Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [29]
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: Tompety 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 place, 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