Chapter 7

Five years earlier
Autumn 2016

Only we steel people know it—that smell that ends up seeping into every wall. Oily flakes of iron oxide that blend with the air of summer heat, with winter drafts, with sweaty overalls, worn-out gloves, greasy hair, the blows of the press.

You can rinse thoroughly, wash, repaint—it’s useless.
The smell follows you through the foyer, climbs the stairs, finds you even in your office.
It welcomes you in the warehouses, in the departments, in the workshops.
Even if you try to ignore it, pretend not to care, it will find you again when you least expect it.
It is the very smell of work here, in metalworking.

It is the factory breathing its moods onto you.
Pickled strip, calcined wire rod, coils of soaped drawn steel. Round, square, semi-square. Raw, baked, annealed, soft, bright, phosphated, copper-plated, galvanized, nickel-plated, brass-plated, painted. Lacquered. Annealed, quenched, tempered, case-hardened, untreated.
The factory devours kilometres of rod, tons of steel, and vomits thousands of products across the world. Nearly a century now.

But this mechanism—once powerful, oiled, precise—now looks worn to me, with teeth missing from the gears and dry lubricant. The factory seems irreversibly aged. The total lack of resources surfaces in a kind of sickness that takes both machines and workers.

The machines, the ones left, are poorly kept.
The fault of a maintenance policy made of postponements and “temporary” fixes that become permanent because spare parts never arrive.

You get used to working like this—surviving with little.
The men lose motivation as they witness the slow decay. You can feel it: morale collapsing. Small islands of chatter form, spontaneous unproductive pauses. Protest groups. A touch of anarchy.
Looking at the numbers, I see the men too have aged along with the factory.
A blind policy of never replacing positions has kept many roles frozen—even those that should have changed years ago.
The average age is above fifty, and most are thinking about retirement, certainly not continuity.

Still, I feel it’s right to finish well what began decades ago.
Many things will have to change here.
I clear my throat and try to explain the situation to the people gathered—about forty of them, in a circle around me, in that space carved between machines and bins of goods.
It’s yet another meeting called by the unions for clarifications on the company’s status.
Lately it’s a constant interruption—the need to stay updated on the unfolding of events, to follow the progress of the insolvency procedure.

“You must trust me. I’m working to put things back in order, and the numbers are beginning to prove us right. The Plan is underway, and at last we’re seeing the first results.”
The room is split: most are sceptical, pessimistic; a small minority is willing to believe me.
Either way, I feel everyone’s eyes on me, and it seems they’re actually listening.
This isn’t one of those meetings where people drift off.
My voice echoes strong and clear in the quiet department.

I take a breath between one sentence and the next, inhaling stale air.
The iron-oxide flakes have mixed with a new taste: mistrust, leaving my mouth bitter and dry.
For once, the smell of the flakes nauseates me.

I force myself forward—the courage of someone who believes deeply in what he is doing.