The first man who taught me a trade was a short, thin Senegalese of sixty, and almost nobody in Italy ever saw him. I fell into a refrigeration apprenticeship by accident, and he was what I found waiting there.
I will call him Papa, because that is what everyone called him, and because I would sooner cut off my hand than put his real name in a book he never asked to be in.
There was nothing to him. No belly, no swagger, no wasted motion. Thirty Italian winters had boiled him down to wire and will. He had worked in the heat of the south and the cold of the north, in France and Germany and Switzerland, in industrial places where the machines are the size of houses and a mistake costs you your fingers or your life. He had forgotten more about refrigeration than the young Italian engineers with their tablets will ever learn, and they knew it, and it made some of them hate him and some of them love him. Papa treated both exactly the same, which is to say with a terrifying, ancient patience.
I had no feeling for machines when I met him. I could not have told you the difference between a compressor and a condenser if you had offered me money for it. I took the refrigeration apprenticeship because it was there, and because a man who has come back to a country that owes him nothing will walk through any door that opens.
A tool is a promise: the first day of a refrigeration apprenticeship
The first thing he taught me was not a skill. It was a sentence.
He put a spanner in my hand on the first morning, a good one, heavy, worn smooth by other men’s palms, and said: this is a promise. When you pick it up, you are promising that the thing you touch will work when you are gone, and that nobody will be hurt by what you did. If you cannot make that promise, put it down.
I thought it was the kind of thing old men say. It took me most of four years in the trade to understand that he meant it exactly as he had said it.
What a refrigeration apprenticeship really teaches you
The second thing he taught me was how to walk into a room, and it took longer, because I had to be broken of something first.
Our work came by referral. Somebody’s cousin has a bar, somebody’s chamber is not holding temperature, somebody heard there is an African who is good and cheap, and the word cheap is doing a great deal of quiet work in that sentence. So we would arrive, the old man and the young man, with our bags, at a place where nobody had seen either of us before.
And a thing happened in that first minute, so reliably that I came to feel it before the door opened. The client would look at us. Then he would begin to explain, in a voice that was not quite an insult and was certainly not a welcome, what the machine was and how much it had cost and how long it had been in the family. And underneath every word of it, plain as a hand on your chest, was the sentence he was not saying: I hope you do not ruin my machine.
I would do what I had been doing since the day I landed in that country. I would smile. I would make my face as pleasant as a face can be made, and go soft in the voice and slightly apologetic in the shoulders, and start reassuring him. We are careful, sir. We know this model, sir. Do not worry, sir.
Papa would stop me. In front of the client. Not gently.
He would turn to the man of the house, this small thin Senegalese of sixty with his bag still in his hand, and say: if you have doubt, we are leaving.
Not if you have doubt, let me reassure you. Not if you have doubt, we will show you our work. If you have doubt, we are leaving. And then he would stand there, entirely still, and let the silence sit on the client’s chest instead of ours.
They never let us leave. Not once, in all that time, did a man say very well, go. They would laugh, or wave a hand, or say no no no, maestro, I only meant. Then we would put our bags down and work, and the job went differently, because a thing had been settled at the door that would otherwise have had to be fought about all afternoon.
It took a second time before I understood it. I was standing there with my face still arranged in its apology, and I felt something in my chest simply give way, some little rope I had been holding since the camp, and I thought: this man is not being rude. He is refusing to buy something. They are trying to hand him their doubt at the door, free of charge, and he will not carry it into the building.
The day we lost the money
The lesson finished at a shopping centre in Rozzano.
There was a heat pump, and a client who had already decided what the problem was, because another company had been in before us and tol him. The machine is finished. Change the machine.
Papa looked at it. He did the thing he always did, which was to be quiet for much longer than a client finds comfortable, and then he said no. The machine is working. It does not need replacing. It needs a deep cleaning of the air flow ways. And then he told them the rest without heat, the way a man reads out a fact: that this machine is hard to find now, that a new one will cost considerably more, and that they would be throwing away a good machine to solve a problem a proper cleaning would solve.
They did not want to hear it. There is a particular deafness that arrives when a man has already spent the money in his head.
So I tried to save it the only way I knew. I began to bargain. Let us do the cleaning, I said. If it works you pay us, if it does not you pay us nothing, and if you do not believe us then.
I did not finish. We were nearly outside by then, and Papa turned on me, and he was not patient this time.
Never beg for a job. If they do not trust you, do not work with them.
I have carried that sentence in my pocket ever since, into rooms he will never see: agency offices, site cabins, interviews, negotiations, years when I had leverage and years when I had none. Because he was not really talking about work. He was saying that your skill is not a plea, it is a fact. A man who bargains away his fee to prove he is worth the fee has already agreed with the person who doubted him. And the trouble with agreeing, even once, even to eat, is that you then have to live inside that agreement, and so does the next man of your colour who comes through that same door with a bag in his hand.
We walked away. It cost us the job. I would like to tell you I felt magnificent. I did not. I felt the money we had not made, all the way home.
The part I did not expect
Some time later the owner telephoned. They had thought about it, or the other company had failed, or the price of a new machine had been said out loud in a room where somebody had to pay it. The work was ours if we wanted it. Come back.
Papa said no.
I stood there not understanding. We had been right. That was the whole point, surely. Here was the proof arriving by telephone with the money behind it, and all we had to do was go and do the cleaning we had said all along was the answer.
He would not go. He did not shout about it and he did not make a speech. He simply would not, and the matter was closed, and we went to another job.
I have had years to think about that no, and I think it is the most valuable thing he ever taught me, and the hardest to hold on to.
Being right was never the point. He was not trying to win the argument about the heat pump. He was drawing a line under a way of being treated. They had doubted him in front of his apprentice, they had preferred the word of a company that was wrong, and they came back only when their own arithmetic failed, not because they had come to trust him. Going back would have taught them that his time can be spent and returned whenever they like, at no cost, and that a man like him is always there once you have finished exhausting the alternatives.
He was not protecting his pride. He was protecting his price. There is a difference, and almost nobody who has been poor gets taught it. I learned it standing next to him with my mouth open.
I feel differently about that lost money now.
Dignity that owes nothing to anyone
Papa knew exactly what he was in the eyes of Italy: a small black man who fixed things, invisible until something broke. He had been called the usual names more times than I will be called them in three lifetimes. And somewhere in those thirty winters he had decided that he would not let the smallness in their eyes make him small in his own.
He is the most dignified man I have ever known, and his dignity had nothing to do with respect from others, because he received almost none. It came entirely from the promise. From the fact that the things he touched worked when he was gone, and nobody was hurt by what he did. That was his. No foreman could bend it, no client could withhold it, no wrong name could tax it. He owned it outright.
Every trade has a Papa in it. Most of them are never named, never promoted, never written down. This is me writing one down.
A refrigeration apprenticeship taught me a trade. Papa taught me the rest of it.
He is in my book, Between Immigrants and Italians, which comes out in November. If you would like to read it early and tell me honestly what you think, send me a message.
