Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (11 page)

A telephone rings. ‘Hello! Hello!’ It’s Signora Dirce’s voice. Paolino runs over to her.

‘Yes, yes, SBAV here. What’s that? What’s that? Where, Brazil? Fancy: they’re calling from Brazil. Yes, but what do you want? I don’t understand… Know what, Signora Pensotti? They’re speaking Brazilian, do you want to hear a bit too?’

Calling at this hour, it must have been a customer from the other side of the world who’d muddled up the time difference.

Paolino’s mother grabs the receiver from Signora Dirce’s hand: ‘There’s no one here, no one, understand?’ she starts shouting. ‘You can call to-o-mor-ro-ow! There’s only u-us here no-ow! The cleaners, understand? The cleaners!’

Pietro and Tommaso were always arguing.

At dawn the squeaking of their old bicycles and the sound of their voices—Pietro’s hollow and nasal, Tommaso’s husky and sometimes hoarse—were the only noises to be heard in the empty streets. They used to cycle together to the factory where they worked. From the other side of the shutter slats you could still feel the sleep and the darkness weighing on the rooms. The muffled ringing of alarm clocks began a sporadic dialogue from one house to the next, becoming denser in the suburbs, until finally it merged, as town merged into country, into a back and forth of cock-a-doodle-doos.

Busy as they were arguing at the tops of their voices, the two workers didn’t notice this first stirring of daily sounds: anyway they were both deaf; Pietro had been a little hard of hearing for some years now, while Tommaso had a constant whistle in one ear that went back to the First World War.

‘That’s how things are, old friend,’ Pietro, a big fellow of sixty-odd, uncertainly balanced on his wobbling machine, thundered down at Tommaso, five years his elder, but smaller and already somewhat bent. ‘You’ve lost faith, old friend. I know myself that with the way things are today having kids means going hungry, but tomorrow you never know, you never know which side the scales might come down, tomorrow having kids could mean wealth. That’s how I see things, and rightly so.’

Without taking his eyes off his friend, yellow bulbs opening wide, Tommaso let out sharp cries that would suddenly turn hoarse: ‘Ye-ess, ye-ess! What’s got to be said to a worker starting a family is this!: bringing babies into the world you’re only adding to poverty and unemployment! That’s what! That’s what he’s got to know! I’m telling you. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again!’

Their discussion this morning was on the general question, does an increase in the population favour or damage the workers? Pietro was optimistic and Tommaso pessimistic. Behind this conflict of views lay the marriage planned between Pietro’s son and Tommaso’s daughter. Pietro was for it and Tommaso against.

‘And anyway, they haven’t had kids yet!’ Pietro suddenly came back. ‘All in good time! That’s all we need! We’re talking about an engagement, not about kids!’

Tommaso yelled: ‘When people marry, they have kids!’

‘In the country! Where you were born!’ Pietro came back. He almost got his wheel caught in a tram rail. He swore.

‘Wha-aat?’ Tommaso shouted, pedalling ahead.

Pietro shook his head and said nothing. They went on in silence for a while.

‘Then, of course,’ Pietro said, winding up a train of thought out loud, ‘when they come, they come!’

They had left the city behind them and were riding along a raised road between fields left fallow. There were some last patches of fog. Above a grey horizon not far away loomed the factory.

An engine droned behind them; they had just got themselves on the verge when a big smart car went by.

The road wasn’t tarred, the dust the car lifted cloaked the two cyclists and from the thick cloud came Tommaso’s raised voice: ‘And it’s in the exclusive interest o-of… oh, oh, oh!’ The dust he’d swallowed brought on a fit of coughing and his short arm emerged from the cloud and pointed in the direction of the car, doubtless to suggest the interest of the ruling classes. Pietro, trying to speak while coughing from a red face, said: ‘Uugh… Not… uugh… for… uugh… lo-ong,’ pointing at the car with a decidedly negative gesture to express the idea that the future did not belong to the owners of custom-built automobiles.

The car was racing away when one of its doors came open. A hand thrust it wide so that it banged back and a woman in silhouette almost threw herself out. But whoever was driving braked at once; the woman jumped down, and in the thin morning mist the workers saw her run across the road. She had blonde hair, a long black dress and a cape of blue fox furs, their tails in fringes.

A man wearing an overcoat got out of the car, shouting: ‘You’re crazy! You’re crazy!’ The woman was already dashing away from the road through the bushes, and the man set off after her until they both disappeared.

Below the road were meadows with dense thickets of shrubs, and the two workers saw the woman appearing and disappearing in and out of them, her steps short and quick in the heavy dew. With one hand she held her skirt from touching the ground and she jerked her shoulders to free herself from the branches that caught at her fox tails. She even began to bend the branches so that they would spring back on the man who was chasing her, though without really hurrying and without, it seemed, too much desire to catch her. The woman ran wild in the meadows, shrieked with laughter, shook the dew on the branches down on to her hair. Until he, calm as ever, instead of following her, cut her off and took her by the elbows; and it looked as though she was wriggling to escape and biting him.

The two workers followed the chase from the raised road, though they never stopped pedalling or paying attention to where they were going. They watched silendy, eyebrows raised and mouths open, with a gravity more diffident than curious. They were almost up to the stationary car, left there with its doors open, when the man in the overcoat came back, holding the woman who was forcing him to push her along and yelling almost like a child. They shut themselves in the car and set off; and again the cyclists ran into the dust.

‘While we’re starting our day,’ choked Tommaso, ‘the drunkards are ending theirs.’

‘Actually,’ objected his friend, stopping to look back, ‘he wasn’t drunk. Look how sharply he stopped.’

They studied the tyre marks. ‘No, no, no… you’re joking… no, a car like that,’ came back Tommaso, ‘do it myself! Don’t you realize that a car like that stops you dead…’

He didn’t finish his sentence; looking down at the ground, their eyes had come to rest on a point just off the road. There was something sparkling on a bush. Simultaneously, softly they both exclaimed: ‘Oh!’

They got down from their saddles and stood their bikes against the kerb. ‘The chicken’s laid an egg,’ said Pietro and jumped down into the meadow with a lightness you wouldn’t have expected in him. On the bush was a necklace of four strings of pearls.

The two workers stretched out their hands and, delicately, as though picking a flower, plucked the necklace from its branch. They both held it, with both hands, feeling the pearls with their fingertips, but ever so carefully, and as they did so lifted it closer and closer to their eyes.

Then, both together, as though rebelling against the awe and fascination the object inspired, they dropped their fists, but neither one of them let go of the necklace. Feeling somebody would have to say something, Pietro breathed out and commented, ‘See the sort of ties that are in fashion these days…’

‘It’s fake!’ Tommaso immediately shouted in one ear, as if he’d been bursting to say it for the last few minutes, indeed as if it had been his first thought the moment he’d set eyes on the necklace and had only been waiting for some sign of gloating from his friend to be able to hit back at him with this remark.

Pietro raised the hand that held the necklace, thus lifting Tommaso’s arm too. ‘What do you know?’

‘I know that you’d better believe what I’m telling you: they always keep their real jewels in the safe.’

Their big, tough, wrinkled hands felt the necklace, turning their fingers between one string and the next, slipping their nails into the spaces between the pearls. The pearls filtered a soft light, like dewdrops on spiders’ webs, a wintery, morning light that hardly convinces you of the existence of things.

‘Real or fake…’ Pietro said, ‘I, as it happens…’ and he was trying to provoke a hostile attitude towards whatever he was about to say.

Tommaso, who wanted to be the first to take the conversation that way, realized that Pietro had got in before him and tried to regain the upper hand by showing that he’d already been developing his own train of thought for some time.

‘Oh, I pity you,’ he said, with an air of irritation. ‘The first thing I…’

It was clear that they both wanted to express the same opinion, yet were looking daggers at each other. They both shouted, in unison and as fast as they could: ‘Give it back!’ Pietro raising his chin with the solemnity of one uttering a verdict, Tommaso red-faced and wide-eyed as if all his energy were engaged in getting the words out before his friend.

But the gesture had excited them and aroused their pride; apparently good friends all of a sudden, they exchanged satisfied glances.

‘We won’t dirty our hands!’ Tommaso shouted. ‘Not us!’

‘Right!’ laughed Pietro. ‘We’ll give them a lesson in dignity, we will.’

‘We,’ Tommaso proclaimed, ‘will never hoard their trash!’

‘Right! We’re poor,’ Pietro said, ‘but more gentlemen than they are!’

‘And you know what else we’re going to do?’ Tommaso’s face lit up, happy to have finally gone one better than Pietro. ‘We won’t accept their reward!’

They looked at the necklace again; it was still there, hanging from their hands.

‘You didn’t get the licence number of the car, did you?’ asked Pietro.

‘No, why? Did you?’

‘Who would have thought?’

‘So, what to do?’

‘Right, a fine mess.’

Then, in unison, as if their hostility had suddenly flared up again: ‘The Lost Property Office. We’ll take it there.’

The fog was lifting; no longer a mere shadow, the factory turned out to be coloured a deceptive pink.

‘What time do you think it is?’ asked Pietro. ‘I’m afraid we’ll be clocking in late.’

‘We’ll be fined,’ said Tommaso. ‘The same old story: those folks live it up and we pay up!’

They had both lifted their hands together with the necklace that kept them together like handcuffed prisoners. They weighed it in their palms as if both about to say: ‘Well, I’ll let you look after it.’ But neither of them did; each had the highest possible opinion of the other, but they were too used to arguing for either to concede a point to the other.

They must get back on their bikes again fast, and still they hadn’t tackled the question: which of them was to keep the necklace before they could hand it back or in any event take a decision as to what to do? They went on standing there without saying a word, looking at the necklace as if it might somehow answer the question itself. And it did: whether in the skirmish or when it fell, the hook that held together the four strings of pearls had been damaged. A tiny twist and it snapped.

Pietro took two strings and Tommaso the other two, with the understanding that whatever was to be done with them would be agreed on together first. They gathered the precious things up, hid them away, got back on their bikes, silently, without looking at each other, and resumed their squeaky pedalling towards the factory under a sky of gathering white clouds and rising black smoke.

They’d hardly got going before a man appeared from behind a billboard at the side of the road. He was scrawny, lanky and badly dressed; he had been watching the two workers from a distance for some minutes. His name was Fiorenzo, he was unemployed, and he spent his time looking through dumps in the suburbs in search of anything usable. It’s an occupational hazard of people like this that they always nurse a stubborn yearning that one day they will discover treasure. On his regular morning round of these fields, Fiorenzo had seen the car set off and the workers run down the embankment to pick something up. And immediately he realized that he had missed a rare, even a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by less than a minute.

Tommaso was a member of the internal commission that was supposed to see Dr Starna. Deaf and stubborn he might be, with obsolete attitudes and a spirit of contradiction, but still Tommaso always managed to get elected in internal factory votes. He was one of the oldest workers in the company, everybody knew him, he was a symbol; and even though his workmates on the commission had long felt that it would be better to have a more able negotiator in his place, somebody sharper and better informed, all the same they recognized that Tommaso had the advantage of a prestige that came of tradition, and they respected him for it and would repeat the most important things said at the meeting in the ear without the whistle.

The day before, one of Tommaso’s sisters who lived in the country and who sometimes came to see him had brought him a rabbit for his birthday, even though his birthday had been a month ago. A dead rabbit, of course, to be casseroled at once. It would have been nice to have kept it for Sunday lunch to have with the whole family round the table; but perhaps the rabbit would go off, so Tommaso’s daughters immediately steamed it and he was carrying his share to work with him in a stick of bread.

Whatever they were having for lunch—tripe, stockfish, or omelette—Tommaso’s daughters (he was a widower) would cut a big stick of bread in two and squash the food in the middle; he put the bread in his bag, hung the bag on his bike and set off in the early morning for his day’s work. But though this loaf stuffed with rabbit should have been the consolation for a worrisome day, Tommaso never managed to take so much as a bite of it. Changing for the meeting and not knowing where to hide the stupid necklace, he had had the bad idea of stuffing it in the bread inside the steamed rabbit meat.

At eleven o’clock someone comes to tell Tommaso, along with Fantino, Criscuolo, Zappo, Ortica and all the others, that Dr Starna has agreed to the meeting and is waiting for them. They wash and change as fast as they can and then go up in the lift. On the fifth floor they wait and wait: comes the lunchbreak and still Dr Starna hasn’t seen them. Finally the secretary, a blonde with the beautiful body and ugly face of a cycling champion, appears to tell them that the doctor can’t see them for the moment, they should go back to the factory floor with the others and as soon as he’s free he’ll call them.