Pietro worked alone in a corner of the workshop set apart from the rest by a section of wall so as to form a separate room, or ‘lounge’, with a glass door that looked out on to a courtyard. Until a few years ago there had been two machines and two workers in this room: Pietro and another man. But one day the other man had gone off sick with a hernia, and in the meantime Pietro had had to look after both machines at once. He learned how to regulate his movements accordingly: he would push down the lever of one machine and go to pull out the piece the other had finished. The hernia case was operated, came back, but was assigned to a different team. Pietro was stuck with the two machines for good; indeed, to make it clear that this was not just forgetfulness, a time-and-motion expert was sent to assess the situation and a third machine was added: the man had calculated that between the operations for one machine then the other there were still a few seconds free. Then, in a general overhaul of productivity bonuses, to have some dubious calculation come out, Pietro was obliged to take on a fourth. At sixty and more years old he had had to learn to do four times the work in the same hours, but since his salary was still the same, his life wasn’t radically transformed, if one excludes that is the development of chronic bronchitic asthma and the bad habit of falling asleep as soon as he sat down, in whatever place or company. But he was a tough old man and, what’s more, full of good spirits, and he was always hoping that major changes were just round the corner.
For eight hours a day, Pietro rotated round the four machines making the same series of movements every time, movements he knew so well now he had managed to shave off every superfluous blip and adjust the rhythm of his asthma to that of his work with perfect precision. Even his eyes moved along trajectories as precise as the stars, since every machine demanded a particular sequence of glances to check that it didn’t seize up and lose him his bonus.
After the first half-hour’s work Pietro was already tired, the factory noises blended in his eardrums into a single background hum with the combined rhythm of his four machines pulsing above. Thrust forward by this rhythm, he worked on in a near daze until, blessed as the first sight of land to the castaway, he caught the groan of the transmission belts slowing and stopping as a result of a breakdown or for the end of his shift.
But so inexhaustible a quality is man’s freedom, that even in these conditions Pietro’s mind was able to weave its web from one machine to the other, to flow on unbroken as the thread from the spider’s mouth, and in the midst of this geometry of steps gestures glances and reflexes he would sometimes find he was master of himself once again and calm as a country grandfather going out late in the morning to sit under the pergola and stare at the sun and whistle for his dog and keep an eye on his grandchildren swinging on a tree and watch the figs ripen day by day.
Of course, such freedom of thought could only be achieved by following a special technique that had taken time and training: all you had to do, for example, was learn how to break off your flow of thought when your hand had to move the workpiece under the lathe, then pick it up again, almost placing it on the piece as it now proceeded towards the grooving machine, and above all take advantage of the moments you had to walk, since one never thinks so well as when one walks a well-known stretch of road, even if here the road was no more than two steps: one-two, but how many things one could think of in that space: a happy old age, all Sundays in piazzas at political meetings listening hard near the loudspeakers, a job for his unemployed son, and then all at once off with a gaggle of grandchildren fishing on summer evenings, each with his rod on the walls above the river, and a bet on a cycle race to propose to his friend Tommaso, or about the collapse of the government, but something so wild as to knock the big-headedness out of him for a bit—and at the same time glance over at the transmission belt to make sure it wasn’t slipping off where it always did by the wheel.
‘If in… (pull up the lever!)… May my son marries that idiot’s daughter… (slide the piece under the lathe!) we can move out of the big room… (and taking two steps)… that way when the newly-weds lie in on Sunday morning they’ll get the view of the mountains from the window… (now push down that lever there!) and me and the old woman can move into the small room… (straighten out those pieces!)… since who cares if we can only see the gas tank from there,’ and, shifting now to another line of thought, as if the idea of the gas tank near his house had brought him back to everyday reality, or perhaps because when the lathe jammed for a second it inspired a more aggressive attitude: ‘Ifthelaminatesshopstartsindustrialactionoverpiecework, we can… (careful! it’s out of line!)… join them… (careful!)… with our cl… with our claim (it’s gone, damn it!)… for higher pay grades for our spe… cia… liz… a… tions…’
Thus the movement of the machines both conditioned and drove the movement of his thoughts. And little by little, softly and stealthily, his mind adapted itself to the confines of this mechanical mesh, as the slim muscular body of the young Renaissance cavalier adapts to its armour, learns to tense and relax biceps to wake up a sleepy arm, to stretch, to rub an itchy shoulderblade against the iron backplate, to tighten buttocks, to shift testicles crushed against the saddle, to twitch a big toe away from the others: in the same way Pietro’s mind stretched and loosened up inside its prison of nervous tension, automatic gestures, weariness.
For there is no prison that doesn’t have its chinks. So even in a system that aims to exploit every last fraction of your time, you discover that with proper organization the moment will come when the marvellous holiday of a few seconds opens up before you and you can even take three steps back and forward, or scratch your stomach, or hum something: ‘Pompety pom…’ and assuming the foreman isn’t around to bother you, there’ll be time, between one operation and the next, to say a couple of words to a workmate.
So it was that when the hen turned up Pietro was able to go: ‘chucketty chuck chuck…’ and to make a mental comparison of his own pirouetting between the four machines, big and flat-footed as he was, to the movements of the hen; and he began to drop his trail of maize that, leading to the scrap metal box, was supposed to lure the fowl into laying its egg for him and not for that stooge Adalberto nor for his friend and rival Tommaso.
But neither Pietro’s nor Tommaso’s nests impressed the hen. It seemed she laid her eggs at dawn, in Adalberto’s coop, before beginning her rounds of the workshops. Both the turner and the quality controller got into the habit of grabbing hold of her and poking her abdomen as soon as they saw her. The hen, tame as a cat by nature, let them, but was always empty.
It should be said that Pietro was no longer on his own with his four machines. That is, the job of running the machines was still entirely his but it had been decided that a certain number of pieces needed a special finishing and a few days ago a worker with a file had joined him and every now and then would take a handful of pieces, carry them to a small bench set up close by and, scrape scrape grind grind, he very calmly filed them down for ten minutes. He gave Pietro no help, on the contrary he was always getting in his way and muddling him up, and it was clear that his real job had nothing to do with the filing. He was already well known in the factory, this worker, and even had a nickname: Giovannino the Stink.
He was scrawny, dark as dark, with thick curly hair, and a snub nose that pulled up his lip with it. Where they had found him nobody knew; what they did know was that the first job he’d been given in the factory, the day they took him on, was that of toilet maintenance man; but the truth was he was supposed to be there all day listening to people talk and passing things on to the management. Quite what there was to hear in the toilets that was so important no one ever really understood; it seems that there being nowhere else in the factory where one could exchange a few words without being fired on the spot, two workers from the Internal Committee, or some other diabolical union invention, had taken to swapping ideas from one cubicle to another, pretending they were there to answer nature’s calling. Not that the workers’ toilets in a factory are a quiet p
lace, having as they do no doors or just a low gate affair leaving head and shoulders visible so that no one can stop for a smoke, and with the security men poking their heads in every few minutes to see that no one stays too long and check whether you’re defecating or just taking it easy, but all the same, compared with the rest of the factory, the toilets are calm, even comfortable places. The fact is that these two men were eventually accused of engaging in political activity during working hours and fired; so someone must have told on them and it didn’t take long to identify that someone as Giovannino the Stink as he was henceforth to be called. He was shut away in there, it was spring, and all day he heard watery noises, flushing, plopping, splashing; and he dreamed of open streams and fresh air. No one talked any more in the toilets. So they moved him. Unskilled, manipulated by the unwarranted fears of a management forever in a state of alarm, he was assigned first to one team then another, given vague and obviously pointless tasks but with secret instructions to spy on the others; and wherever he went his workmates turned their backs on him in silence, not deigning so much as a glance at the superfluous tasks he muddled over as best he could.
Now he had wound up on the heels of an old worker, deaf and alone. What was he supposed to find out? Was he too at his last assignment before being put out on the street like the victims of his spying? Giovannino the Stink racked his brains for a trail, a suspicion, a clue. The moment was propitious; the whole factory was in turmoil, the workers at boiling point, the management with their hackles up. And for a while Giovannino had been churning over an idea. Every day, around the same time, a hen would come into the workshop. And the turner Pietro would prod at it. He lured it with a few grains of maize, got close to it and put his hand right under it. What on earth could it mean? Was it a system for passing secret messages from one workshop to another? Giovannino was sure of it now. The way Pietro touched the hen it was exactly as if he were looking for something, or slipping something inside its feathers. And one day, when Pietro let go of the bird, Giovannino the Stink followed it. The hen crossed the yard, climbed on a pile of iron girders—Giovannino did a balancing act to follow—dived into a segment of piping—Giovannino crawled after it—crossed another patch of courtyard and went into Quality Control. Here there was another old man who seemed to be waiting for the hen: he was watching for it to appear at the doorway, and as soon as he saw it he dropped his hammer and screwdriver and went to meet it. The hen was on friendly terms with this man too, so much so that she let herself be picked up by the feet and, once again! prodded under the tail. By now Giovannino was sure he had struck gold. ‘The message,’ he thought, ‘is sent every day from Pietro to this fellow here. Tomorrow, as soon as the hen leaves Pietro, I’ll have it stopped and searched.’
The next day, having half-heartedly prodded the hen for the nth time and then sadly replaced it on the ground, Pietro saw Giovannino the Stink set down his file and go off almost at a run.
When he raised the alarm, the watchmen on duty gave chase. Surprised in the yard pecking at maggots between bolts strewn in the dust, the hen was taken to the security chief’s office.
Adalberto knew nothing as yet. Given that connivance on his part could not be excluded, the operation had been conducted without his being informed. Summoned to head office, no sooner did he see the hen immobilized by two colleagues on the boss’s desk than his eyes all but filled with tears. ‘What has she done? What’s happened? I always kept her shut in her coop!’ he began to say, thinking they were blaming him for having let the bird wander about the factory.
But the accusations were far more serious, as he quickly appreciated. The security chief fired off a volley of questions. He was a retired carabiniere inspector and over the ex-carabinieri amongst his security staff he continued to exercise the hierarchical authority typical of the force. Throughout the questioning, more than his love of the hen, more than his hopes to become a chicken breeder, what was uppermost in Adalberto’s mind was the fear that he would compromise himself. He came clean, he tried to justify himself for having left the hen free, but when it came to questions about the relationship between the hen and the unions, he didn’t dare compromise himself by clearing the bird or excusing it. He withdrew behind a wall of ‘I don’t know, I’ve got nothing to do with it,’ concerned only that he should in no way be held responsible for the affair.
The security man’s good faith was accepted; but, with a lump in his throat and a pang of remorse, he was now looking at a hen that had been abandoned to its destiny.
The inspector ordered that the bird be searched. One of the agents stalled saying it made him feel sick, and after some fierce pecking another withdrew sucking a bleeding finger. In the end the inevitable experts emerged, more than happy to demonstrate their zeal. The oviduct was shown to be free of any messages inimical to the interests of the company, or indeed of any other variety. Expert in the many techniques of war, the inspector insisted that they search under the bird’s wings, where the Pigeon-Lover Brigade are wont to conceal their messages in special sealed cartridges. They searched; feathers, down and dirt were strewn across the desk, but nothing was found.
Nonetheless, considered too suspect and treacherous to be innocent, the hen was condemned. In the dingy courtyard two men in black uniforms held it by the claws while a third wrung its neck. The bird let out a last long heart-breaking shriek, then a lugubrious cluck, she who had been so discreet as never to dare cluck for joy. Adalberto hid his face in his hands, his harmless dream of a cackling hencoop buried stillborn. Thus does the machine of oppression ever turn against those who serve it. The owner of the company, concerned that he had to meet a delegation of workers who were protesting against firings, heard the hen’s death wail in his office and sensed it boded ill.
Numbers in the Dark
The evening dark slips into streets and avenues, shades the spaces between the leaves of the trees, dots the moving tram arms with sparks, opens up in soft cones beneath the punctual streetlamps, turns on festive displays in shop windows, throwing into relief the curtained domesticity of apartments above. But on first floors and mezzanines, broad rectangles of unshaded light reveal the mysteries of a thousand city offices. The working day is over. The last letters are wound out from the drums of a line of typewriters and separated from their carbons; files full of correspondence are laid for signing on managers’ desks, the typists cover their machines and head for the cloakroom, or they are already in line in the coated bustle waiting to clock out. Soon all is deserted. The windows reveal a series of empty rooms, immersed in the chalky whiteness that reverberates from fluorescent tubes on walls divided by cheerful colours into different sections, on bare polished desks, on the data-processing machines, which, the urgent patter of their straining thought now over, sleep on their feet like horses. Until all at once this geometric scenario is filled with middle-aged women, wrapped in flowery scarlet-and-green gowns, their heads tied in scarves or with ‘Empire’ hairstyles or a fichu, wearing skirts too short for them from which swollen legs protrude in woolly stockings, cloth-slippered feet. Accountancy’s night spawns witches. Brush and broom in hand they launch themselves across those smooth surfaces, tracing out their spells.
In a square of window, a boy’s freckled face, thick wave of black hair above, appears and flits away, reappears at the next window, and the next, and the next again, like a moon-fish in an aquarium. There, he’s stopped in the corner of a window, and with a sudden crash a shutter rolls down, the bright rectangle of the aquarium is gone. One two three four, darkness falls on all the windows and in each the last thing you see is the moon-fish grimace of that little face.
‘Paolino! Got all the shutters down, have you?’
Although he has to be up early for school in the morning, Paolino’s mother takes him with her every evening so that he can help a bit and learn how to work. By this time a soft cloud of sleep is beginning to weigh down on his eyelids. Coming in from the already dark streets, these deserted, brightly lit rooms put
him in a sort of daze. Even the desklamps have been left on, their green shades on long adjustable necks leaning towards the shiny desktops. Passing by, Paolino presses buttons to turn them off and ease the glare.
‘What are you doing? You can’t play now. Come and give us a hand! Have you got the shutters down yet?’
With a sharp tug Paolino lets the shutters fall all at once. The night outside, the haloes of the streetlamps, the softened glow of distant windows across the street, disappear; now there is nowhere but this box of light. With every rattle of a shutter, it’s as if Paolino were gradually waking from his torpor: but as though in sleep when you dream of waking only to go into another and deeper dream.
‘Can I do the wastebins, Mum?’
‘Good boy, yes, take the bag, off you go!’
Paolino takes the bag and goes off round the offices to empty the wastepaper bins. The bag is bigger than he is and Paolino drags it after him so that it slides across the floor. He walks slowly to make the job last as long as possible: of the whole evening this is the moment he likes best. Big rooms with lines of identical calculators and filing cabinets open before him, rooms with authoritative desks crammed with touch-button telephones and intercoms. He likes going round the offices alone, to immerse himself in those metallic ornaments, those sharp right-angles, forgetting everything else. Above all he likes getting away from the sound of his mother and Signora Dirce’s chatter.
The difference between Signora Dirce and Paolino’s mother is that Signora Dirce is very conscious of the fact that she is cleaning SBAV’s offices, whereas it’s all the same to Paolino’s mother whether she is cleaning an office, a kitchen or the back of a shop.
Signora Dirce knows the names of all the departments. ‘Now we’ll go into Accounts, Signora Pensotti,’ she says to Paolino’s mother.
‘Come again?’ says Signora Pensotti, a small fat little woman, only recently arrived from the provinces.
Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories Page 7