Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [37]
‘Then, of course,’ Pietro said, winding up a train of thought out loud, ‘when they come, they come!’
They had left the city behind them and were riding along a raised road between fields left fallow. There were some last patches of fog. Above a grey horizon not far away loomed the factory.
An engine droned behind them; they had just got themselves on the verge when a big smart car went by.
The road wasn't tarred, the dust the car lifted cloaked the two cyclists and from the thick cloud came Tommaso's raised voice: ‘And it's in the exclusive interest o-of… oh, oh, oh!’ The dust he'd swallowed brought on a fit of coughing and his short arm emerged from the cloud and pointed in the direction of the car, doubdess to suggest the interest of the ruling classes. Pietro, trying to speak while coughing from a red face, said: ‘Uugh …Not … uugh… for … uugh … lo-ong,’ pointing at the car with a decidedly negative gesture to express the idea that the future did not belong to the owners of custom-built automobiles.
The car was racing away when one of its doors came open. A hand thrust it wide so that it banged back and a woman in silhouette almost threw herself out. But whoever was driving braked at once; the woman jumped down, and in the thin morning mist the workers saw her run across the road. She had blonde hair, a long black dress and a cape of blue fox furs, their tails in fringes.
A man wearing an overcoat got out of the car, shouting: ‘You're crazy! You're crazy!’ The woman was already dashing away from the road through the bushes, and the man set off after her until they both disappeared.
Below the road were meadows with dense thickets of shrubs, and the two workers saw the woman appearing and disappearing in and out of them, her steps short and quick in the heavy dew. With one hand she held her skirt from touching the ground and she jerked her shoulders to free herself from the branches that caught at her fox tails. She even began to bend the branches so that they would spring back on the man who was chasing her, though without really hurrying and without, it seemed, too much desire to catch her. The woman ran wild in the meadows, shrieked with laughter, shook the dew on the branches down on to her hair. Until he, calm as ever, instead of following her, cut her off and took her by the elbows; and it looked as though she was wriggling to escape and biting him.
The two workers followed the chase from the raised road, though they never stopped pedalling or paying attention to where they were going. They watched silently, eyebrows raised and mouths open, with a gravity more diffident than curious. They were almost up to the stationary car, left there with its doors open, when the man in the overcoat came back, holding the woman who was forcing him to push her along and yelling almost like a child. They shut themselves in the car and set off; and again the cyclists ran into the dust.
While we're starting our day,’ choked Tommaso, ‘the drunkards are ending theirs.’
‘Actually,’ objected his friend, stopping to look back, ‘he wasn't drunk. Look how sharply he stopped.’
They studied the tyre marks. ‘No, no, no… you're joking … no, a car like that,’ came back Tommaso, ‘do it myself! Don't you realize that a car like that stops you dead…’
He didn't finish his sentence; looking down at the ground, their eyes had come to rest on a point just off the road. There was something sparkling on a bush. Simultaneously, softly they both exclaimed: ‘Oh!’
They got down from their saddles and stood their bikes against the kerb. ‘The chicken's laid an egg,’ said Pietro and jumped down into the meadow with a lightness you wouldn't have expected in him. On the bush was a necklace of four strings of pearls.
The two workers stretched out their hands and, delicately, as though pickings flower, plucked the necklace from its branch. They both held it, with both hands, feeling the pearls with their fingertips, but ever so carefully, and as they did so lifted it closer and closer to their eyes.
Then, both together, as though rebelling against the