The circumstances in which my childhood was spent were the following: my father worked at sugar-beet factories which are usually built out in the sticks, far from any city, large or small. The sugar-beet plantations were large. A lot of manpower, provided by peasants, mostly, was needed to run these plantations. Peasants, young and old, worked on these plantations almost all summer and fall. As a future artist, I feasted my eyes upon the fields and the colored workers who weeded or dug up the beetroot. Platoons of girls in colorful clothes moved in rows across the whole field. It was a war. The troops in colorful dresses struggled with weeds, liberating the beetroot from unwanted overgrowths. I loved to look at these fields in the morning when the sun was not yet high, and the larks would soar upwards in song, and the storks, trilling, would dive after frogs, and the kites, circling high above, would spy out small birds and mice. The sugar plantations stretched as far as the eye could see, blending into the distant horizon, sloping down to the small cornfields, or running up the hills, engulfing towns and villages in their fields, covered with the monotonous texture of green plants. In order to supply a single factory with sugar beet, no less than twenty thousand desyatinas1 of beets had to be planted, and a thousand people sent out to work these fields. It was in villages like these, situated amidst the beauties of nature and landscape, that my childhood was spent. The other part of the factory recalled some fortress in which people worked day and night, obeying the merciless summons of factory whistles. People stood in the factories, bound by time to some apparatus or machine: twelve hours in the steam, the stench of gas and filth. I remember my father standing in front
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Feb 1, 1998
C Magnani + 1
Open Access
