all mass struggles are doomed if there’s no vanguard to lead them you’ve got no political line and you’re dragging the masses to defeat and blablabla and blablabla
9
Well right at the start of the revolt there was pandemonium in the sense that the first word going round was that there are nineteen guards taken hostage and this provoked outright amazement there was incredulity fear and amazement but then at once the general mood rapidly became a mood of great excitement probably because what everyone felt most of all at that moment was the fact of being in control of this space the fact of freedom of movement all over this space and just the simple fact of free movement in a space bigger than the cell you were confined to released this whole general excitement
then what happened was that those prisoners who’d planned the whole thing who’d organized it immediately set in motion all the organizational functions of the revolt these comrades assigned themselves roles precise tasks which involved guarding and surveying the most likely points where a break-in could be made from outside because the guards could always try a break-in even if the hostages we were holding meant it wasn’t so simple and then somebody had to attend to guarding the hostages and all this took place in great haste the whole organizational machine was quickly set in motion despite the great amount of confusion because obviously it had all been decided in advance and these roles had all been assigned well ahead
there were comrades with a weapon made from those coffee-makers they were moka coffee-makers later on in fact they were banned from being used in cells the fuse came out of the coffee-maker there was the detonator and inside was the explosive and these coffee-makers functioned as grenades the explosive had been hidden in the cells and it was this the guards were looking for when they’d carried out that peculiar search they’d searched in all the boxes and bottles because that’s where people hide explosives they hadn’t found any but they’d left them all on the tables to make it clear that they knew there were explosives in the prison that they’d got wind that something was going to happen
the guards were all put in a dormitory cell and there began the whole ritual of the search and so on the guards weren’t molested nobody harmed them only some comrades began to mimic though without any malice very ironically it looked like the kind of thing the indians* did in ’77 they started mimicking the whole ritual of the guard towards the prisoner and then they were all searched like that exactly the way they searched the prisoners every day they were made to stand there with their legs slightly apart their arms raised and then they were searched in the routine way as they did to us day in day out whenever we went out and whenever we returned to our cells
first the head was searched fingers through the hair under the hair then down the back of the head on the neck down on to the shoulders and under the armpits and then going right down the back under the bum the legs the backs of the legs and down the legs to the feet and then back up again up the legs the thighs the inner thighs the stomach and then all the way up the trunk back to the neck and then making them undo their trousers pull down the zip feeling the waistband feeling the balls and then making them take off their shoes hand them over and turn them upside down to look inside them all this with the guards there waiting one after the other like our routine with arms raised legs slightly apart
but what we all confirmed after these searches carried out on all the guards was that among the nineteen guards taken hostage there wasn’t even one non-commissioned officer just some poor wretch of a lance-corporal who obviously just happened to be there and this fact that there wasn’t even one non-commissioned officer there made us all think that the non-commissioned officers had got wind of something going on they had a good idea what was going to happen because it had never ever come about that there wasn’t at least one non-commissioned officer on the floor there wasn’t a single non-commissioned officer not even a sergeant and just by a complete coincidence on the whole floor no on both floors the first and second floor in every wing there wasn’t a single sergeant
then later they made them take off their uniforms too they stripped them and they brought them clothes the prisoners wore and they made them put on these clothes because they were hostages and so if they were wearing their uniforms if there was a break-in they would immediately be identifiable by whoever was breaking in police carabinieri or guards themselves to free them so that they could carry out on-the-spot reprisals against the prisoners without running the risk of endangering the lives of their guards if instead they were dressed like the prisoners it would all be more difficult
but there was no violence directed at the guards everyone I remember was concerned about this and they kept on saying that in any case nothing should be done to the guards because that was our insurance that things would turn out all right the hostage guards were all put in a big cell and watched from outside they were always well treated they even ate the same as us what we ate during the revolt was spaghetti which there was plenty of in the cells there were comrades who cooked spaghetti for all the rest of us and they came to take orders three alla matriciana four alla carbonara five with tomato sauce everywhere spaghetti was being cooked on the camping-gas rings and the hostage guards got their spaghetti too
and the rest of the prisoners the ones that weren’t involved in starting the revolt right away they got themselves organized too to deal with taking on the guards in the likely event of an attack so a whole machinery was set in motion with everyone very involved basically people started arming themselves they started pulling down the window frames to make blades bars and things like that out of them they started making skewers by sharpening the points of the metal fittings of the camping-gas rings they started breaking off table-legs to make clubs and things like that then the armoured doors were pulled off their hinges and placed against the big windows at the end of the corridors because from outside they could fire in at us and so on
in the process of taking over the entire prison people had also got hold of some tools and machinery too for instance they’d taken an electric grindstone and used it to cut through the iron slats of the beds and so with those slats blades could be made they could be made in quantity and there was also an electric welding machine that was used to weld the gates of the rotunda and so block the possibility of a break-in from below and also a break-in from above because from the second floor there was a spiral stair leading up to the roof and then we were also able to make use of the guard-post telephone on the second floor and on this telephone we communicated with the prison administration and this was the medium of communication for negotiations
and then there was the television because another peculiar thing was that when there’s a revolt they usually cut off all the electricity and this time instead they hadn’t cut off the electricity and they’d left the television working as if to let us stay in touch with the news from outside they could easily have pulled the plug on the lot but instead they left the electricity on they left the telephone working they left the television working and on the television we got news about the negotiations all the televisions in the cells were on all the time with the sound turned right up especially when the news was on and the news of the revolt was always the lead item
inside the cells weren’t damaged in any way everything was turned into a huge bivouac in the sense that all people did was go up and down the whole length of the corridors which would be about fifty or sixty yards everyone was walking up and down the whole time some disguised with just a scarf or a handkerchief around their faces while others were unrecognizable hooded in a pillow-case with two holes for their eyes a blanket like a poncho over their shoulders and these were obviously non-politicals because the non-politicals had their own way of doing things in a revolt so that they wouldn’t be recognized as you always see in photographs of a rooftop revolt they always have their faces hidden so they won’t be recognized so as to avoid any bad consequences
and everywhere people did nothing but move about they all did nothing but walk up and down the corridors inside and outside the cells they truly seemed to be measuring a larger physical space a bigger space for manoeuvre that they’d won and they kept on walking they went on up and down
