Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [31]
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 streedamps, 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, brighdy 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 ratde of a shutter, it's as if Paolino were gradually waking from his torpor: but as