The crackdown began in March. Within a couple of weeks it delivered to the people's hunger for justice its first comforting results: twenty-two false invalids flushed out thanks to the sudden zeal of the finance police. They had filmed them in secret, in various Italian cities: blind men driving their own cars, deaf-mutes chatting away pleasantly with friends at a café table, paraplegics coming back from their daily half-hour of healthy jogging. Among them there was even a traffic warden with a forged permit displayed prominently on his windscreen, which let him drive into the streets of central Rome and park without facing the notorious torments of his fellow citizens. On television they had broadcast clips of the videos and photographs. Indignation had rained down suddenly on the heads of the unsuspecting citizens who, though inwardly indifferent to the matter, joined in the general resentment with ready-made comments. I followed the unfolding of events as if watching a television series: the news reports, the specials, the afternoons spent debating – on Rai or Canale 5 – and replaying the footage dozens of times.
It was in those days that my wife Teresa decided we would move to the capital, off Via Tuscolana, a single street with more inhabitants than our whole town in Abruzzo.
"There's our family," she said, "and there's Franco."
By 'our family' she means hers, and Franco is my brother-in-law, Teresa's brother, the man who sorts things out because he has connections. I'll grant him that, we owe him something, I can't deny it, but favours always come at a price, always. My parents, for instance. They felt forever in debt to don Mimmo because he found me the job, and all his life, right up to the year before he died, my father never missed a holiday: Christmas hampers and Easter doves, a present on his birthday, dozens of litres of oil at every pressing. And they told me I was ungrateful because I complained. But I had qualified as a surveyor, I didn't want to end up a bricklayer, and much satisfaction there is in being a site foreman. For years I fooled myself that sooner or later he would let me do my own job, but according to him I was too good with the trowel and the shovel to waste myself drawing rows of little terraced houses. I left don Mimmo's firm right after my father died, to go on laying bricks for a rival firm, until the accident.
Hard years, of a trade that tears your body to shreds. You wake in the morning while it's still dark, and whatever city you happen to be in you cross it like a ghost, without caring about it, without it caring about you; and when you reach your destination the sight is always the same: a devastated, beautyless place where, little by little, something takes shape that ends up being worth far more than your work and that of all your workmates put together. You breathe dust and harden your hands until the callused part completely replaces the layer of skin you carry on you. You grow so used to the toil that you end up making it the only unit of measure of your life and of other people's: 'So-and-so doesn't know what hard graft is', 'What's-his-name toiled so much he deserved more', 'to understand certain things you have to toil'. In short, it seems that only through toil can you grasp life and hold your place in it with dignity. I really don't know whether that's true, I don't know any more. Meanwhile, when I was up there, I felt I belonged to the only category that actually produces something concrete; or rather, to one of the two categories, since farmers are no less than us: to feed oneself and have a roof are truly the only needs we cannot do without, things somebody has to do for others, for the rest men know how to manage on their own.
Up there on the scaffolding everything is in suspension; you're not so much a certain number of metres from the ground as from the world, mutually uninterested in one another.
Now it happens that, looking up from down here, from the wheeled cage in which I'm confined, the men on the scaffolding make me envious, and I'd feel like getting down and climbing up and sharing with them a meal as hearty as only a man bent by toil knows how to eat, and looking down as though the earth and its inhabitants were something distant, and going on living without imagining any other life.

I often ask myself in what way this new condition is supposed to be better than the previous one.
"Don't worry," my brother-in-law would say, "you'll get used to it faster than you think." Once he even gave me a long speech about man as an adaptive animal and the need to know how to see the good that opportunities offer us. Right, it takes little to theorize, to build theorems on other people's skin. Here we all play at who can tell the tallest tale, or at pretending. I have to admit, though, that in a world of lies, the best one you can draw onto yourself is compassion.
And that I read in every pair of eyes I meet. It's a matter of oxytocin, like between mother and child, like between dog and master; and from the bottom of my condition I play the master, and they the beaten dogs that watch me with that unbearable, unwarranted sense of guilt. Like dogs, precisely, ever since they stopped being wolves and exchange with men languid, knowing looks, looks of recognition and subordination.
With my disability pension almost everything has fallen back into place. My brother-in-law was right: "Between the pension and the care allowance you'll take home more than double what you earned working like a mule. And then there's the insurance, a nice bit of extra cash that'll let you do all sorts of things." We bought the living-room suite and the LED TV, changed the mobile phones of the whole family, my daughter's car – which she needs to get to university – and my mother-in-law can blow a bit of money at bingo every Sunday. As for me, I live on nostalgia, and on the inevitable to which I am doomed and to which I have surrendered. Everything my condition has produced for my family it has taken from me. And I curse them one by one every time I find myself trapped on these damned pavements blocked by the swarm of dawdling pedestrians and insolent motorists: I swear and I curse them, as if that eased everything and made everything understandable.
And yet, after what happened three days ago, I find myself toying with the idea of a rebirth. Nonsense, maybe, but I don't mind thinking it. And once again what will become of my life won't depend on me: first my wife, then my brother-in-law, and now him, the man across the way.
They gathered in the living room while I was in the bathroom: my brother-in-law, my wife and my daughter; my mother-in-law was missing (I think she's taken to playing on weekdays too).
"We have to find a solution," I heard Teresa say, gripped by agitation.
"All right, let's stay calm, I'll take care of it."
Right, the great man will take care of it.
Among the various purchases, the curtains. Beautiful and protective, they let the light barely through but concede nothing to the outside: a peculiar weave that seemed designed for our needs. They performed their task worthily, unaware, like my family, of the gesture that would definitively compromise those very qualities and that threw the man with connections and his sister into a panic. He was there, on the third floor, upright on his legs, beyond a French window, motionless, slowly swirling the little spoon inside his coffee cup, staring at me expressionless; I, upright on mine, arms spread like a Christ, still clinging to the two flaps of curtain just parted, taking in the light, his gaze, and whatever is to come.

Marcello Marino has taught Ethics of Communication at the University for Foreigners of Perugia and General and Social Pedagogy at the University of Perugia and the University of Siena. He has published essays in various journals and monographs with Franco Angeli, Rizzoli and Morlacchi University Press.