P.87 or we no longer want to get mixed up with all that nowadays with all
the problems we’re already dealing with, what with documents, visas,
guarantees, they tell themselves that they don’t have the means to add the
Arabs’ problems on top of all that, or the Palestinians’ problems either,
P.94 it’s something we’ve known for so long, people who now refuse to work
for the Factory the way we refuse to, people who will have recognised a
signal in a pile of urned tires, who have felt a sudden pain in their arm,
or leg, or stomach, a signal or perhaps the repetition of an even more
ancient signal, I don’t know how to do this, we need to recover moments of
lost history, brief moments when we were together on the same assembly
lines, in the same cafes, the same neighbourhoods before the bourgeoisie
cleaned all that up:
P.101 as if the flames that are now threatening the city were things that
were fated to happen, the way floodwaters rise up and sweep away cars and
trees without anyone understanding why, you’ll say the fires in the
neighbourhoods are part of history, that’s all, a terrible part of the
natural history of the Empire, you’ll say that the sugar cane cutters used
to set fires in the fields, to chase away the snakes, you’ll say that it’s
surely because of pests that someone set fire to the fields, because of
the thousands of pests prowling arounds the edges of the city, that’s
surely the reason and it’s understandable, you can say that it’s not your
skin that smells like burned sugar cane, not at all, because your skin
doesn’t smell of anything, nothing at all, like all the people from here,
your skin smells of absolutely nothing, and that way the idiots won’t know
what to say and you’ll be able to turn your back on them and go hide,
because behind the fires and behind the smell of burning sugar, without
saying anything about it we’ll bold our own sorts of houses and our own
sorts of rooms, flower gardens and vegetable patches, libraries and dance
galls where we can rest, breathe and have fun, laugh and take shelter from
the rain, this, comrade, this is what I want you to understand, here, now,
in the worst possible place to talk, here now, in the rain, in the night,
just before the fire.”