(Translated by Stella Heath)
After killing Charlotte I had to face the practical problem of what to do with the body. Obviously I couldn't leave it ,the smell would alert the neighbours, with who knows what consequences. And it was at that point, when I was digging a grave in the middle of the night, that my daughter Fabiana,
turned up and not surprisingly almost fainted at the shock,.
“Dad, what are you doing?”
“Digging a grave, as you can see. She's a bloody English rat. What was I supposed to do? I smashed her head in and her brains spilt out. There's her Brexit.”
“Oh God!” she said, dumbfounded.
It should be noted that God has not often been invoked in my family for generations. My children, normally absent from these stories, are atheist to the core, as am I, her mother lost her faith little by little; my parents were fierce atheists as I believe were two of my grandparents, not to mention a great-grandfather who was excommunicated.
“Oh God!” she repeated looking at the corpse.
“The best swine gets into a Sunday hog roast, and so has this English rat,” I said.
“You killed her just like that?” she said, horrified, “And you've become a racist to boot!”
“Her name was Charlotte, and I hit her in the head with a spade” I said, just to wind her up.
There are more important things to tell in this story, but as I was digging a grave to bury the corpse, all sorts of things were going through my head, and this is the second time she's called me a racist. And that infuriates me. I might wonder if my racism is the same as that of white English people because it takes place in a power structure where they are in the domineering pole. Well, being a racist when you are a member of the dominant race is to justify the power structure; to be a racist when you segregated and exploited is another matter, I think. And I think it over again and tell myself racism is racism, the rest doesn't matter, being a victim doesn't justify being a victimiser. Rapists were the victims of sexual abuse as children, it's a well-known fact, but many victims become resilient and kind-hearted, so retaliatory racism is no good, it's wrong, it's not justifiable, I thought as I quickly finished digging the hole.
There was a gust of cold wind, damned English climate, so I pushed the corpse into the hole and didn't bother to cover it up. I went into the house and back to the couch, my favourite place for reflection. Lying flat out on the couch with my head on one arm and my feet on the other, which is the way to make oneself comfortable and reflect after doing something transcendental, especially after ending a life, however small and irrelevant. And I started to think the matter over.
I tried to remember how this business of racism had started, and it wasn't all at once. It happened little by little, but the day of the Brexit referendum was a turning point. That morning, when I learned the result of the referendum, I went out to the street, I wanted to take a walk to the town centre, and I couldn't help staring at all the old people I came across. If they were fat, they had voted for Brexit. That was my stereotype of people who voted for Brexit; old, fat and diabetic. And stupid. But little by little my paradigm changed, broadening the range of Brexiters until every white English person I saw was a Brexit voter. To be clear, for me being a Brexit voter is not a social category or a sociological label subject to objective verification. No. For me a Brexit voter is a ratbag who voted for me to leave this country, to get out of his sight, not to work here, not to get in the queue at the doctor's, at the supermarket, at the traffic lights. That is, Brexit became the negation of my existence so turned my personal failures and frustrations into rejection and hatred. And I lay on the couch, thinking back.
Some time ago, when I had a good job, in the train station on my way to my office in Leeds I would always come across the front page of the Daily Mail, a newspaper with little sympathy for foreigners, except for Hitler and Mussolini back in the day, before they went to war. On my way to work I would look at the headlines of this tabloid with the cold eye of a social analyst, rather than the passion of the exploited. As a biologist watches the struggle between a spider and a wasp, nothing more. In this rag one day you could read the headline that immigrants were idlers living off social security and the next the news was that immigrants were taking jobs from native English people. Foreigners are bad, whether they work or not; by their mere existence. And I took note of the cognitive dissonance. But for me the Daily Mail was nothing but an anthropological curiosity.
But sometimes I took the bait. Not surprisingly. I still recall a headline which made me stop to read what it was about: “40 million Poles were coming to England, and there's no room”. I saw the headline as I was getting out of the train and it snapped me out of my early-morning daydreams. I thought there'd been a nuclear explosion in Russia or something, and I began to think how I could prepare a room to receive my share of Polish refugees. I stopped a moment by the newsstand and read the text of the news: it turns out that Poland was joining the European Union, and according to the newspaper this was the end for the country, as 40 million Poles would be coming to live off the system. What an exaggeration!
And I, with the coldness of the political analyst, wondered if there was any readership for this paper which promoted the idea that humanity was divided into two types of people, those who were fortunate enough to have been born in England and the hordes of foreigners awaiting the opportunity to take up residence in the English countryside at the expense of the British workforce. In time I learned that it did have a readership, and then some! But I was still seeing the news with the coldness and good humour afforded by distance.
But the years went by, professional jobs for me became more and more scarce, and I became unemployed at the age of 50, which is not easy. I had no choice but to take a job in a mill, as an unskilled factory worker. I had to learn to pretend that I didn't speak several languages or have a degree or anything, because employers hate the overqualified.
And I learned to cut grapes at top speed, A conveyor belt carries boxes with bunches of grapes and I have to take the box, about 10 kilos, and put it on the table, which I must have cleaned beforehand, or kept clean, open the box, remove the protective paper from the grapes, throw the paper in the recycling bins, pick up some scissors which are inconveniently fixed to the table by a chain, pick up a bunch of grapes and crop it. I have to take some plastic punnets, and if there aren't any punnets fetch them from the other end of the plant, open the box and bring back the punnets, unstick them, because the bastards are sometimes stuck together, take a punnet, put a 400gr bunch of grapes in the punnet, weigh it, wait for the scale to say whether the weight is right, “well done” indicates a correct weight, and if it weighs more than 400 gr “remove grapes”, and if it weighs less “add grapes” but to a maximum of three bunches, because that is the quality standard. And finally put the box of grapes on the conveyor belt, which is sometimes full of boxes filled by other workers, in short, wait, as if waiting were easy in this scramble, then take the box with the 400gr bunch of grapes, push it onto the conveyor belt and finally take the empty large boxes of grapes and put them on another conveyor belt. Well, all this business of making sure a punnet weighs 400gr must be done in about 20 seconds. And all so that some old geezer can eat grapes from a plastic punnet which only goes to contaminate the environment. And to make matters worse, the old geezers, as I found out later, would be the ones who would vote for Brexit some time later, and for the end of my existence.
With all that, my first day at the factory I was happy and scared. Happy because at last I could pay the costs of my existence, including the dreaded credit card. But seeing the speed of the workers I panicked because I thought I could never be as fast as them. They're young and I'm old, so they learn those hand and eye movements at a rate that I couldn't possibly reproduce, much less for such long hours.
The first day I spent several hours trying to work out the algorithm of the machine to be able to increase my speed. I had to or I would lose the job, another job or I'd end up begging in the tube in London or Paris. Buck up, Fabrizio. Simple things like sleight of hand in order to count the same box twice, which I'd only have to do every five boxes, according to the calculations I'd made, not without difficulty, to keep up an acceptable rate. The moment of exchanging boxes was the opportunity for double counting. I did some experimenting, and it worked.
But I still l watched the other workers and was amazed by the fluidity of their movements, compared to my clumsy attempts to take up the scissors, cut, weigh and all the rest. Of course, I thought, they're busy working, not wasting time thinking of how to cheat. I'm an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I think I won't be able to succeed and rather than learning, I get an inferiority complex. I look for a way to cheat, Venezuelan education, but I also observe and try to be efficient, also Venezuelan education, and what am I going to do in the Paris underground, I thought, if I can't sing, and while I'm thinking and taking decisions my movements fall behind, so I go slowly, then I work at top speed to make up for it, not like those operatives who move with robotic fluency at the same rate as the machine, alas, I thought, I won't be able to pay my credit card bill or instalments on anything, but I thought and watched a bit more, and I also realised that they're younger, that's why they're more agile, it's like learning a sport when you're older. Calm down Fabrizio, we old folks may have less fluid intelligence, but we have better metacognitive strategies, so I have to think it through, all those years of studying must be good for something, and well, I observed a bit longer and I noticed that the machine calculated our average speed, but didn't make the necessary adjustments for the time lost during stoppages, because the machine got stuck quite often. And it stopped for at least five minutes every half hour, because the punnets got piled up somewhere. Shit, how was I supposed to be fast if the damned machine kept stopping? Damned abusive English people! So I pretended I had dropped something, I bent down and looked at the wires under the table and noticed where the plug and the switch were so if the counter was turned off, it would start measuring the speed over again, which is like reducing the denominator of the equation in the algorithm and Eureka!, when the machine stops I drop a glove, I pick something up off the floor and problem solved. Problem solved! That improved my average. Great! I can work here and pay my credit card debt and buy food, and no singing out my plainsman's soul in the Paris underground.
It was my second day working here when I first saw the red hat manager who would make my life impossible, Charlotte. The bitch! I was concentrated on achieving the speed required to achieve the goal set for the green hats by the white hats. It's not easy to concentrate because the white hats walk up and down the aisles of the grape-cutters' tables and yell and yell. XXI century factories aren't so different from how they were at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Nowadays the machine drivers, in white hats, yell at us to get a move on, they yell “Hurry up!”, they yell “Come on guys”. He who shouts gives the orders, the underlings obey in silence. And the only sign that we're not in the nineteenth century is that from time to time they say “well done”, obviously the result of the motivational courses they have to take, and I wonder if the people who give those courses have studied anything about the psychology of character, or cognitive theory, I doubt it. For me the damned well done is more humiliating than the yelling, no need to explain why, why else? Because it reminds me of where I am. I was pondering in this guise when Charlotte, the super general manager, turned up, the one I said before that made my life impossible. She walked slowly, as if to confirm that she could see at a glance the mistakes made by us idiots in the green hats. On one side of her walked a blue-hatted supervisor, on the other a white hat, terrified of what the general might discover. She stopped a second at my table, checked my average, which of course was swollen thanks to my Creole tweaks, she said you are good, well done. My response was obvious.
“You are good” bollocks, asshole, if I'm good at anything it's not cutting grapes, it's at ripping off your stupid little productivity-measuring machine, I felt like saying to her, but I'm not anything like as rude as that, and much less quick with my words, I just couldn't think of anything to say, my response, the only one I could give, was to dare to look at her for a fraction of a second, or less because a second later she'd finished her supervision of my table and directed her triumphant steps towards the next one, brow high and chin up in a Mussolinian pose, as if to make sure she could look down on even the tallest of us, of whom there were many from northern countries I'd never heard of in Venezuela such as Lithuania and Estonia.
Relieved at having passed the average speed test approved by a red hat caste, the top hierarchy in the warehouse, I could concentrate on my next goal in this job, which was to preserve my battered mental health. And, of course, my clapped-out brain needed reminding that I'm writing the novel about Sofía, based on the true story of my Venezuelan friend who sought asylum here, in this country which despises foreigners, in short, each experience lets me know how her experiences might have been. I took upon myself the task of telling the story of the Venezuelan diaspora, at least what it fell to me to witness, and even while I'm cutting grapes, here I am spilling it all out. I studied the worker opposite me, fixated on his job. He was certainly faster than me, but his average, poor man, was barely enough to survive. Still, I wanted to take the opportunity to get to know the kind of people Sofía might have met in her time spent in the labour market. So I was ready for my first in-depth interview, sociology in action. Ready to understand the life of the comrade working opposite me. I searched for a phrase to break the ice.
“Hard job,” I said aloud, and stood watching him.
He raised his eyes, looked at me and said nothing.
“Hard job,” I repeated, “isn't it?”
He looked at me again.
How long have you been doing this job?” I said, again trying to start a conversation.
“Me coming tomorrow,” he said, self-assuringly, “me English, no English. Me coming tomorrow, no English, me sorry.”
The difficulties in communication didn't improve with further attempts to talk, so I took to thinking things over, in the middle of the grape cutting, box grabbing and the rest, well I thought I'd have to practise specific techniques to improve my work rate, which would allow me to have more fruitful conversations when someone could speak English so I could interview people, learn about their lives and things. More than improving my speed to please the company, what happened was that I remembered Bandura, from when I was studying learning processes, and I recalled his processes of cognitive automatization, so it became clear to me that if I made efficient automatic movements I could free my mind up for thinking, like when you're driving a car. And even though when you're learning to drive and you're all messed up with declutching, dipping lights, breaking, changing gear and everything, when the processes become automatic you can go out for a drive. It can be done, Fabrizio, you'll come to work and earn money for thinking about your novel, which you can write later. And most importantly, there'd be no crying out my plainsman's soul in the London underground. To literature, then. The first step in writing a novel is having time to think, and so the very first thing is to learn to throw the punnets onto the conveyor belt. That way I could save a few seconds. I began throwing them from a centimetre away, then two, then three, then four. And by the end of the following evening I was able to throw the punnet, from my table, with the exact force for it to land on the conveyor belt without spilling anything. Quite a skill. The things we do for a living!
I did the same with the art of grabbing the boxes off the conveyor belt. I learned to pick them up while at the same time opening them with my thumbs, with minimum effort so that they fell on table in the exact spot I wanted them. Hours and hours of practice. By the same process I also learned to throw the papers in the recycling bin. More hours and hours of practice, not without a certain intellectualisation of the procedure. And most importantly, I learned to recognise on sight the size of a four hundred grams bunch of grapes. That took me a whole week because the bunches are sometimes denser, sometimes more sparse, grapes with more water are heavier than more fibrous ones, in short, I learnt a load of codswallop that nobody cares about but which allowed me to cut the grapes with more precision and speed than the future Japanese robots which will come and take the jobs of the skilless europeans after brexit.
That's how I became the fastest cutter they've ever seen in that plant. By applying a combination of my Creole tricks and the super efficiency I'd been practising I could be as fast as those who cheated by weighing the same punnet twice. Except that they got caught out and the combination of efficiency and liveliness made me unbeatable.
And all of a sudden she was back, the red-hatted general supervisor, Charlotte, with her Mussolinian air, who seemed determined to make my life impossible. She stopped to watch me working. I knew well that with the power of her vote she could put an end to my life and with the power of her position she could fire me at the drop of a hat. She stayed for about ten minutes watching my speed. Unbeatable, of course. And she stood there trying to see why I was so fast. I used my Creole tricks to take a break or two, as I had everything off pat, if you think I'm stupid, you're wrong matey, and there I was keeping up the record average rate, at the speed I gained through efficiency, without cheating. I was insured against being found out. And so it was. She stood there and the needle didn't move. 3.6 punnets a minute. She looked me in the face and said Well done, very fast, well done.
But a new batch of grapes arrived. It was a batch which was half rotten. And now we not only had to cut but also remove the mouldy grapes and cut off the rotten shoots. Obviously, we the green hats had to pay more attention and consequently cut more slowly. I say obvious, but I'm not English, britons are different, we know, and a different thing went through the minds of those who weigh in pounds, stones and ounces.
A white hat came by, table to table, telling us to be careful, that the mouldy grapes had to be removed. To check carefully, quality was important. I took note and started checking carefully to do as I was asked and I stopped paying attention to the speed monitor. After a while another one came by, in a blue hat, and yelled that we had to move faster. I started going faster, as did the other workers. After a while another one went from table to table wearing an orange hat, which is the attire of the quality controllers, showing us all a bunch of grapes cut and ready in its punnet, with mould all over. “Unacceptable”. I couldn't agree more, so I paid closer attention not to let pass any punnets with putrid, mouldy, poisonous grapes. Not ten minutes went by before the blue hat again told us to go faster. I asked him if he realised that the orange hat had asked us to pay more attention. He said of course we had to pay attention and go faster. Faced with the dilemma I decided to go faster because after all they measure our speed, not our care. But the white hat came by again to tell us to pay attention to the quality of the grapes, that rotten grapes don't sell, they're unacceptable. I obeyed, fed up by now, and I told him that his boss kept asking us to go faster. He said yes, both. I carried on working at top speed. But then the orange hat came past again and told us off for the unacceptable quality. He went from table to table asking, in a very pedantic tone, would you buy grapes like this? In a didactic tone he asked what's more important, quantity or quality? So I decided to comply, it's a matter of ethics now. But the blue hat came back, this time with a twist, as he said in the tone of someone herding cattle, that the standard of speed must be kept up if we wanted to keep our jobs. Right, to hell with ethics, I've been thrown out of too many posts for doing the right thing, so I obeyed the blue hat, but I couldn't help it.
-“Look, I said, you have to make up your minds, either we move fast, or we pay more attention”.-
The guy answered both. Trying to be reasonable I asked him,
If you're driving and you see a sign for caution, do you accelerate or go slower?- He said he paid more attention while speeding. The evening went by between the goading on one hand and scolding on the other. At one point a blue hat stopped at my table and asked, “What's up?” or something like that. I think he was annoyed at me for making that comment, maybe he finally understood it a few hours on, I don't know. But I couldn't help it and I told him that if they wanted us to remove the bad grapes they had to admit that we'd have to work more slowly. He snorted and muttered something in the typical Yorkshire dialect and from a distance I saw that the general supervisor was walking not far off. Time to put an end to this absurdity, I thought.
I signaled to Charlotte, the general, that I wanted to talk to her. She looked at me, surprised, and glanced at the blue hat as if to say “what does this pleb want?” I commented that we were getting contradictory instructions, some were asking us to work faster and others to go carefully, more slowly. She didn't hear me out. She asked the blue hat what was going on, as if I were incapable of expressing myself.
Blue hat gave her his executive summary, that is, he told her that I didn't want to follow instructions. So I tried to explain to her that the instructions weren't clear but the general interrupted me and repeated word for word the blue hat's speech. I said yes, I had no problem in going fast, and was about to add that “however I couldn't pay the required attention”, but I was unable to finish because she interrupted me again and told me that I had to listen, not speak, that I had to follow the instructions, not answer back and she carried on speaking, repeating that I had to listen obediently. Then, “what instructions, these ones or those of the white hat, I meant to say, but I couldn't because she interrupted me and with all her insolence told me to follow her.
And I followed her down corridors and corridors covered in institutional propaganda, instructions on how to wash one's hands, indexes of productivity, employees of the month, smiling photos of the bosses, who only smile in those photos, by the way, because at work they just grunt and goad cattle, I went down more corridors, I climbed stairs, I saw more instructions on how to wash hands, until I came to a door, an exit door. She asked the doorman to call the representative of the agency that had contracted me and the main boss of the workhouse, the big red hat. She made a phonecall and the doorman commented to me that whenever the general brought someone there and called the big bosses it was to throw someone out.
“How often does that happen” I asked.
“A couple of times a week”
“Ok, I'm fired, what the heck.”
When the boss of the red-hatted bosses came, the general, Charlotte, explained briefly that I wouldn't follow instructions, nor did I want to. The boss of bosses listened impatiently and told me that if I didn't want to follow instructions I couldn't work for the company. I tried to explain but he interrupted me to repeat the general's speech. I tried to say something but I couldn't because they asked me to listen. Then the agency representative came into sight, I think he was behind me, and repeated the general's speech, emphasising that I couldn't work there and that I had to learn to listen and there I was itching to tell them that I had listened to them all telling me the same thing, but that they hadn't listened to me, but I didn't say anything, yet, I just couldn't get a word in edgeways. I could see myself once again increasing my credit card debt, fucked with all the unpaid bills, looking for a job right and left and with no hope of defending myself against this summary judgment at the company door. The boss of the red-hatted bosses, the big red hat, was already showing me the door and signalling to the agency rep to prepare the paperwork, when I managed to say something:
“May I ask a question?”
It occurred to me that asking an intriguing question might give me the chance to speak, and so it did. The boss of bosses, in a magnanimous tone, said of course, what made me think I couldn't ask anything.
“What instructions should I follow if one boss tells me one thing and the other tells me the opposite?”
“What do you mean?“ he asked while Charlotte sneered with contempt and intensified her Mussolinian expression.
“Well some ask me to go fast and others ask me to watch out for the rotten grapes. And the orange and white hats are very serious when they ask us to work carefully.”
The boss of bosses turned to look at Charlotte, the general, who turned almost as red as her hat. She immediately responded,
“But that's not the only thing, he's the slowest of all the workers, he never manages to keep up the pace.”
“That's not true” I said decidedly, “I can keep up the pace and it's registered in the system.”
Charlotte, the general, shook her head and asked me not to shout. The agency rep also asked me not to shout and told me to learn some respect. The boss of bosses told me to be respectful but for that evening I could stay if I could keep up the minimum speed. In short, I wasn't fired. And at last I could see defeat on the face of Charlotte, the general.
I went back to the grape store. I maintained my speed firmly above the maximum, almost three times normal, and thanks to all my experiments, it was all done without cheating. The evening ended and I went home. Victory.
The general's revenge would come later, but that's another story. For the time being I went home that night, and my daughter, Fabiana, was just waking up to go out who knows where. She was terrified because she had again seen a mouse coming into our kitchen. We've got a cat that doesn't bother catching it, because it scuttles away the moment it sees it. The mouse looks inoffensive and even friendly. But I have to catch it because it goes all over the kitchen and it might get in amongst the plates. That night I told Fabiana what had happened with the general and she christened the mouse Charlotte Rat. The name was its doom, poor thing, and I slayed it with a broom to the head and buried it in the garden, to prevent it stinking. And that was when my daughter called me a racist.
