"Virtual Strike" by Sergio Staino, English trans. by Wendell Ricketts.
The Year of the Paper Tiger - Leonardo Blogspot
The Year of the Paper Tiger
Or, Who’s Reporting Hu?
by Leonardo, the author of the leonardo blogspot
Italian version here.
English trans. by Wendell Ricketts
* * * * * * *
“Good morning. May I help you?”
“Good morning. Yes, I’m here to report a crime.”
“Fine, just give me a minute to get my terminal turned on. It’s a theft, I imagine?”
“No, not really.”
“Vandalism?”
“Actually, I’m here to report ... what’s it called ... you’ll have to forgive me, I don’t have a lot of experience in these matters, you know? An imm ... an ....”
“Immorality? An immoral act?”
“No, no, an immigration.”
“Ah.”
“Illegal.”
“Right, right, I see.”
“What I mean is, there’s this person and he’s an illegal immigrant.”
“Of course.”
“And I’m here to turn him in. Because now it’s a crime, right?”
“Do you know this person’s name?”
“I certainly do.”
“Do you know where he lives or his place of work?”
“I have all the information.”
“And you have a reasonable basis for stating that he is an illegal immigrant?”
“I have proof.”
“Fine. You tell me the whole story, and I’ll make out the report....”
“And then you’ll go arrest him!”
“If we deem it necessary.”
“What do you mean ‘necessary’? You have to do it, end of story! In Italy, you have that ... what’s it called ... the compulsory minister.”
“The compulsory administration of criminal penalties. You know a lot about this.”
“Thank you. I studied law, back in my country.”
“I wanted to study law, but you know ... I come from a big family.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, let’s get down to business. Your name, sir?”
“Hu Wen. H, U, space, Wen. Just like it sounds.”
“Excellent. And the last name?”
“Hu.”
“Hu Wen Hu?”
“No, just Hu space Wen.”
“Ah, OK. Sorry, but all these foreign names nowadays are enough to drive you crazy.”
“You have my complete sympathy.”
“All right, then. So: Hu Wen. Born on?”
“Thirteenth of September, 1974.”
“The Year of the Tiger!”
“My compliments, sir. Does that mean that you....”
“Yes, I was a 1974 baby, too, I admit it. Now then, Hu Wen, born on the thirteenth of September, 1974, and a resident of....?”
“Umm ... put this: resident of Canton, China.”
“You’re not a legal resident of Italy, then?”
“No. But I can still make a police report, yes? I mean … if I were a tourist and somebody stole my wallet.…”
“Quite right. Very well, then. Hu Wen, born on the 13th day of September, 1974, and a resident of Canton, China, on the 3rd day of July of the current year did appear at the Parmeggiano Alto Division of the Italian state police, in the Province of Mussolonica, and, having so appeared, did subsequently report to the competent authorities, in the person of Gabriele Panunzio, a duly designated functionary of said division, the presence on sovereign Italian soil of an illegal immigrant, hereinafter denominated as....”
“Yes?”
“I’m asking you. Hereinafter denominated as ....?”
“Sorry?”
“This illegal immigrant ... I’m saying, what’s his name?”
“Oh, him. His name is Hu Wen.”
“Last name?”
“Hu.”
“Wen Hu Hu?”
“No, Hu space Wen.”
“Ahh. You know, I’ve heard that name before. You just wait and see. I’ll bet this isn’t his first run-in with the law.”
“Well, actually....”
“Hold on. Your name is also Hu Wen.”
“I cannot deny it.”
“One of those coincidences. I understand.”
“No, perhaps you do not. I am him. I am here to report myself. I am an illegal immigrant. Arrest me.”
“All right, all right ... let’s not get ahead of ourselves, now.”
“There is that whatsit, the compulsory administration of criminal penalties.”
“Excuse me, but why are you trying so hard to get arrested?”
“Put yourself in my shoes. I work in the outdoor markets, and I travel the entire province. I get up every single morning at five o’clock. Whether it’s raining or whether it’s snowing. Five years like that. I’m not used to that kind of work. In China, I was a law student. I’m tired.”
“You might have thought about turning yourself in before.”
“Before you would have sent me back to my country as an illegal immigrant. But now you cannot do that anymore.”
“What do you mean we can’t?”
“You cannot because illegal immigration is now a crime, which means you have to try me in court.”
“Who knows if there’d ever be a trial....”
“But I want to take advantage of my automatic appeal.”
“Don’t make me laugh! I mean, if all the illegal immigrants in Italy waited for their automatic appeal to be heard....”
“Yes? Please go on.”
“It would bring the courts to a standstill!”
“This is not my problem. I am a criminal suspect, and as such I have the right to a fair trial. Ah, and since I also work, I have compounded my crime, because I am stealing a job from an Italian citizen. I think you better put me away in prison or some place like that. I know your prisons. Compared to the basement where I’ve been sleeping, they’re not so bad.”
“They’re overflowing.”
“True. You probably have no choice but to release me and find me a job while I wait to go to court. Now, it happens that I have studied the Italian justice system for quite some time. I would say I could count on a good five or six years of food and lodging plus a job, guaranteed.”
“But then they’ll send you back to China.”
“Who can say? In the meantime, the government will change and they will announce an amnesty. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if the amnesty came along sooner rather than later, the way things are going. It’s a shame, really, because then I’ll have to go back to the outdoor markets. I really hate those markets.”
“You should have become a lawyer.”
“True. Shall we proceed, if you don’t mind?”
“All right, then. Hu Wen ... did report to the competent authorities, in the person of Gabriele Panunzio, a duly designated functionary of said division, the presence on sovereign Italian soil of an illegal immigrant, hereinafter denominated as .... ”
“Hu Wen. Just do a cut-and-paste.”
“… born on the 13th day of September, and so forth and so on, and domiciled at?”
“Number 3, Via Garibaldi. It’s the doorbell with the ideograms next to the buzzer. If you want, I’ll give you my cell phone number.”
“You’re making things too easy.”
“This is what we have come to! Now that you know where to find me, you have no choice but to arrest me.”
“But you might not even be a real illegal immigrant.”
“Of course I am a real illegal immigrant.”
“Aha. Easy to say. But can you prove it?”
“I certainly can. I don’t have a single document to show you.”
“That’s no proof. At most, it’s an absence of proof.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Who’s to say, for example, that you didn’t just tear up your work visa? I mean, look at it from our point of view. Do you really expect us to arrest the first person who comes along just because he says he doesn’t have any documents on him?”
“That’s what you used to do.”
“It used to be a lot easier. Dash off a deportation order, charter a plane if absolutely necessary, and off you’d go back to wherever you came from. But if we have to arrest all of you and put you on trial.... I mean, you tell me....”
“So you’re not going to come and arrest me?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“Italy never changes. ‘Pass a law, find the flaw.’”
“Take it easy, okay? Or else...”
“Or else?”
“I’ll arrest you for defamation.”
“Excellent! What is defamation?”
“It’s when you offend someone.”
“I see, very good. Italy is a hundred thousand square miles of dried-up swamp weed waving in the lurid wind of stupidity.”
“Sorry?”
“It is an offense against your country. Arrest me.”
“You were just exercising poetic license. At most, it was the free expression of a personal opinion. I’m not going to arrest you for that.”
“Italy is shit. Arrest me.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? No, I’m not going to arrest you.”
“You have to arrest me! There’s the compulsory minister! It’s defamation!”
“No, it’s not. It’s just satire, and I’m not arresting you.”
“The President of the Republic is a Nazi invert.”
“It’s satire, political satire.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Come on nothing. Look, I’m laughing, too. Ha ha ha!”
“Italian women all whores.”
“Hee, hee, what a kidder.”
Singloids - No. 250
"Singloids No. 250" by The Persichetti Brothers, English trans. by Wendell Ricketts.
Not One Euro for the Earthquake in Abruzzo
by Giacomo Di Girolamo
English trans. by Wendell Ricketts
You'll have to forgive me, but I won’t be donating so much as a single cent toward the fund -raising efforts now underway for the victims of the earthquake in the Abruzzo. What I'm saying sounds like an obscenity, I know, and I also know that people normally flaunt the opposite position, with none of the modesty that charity requires.
But I’ve made up my mind. I won’t be making any telephone calls to toll-free numbers that extract a Euro from my account; I won’t be sending any "donate-a-Euro" text messages. From my end, there won’t be any bank transfers to special accounts set up for earthquake-relief. I don’t have a spare bedroom to offer, no summer house on the coast to open up to a needy family, no old clothes to donate, not even ones that have gone out of style.
I resisted the celebrity appeals, the minutes of silence at the soccer games, the statements by politicians, our Prime Minister being moved to tears on live TV. The television schedules turned topsy-turvy, the non-stop live broadcasts, the appeals superimposed on the screen during prime time—none of it made an impression on me. I’m not going to donate one single Euro. And I believe that’s the greatest gesture of civility that I, as an Italian, can make at a time like this.
I’m not going to donate so much as a Euro because the thing that is destroying this country is charity: the stereotype of the generous Italian, of that bungling populace guilty of every kind of foul-up and impropriety but which, in the midst of tragedy, is capable of spasms of generosity and is consequently forgiven everything. That’s the point: I’m sick and tired of that Italy. I want nothing more to be forgiven. Generosity, unfortunately, and with it charity, is a pretense. We’re still standing there, on the edge of that well in Vermicino in 1981, waiting to see whether little Alfred will make it out alive,[1] holding on to one another with all our might. The compassion we suffer from (and which we offer one another) is genuine. But we haven’t moved one single centimeter.
In fact, I believe that tragedies, all of them, can be anticipated. The wells covered over. The guilty parties identified. The damage repaired in a timely manner. I refuse to donate a dime, because I already pay my taxes. And what I pay is a lot. Those taxes already include money for rebuilding, for aid, for police, fire fighters, and other public safety measures. All of which winds up being spent for other things. And that, in turn, means that the police, fire fighters, and public-safety authorities turn to Italians for donations when they need money. I’m saying no. Go get the money out of all the illustrious tax cheats that permeate this country’s economy.
My taxes also pay for the courts whose job is supposed to be to figure out who is speculating on building safety, and which are supposed to be doing that job before catastrophes take place. With my taxes I also support an entire political establishment—all of them, at every level of government, incapable of accomplishing anything, not one single thing, unless you count putting themselves front-and-center whenever there’s a camera in sight.
Even the President of the Sicily Region, Raffaele Lombardo, went to visit the areas hit by the earthquake—a trip paid for, like all the others, by us, the taxpayers. But what was the point? Was there really any need for him to go?
I might have been able to come up with a Euro, or maybe even two. Then Berlusconi started talking about building a “New Town” in L'Aquila, and I thought about “Milano 2,”[2] about the lake with its swans, and about the neologism “new town.” Where did he get that from? Where did he read it? How long had he been mulling that one over?
A time of anguish like this can’t be allowed to be marked by silence. Everything has to be toyed with, reproduced for the spectator to consume. That’s where “New Town” comes from. It’s a brand name. Like Brooklyn Chewing Gum.[3]
I could have shelled out a few cents. Then I saw that even Renato Schifani had decided to pay a visit to the earthquake zone. The President of the Senate declared that “what we need at a time like this is a united political effort.” Amen to that. But don't ask me to be on your side, because I’m not like you. I work. I don’t make my living from politics, on the backs of the community. While you, all of you, are responsible for what happened, because in one form or another you’ve governed the Italians and the ground they stand on for generation after generation, I am guilty of nothing. In fact, I'm in favor of justice. What you’re in favor of is the kind of solidarity that helps us forget about the fact that there isn’t any justice.
I’m not going to part with it, my Euro. Because I remembered my mother, who worked for the Italian government for forty years: In an entire year, her pension is worth what Schifani earns in a single month. So explain why I should fork over my Euro. To pay for what? Oh and by the way: When the Belice earthquake hit Western Sicily in 1968, my parents were deeply touched by what had happened, and donated some of their savings to the victims.
Then there was the earthquake in Irpinia in 1980, and once again my parents made a noble and symbolic donation through their post-office account. For the rebuilding. And we all know how that turned out.[4]
After Irpinia, there was the quake in Umbria in 1997. Then, in 2002, in San Giuliano di Puglia in Molise, where no one could have failed to be moved by the story of the classroom that collapsed on twenty-seven children, killing them and their teacher.
But now I’ve had enough. What’s the point of sending aid if everything goes on just the way it always has?
They’ve discovered, just the way decent journalists should do (now there’s a good way to spend a Euro—buy a newspaper written by decent journalists) that one of the schools that collapsed in L’Aquila was once actually a hotel. With the stroke of a pen, however, some obliging city bureaucrat decided to transform it into a school, regardless of the fact that it satisfied not even the minimum safety requirements for such a building.
In fact, in my own city, Marsala, there’s a school just like it, the largest one in the area: the Istituto Tecnico Commerciale. For thirty years it has been housed in a building that’s really a hotel transformed into a school. Not one safety requirement has ever been respected in this papier-mâché building with 600 students. To date, the Province of Trapani has spent nearly €7 million in rent on that school, where—just to give one example—the asbestos subceiling in the gym collapsed last October during a sirocco. (A sirocco!! Not an earthquake! A sirocco! Is there a Richter Scale for south-easters? Should we invent one?)
So that’s where my Euro went—drowned along with all those other millions of Euros—my one Euro of shame for the members of a political establishment who are incapable of making decisions, unless it’s the decision to line their own pockets without the slightest restraint and to pay their pals back by making sure they get rich, too.
I was just about to send off my one-Euro solidarity SMS, and then I heard them bragging on the Tg1 newscast about the exceptional audience shares they’d been receiving during their live broadcasts from the earthquake zone. Since I also pay for the public television service with my annual license fee, my feeling is that I’m already doing them a favor if I don’t ask for my money back after hearing an atrocity like that.
I won’t donate a dime for the towns ravaged by the earthquake. And I don’t want anyone else’s money if something should happen to me. What I want is an efficient national government, one in which it isn’t only the craftiest and the slipperiest who run things. And since I already know that nothing like that is going to come to pass, I also believe that the earthquake will turn into a great big lottery landslide for politicians. Now they all have the perfect excuse not to talk about anything else. Now no one can criticize the government or the majority political party (which is all of them, even the ones in the opposition), because there’s the earthquake to think about. Just as with 9/11, the earthquake and the situation in the Abruzzo are going to be the front that is used to justify anything and everything.
Thousands of resources are wasted in this country every day. If only it truly wanted to, the national government knows where it could get the money to help the earthquake refugees: by freezing politicians’ salaries for a year, or the salaries of the “super managers”; by combining the next European parliamentary elections with the upcoming referendum, rather than funding two national elections. Those are the first ideas that come to mind. Every time I think of something else, I’m that much more enraged.
I’m not going to donate a dime. Instead, I’m giving the best help I can: my outrage, my indignation. In these difficult days, I want to assert my right as an Italian to live in a house that is safe. And the rage welling up inside me turns to tears when I hear people say “something like this would never have happened in Japan,” as if the Japanese had discovered something new, as if know-how was the exclusive province of the Land of the Rising Sun. Every engineering student with a freshly printed university degree understands how a building ought to be constructed. What happens is that they’re made to forget as they exercise their profession.
I cry in my rage because it is always the poorest people who die, and in the televised pandemonium there’s not even one single poet with the greatness of a Pasolini to tell us how things really are, to gather together the pain and anguish of the least among us. This country has killed all of them, all the poets, or else it's allowed them to die of boredom.
But today, here, I feel Italian, a poor man among poor men and women, and I demand the right to have my say.
In the end, just the way that nature does when it causes the earth to move.
But I’ve made up my mind. I won’t be making any telephone calls to toll-free numbers that extract a Euro from my account; I won’t be sending any "donate-a-Euro" text messages. From my end, there won’t be any bank transfers to special accounts set up for earthquake-relief. I don’t have a spare bedroom to offer, no summer house on the coast to open up to a needy family, no old clothes to donate, not even ones that have gone out of style.
I resisted the celebrity appeals, the minutes of silence at the soccer games, the statements by politicians, our Prime Minister being moved to tears on live TV. The television schedules turned topsy-turvy, the non-stop live broadcasts, the appeals superimposed on the screen during prime time—none of it made an impression on me. I’m not going to donate one single Euro. And I believe that’s the greatest gesture of civility that I, as an Italian, can make at a time like this.
I’m not going to donate so much as a Euro because the thing that is destroying this country is charity: the stereotype of the generous Italian, of that bungling populace guilty of every kind of foul-up and impropriety but which, in the midst of tragedy, is capable of spasms of generosity and is consequently forgiven everything. That’s the point: I’m sick and tired of that Italy. I want nothing more to be forgiven. Generosity, unfortunately, and with it charity, is a pretense. We’re still standing there, on the edge of that well in Vermicino in 1981, waiting to see whether little Alfred will make it out alive,[1] holding on to one another with all our might. The compassion we suffer from (and which we offer one another) is genuine. But we haven’t moved one single centimeter.
In fact, I believe that tragedies, all of them, can be anticipated. The wells covered over. The guilty parties identified. The damage repaired in a timely manner. I refuse to donate a dime, because I already pay my taxes. And what I pay is a lot. Those taxes already include money for rebuilding, for aid, for police, fire fighters, and other public safety measures. All of which winds up being spent for other things. And that, in turn, means that the police, fire fighters, and public-safety authorities turn to Italians for donations when they need money. I’m saying no. Go get the money out of all the illustrious tax cheats that permeate this country’s economy.
My taxes also pay for the courts whose job is supposed to be to figure out who is speculating on building safety, and which are supposed to be doing that job before catastrophes take place. With my taxes I also support an entire political establishment—all of them, at every level of government, incapable of accomplishing anything, not one single thing, unless you count putting themselves front-and-center whenever there’s a camera in sight.
Even the President of the Sicily Region, Raffaele Lombardo, went to visit the areas hit by the earthquake—a trip paid for, like all the others, by us, the taxpayers. But what was the point? Was there really any need for him to go?
I might have been able to come up with a Euro, or maybe even two. Then Berlusconi started talking about building a “New Town” in L'Aquila, and I thought about “Milano 2,”[2] about the lake with its swans, and about the neologism “new town.” Where did he get that from? Where did he read it? How long had he been mulling that one over?
A time of anguish like this can’t be allowed to be marked by silence. Everything has to be toyed with, reproduced for the spectator to consume. That’s where “New Town” comes from. It’s a brand name. Like Brooklyn Chewing Gum.[3]
I could have shelled out a few cents. Then I saw that even Renato Schifani had decided to pay a visit to the earthquake zone. The President of the Senate declared that “what we need at a time like this is a united political effort.” Amen to that. But don't ask me to be on your side, because I’m not like you. I work. I don’t make my living from politics, on the backs of the community. While you, all of you, are responsible for what happened, because in one form or another you’ve governed the Italians and the ground they stand on for generation after generation, I am guilty of nothing. In fact, I'm in favor of justice. What you’re in favor of is the kind of solidarity that helps us forget about the fact that there isn’t any justice.
I’m not going to part with it, my Euro. Because I remembered my mother, who worked for the Italian government for forty years: In an entire year, her pension is worth what Schifani earns in a single month. So explain why I should fork over my Euro. To pay for what? Oh and by the way: When the Belice earthquake hit Western Sicily in 1968, my parents were deeply touched by what had happened, and donated some of their savings to the victims.
Then there was the earthquake in Irpinia in 1980, and once again my parents made a noble and symbolic donation through their post-office account. For the rebuilding. And we all know how that turned out.[4]
After Irpinia, there was the quake in Umbria in 1997. Then, in 2002, in San Giuliano di Puglia in Molise, where no one could have failed to be moved by the story of the classroom that collapsed on twenty-seven children, killing them and their teacher.
But now I’ve had enough. What’s the point of sending aid if everything goes on just the way it always has?
They’ve discovered, just the way decent journalists should do (now there’s a good way to spend a Euro—buy a newspaper written by decent journalists) that one of the schools that collapsed in L’Aquila was once actually a hotel. With the stroke of a pen, however, some obliging city bureaucrat decided to transform it into a school, regardless of the fact that it satisfied not even the minimum safety requirements for such a building.
In fact, in my own city, Marsala, there’s a school just like it, the largest one in the area: the Istituto Tecnico Commerciale. For thirty years it has been housed in a building that’s really a hotel transformed into a school. Not one safety requirement has ever been respected in this papier-mâché building with 600 students. To date, the Province of Trapani has spent nearly €7 million in rent on that school, where—just to give one example—the asbestos subceiling in the gym collapsed last October during a sirocco. (A sirocco!! Not an earthquake! A sirocco! Is there a Richter Scale for south-easters? Should we invent one?)
So that’s where my Euro went—drowned along with all those other millions of Euros—my one Euro of shame for the members of a political establishment who are incapable of making decisions, unless it’s the decision to line their own pockets without the slightest restraint and to pay their pals back by making sure they get rich, too.
I was just about to send off my one-Euro solidarity SMS, and then I heard them bragging on the Tg1 newscast about the exceptional audience shares they’d been receiving during their live broadcasts from the earthquake zone. Since I also pay for the public television service with my annual license fee, my feeling is that I’m already doing them a favor if I don’t ask for my money back after hearing an atrocity like that.
I won’t donate a dime for the towns ravaged by the earthquake. And I don’t want anyone else’s money if something should happen to me. What I want is an efficient national government, one in which it isn’t only the craftiest and the slipperiest who run things. And since I already know that nothing like that is going to come to pass, I also believe that the earthquake will turn into a great big lottery landslide for politicians. Now they all have the perfect excuse not to talk about anything else. Now no one can criticize the government or the majority political party (which is all of them, even the ones in the opposition), because there’s the earthquake to think about. Just as with 9/11, the earthquake and the situation in the Abruzzo are going to be the front that is used to justify anything and everything.
Thousands of resources are wasted in this country every day. If only it truly wanted to, the national government knows where it could get the money to help the earthquake refugees: by freezing politicians’ salaries for a year, or the salaries of the “super managers”; by combining the next European parliamentary elections with the upcoming referendum, rather than funding two national elections. Those are the first ideas that come to mind. Every time I think of something else, I’m that much more enraged.
I’m not going to donate a dime. Instead, I’m giving the best help I can: my outrage, my indignation. In these difficult days, I want to assert my right as an Italian to live in a house that is safe. And the rage welling up inside me turns to tears when I hear people say “something like this would never have happened in Japan,” as if the Japanese had discovered something new, as if know-how was the exclusive province of the Land of the Rising Sun. Every engineering student with a freshly printed university degree understands how a building ought to be constructed. What happens is that they’re made to forget as they exercise their profession.
I cry in my rage because it is always the poorest people who die, and in the televised pandemonium there’s not even one single poet with the greatness of a Pasolini to tell us how things really are, to gather together the pain and anguish of the least among us. This country has killed all of them, all the poets, or else it's allowed them to die of boredom.
But today, here, I feel Italian, a poor man among poor men and women, and I demand the right to have my say.
In the end, just the way that nature does when it causes the earth to move.
[1] Life in
[2] Milano 2 is a planned “new town” or “supercondo” community in Segrate, in the suburbs of
[3] Brooklyn “the chewing gum with the bridge on the package,” was introduced in
[4] The allusion here is to the fact that, following the 1980 earthquake in Irpinia, reconstruction and repair efforts quickly became a lucrative business opportunity for organized crime, which controlled contractors and contracts, supplies and suppliers, etc. An article in the 15 April 2009 The Independent contains more background on what took place.
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About Me
- Wendell Ricketts
- Wendell Lokomaika‘i Ricketts was born on an atoll you’ve never heard of and raised in small towns on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. His writing about politics; class; performance, literature, and the visual arts has appeared in Contact Quarterly, The Advocate, Out, Spin, Gay & Lesbian Literary Heritage, Western American Literature & Silent No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools, among others. His fiction & poetry have appeared in Mississippi Review, Blithe House Quarterly, James White Review, Salt Hill, modern words & elsewhere. He is editor of Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life & translator of The Wrong Door: The Complete Plays of Natalia Ginzburg. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from the U. of New Mexico, where he received the highly specialized training that afforded him years of rewarding employment as an office temp. In 2005, he abandoned the U.S. of the Bushocracy and embarked upon a career as an expat. COPYRIGHT © 1995-2009: If I wrote it or I photographed it, it’s copyright protected. Don’t use without my permission.
