Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (12 page)
In the canteen, all their workmates were waiting with bated breath: ‘So? So, what happened?’ But union talk was forbidden in the canteen. ‘Nothing, we’re going back in the afternoon.’ And already it was time to return to work: the men on the committee sat down at the zinc tables to grab a quick bite and get back, because every minute they were late would be docked from their pay. ‘But what are we going to do about tomorrow?’ the others asked, leaving the canteen. ‘As soon as we’ve had the meeting, we’ll tell you and we can decide what to do.’
Tommaso reached in his bag and pulled out a head of boiled cauliflower, a fork and a tiny bottle of oil. He poured a little oil on to an aluminium plate and ate the cauliflower with one hand while the other was in his jacket pocket stroking that fat sandwich full of meat and pearls that he couldn’t pull out because of his workmates. And with a sudden greedy hunger for the rabbit, he cursed the pearls that were keeping him chained to a diet of cauliflower all day, and preventing him from feeling at ease with his friends, imposing a secret on him that, just at the moment, was no more than an irritation.
Suddenly, standing opposite him on the other side of the table, he saw Pietro, come to say hello before going back to work. The big man stood in front of him twisting a toothpick in his mouth and closing one eye in an exaggerated wink. Seeing him there, well fed and fancy free—or so it seemed to Tommaso—while he was swallowing forkfuls of boiled and quite insubstantial cauliflower, the older man went into such a rage that the aluminium plate started to rattle on the zinc table as though there were spirits about. Pietro shrugged his shoulders and left. By now the last workers were likewise hurrying out of the canteen, and Tommaso, greasy lips sucking on a soda bottle full of wine, dashed off too.
The workers’ reaction to the Great Dane when it came into the director’s waiting room—they had all turned to the door with a start thinking it was Dr Gigi Starna at last—was, on the part of some, welcoming, on the part of others, hostile. The former saw the dog as a fellow creature, a strong free thing kept prisoner here, a companion in servitude, the latter as merely a lost soul of the ruling class, a tool or accessory, a luxury. The same contrasting attitudes, in short, that workers sometimes manifest with regard to intellectuals.
Guderian’s reaction to the workers, on the other hand, was one of reserve and indifference, both to those who said: ‘Beauty! Come here! Give us a paw!’ and those who said ‘Off, scat!’ With just a hint of combativeness in the way he sniffed lightly here and there and wagged his tail slowly and evenly, the dog began to do the rounds of the company: the freckled, curly-headed Ortica—the one who knew everything about everything, who was barely in the waiting room before he had his elbows planted on the table and was browsing through some ad magazines left there, and who, on seeing the dog had looked him up and down and said everything there was to be said about his breed age teeth fur—wasn’t deigned so much as a glance, nor was the baby-faced Criscuolo, who, his gaze lost in the distance as he sucked on a dead cigarette, made as if to kick the animal. Fantino, who had pulled his crumpled paper from his pocket, a paper forbidden in the factory (he felt himself protected here by a sort of diplomatic immunity and so was taking advantage of the wait to read the thing, because when he got home in the evenings he immediately fell asleep) saw the dog’s smoky snout with its glinting red eyes appear above one shoulder and instinctively, though he didn’t often let things frighten him, folded over a page to hide the name of his paper. When he got to Tommaso, Guderian stopped, went down on his back paws and sat there with ears pricked and nose raised.
Although not the kind to start playing with pets or people, Tommaso, perhaps responding to a certain awe on finding himself in this brightly authoritative environment, felt the need to offer a few bland overtures, such as a click of the tongue, or a soft whistle, which, in his deafman’s inability to control it, immediately came out as extremely shrill. In short, he tried to reassert that spontaneous trust between man and dog reminiscent of his farmboy’s youth, of rustic animals, meek droopy-eared bloodhounds or hairy snarling barnyard mongrels. But the social gulf between the dogs of his past and this one, so glossy and well clipped, so much his master’s creature, was immediately obvious to him, and intimidating. Sitting with his hands on his knees, he moved his head in little sideways jerks, his mouth open, as if silently barking, urging the dog to make up its mind and shove off, get lost. But Guderian sat still, at once motionless and panting, until at last he stretched out his snout towards a flap of the old man’s jacket.
‘You’ve got a friend in the management, Tommaso, and you never told us!’ his friends joked.
But Tommaso went pale: he had just that moment realized it was the smell of casseroled rabbit the dog had caught.
Guderian went on the attack. He put a paw on Tommaso’s chest, almost knocking him over in his chair, then licked his face, smothering it in saliva; to get rid of him the old man made as if to throw a stone, as if to shoot at a thrush, as if to jump a ditch, but the dog didn’t understand his mime or wasn’t taken in, and wouldn’t get off him; on the contrary, apparently seized by a sudden enthusiasm, he jumped up raising his front paws right above the worker’s shoulders, all the time looking to push his nose in the direction of that jacket pocket.
‘Off, boy, come on, off! Come on, boy, God damn!’ Tommaso spoke under his breath, his eyes bloodshot, and in the middle of its demonstrations of affection the dog felt a sharp kick in one side. The animal threw itself at the man, baring its teeth at head height, then suddenly snapped at the flap of jacket and tugged. Tommaso just managed to get the bread out before the dog could rip off his pocket.
‘Oh, a sandwich!’ his friends said. ‘Very smart, he keeps his dinner in his pocket, obvious the dogs go after him! Wish you gave us your leftovers!’
Raising his short arm as high as he could, Tommaso was trying to save the bread from the assaults of the Great Dane. ‘Oh, let him have it! You’ll never take it off him now! Let him have it!’ his friends said.
‘Pass! Pass to me! Why don’t you pass?’ Criscuolo was saying, clapping his hands, ready to catch the thing in flight like a basketball player.
But Tommaso didn’t pass. Guderian jumped even higher than before and went to lie down in a corner with the sandwich between his teeth.
‘Let him have it, Tommaso, what do you think you’re going to do now? He’ll bite you!’ his friends said, but crouching down beside the Great Dane the old man seemed to be trying to talk to him.
‘What do you want now?’ his friends asked. ‘To get a half-eaten sandwich back?’ but at that moment the door opened and the secretary reappeared: ‘Would you like to come through now?’ and everybody hurried to follow her.
Tommaso got up to go after them, though he was still far from resigned to losing the necklace like this. He tried to get the dog to come in with him, then thought that having the thing appear in front of Dr Starna with the necklace in his mouth would be worse, and struggling to twist his angry face into a smile as grotesque as it was pointless, he bent down again to whisper: ‘Come on, here boy, here you wretched beast!’
The door had closed again. There was no one left in the waiting room. The dog carried his prey into a secluded corner, behind an armchair. Tommaso wrung his hands, though what really upset him was not so much the loss of the necklace (hadn’t he insisted throughout that it meant nothing to him?) as his having to feel guilty towards Pietro, having to tell him how it had happened, having to justify himself… and then the fact that he didn’t know how to get out of here, that he was wasting time in a situation at once completely stupid and inexplicable to his friends…
‘I’ll snatch it off him!’ he decided. ‘If he bites me, I’ll ask for damages.’ And he got down on all fours beside the dog behind the armchair, then stretched out a hand to the animal’s mouth. But the dog, being extremely well fed and trained, what’s more, after his master’s school of procrastination, wasn’t eating the bread, but just nibbling at one side of it, nor did the animal react with that blind ferocity typical of the carnivore whose food you are trying to steal; no, he was playing with it, displaying certain decidedly feline traits that in such a bull of a beast could only amount to a serious sign of decadence.
The others in the committee hadn’t noticed that Tommaso hadn’t followed them. Fantino was presenting their case, and, having reached the point where he was saying: ‘… And there are men here amongst us with white hair who have given the company more than thirty years of their lives…’ he meant to point to Tommaso, and first he pointed right, then left, and everybody realized that Tommaso wasn’t there. Had he been taken ill? Criscuolo turned and tiptoed out to look for him in the waiting room. But saw no one: ‘He must have felt tired, poor old guy,’ he thought, ‘he must have gone home. Never mind! He’s deaf anyway! Could have told us though!’ And he went back into the committee, never thinking to look behind the armchair.
Curled up together back there, the old man and the dog were playing; Tommaso with tears in his eyes and Guderian baring his teeth in a doggy laugh. Tommaso’s obstinacy was not unfounded: he was convinced that Guderian was stupid and that it would be shameful to give up. He was right. Taking advantage of the animal’s feline friendliness, he managed to knock the bread in such a way that the top part flew off, at which the dog leapt off after the half-sandwich he had lost, allowing Tommaso to hold on to the other half with the pearls and the rabbit. He grabbed the necklace, brushed off the pieces of rabbit caught between the pearls, stuffed it in his pocket and stuffed the meat in his mouth, having rapidly reflected that the dog’s teeth had never got further than the edge of the sandwich and never penetrated the filling.
Then, treading on tiptoe, face purple and mouth full, the whistle singing high and fierce in his ear, he went through to Dr Starna’s office and joined his friends, who all threw him sidelong questioning glances. Gigi Starna, who throughout Fantino’s presentation hadn’t lifted his eyes from the report spread out on his desk before him, as though concentrating on the figures there, heard a noise as if of someone eating close by. Looking up he saw an extra face in front of him, one he hadn’t seen before: a wrinkled, livid face, with two yellow veiny staring eyeballs, and an expression at once furious and blind around cheeks that moved in an insistent chewing motion with an angry noise of chomping jaws. The sight so unsettled him that he lowered his eyes to his figures and didn’t dare look up again, and he couldn’t understand how on earth that man could have come to be eating here in his presence, and he tried to get the fellow out of his mind so as to be ready to counter Fantino’s arguments cleverly and forcefully, but already he was aware that much of his confidence had gone.
Every night before going to bed, Signora Umberta anointed her face with vitaminized cucumber cream. The fact that after a night on the town she had collapsed in her bed that morning—she couldn’t quite remember how—without her cucumber cream, her massages and her anti-tummy-flab exercises, without, in short, her whole daily ritual for keeping beautiful, could not but result in a troubled sleep. And it was to her neglect of these rites, and not to the amount of alcohol she had drunk that she attributed the nervousness, headache, and sour taste in the mouth that afflicted her few poor hours of sleep. Only her habit of sleeping on her back, in observation of a beautician’s rule that had become a way of life, allowed the restlessness of her repose to express itself in shapes at once harmonious and—she was very much alive to the fact—always attractive to an imaginary observer, appearing as they did between the crumpled folds of her sheets.
Amid her morning bleariness and disquiet, her apprehension of having forgotten something, she was seized by a vague sense of alarm. So then, she had come home, she had tossed the foxfur gown on the armchair, she had slipped off her evening dress… but amongst the gaps in her memory what was bothering her was: the necklace, that necklace she should have held more precious than her own soft, smooth skin, she just couldn’t remember taking it off, and still less tucking it away in the secret drawer in her toilette.
She got out of bed in a swirl of sheets, fine muslin skirts and rumpled hair, crossed the room, took a quick glance at the chest of drawers, the dresser, wherever she might have left the necklace. She looked at herself a moment in the mirror, frowning her disapproval at the haggard face she found, opened a couple of drawers, looked in the mirror again in the hope that her first impression might have been wrong, went into the bathroom and looked over the shelves, put on a bed-jacket, checked how she looked in it in the mirror over the sink, then in the big mirror beyond, opened the secret drawer, closed it again, pushed a hand through her hair, carelessly at first, then with a certain pleasure. She had lost the necklace with the four strings of pearls. She went to the telephone.
‘Could I speak to the Architect… Enrico, yes, I’m up… Yes, I’m fine, but listen, the necklace, the pearl necklace… I had it when we left the place, I’m sure I had it… No, no, I can’t find it now… I don’t know… Of course I’ve looked everywhere… Don’t you remember?’
Enrico, late for work, dog-tired (he’d slept two hours), irritated, bored, his young draughtsman using the excuse of tidying up a project to listen in on every word, smoke from his cigarette smarting in his eyes, said: ‘So, you get him to buy you another…’
In response the receiver came out with such a shriek that even the draughtsman started. ‘Are you cra-a-zy! It’s the one my husband had forbidden me to wear! don’t you understa-a-and! It’s the one that cost… no, I can’t say it on the pho-o-one! Stop being stu-u-upid! If he even found out I’d been wearing it around he’d kick me out of house. If he finds I’ve lost it… he’ll kill me!’
‘Probably in the car,’ said Enrico and in a twinkling she relaxed.
‘You think so?’
‘I do.’
‘But do you remember if I had it?… You remember we got out of the car somewhere… where was that?’