Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories by Italo Calvino Page A

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