A Life Read Free

passage, like Miceni’s room.
    Miceni raised his head with a friendly smile. Ballina was always popular, as he was a jester, the bank jester. But that evening he was not in form and was complaining. He had been working in his information office till then, and now he found he had to do other work; he did not even know if there would be any supper left for him that night. He was pretending to be more miserable than he really was. He once amazed Alfonso, whom Ballina called a sponge , by telling him that towards the end of the month he lived on Scott’s Emulsion given him by a doctorrelative. He had well-to-do relatives who must have been a help because he was always speaking well of them.
    Sanneo came in, rushed as ever; he was followed by the serious adolescent’s face of Giacomo, carrying a big pile of paper at which he was staring with excess of zeal.
    Sanneo asked Ballina rather roughly why he was not yet writing.
    “Well …” exclaimed Ballina with a shrug, “I’m waiting for the letter to copy out.”
    “You’ve not had it yet?” Then, remembering that Alfonso was supposed to hand it over, he went on, “Hasn’t he done even one yet?”
    Alfonso, shaken by the Sanneo’s angry look, rose to his feet. Miceni, still sitting, observed that he had not yet finished one either. Sanneo turned his back on Alfonso, looked at Miceni’s letter and asked him to hand it over to Ballina as soon it was done. He went out in the same rush, preceded by Ballina, who wanted to show that he had gone straight back to his own room, and followed by Giacomo strutting and banging his feet on the floor to make himself sound important.
    A few minutes later Miceni handed Ballina the letter for copying . From the next room Alfonso heard Ballina’s curses, his voice thick with rage at seeing that the letter covered four pages.
    In an hour or so Miceni had finished his work. Very calmly he settled his clothes, carefully put on his hat as though he would never take it off, picked up the telegrams and letters—including the two written by Alfonso—which he wanted to hand over to Signor Sanneo as he passed, and left humming.
    In the complete quiet work went faster. To keep his attention on his work, Alfonso was in the habit when alone of declaiming aloud, for lack of anything more interesting, the letter he was writing. This one was particularly suitable for declamation as it was full of reverberating words and big figures. By reading out a phrase and repeating it as he transcribed it, he reduced the effort of writing because he needed only the memory of the sound to direct his pen.
    To his surprise he suddenly found that he had finished and went straight off to Sanneo, fearing he was already late. Sanneo kept the telegrams and told him to put the letters on Signor Maller’s desk.
    The floor of Signor Maller’s room was covered with grey carpets during the winter. The furniture was also dark grey, with arms andlegs of black wood. Of the three gas brackets only one was lit, and at half pressure. In the dimness the room looked gloomier than ever. Alfonso always felt ill at ease there. He put down the letters on top of another pile already on the desk for signature and went out without making a sound, as if his chief had been present.
    He could have left now but was held back by exhaustion. He thought of putting his desk in order but sat there inert, daydreaming . Ever since he had become a clerk, deprived of the physical exercise of country life and mentally stifled in his work, his great vitality had taken to creating imaginary worlds.
    The centre of these dreams was Alfonso himself, all self-mastery , wealth and happiness. Only when daydreaming was he aware of the extent of his ambitions. To make himself into someone overwhelmingly clever and rich was not enough. In his dreams he changed his father. Unable to bring him back to life, he turned him into a rich nobleman who had married his mother for love, though Alfonso loved her so much