Sleeping in turn for 150 euros: the pillow-place of immigrants

Repubblica inquiry / Crowded together in dirtiness in the centre of Rome
Asiatics and Africans: 60 of them sharing 150 square metres in the Pigneto area
by Emilio Radice
CISSÈ, Mohammad, Azar, Abdou, Bathie, Babacar, Sammadi, Sikdar, Sow, Melick... sixty men packed in 120 square metres. Mattresses on the ground, bare floor, latrine next to the kitchen, cables hanging in clusters from the ceiling and from the bare boxes of the switches. An hidden place, even not that secret, in a roman street in the Pigneto area, ex-working-class neighbourhood now becoming fashionable: fresh painted houses, touched-up stuccos, pastel colours and trendy shops. Here the price for houses has gone over 4.000 euros per metre, but the story is completely different for the inhabitants of number 97: you pay to spend one night in a dry place, even if lying on the ground; you pay 100-150 euros each, to rest with a pillow under your head. And if there is no pillow you have a roll of rags in two precious metres of cement, to be used in turn. One wakes up to go and sell lighters and another one can rest.
They call it “head place”, a widespread shame in all the hurban ghettos of the capital and not only. And they are immigrants, without a house, without rights. Senegalese, Bangladeshis, Nigerians, Pakistanis, thousands and thousands who hide themselves in the city folds. Ready to spend even one quarter of their pay, not for a room or a bed, but only for the right to sleep. Even simply on the ground. “What shall we do? Where can we go?”, they say.
The real danger for these desperates is being without a roof, even if tumbledown and infiltrated by water, and without that slice of cement called “head place” where they can close their eyes (and break their bones) when outside it’s cold.
That’s why Bilal, from Bangladesh, has not difficulties telling us that every night he sleeps with other six compatriots in a cubbyhole-room, somewhere in Porta Maggiore. Just one bed where they sleep in turn. But there are troubles to see it: “If someone tells it to the owner, he expels us”. Baku, also from Bangladesh, says the same thing, telling that for a whole year he paid for a “head place” in Centocelle: "I used to lie in front of the bath door, and everybody who wants to enter it had to pass over me”.
The confirmation also comes from Azar, an Albanian who shares a 15-square-metres floor and a unique bed in turn with other 7 people, somewhere in via Turati, for 600 euros a month. And there they switch on gas bombs and cookers, heaters and lamps hanging from makeshift cables, fixed as well as possible, with a nail on the wall. Every day and every night risking their lives. The same for Joseph, Indian, without a residence permit, who pays 150 euro a month for an extendable bed: “We are five in one room – he says – Usually the one who arrives first places himself on the sofa, and the others on the ground. I don’t care so much, the only problem is that when I wake up I have backache. But now we have decided to do it in turn”.
It was not easy to arrive to one of these poor and survival places, protected by the suspiciousness of its inhabitants. But at the end here it is, the hell, behind an anonimous little main door, like so many are. We enter.
It’s pitch dark, the clusters of bare cables do not lead to any lamp. Inside Senegalese, who survives selling pirate cds. An head place? One square metre against payment, to lie on the ground and sleep sheltered from the rain? No, here it’s worst. “Sometimes in the whole building we are even ninety, and then we sleep everywhere, on the stairs, on the balconies and even in the bathroom”. Yet the owner calls them flats.
Here is another house: three steps for one side, and five for the other side. Fifteen square metres, maybe less.
Inside, a kitchen supplied with gas bombs and some chalky partition to close a small latrine covered by mould. In the remaining space lives Elisabeth, Peruvian, 38 years-old, with her husband and two sons, and one incoming. “I’m five month pregnant, I think”. The rent is 550 euros, charges excluded. And it’s not the worst house.
We only have to arrive to the next floor, after climbing on a dark stair with dirty and oily walls. On the landing, a dustbin. Inside, a part of the Third World, as documentaries tell it: smelling staffy air and dampness, piles of putrid foam rubbers, rags, pillows stockpiled on the ground, bags full of cds.
Sikdar, Senegalese, explain us that this rottenness comes from a strict economical logic. If one owns a building decayed by deterioration, he rents it illegaly, dividing it in awful niches, to hundreds of immigrants who have no possibility to protest nor to negotiate the price; thus obteining from them, the most desperates, the money he needs to renovate his house, and finally to put it in the property market, new and clean. Actually all the exploited, once squeezed, receive notice to quit. Poor people can be a big business, twice.
It’s two pm. From Melick’s “flat” a gust of ginger and cumin passes through mould and sweat. On the ground there is the tablecloth: old newspapers, spread on with care. Gas flame flashes five spans from a suitcase full of rags. From the latrine a leak of water is spreading threateningly, already bording a mattress. There are no windows. And if a fire breaks out?
The answer: “Somebody dies, such as the two Bangladeshis in piazza Vittorio. What are we supposed to do?”. How much do you pay for this cubbyhole? “Six hundred euros”. They live here – five people. The makeshift couches are so near one to the other that they have to get up, dress and take the door in turn. “But now we are a few. In summertime it’s worst, even if you can lie on the terrace”. And what about women? “We don’t take here our women, it’s too disgusting”. In the building there are other eight rooms like this, each one 10 to 15 metres, “bathrooms” included.
And for each one the owner earns from 400 to 600 euros.
The photographer frames mice excrements as big as olive stones and foam rubbers rolled up, ready to be used for the night. But Mohammad, Abdou and Sharani thank heavens for living under a roof “because we risk to lose even this”. Such as in Porta Maggiore the Bangladeshi Abdil shudders at the thought of losing a piece of ground, for which he pays 200 euros a month with other five people. “Why should we denounce the owners? – one of the leaders of the Bangladeshi community says in piazza Vittorio – Just to be fooled again? The ones who denounced up to now have obtained just one result: being put on the street. Even without a pillow-place”.

Traduzione a cura di Elisa Gamba, che ringraziamo.