Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [32]
‘Can I do the waste-bins, Mum?’
‘Good boy, yes, take the bag, off you go!’
Paolino takes the bag and goes off round the offices to empty the wastepaper bins. The bag is bigger than he is and Paolino drags it after him so that it slides across the floor. He walks slowly to make the job last as long as possible: of the whole evening this is the moment he likes best. Big rooms with lines of identical calculators and filing cabinets open before him, rooms with authoritative desks crammed with touch-button telephones and intercoms. He likes going round the offices alone, to immerse himself in those metallic ornaments, those sharp right-angles, forgetting everything else. Above all he likes getting away from the sound of his mother and Signora Dirce's chatter.
The difference between Signora Dirce and Paolino's mother is that Signora Dirce is very conscious of the fact that she is cleaning SBAV's offices, whereas it's all the same to Paolino's mother whether she is cleaning an office, a kitchen or the back of a shop.
Signora Dirce knows the names of all the departments. ‘Now we'll go into Accounts, Signora Pensotti,’ she says to Paolino's mother.
‘Come again?’ says Signora Pensotti, a small fat little woman, only recendy arrived from the provinces.
Signora Dirce on the other hand is long and thin, very haughty, and wears a kind of kimono. She knows all the company's secrets, and Paolino's mother listens agape. ‘You see how untidy Dr Bertolenghi is, it's incredible,’ she says, I bet exports are bad with all this mess.’
Paolino's mother tugs her sleeve: Who's he when he's at home … ? Oh give it a rest… What do you care, Signora Dirce? Don't you know that if the desks aren't cleared we don't have to clean them. Just give the phone a quick wipe, to take off the worst…’
Signora Dirce even sticks her nose in the papers, picks up a letter, holds it close to her nose because she's short-sighted, says: ‘Hey, listen to this, three hundred thousand dollars, it says here… You know how much three hundred thousand dollars is, Signora Pensotti?’
As Paolino sees it, the two women strike a false note, they're an affront to the composure of the office. They get on his nerves, both of them: Signora Dirce is arrogant, ridiculous when, to dust intercom keyboards or drawer handles, she sits in the manager's big chair and, wiping things with her rag, assumes the managerial expression of someone doing something important; and his mother is still the country woman she always was, dusting calculators as if she were pushing cows round the farm.
The further Paolino gets away from them, adventuring into the deserted offices, so the further his eyes, droopy with sleep, push back that bare, linear horizon, and he likes to think of himself as an ant, an almost invisible creature crossing a smooth desert of linoleum, amid shiny mountains that fall sheer to the ground beneath a flat white sky. Then he's overawed; and to pull himself together he looks around for signs of human life, always varied and disordered. Under the glass top of a desk — a woman's it must be — there's a photograph of Marlon Brando; someone else is keeping a pot of daffodil bulbs on a windowsill; there's a magazine in a waste bin; in another a sheet of block-notes has been filled with pencil sketches of little figures; a typist's stool smells of violets; in an ashtray there are some of those small foil cups that chocolate liqueurs come in. There, he only has to latch on to these details and his awe at that geometric desert subsides, but Paolino feels almost humiliated, as if he were being a coward, because it's precisely what most strikes awe in him that he wants to and must make his own.
One room is full of machines. They're motionless now, but Paolino saw them working once, with a constant hum and thick sheets of perforated paper jerking up and down like insect wings; and a man in a white doctor's coat who was operating the machines stopped to talk to Paolino. ‘There'll come the day when machines