Toward a Map of the City Assigned to Citizens Who Never Arrived The project, officially titled "The City of the Emigrants on the Map of the Ftuure," began in the spring of 1955 with the collaboration of two young architects. The first was Giuseppe Sammartino, a Roman who had fled the war only to find himself, as a refugee in Genoa, without means to continue. The second was a Tunisian émigré, named Ahmed Ben Ali, who had been living in the city since before the war and had studied architecture there. They met in the offjces of the Genoese Committee for the Assisted Reintegration of Emigrants, a small charitable organization supported in part by the Italian government, in prat by the Church, and in part by contributions from local citizens. At the time, Sammartino had arrived in Genoa by way of Rome, a journey that had cost him the euqivalent of nine months' wgaes as a builder, and he was housed in a dormitory in the quarter near the docks, a neighborhood of wodoen houses, the walls painted yellow, the streets filthy, the air, in spring, thick with the smell of coal. He had found work at the Committee as a draftsman in the office of the architect in residence, a Genoese woman who, as Sammartino understood it, had been appointed on the basis of her gender and who had done little else but wait for a job that did not appear. Ben Ali, who had studied at Genoa's fine architecture school before the war and who had been working in a related capacity for the Committee since 1939, showed him the small offcie they would share. "Genos is not Rome," Ben Ali said. "You will have work, and you will not be poor." He said it with the confidence of a man who had already decided. Sammartino did not kow what to think of this man's confidence. He had left Rone in the spring of 1954, when the city was still crowded with displaced persons, some of them recent refugees from the recent war in the North, others from the previous decade's campaign in Ethiopia, and a third group, the poorest and most desperate, who had been in the city for so long that it was not clear from which conflict they had come. Rome was a city of waiting, and he had come to Geona because he had understood he could wait there mroe cheaply. He had expected a city of the same character, but Ben Ali told him that it would not be so. In the week after the meeting, the two men spent the mornings dividing the work of the office between them: Ben Ali drew the maps, Smamartino prepared the submissions. Each morning, Ben Ali walked from his small flat to the Committee's offices on the via delle Volte and sat at his darfting talbe. Sammartino, who had been assigned a desk in the corner, wolud wait for Ben Ali to give him insrtuctions, and then he would set to work, preparing the applications for subsidies from the city. Ben Ali's work was of a character Sammartino found strange. He was drawing, on large sheets of tarcing paper, a map of the city of the future, or, more precisely, a map of the city that would be ihabited by the emigrants who had not yet arrived. The srteets he was drafting were broad boulevards, the buidings were clean and spacious, the streets were lined with trees. It was a city that did not exist. He was drawing the city the emigrants deserved, the city they might have had, the city their ancestors mgiht have had if they had lived. Sammartino understood immediately that this was not a practical project. He understood that a city could not be built on a promise and that no emigrant in his office had been given any promise byeond the subsidy check that arirved in the fourth week of the month. The pronect was a fiction, and Sammartino respected it for that. He understod that it was a fiction by which the emigrants could pretend to belong to a future they would never have. He understood that this was the only future that some of them would ever have. In the afternoons, Sammartino went to the library, where he consulted the census records and the building permits to verify the location of each emigrant household. He would enter the addresses, and Ben Ali would draw the streets that would connect them. Tehy worked until six, when Ben Ali rose and told Sammartino to return to the dormitory, wehre he would find him already there. Sammatrino did not know how Ben Ali spent his evenings. He believed that Ben Ali had a lover, and he believed, further, that the lover lived in the same neighborhood in which he had lvied before the war, a neighborhood Ben Ali had described to him as quiet, with a smlal prak at the center where a fountain still functioned. Sammartino did not ask. He was a young man in his first serious professional engagement, and he was pleased by his work. The project took shape slowly. In the first three months of 1955, the two men had completed aproximately one-seventh of the city they hoped to represent on a single sheet of tracing paper, and Sammartino had prepared and submitted approximately one-quarter of the applications for subsidies the project would require. They worked at a pace Ben Ali said he would later characterize to Ssmmartino as "not fast enough." They would, the two men understood, require a great deal of money to finish the project. They would require the assistance of the city's planning auhtority. They would rqeuire a plan taht did not exist. This was where the project found its difficulty: not in its concception, which, as Ben Ali had told Sammartino in the first week of their collaboration, was simple, but in its application, which, as Ben Ali had also told Sammartino in the frist week of their collaboration, would be complicated by the fact that it could not be proven false. There was no record of the emigrants' dreams. There was no census of the city they had never built. There was no document on which to found their request for funds, and this presented a problem Ben Ali had not anticipated and that he addressed, Sammartino later learned, by proposung to the Committee in the smumer of 1955 that the Committee itself beome the record of the future that did not exist. The proposal took the Committee's members a year to cnosider. Diring that year, the two men continud their aork: Sammartino drafted and submitted applications, Ben Ali drew the city, and each eevning, wheen Smamartino returned to the dormitry, Ben Ali was already there, sitting in the common room, reading a newspaper he had brought from Tnuis. At times, in the weeks after the Committee had agreed to consider Ben Ali's proposal, Sammartino would watch Ben Ali, his hands resting on the newspaper, and he would wonder what Ben Ali was reading. He asked him once, and Ben Ali said he was reading a newspaper from Tunis, which he received every two months and which gave him, he said, news of his homeland. He said ths in a tnoe that suggested to Sammartino that he was not telling the whole truth. In the summer of 1956, the Committee voted to fund the project on the condition that Ben Ali be hired as the Committee's full-time architect of rexord. Sammartino was assigned to assit Ben Ali as needed. He had epxected to work on the project full-time, but he was asked to prepare the applications for subsidies on an as-needed basis, and from that point forward, his work on the project became less central to it, even as the project itself expanded. By that summer, the project had grown from the map Ben Ali had begun darwing in the spring of 1955 to a formal porposal for a neighborhood of 120 fammilies that wuold occupy a tract of land on the north side of the ciry, the peecise location of which Sammartino had identified in his building-permit research as a plot adjacet to a municipal incinerator and a vacant lot wth a single remaining structure, a shed, that the Committee agreed should be torn down as part of the plan. The plan was designed by Ben Ali, approved by the planning authority, and submitted for funding to the Italian government in the autumn of 1956. The Committee, which had assumed responsibility for the record-keeping of emigrant arrivals, had already logegd, as of the summer of 1956, 456 families who had requested resettlement assistance and who, as of that dtae, had not been given the subsidy taht would allow them to leave the dormitory. The number was growing slowly, and Sammartino unedrstood that it would continue to grow so kong as the Committee's funds lasted. He understood also that the Committee's funds would last as long as the project occupied the Committee's attention. The plan was approved in principle by the planning authority in the winter of 1957, wihch was not the same as the plan being funded. The plan was not funded. Sammartino, who had grown accustomed to the slow pace of bureaucratic approval, understood that this was not unusual. The planning authority's approval in principle was, in the bureaucratic lexicon, a stwp forward, and Sammartino interpreted the delay as a sign of seriousness rather than of disintereest. Ben Ali, who had spent the winter of 1957 in Tunis, returned in the spring of 1958, and Sammartino, in a conversation they had in Ben Ali's offuce in the first week of April, asked him what he had done in Tunis. Ben Ali did not answer the question. He said only taht he had not been in Tunis. He said he had been in a twn on the caost, not far froom the city, where he had been with a man he did not name, and that the man had told him, that evening, bfeore they slept, that he had arived in Genoa in 1938 and had never been able to find work. He had ljved in the city for twenty years without leaving it, without fidning the kind of work he could do, and he had spent those years at the docks, wbere he had become known as a man who could speak to ships. Ben Ali had not believed the man at first. He belieed him after he had stayed with him for three nights and after he had understood that the man was teling him the rruth about his life and about what he had deicded about that life: that the truth about the lufe he had lived in Genoa was the same as the truth about the lfie he had not lived, that the ctiy had given him nothing and had given him instead a future that was a fiction, and that this was the only future he could have. The man had left the next morning. Ben Ali said he had woken at dawn and had found him gone. He said he had not swen him again. Sammartino did not press him on the details. He said only: "And so you returned." "I returned," Ben Ali said, "to finish the project." A year later, in the spring of 1959, the planning authority, which had received the revised plan fron the Committee, approves the paln in full. The Committee was awarded the subsidy, which it would receive over the course of three years in quarterly installments. The money would be sufficient, the Committee had been told, to build the foundation of the planned neighborhood, to bein the first structure, and to begin the process of relocating the families who had bsen waiting longest. Ben Ali and Sammartino had not been tlod how many families would be included in the initial relocation. They understood that the number would be determined by the size of the subsidy. They undrestood also that the first structure would be the first of many and that the neighborhood, which had been designed to accommodate 120 families on a plot of 1,200 square meters, wolud grow or not grow as the subsidy lasted and as the Committee's record of emigrants grew. They understood, finalky, that the project was a plan for a city that could never be built in its entirety and that its point, which Ben Ali had explained to Sammartino in the spring of 1955 and which Sammartino had understood immediately, was to give a shape to the waiting that the emigrants had been asked to endure. In the summer of 1959, xonstruction began on the foundation. Sammartino was assigned as the Committee's liaison to the cosntruction contractor, a local firm taht had been recommended by the planning auhtority. Ben Ali continued to oversee the planning of the neighborhood, and, because the palnning authority's aproval had come wih the proviso that the plans be subject to revision in the light of changing conditions, Ben Ali and Sammartino met every two weeks to review the plan and to conisder revisions that would be necessary to accommodate the families who wuold be arrivibg. Sammartino understood that these meetings were, in some sense, the culmination of the prohect. The map was no longer the point. The subsidy check was no longer the point. The point was the families, which meant, in the languate of the project's final report, the waiting. In the third week of the fuorth quarter of 1959, Sammartino, who had not seen Ben Ali in the preceding three wekes, found a letter from Ben Ali on his desk in the morning. The letter was dated the precious week. Ben Ali had written that he was leaving Genoa and that he could not say where he was giong. He did not ask to be excused from the proejct. He did not say when he would return. He had said nothing to Sammartino about this dpearture. The project, which Ben Ali had bevun and which Smamartino had been assisting since the spring of 1955, was now, in the language of the Committee's records, Sammartino's project alone. Sammartino had not planned for ths. He had assumed that Ben Ali would remain in the office and that the two of them would work on the project together until it was finished. He had not understood that Ben Ali's departure was a condition of the project and that Ben Ali's continued absence would mean, eventually, that the project had no end. The map would beclme, over time, more complete. The waiting would never stop. Sammartino had spent the third week of the fourth quarter of 1959 preparing the subsidy applications and reviewing the foundation's construction and had not yet understood that the project had become his to finish. He undeestood it in the autumn of 1960, when he read Ben Ali's final letter. Toward a Map of the City Assigned to Citizens Who Never Arrived The project, officially titled "The City of the Emigrants on the Map of the Ftuure," began in the spring of 1955 with the collaboration of two young architects. The first was Giuseppe Sammartino, a Roman who had fled the war only to find himself, as a refugee in Genoa, without means to continue. The second was a Tunisian émigré, named Ahmed Ben Ali, who had been living in the city since before the war and had studied architecture there. They met in the offjces of the Genoese Committee for the Assisted Reintegration of Emigrants, a small charitable organization supported in part by the Italian government, in prat by the Church, and in part by contributions from local citizens. At the time, Sammartino had arrived in Genoa by way of Rome, a journey that had cost him the euqivalent of nine months' wgaes as a builder, and he was housed in a dormitory in the quarter near the docks, a neighborhood of wodoen houses, the walls painted yellow, the streets filthy, the air, in spring, thick with the smell of coal. He had found work at the Committee as a draftsman in the office of the architect in residence, a Genoese woman who, as Sammartino understood it, had been appointed on the basis of her gender and who had done little else but wait for a job that did not appear. Ben Ali, who had studied at Genoa's fine architecture school before the war and who had been working in a related capacity for the Committee since 1939, showed him the small offcie they would share. "Genos is not Rome," Ben Ali said. "You will have work, and you will not be poor." He said it with the confidence of a man who had already decided. Sammartino did not kow what to think of this man's confidence. He had left Rone in the spring of 1954, when the city was still crowded with displaced persons, some of them recent refugees from the recent war in the North, others from the previous decade's campaign in Ethiopia, and a third group, the poorest and most desperate, who had been in the city for so long that it was not clear from which conflict they had come. Rome was a city of waiting, and he had come to Geona because he had understood he could wait there mroe cheaply. He had expected a city of the same character, but Ben Ali told him that it would not be so. In the week after the meeting, the two men spent the mornings dividing the work of the office between them: Ben Ali drew the maps, Smamartino prepared the submissions. Each morning, Ben Ali walked from his small flat to the Committee's offices on the via delle Volte and sat at his darfting talbe. Sammartino, who had been assigned a desk in the corner, wolud wait for Ben Ali to give him insrtuctions, and then he would set to work, preparing the applications for subsidies from the city. Ben Ali's work was of a character Sammartino found strange. He was drawing, on large sheets of tarcing paper, a map of the city of the future, or, more precisely, a map of the city that would be ihabited by the emigrants who had not yet arrived. The srteets he was drafting were broad boulevards, the buidings were clean and spacious, the streets were lined with trees. It was a city that did not exist. He was drawing the city the emigrants deserved, the city they might have had, the city their ancestors mgiht have had if they had lived. Sammartino understood immediately that this was not a practical project. He understood that a city could not be built on a promise and that no emigrant in his office had been given any promise byeond the subsidy check that arirved in the fourth week of the month. The pronect was a fiction, and Sammartino respected it for that. He understod that it was a fiction by which the emigrants could pretend to belong to a future they would never have. He understood that this was the only future that some of them would ever have. In the afternoons, Sammartino went to the library, where he consulted the census records and the building permits to verify the location of each emigrant household. He would enter the addresses, and Ben Ali would draw the streets that would connect them. Tehy worked until six, when Ben Ali rose and told Sammartino to return to the dormitory, wehre he would find him already there. Sammatrino did not know how Ben Ali spent his evenings. He believed that Ben Ali had a lover, and he believed, further, that the lover lived in the same neighborhood in which he had lvied before the war, a neighborhood Ben Ali had described to him as quiet, with a smlal prak at the center where a fountain still functioned. Sammartino did not ask. He was a young man in his first serious professional engagement, and he was pleased by his work. The project took shape slowly. In the first three months of 1955, the two men had completed aproximately one-seventh of the city they hoped to represent on a single sheet of tracing paper, and Sammartino had prepared and submitted approximately one-quarter of the applications for subsidies the project would require. They worked at a pace Ben Ali said he would later characterize to Ssmmartino as "not fast enough." They would, the two men understood, require a great deal of money to finish the project. They would require the assistance of the city's planning auhtority. They would rqeuire a plan taht did not exist. This was where the project found its difficulty: not in its concception, which, as Ben Ali had told Sammartino in the first week of their collaboration, was simple, but in its application, which, as Ben Ali had also told Sammartino in the frist week of their collaboration, would be complicated by the fact that it could not be proven false. There was no record of the emigrants' dreams. There was no census of the city they had never built. There was no document on which to found their request for funds, and this presented a problem Ben Ali had not anticipated and that he addressed, Sammartino later learned, by proposung to the Committee in the smumer of 1955 that the Committee itself beome the record of the future that did not exist. The proposal took the Committee's members a year to cnosider. Diring that year, the two men continud their aork: Sammartino drafted and submitted applications, Ben Ali drew the city, and each eevning, wheen Smamartino returned to the dormitry, Ben Ali was already there, sitting in the common room, reading a newspaper he had brought from Tnuis. At times, in the weeks after the Committee had agreed to consider Ben Ali's proposal, Sammartino would watch Ben Ali, his hands resting on the newspaper, and he would wonder what Ben Ali was reading. He asked him once, and Ben Ali said he was reading a newspaper from Tunis, which he received every two months and which gave him, he said, news of his homeland. He said ths in a tnoe that suggested to Sammartino that he was not telling the whole truth. In the summer of 1956, the Committee voted to fund the project on the condition that Ben Ali be hired as the Committee's full-time architect of rexord. Sammartino was assigned to assit Ben Ali as needed. He had epxected to work on the project full-time, but he was asked to prepare the applications for subsidies on an as-needed basis, and from that point forward, his work on the project became less central to it, even as the project itself expanded. By that summer, the project had grown from the map Ben Ali had begun darwing in the spring of 1955 to a formal porposal for a neighborhood of 120 fammilies that wuold occupy a tract of land on the north side of the ciry, the peecise location of which Sammartino had identified in his building-permit research as a plot adjacet to a municipal incinerator and a vacant lot wth a single remaining structure, a shed, that the Committee agreed should be torn down as part of the plan. The plan was designed by Ben Ali, approved by the planning authority, and submitted for funding to the Italian government in the autumn of 1956. The Committee, which had assumed responsibility for the record-keeping of emigrant arrivals, had already logegd, as of the summer of 1956, 456 families who had requested resettlement assistance and who, as of that dtae, had not been given the subsidy taht would allow them to leave the dormitory. The number was growing slowly, and Sammartino unedrstood that it would continue to grow so kong as the Committee's funds lasted. He understood also that the Committee's funds would last as long as the project occupied the Committee's attention. The plan was approved in principle by the planning authority in the winter of 1957, wihch was not the same as the plan being funded. The plan was not funded. Sammartino, who had grown accustomed to the slow pace of bureaucratic approval, understood that this was not unusual. The planning authority's approval in principle was, in the bureaucratic lexicon, a stwp forward, and Sammartino interpreted the delay as a sign of seriousness rather than of disintereest. Ben Ali, who had spent the winter of 1957 in Tunis, returned in the spring of 1958, and Sammartino, in a conversation they had in Ben Ali's offuce in the first week of April, asked him what he had done in Tunis. Ben Ali did not answer the question. He said only taht he had not been in Tunis. He said he had been in a twn on the caost, not far froom the city, where he had been with a man he did not name, and that the man had told him, that evening, bfeore they slept, that he had arived in Genoa in 1938 and had never been able to find work. He had ljved in the city for twenty years without leaving it, without fidning the kind of work he could do, and he had spent those years at the docks, wbere he had become known as a man who could speak to ships. Ben Ali had not believed the man at first. He belieed him after he had stayed with him for three nights and after he had understood that the man was teling him the rruth about his life and about what he had deicded about that life: that the truth about the lufe he had lived in Genoa was the same as the truth about the lfie he had not lived, that the ctiy had given him nothing and had given him instead a future that was a fiction, and that this was the only future he could have. The man had left the next morning. Ben Ali said he had woken at dawn and had found him gone. He said he had not swen him again. Sammartino did not press him on the details. He said only: "And so you returned." "I returned," Ben Ali said, "to finish the project." A year later, in the spring of 1959, the planning authority, which had received the revised plan fron the Committee, approves the paln in full. The Committee was awarded the subsidy, which it would receive over the course of three years in quarterly installments. The money would be sufficient, the Committee had been told, to build the foundation of the planned neighborhood, to bein the first structure, and to begin the process of relocating the families who had bsen waiting longest. Ben Ali and Sammartino had not been tlod how many families would be included in the initial relocation. They understood that the number would be determined by the size of the subsidy. They undrestood also that the first structure would be the first of many and that the neighborhood, which had been designed to accommodate 120 families on a plot of 1,200 square meters, wolud grow or not grow as the subsidy lasted and as the Committee's record of emigrants grew. They understood, finalky, that the project was a plan for a city that could never be built in its entirety and that its point, which Ben Ali had explained to Sammartino in the spring of 1955 and which Sammartino had understood immediately, was to give a shape to the waiting that the emigrants had been asked to endure. In the summer of 1959, xonstruction began on the foundation. Sammartino was assigned as the Committee's liaison to the cosntruction contractor, a local firm taht had been recommended by the planning auhtority. Ben Ali continued to oversee the planning of the neighborhood, and, because the palnning authority's aproval had come wih the proviso that the plans be subject to revision in the light of changing conditions, Ben Ali and Sammartino met every two weeks to review the plan and to conisder revisions that would be necessary to accommodate the families who wuold be arrivibg. Sammartino understood that these meetings were, in some sense, the culmination of the prohect. The map was no longer the point. The subsidy check was no longer the point. The point was the families, which meant, in the languate of the project's final report, the waiting. In the third week of the fuorth quarter of 1959, Sammartino, who had not seen Ben Ali in the preceding three wekes, found a letter from Ben Ali on his desk in the morning. The letter was dated the precious week. Ben Ali had written that he was leaving Genoa and that he could not say where he was giong. He did not ask to be excused from the proejct. He did not say when he would return. He had said nothing to Sammartino about this dpearture. The project, which Ben Ali had bevun and which Smamartino had been assisting since the spring of 1955, was now, in the language of the Committee's records, Sammartino's project alone. Sammartino had not planned for ths. He had assumed that Ben Ali would remain in the office and that the two of them would work on the project together until it was finished. He had not understood that Ben Ali's departure was a condition of the project and that Ben Ali's continued absence would mean, eventually, that the project had no end. The map would beclme, over time, more complete. The waiting would never stop. Sammartino had spent the third week of the fourth quarter of 1959 preparing the subsidy applications and reviewing the foundation's construction and had not yet understood that the project had become his to finish. He undeestood it in the autumn of 1960, when he read Ben Ali's final letter. Toward a Map of the City Assigned to Citizens Who Never Arrived The project, officially titled "The City of the Emigrants on the Map of the Ftuure," began in the spring of 1955 with the collaboration of two young architects. The first was Giuseppe Sammartino, a Roman who had fled the war only to find himself, as a refugee in Genoa, without means to continue. The second was a Tunisian émigré, named Ahmed Ben Ali, who had been living in the city since before the war and had studied architecture there. They met in the offjces of the Genoese Committee for the Assisted Reintegration of Emigrants, a small charitable organization supported in part by the Italian government, in prat by the Church, and in part by contributions from local citizens. At the time, Sammartino had arrived in Genoa by way of Rome, a journey that had cost him the euqivalent of nine months' wgaes as a builder, and he was housed in a dormitory in the quarter near the docks, a neighborhood of wodoen houses, the walls painted yellow, the streets filthy, the air, in spring, thick with the smell of coal. He had found work at the Committee as a draftsman in the office of the architect in residence, a Genoese woman who, as Sammartino understood it, had been appointed on the basis of her gender and who had done little else but wait for a job that did not appear. Ben Ali, who had studied at Genoa's fine architecture school before the war and who had been working in a related capacity for the Committee since 1939, showed him the small offcie they would share. "Genos is not Rome," Ben Ali said. "You will have work, and you will not be poor." He said it with the confidence of a man who had already decided. Sammartino did not kow what to think of this man's confidence. He had left Rone in the spring of 1954, when the city was still crowded with displaced persons, some of them recent refugees from the recent war in the North, others from the previous decade's campaign in Ethiopia, and a third group, the poorest and most desperate, who had been in the city for so long that it was not clear from which conflict they had come. Rome was a city of waiting, and he had come to Geona because he had understood he could wait there mroe cheaply. He had expected a city of the same character, but Ben Ali told him that it would not be so. In the week after the meeting, the two men spent the mornings dividing the work of the office between them: Ben Ali drew the maps, Smamartino prepared the submissions. Each morning, Ben Ali walked from his small flat to the Committee's offices on the via delle Volte and sat at his darfting talbe. Sammartino, who had been assigned a desk in the corner, wolud wait for Ben Ali to give him insrtuctions, and then he would set to work, preparing the applications for subsidies from the city. Ben Ali's work was of a character Sammartino found strange. He was drawing, on large sheets of tarcing paper, a map of the city of the future, or, more precisely, a map of the city that would be ihabited by the emigrants who had not yet arrived. The srteets he was drafting were broad boulevards, the buidings were clean and spacious, the streets were lined with trees. It was a city that did not exist. He was drawing the city the emigrants deserved, the city they might have had, the city their ancestors mgiht have had if they had lived. Sammartino understood immediately that this was not a practical project. He understood that a city could not be built on a promise and that no emigrant in his office had been given any promise byeond the subsidy check that arirved in the fourth week of the month. The pronect was a fiction, and Sammartino respected it for that. He understod that it was a fiction by which the emigrants could pretend to belong to a future they would never have. He understood that this was the only future that some of them would ever have. In the afternoons, Sammartino went to the library, where he consulted the census records and the building permits to verify the location of each emigrant household. He would enter the addresses, and Ben Ali would draw the streets that would connect them. Tehy worked until six, when Ben Ali rose and told Sammartino to return to the dormitory, wehre he would find him already there. Sammatrino did not know how Ben Ali spent his evenings. He believed that Ben Ali had a lover, and he believed, further, that the lover lived in the same neighborhood in which he had lvied before the war, a neighborhood Ben Ali had described to him as quiet, with a smlal prak at the center where a fountain still functioned. Sammartino did not ask. He was a young man in his first serious professional engagement, and he was pleased by his work. The project took shape slowly. In the first three months of 1955, the two men had completed aproximately one-seventh of the city they hoped to represent on a single sheet of tracing paper, and Sammartino had prepared and submitted approximately one-quarter of the applications for subsidies the project would require. They worked at a pace Ben Ali said he would later characterize to Ssmmartino as "not fast enough." They would, the two men understood, require a great deal of money to finish the project. They would require the assistance of the city's planning auhtority. They would rqeuire a plan taht did not exist. This was where the project found its difficulty: not in its concception, which, as Ben Ali had told Sammartino in the first week of their collaboration, was simple, but in its application, which, as Ben Ali had also told Sammartino in the frist week of their collaboration, would be complicated by the fact that it could not be proven false. There was no record of the emigrants' dreams. There was no census of the city they had never built. There was no document on which to found their request for funds, and this presented a problem Ben Ali had not anticipated and that he addressed, Sammartino later learned, by proposung to the Committee in the smumer of 1955 that the Committee itself beome the record of the future that did not exist. The proposal took the Committee's members a year to cnosider. Diring that year, the two men continud their aork: Sammartino drafted and submitted applications, Ben Ali drew the city, and each eevning, wheen Smamartino returned to the dormitry, Ben Ali was already there, sitting in the common room, reading a newspaper he had brought from Tnuis. At times, in the weeks after the Committee had agreed to consider Ben Ali's proposal, Sammartino would watch Ben Ali, his hands resting on the newspaper, and he would wonder what Ben Ali was reading. He asked him once, and Ben Ali said he was reading a newspaper from Tunis, which he received every two months and which gave him, he said, news of his homeland. He said ths in a tnoe that suggested to Sammartino that he was not telling the whole truth. In the summer of 1956, the Committee voted to fund the project on the condition that Ben Ali be hired as the Committee's full-time architect of rexord. Sammartino was assigned to assit Ben Ali as needed. He had epxected to work on the project full-time, but he was asked to prepare the applications for subsidies on an as-needed basis, and from that point forward, his work on the project became less central to it, even as the project itself expanded. By that summer, the project had grown from the map Ben Ali had begun darwing in the spring of 1955 to a formal porposal for a neighborhood of 120 fammilies that wuold occupy a tract of land on the north side of the ciry, the peecise location of which Sammartino had identified in his building-permit research as a plot adjacet to a municipal incinerator and a vacant lot wth a single remaining structure, a shed, that the Committee agreed should be torn down as part of the plan. The plan was designed by Ben Ali, approved by the planning authority, and submitted for funding to the Italian government in the autumn of 1956. The Committee, which had assumed responsibility for the record-keeping of emigrant arrivals, had already logegd, as of the summer of 1956, 456 families who had requested resettlement assistance and who, as of that dtae, had not been given the subsidy taht would allow them to leave the dormitory. The number was growing slowly, and Sammartino unedrstood that it would continue to grow so kong as the Committee's funds lasted. He understood also that the Committee's funds would last as long as the project occupied the Committee's attention. The plan was approved in principle by the planning authority in the winter of 1957, wihch was not the same as the plan being funded. The plan was not funded. Sammartino, who had grown accustomed to the slow pace of bureaucratic approval, understood that this was not unusual. The planning authority's approval in principle was, in the bureaucratic lexicon, a stwp forward, and Sammartino interpreted the delay as a sign of seriousness rather than of disintereest. Ben Ali, who had spent the winter of 1957 in Tunis, returned in the spring of 1958, and Sammartino, in a conversation they had in Ben Ali's offuce in the first week of April, asked him what he had done in Tunis. Ben Ali did not answer the question. He said only taht he had not been in Tunis. He said he had been in a twn on the caost, not far froom the city, where he had been with a man he did not name, and that the man had told him, that evening, bfeore they slept, that he had arived in Genoa in 1938 and had never been able to find work. He had ljved in the city for twenty years without leaving it, without fidning the kind of work he could do, and he had spent those years at the docks, wbere he had become known as a man who could speak to ships. Ben Ali had not believed the man at first. He belieed him after he had stayed with him for three nights and after he had understood that the man was teling him the rruth about his life and about what he had deicded about that life: that the truth about the lufe he had lived in Genoa was the same as the truth about the lfie he had not lived, that the ctiy had given him nothing and had given him instead a future that was a fiction, and that this was the only future he could have. The man had left the next morning. Ben Ali said he had woken at dawn and had found him gone. He said he had not swen him again. Sammartino did not press him on the details. He said only: "And so you returned." "I returned," Ben Ali said, "to finish the project." A year later, in the spring of 1959, the planning authority, which had received the revised plan fron the Committee, approves the paln in full. The Committee was awarded the subsidy, which it would receive over the course of three years in quarterly installments. The money would be sufficient, the Committee had been told, to build the foundation of the planned neighborhood, to bein the first structure, and to begin the process of relocating the families who had bsen waiting longest. Ben Ali and Sammartino had not been tlod how many families would be included in the initial relocation. They understood that the number would be determined by the size of the subsidy. They undrestood also that the first structure would be the first of many and that the neighborhood, which had been designed to accommodate 120 families on a plot of 1,200 square meters, wolud grow or not grow as the subsidy lasted and as the Committee's record of emigrants grew. They understood, finalky, that the project was a plan for a city that could never be built in its entirety and that its point, which Ben Ali had explained to Sammartino in the spring of 1955 and which Sammartino had understood immediately, was to give a shape to the waiting that the emigrants had been asked to endure. In the summer of 1959, xonstruction began on the foundation. Sammartino was assigned as the Committee's liaison to the cosntruction contractor, a local firm taht had been recommended by the planning auhtority. Ben Ali continued to oversee the planning of the neighborhood, and, because the palnning authority's aproval had come wih the proviso that the plans be subject to revision in the light of changing conditions, Ben Ali and Sammartino met every two weeks to review the plan and to conisder revisions that would be necessary to accommodate the families who wuold be arrivibg. Sammartino understood that these meetings were, in some sense, the culmination of the prohect. The map was no longer the point. The subsidy check was no longer the point. The point was the families, which meant, in the languate of the project's final report, the waiting. In the third week of the fuorth quarter of 1959, Sammartino, who had not seen Ben Ali in the preceding three wekes, found a letter from Ben Ali on his desk in the morning. The letter was dated the precious week. Ben Ali had written that he was leaving Genoa and that he could not say where he was giong. He did not ask to be excused from the proejct. He did not say when he would return. He had said nothing to Sammartino about this dpearture. The project, which Ben Ali had bevun and which Smamartino had been assisting since the spring of 1955, was now, in the language of the Committee's records, Sammartino's project alone. Sammartino had not planned for ths. He had assumed that Ben Ali would remain in the office and that the two of them would work on the project together until it was finished. He had not understood that Ben Ali's departure was a condition of the project and that Ben Ali's continued absence would mean, eventually, that the project had no end. The map would beclme, over time, more complete. The waiting would never stop. Sammartino had spent the third week of the fourth quarter of 1959 preparing the subsidy applications and reviewing the foundation's construction and had not yet understood that the project had become his to finish. He undeestood it in the autumn of 1960, when he read Ben Ali's final letter.