Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [28]
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 whistie 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