Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories

  ‘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?’

  ‘How should I know…’ said Enrico, passing a hand over his face, recalling with gr
eat weariness the moment when she had run off amongst the bushes, and they had had a bit of a tussle, and it came to him the necklace could perfectly well have fallen off there, so that already he was experiencing the tedium of having to go and look for it, to search that stretch of scrub inch by inch. He felt a prick of nausea. ‘Don’t worry: it’s so big, it’ll turn up… Look in the car… Can you trust the man in the garage?’ (The car was hers. Likewise the garage.)

  ‘Sure. Leone’s been with us for years and years.’

  ‘So phone him right away and tell him to look.’

  ‘What if it’s not there?’

  ‘Phone me back. I’ll go and look where we got out.’

  ‘You’re so sweet.’

  ‘Right.’

  He hung up. The necklace. He pulled a face. God only knew what a fortune it was worth. And when Umberta’s husband was unable to meet his debts. Very nice. Yes, this could lead to something very nice indeed. On a sheet of paper he drew a necklace with four strings of pearls, filling it in minutely pearl by pearl. He must keep his eyes open. He turned the pearls in the drawing into eyes, each with its own iris, pupil, lashes. There was no time to lose. He must go and search those fields. Why wasn’t Umberta phoning back at once? The hell it was in the car. ‘You can get on with that on your own,’ he said to the draughtsman. ‘I’ve got to go out again.’

  ‘Are you going to see the contractor? Remember those papers…’

  ‘No, no, I’m going to the country. For strawberries.’ And with his pencil he filled in the necklace to make a huge strawberry, complete with sepals and stalk. ‘See, a strawberry.’

  ‘Always after the women, boss,’ the boy said, smirking.

  ‘Dirty so-and-so,’ said Enrico. The phone rang. ‘As I thought, nothing. Keep calm. I’ll go now. Did you warn the man in the garage not to say anything? To him I mean, for God’s sake, to what’s his name, his majesty! Good. Yes of course I remember where it was… I’ll phone you… bye then, don’t worry…’ He hung up, began to whistle, pulled on his coat, went out, jumped on his scooter.

  The city opened up before him like an oyster, like a halcyon sea. When you’re young and on the move, and especially when you’re driving fast, a town can suddenly open up before you, even a familiar place, a place that’s so routine as to have become invisible. It’s the thrill of adventure does it: the only youthful thrill this prematurely cynical architect retained.

  Yes, going after lost necklaces was turning out to be good fun, not boring as he had at first imagined. Perhaps precisely because he cared so little about the thing. If he found it well and good, and if not, too bad: Umberta’s problems were the problems of the rich, where the bigger the figure at stake the less it seems to matter.

  And then what could ever really matter to Enrico? Nothing in the whole world. Yet this town he was now racing across, carefree and bold, had once been a kind of fakir’s bed for him, with a shriek, a fall, a sharp nail wherever you looked: old buildings, new buildings, cheap housing projects or aristocratic apartments, derelict shells or building site scaffolding, the town had once presented itself as a maze of problems: Style, Function, Society, the Human Dimension, the Property Boom… Now he looked with the same self-satisfied sense of historical irony on neoclassical, liberty, and twentieth century alike, while the old unhealthy slums, the new tower blocks, the efficient factories, the frescos of mould on windowless walls were all seen with the objectivity of someone observing natural phenomena. He no longer heard that shrill blast as of trumpets at Jericho which had once followed him on his city walks, proclaiming that he would punish the monstrous urban crimes of the bourgeoisie, that he would destroy and rebuild for a better society. In those days, if a workers’ march with its placards and its long tail of men pushing bicycles were to fill the streets towards the police station, Enrico would join in, while above the humble crowd he had the impression there hovered, white and green in a geometric cloud, the image of that Future City he would build for them.

  He’d been a revolutionary then, Enrico had, waiting for the proletariat to take over and give him the job of building the City. But the proletarian triumph was slow in coming, and then the masses didn’t seem to share Enrico’s obsessive passion for huge bare walls and flat roofs. So the young architect embarked on that bitter and dangerous season when the flag of every enthusiasm is lowered. His rigorous sense of style found another outlet: seaside villas, which he designed, for philistine millionaires unworthy of the honour. This too was a battle: outflanking the enemy, attacking from within. To reinforce his positions he would strive to become a fashionable architect; Enrico had to start taking the problem of ‘career advancement’ seriously: what was he doing still riding round on a scooter? By now the only thing he was interested in was getting hold of profitable work, of whatever kind. His designs for the City of the Future gathered dust in the corners of his studio and every now and then, while hunting about for a piece of drawing paper, he would find one of those old rolls in his hand and on the back sketch out the first outline of a roof extension.

  Driving through the suburbs on his scooter that morning did not prompt Enrico to return to youthful reflections on the squalor of workers’ housing projects. Instead, like a deer after fresh grass, his nose picked up the scent of potential building sites.

  Indeed it was a potential site he had been meaning to go and see early that morning when he got into Umberta’s car. They were coming out of a party, she was drunk and didn’t want to go home. Take me to this place, take me to that. For his part Enrico had been toying with the idea for some time: and since they were driving here there and everywhere they might as well go and take a look at a place he knew; there wouldn’t be anybody there at this time of day and he could get a good idea of its potential. It was a piece of property Umberta’s husband owned, some land round a factory. Enrico was hoping that with her help he could get the man to give him a contract for something big. It had been on the way to the factory that Umberta had come close to jumping from the moving car. They were arguing; she was pretending to be more drunk than she was. ‘And where are you taking me now?’ she whined. Enrico said: ‘Back to your husband. I’m fed up with you. I’m taking you to see him in his factory. Can’t you see that’s where we’re going!’ She half sang something to herself, then opened the door. He broke hard and she jumped out. Which was how she had lost the necklace. Now he had to find it. Easily said…

  A bushy slope of abandoned land fell away beneath him. He only knew he was in the same place as this morning because the road was dusty and not often used and the tyre marks were still there where he’d braked: aside from that the whole landscape was shapeless; never had the official expression, terrain vague, taken on such a precise and subtly disturbing relevance in his mind. Enrico took a few steps this way and that peering between the branches of the bushes at the matted ground beneath: as soon as he set foot on the mean barren earth, insensitive to any footprint, strewn with litter, elusive and indefinable, smeared with a streaky pale light that might have been slug slime, any zest for adventure ebbed, the way a readiness to love shrinks and retreats when met by coldness, or ugliness, or apprehension. He was seized by the nausea that had been coming over him in waves ever since he woke up.

  He began his search already convinced that he wouldn’t find anything. Perhaps he should have settled on a rigid method first, established the area where Umberta had probably been, divided it into sectors, scoured it inch by inch. But the whole enterprise seemed so pointless and unrewarding that Enrico went on walking about at random, barely bothering to move the twigs. Looking up, he saw a man.

  He had his hands in his pockets, in the middle of the field, bushes up to his knees. He must have sneaked up quietly, though where from Enrico couldn’t have said. He was lanky and lean, pointy as a stork; he had an old military cap pulled down on his head with balaclava flaps dangling like bloodhound ears, and a jacket, likewise military, its shoulders in tatters. He was standing still, as if waiting for Enrico at
some threshold.

  The truth is he had been waiting there for quite a few hours: since even before Enrico had realized he would have to come. It was the unemployed Fiorenzo. Having got over his first flush of frustration at seeing those two workers snatch what might well be a treasure from under his nose, he had told himself that the thing to do was to stay put. The game was by no means over yet: if the necklace really was valuable then sooner or later the person who had lost it would come back to look for it; and when treasure was at stake there was always the hope you might grab a bit of it.

  Seeing the other man standing there motionless, put the architect on the alert again. He stopped, lit a cigarette. He was beginning to take an interest in the story again. He was one of those people, Enrico, who think they have put down foundations in things and ideas, but who really have no other guiding principle in life than their shifting and intricate relationships with others; confronted with the vastness of nature, or the safe world of things, or the order of reasoned thought, they feel lost, recovering their poise only when they get wind of the manoeuvres of a potential enemy or friend; so that for all his plans the architect never actually built anything, either for others or for himself.

  Having caught sight of Fiorenzo, Enrico, to get a better idea of what the fellow was up to, went on stooping and searching along a straight line that would take him nearer to the other but not actually to him. After a moment or two, the man also began to move, and in such a way that he would cross Enrico’s path.

  They stopped a yard or so apart. The out-of-work Fiorenzo had a gaunt, bird-like face, mottled with scraggy beard. It was he who spoke first.

  ‘Looking for something?’ he said.

  Enrico raised his cigarette to his lips. Fiorenzo smoked his own breath, a small thick cloud in the cold air.

  ‘I was looking…’ Enrico said vaguely, making a gesture that took in the landscape. He was waiting for the other to declare himself. ‘If he’s found the necklace,’ he thought, ‘he’ll try to find out how much it’s worth.’