, Portuguese, Greek. A sorrow at every door. A State at every sorrow. “And they all talk to the clouds / whose unity is blocked / by the boss, the sun, / like the migrants, / workers in the factory, / spread into separate thermometre tubes / lest they bring out, all together, / the fever of the mass.” And after they scatter them like that into separate camps, they divide them again inside each camp into various containers, making the communication between them problematic. Everything follows an architecture of morale breaking. Coming out of the toilet, an Italian showed them which door to knock.
“Come in.” Opening the door they faced a naked room, with two beds, a football calendar on the wall, and a transistor radio next to an electric heater. The time must have been about eight. The two roommates were sitting each on his own bed, back to the wall. They pretended to look for an Ananiadis. “This name does not exist here.” “He was here some years ago.” “Where does he work?” “In chains.” They look at each other. They wonder. Ananiadis. In chains. “And have you come to the right camp? Could you be looking for another factory?” The friend in the fur collar over his black coat insists: “We have a message for him from home.” A message? And who are these two who invade other people’s misery so indiscreetly? The guy with the glasses is checking out the space. Both workers, by experience hesitant to confide and sharing few words with strangers (even if the strangers speak their own language), shake their heads thoughtfully. Without the backgammon in the village coffee shop, they sit, from eight o’clock, with the tiny transistor keeping them company, near Sicilans, Serbians, Mauritanians, Catalans – no, the crucial point is the right dosage in the mix to avoid an explosion – they sit (who is the mother they’ve left behind, who is the sister they have to marry off, where are the fields, where are the olives, where are the springs, where are the cattle?) “migrants, coming from rural districts in their majority, are proletarised in the factories abroad”) inside this frozen tent, a wagon that got detached from the diesel engine that took off like a jet, an immobilised wagon, they sit in the prison of the foreign land, thousands of kilometres away from home, but without the pride of the political prisoner, or the courage, they sit inside a metal container, in the desolation of the walls, with the football team calendar, cut off, unspeaking, with their macedonian constitution, prematurely bald and using few words: “We don’t know him. He might have gone. We’ve been here since 1965” – until (the trip not leading to any testimonies) the guard came with salvation, asking for the IDs
and papers of the strangers who entered the camp without his permission. And the guy in the fur collar and the other one with the glasses, again they asked after the same name. “You’d better ask for him at the central offices in Nanterre.”
2
And you complain to me that your central heating is malfunctioning and that your toilet is in the hallway and not inside the house. You should go see the unseen camps of workers, the camps of your car brand, under the heavy shadow of the newly built apartment blocks, which are so well camouflaged with trees that you couldn’t even see them from an airplane, a few kilometres from the Elysian Fields, in the suburbs of Paris.
3
– I work in shipowners’ houses, and for the Big One. I work as a waiter in their parties. I know Paris. I’ve been living here for years. I know a lot of people. I used to sell Sweepstake tickets. Until things changed. They put their own people. In this life, my boy, everyone’s looking out for himself. No one cares about us poor. Me, until these good people, the shipowners, took me in, I ate the food off the cats. In the factory, after the workers finished their lunch, a fat woman came, she had an ass that wobbled from side to side, and picked up their leftovers, threw them to the cats. And I used to snatch them away from the cats and eat them. Until these good people took me in. And they spent twenty-seven hundred to dress me. What? I didn’t hear you? Drachmas? Twenty-seven hundred french francs, shiny new. If you please. There’s different kinds of rich. The idiot rich and the good rich. No, there are no beastly rich people. Idiots. If you’re clever, if you can spot what’s what, if you catch on quick, like me, you can tell them from the way they’ll talk to you at their whiskeys. The good one is going to say: “No, thank you, thank you,” twice. The idiot is just going to say: “no.” The butler needs to have an eagle eye, to see which glass is running low and fill it up again. There’s fifty-two numbers, i mean people, working for the shipowners. I don’t know which one of us you’re asking about. Those people, my boy, they don’t give a damn. They don’t care about art, either. Nor about books. Only about their money. And they are always sad. My bosses are always full of sadness. They have all this money and they don’t know what to do with it. Long faces. Isn’t this what they call the people who sulk and pull faces? What can I say. Us poor, we care. You’re hungry and you’re writing a book. Aren’t you? Someone who’s not hungry, why should they write? And they don’t care about whatever Papadopoulos [tn: dictator] or what’d you call them. They’re concerned about the possible devaluation of the franc or the British pound. And that’s all: they eat caviar, they drink champagne, and they’re sad. They’re looking after their own interest. What? Of course they get their hands bloody to climb over people. Who doesn’t do that to get ahead? Ah, enough! I learned one thing in the School for Destitute Boys: not to snitch. We had a teacher who’d tan our hide with the ruler every time we snitched. Here, on the hand, with the stick. That’s why when some people here approached me to spy, I told them, “you’ve tried the wrong door.” I’m not becoming the spy of anyone. I’m on nobody’s side. Never mind. Nobody. They say they’ve abolished the parliamentary exemption from bills. And all the free trips of these bullies, what are they? Who’s paying for them? In any case, you don’t know a thing, either. What goes on the newspapers is tall stories. Tonight the master is having lunch with the King, at Latina gate. Yes, sir. He’s coming back tomorrow. And the Big One is leaving tomorrow on the yacht of a big shipowner. These people know how to live their life, my boy. You see, I move in high society. This is why I drink milk. I suffer from my stomach. I go down to Greece in the summers, I go to a deserted island, and I see no people. This is what it means to be poor: you know how to live, at least.
4
The workers sat mingled with the students who were there to observe their assembly. They were not the workers you’d see in Greece: here they had the distorted faces of migrants. Without learning the language, what with the years they’ve lived in France – there was no chance of them “improving” their French, since they hadn’t had nannies when they were little –, they also forgot what was left of their Greek. At an oblong table, under the poster for the thirty years’ anniversary, the two councils, the legal and the illegal one, were erupting in counteraccusations every once in a while.
With his nasal voice, a short man debriefed the anti-dictatorship action of the Union. The protests, the appeals, the flyers in soldarity with the strikers of Renault. “I didn’t get one,” shouted someone from the audience. “Your own fault,” came the answer “we gave it to everyone.”
Luckily inside the rented room – a Moroccan restaurant which closes on Sundays – there weren’t many crying infants. Two pretty women were discussing where they could find large baking pans, like the ones they used in Greece, for spanakopita. “At the basement of the Samaritain,” whispered an “old cat” behind them. And one would marvel looking at a peasant woman from Thessaly with rosy red cheeks, who had been in France for three months and she still hasn’t turned yellow, hasn’t dried up, hasn’t…
Then the cashier made a debriefing. All expenses, in the order of 1,200 francs, ended in “centimies”. From the costume ball we collected 230 francs and 83 centimies. To rent the hall for March 25, we gave 340 francs and twelve centimies. In the end, 120 francs and 21 centimies were left in the fund. He sat down.
The fight broke out when someone accused a member of the retiring administrative council of “embezzling.” “You want to call me an embezzler! Come outside if you’re a man!” But the “outside” was a french boulevard under constant combing by the local police that fill up the buses for identity checks. It required other circumstances, stemming from other layers of Greekness.
The episode seemed to calm down as soon as the worker with the missing fingers in his right hand, who distributed the bulletin to incomers, stepped in the middle. A blond with blue eyes and red veins on the cheeks, one you’d think was French, while he came from Tyrnavos, tried to hit a woman in trousers who dropped a hint about him, but the slap came up short, so to speak, on the tie of the confectioner sitting next to the woman, on the same bench, who protected her.
A motion of no-confidence against one of the two councils gave a student the opportunity to make a scientific elaboration of the topic. With a trenchcoat on his arm, a fishbone jacket, and patent leather shoes, he sounded like “classical music inside a taverna.” The majority rejected the motion with their fists raised high.
A baby was whimpering and its mother took it out into the hallway. The worker with the missing fingers gave it a sweet.
– The colleague keeping the minutes isn’t writing a thing, someone remarked.
Next to the one who “wasn’t writing a thing” sat tiny Elpinor, with his broad smile, so broad that it reached his ears making his face seem split in two, who had left Greece in the first days of the dictatorship, because he’d been feeling he’d started to get spoiled in capitalism, with his newborn little factory, and observed then, in the first period, that the French said “Voila” rather than the “Void” that he remembered from school, and when his savings ran out and he had to work as a housepainter, he discovered what arrogant xenophobes the same French that he’d admired a priori were, and how many times he left his job, at the construction site, for the Greek sense of honour, until he got sick and to make it through he gave out the “Free Homeland” of London [tn: a democratic newspaper of emigrated Greeks], tiny Elpinor, who found his final refuge in the rigid party, seeing around him, everywhere, destruction, the plunge into social democracy, he hadn’t closed his shop just to return with the Papandreou-Karamanlis people as liberators, sweet, indomitable, with his wide smile bursting on his face like a gondola.
The clock of Saint Sulpice struck twelve. The chairman had to break the meeting. They unfortunately had to leave the rented room. The vote was next Sunday. Some ran off to catch the last metro. The women were complaining that they weren’t done today and had to come back next Sunday. They only had one day of rest, and they were passing it with their husbands’ political posturing. In the end, “who are the workers?” he wondered. Caught in the grindstone of the foreign land, they looked more like transplanted basil plants, which get a different smell at their contact with strange air. In Germany, many and together, they make up another picture. Here they bring to mind the remnant of a mural that’s been scratched off and the old plaster’s falling in pieces. “Every day our life becomes less.”