Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories by Italo Calvino Page A

out. ‘Stop whistling, are you stupid?’ his mother shouts. ‘Do you want a spanking?’
    Now Paolino goes round with the bin to empty all the ashtrays. He goes back to the office with the two working overtime. He can’t hear the tippety-tap of the typewriter. Have they gone? Paolino pokes his head round. The girl is standing, stretching out a hand bent at the knuckles and with brightly varnished nails towards the brylcreamed young man; he lifts an arm as if to take her by the throat. Paolino begins to whistle: what comes to his lips is the tune he invented a few moments ago. The two compose themselves. ‘Oh, it’s you again?’ They’ve already got their coats on and are standing together looking at some papers for tomorrow’s work. ‘The ashtray!’ Paolino says. But they’re not interested, they put the papers down and go. At the bottom of the corridor he takes her arm.
    Paolino’s sorry they’ve gone. Now there really is nobody left: all he can hear is the hum of the polisher and his mother’s voice. Paolino crosses the Board of Directors’ conference room with its mahogany table, so shiny you can see your face in it, and the big leather chairs all round. He’d like to take a run up and do a fish dive on the table top, slide from one end to the other, then collapse in a chair and fall asleep. But all he does is rub a finger across, look at the damp mark it makes like the wake of a ship, then rub it off with the elbow of his sweater.
    The big accounts department is divided into lots of cubicles. There’s a tippety-tap coming from the bottom. There must be somebody there still, working overtime. Paolino goes from one cubicle to another, but it’s like a maze where every passage is the same and the tippety-tapping always seems to be coming from a different place. In the end, in the very last cubicle, bent over an old adding machine, he finds a skinny accountant in a pullover, with a green plastic eyeshade halfway down a bald, oblong skull. To tap the keys the accountant lifts his elbows with the movement birds make when they beat their wings: he looks just like a big bird perched there, his visor like a beak. Paolino goes to empty the ashtray, but the accountant is smoking and at that very moment puts his cigarette down on the rim.
    ‘Hi,’ the accountant says.
    ‘Good evening,’ says Paolino.
    ‘What are you doing up and about at this time?’ The accountant has a long white face and dry skin, as if he never saw the sun.
    ‘I’m emptying the ashtrays.’
    ‘Little boys should be in bed at night.’
    ‘I’m with my mother. We do the cleaning. We start now.’
    ‘How late do you stay?’
    ‘Till half-past ten, eleven. Then sometimes we do overtime, in the morning.’
    ‘The opposite of what we do, overtime in the morning.’
    ‘Yes, but only once or twice a week, when we do the waxing.’
    ‘I do overtime every day. I never finish.’
    ‘Finish what?’
    ‘Getting the accounts right.’
    ‘They won’t come out right?’
    ‘They never do.’
    Motionless, the handle of the adding machine in his fist, his eyes on the thin strip of paper dangling almost to the ground, the accountant seems to be expecting something of the line of numbers that rises from the drum, as the smoke from the cigarette held tight between his lips likewise rises, first in a straight line in front of his right eye, till it meets his visor, takes a turn, then floats up again as far as the light bulb where it gathers in a cloud beneath the shade.
    ‘Now, I’ll say it,’ thinks Paolino, and he asks: ‘Excuse me, but aren’t there electronic machines that do all the sums on their own?’
    Irritated by the smoke, the accountant closes one eye. ‘All wrong,’ he says.
    Putting down the cloth and the bin, Paolino leans on the accountant’s desk. ‘Those machines make mistakes?’
    The man with the visor shakes his head. ‘No, from the start. It was wrong from the start.’ He gets up, his pullover is too short and his