The Neapolitan Novels

83.

Enzo wanted to start off again right away, but Pietro welcomed him courteously and obliged him to stay for the night. I tried to get Gennaro to play with Dede, even if there was almost six years’ difference between them, but while she was clearly eager he refused, shaking his head decisively. I was struck by the way Enzo cared for the son who wasn’t his, indicating that he knew his habits, his tastes, his needs. Although Gennaro protested because he was sleepy, Enzo gently insisted that he pee and brush his teeth before going to bed, and, when the child collapsed, he delicately undressed him and put his pajamas on.

While I washed the dishes and cleaned up, Pietro entertained the guest. They were sitting at the kitchen table; they had nothing in common. They tried politics, but when my husband made a positive reference to the progressive rapprochement of the Communists and the Christian Democrats, and Enzo said that if that strategy prevailed Berlinguer would be giving a hand to the worst enemies of the working class, they ended the discussion in order to avoid a quarrel. Pietro then politely asked him about his job, and Enzo must have found his interest sincere, because he was less laconic than usual and started on a dry, perhaps slightly too technical account. IBM had just decided to send Lila and him to a bigger company, a factory near Nola that had three hundred technical workers and forty clerical employees. The financial offer had left them stunned: three hundred and fifty thousand lire a month for him, who was the department head, and a hundred thousand for her, as his assistant. They had accepted, naturally, but now they had to earn all that money, and the work to be done was really tremendous. We are responsible, he explained—and from then on he used “we”—for a System 3 Model 10, and we have at our disposal two operators and five punch-card operators, who are also checkers. We have to collect and put into the System 3 a huge quantity of information, which is necessary so that the machine can do things like—I don’t know—the accounting, wages, invoicing, the warehousing, management of the salespeople, orders to suppliers, production, and shipping. For this purpose we use little cards—that is, the punch cards. The holes are everything, the effort is concentrated there. I’ll give you an example of the work it takes to program a simple operation like issuing invoices. You begin with the paper invoices, on which the warehouseman has marked both the products and the client they’ve been delivered to. The client has a code, his personal information has a code, and so do the products. The punch-card operators sit at the machines, press a key to release the cards, then by typing on the keys reduce the bill number, the client code, the personal-data code, the product-quantity code, to holes in the cards. To help you understand, a thousand bills for ten products make ten thousand punch cards with holes like the ones a needle would make: is it clear, do you follow?

So the evening passed. Pietro every so often nodded to show that he was following and even tried to ask some questions (The holes count but do the unperforated parts also count?). I confined myself to a half smile while I washed and polished. Enzo appeared pleased to be able to explain to a university professor, who listened to him like a disciplined student, and an old friend who had her degree and had written a book, and now was tidying up the kitchen, things that they knew nothing about. But in truth I was quickly distracted. An operator took ten thousand cards and inserted them in a machine that was called a sorter. The machine put them in order according to the product code. Then there were two readers, not in the sense of people but in the sense of machines programmed to read the holes and the non-holes in the cards. And then? There I got lost. I got lost amid codes and the enormous packets of cards and the holes that compared holes, that sorted holes, that read holes, that did the four operations, that printed names, addresses, totals. I got lost following a word I’d never heard before, file, which Enzo kept using, pronouncing it fi-le, this file, that file, continually. I got lost following Lila, who knew everything about those words, those machines, that work, and was doing that work now in a big company in Nola, even if with the salary her companion was earning she could be more of a lady than me. I got lost following Enzo, who could say proudly: Without her I wouldn’t be able to do it. Thus he conveyed to us his love and devotion, and it was clear that he liked to remind himself and others of the extraordinary quality of his woman, whereas my husband never praised me but, rather, reduced me to the mother of his children; even though I had had an education he did not want me to be capable of independent thought, he demeaned me by demeaning what I read, what interested me, what I said, and he appeared willing to love me only provided that I continually demonstrate my nothingness.

Finally I, too, sat down at the table, depressed because neither of the two had made a move to say: Can we help you set the table, clear, wash the dishes, sweep the floor. An invoice, Enzo was saying, is a simple document, what does it take to do by hand? Nothing, if I have to create ten a day. But if I have to do a thousand? The readers read two hundred cards a minute, so two thousand in ten minutes, and ten thousand in fifty. The speed of the machine is an enormous advantage, especially if it’s enabled to do complex operations, which require a lot of time. And that’s what Lila’s and my work is: to prepare the System 3 to do complex operations. The development phases of the programs are really wonderful. The operational phases a little less. The cards often jam and break in the sorters. Very often a container in which the cards have just been sorted falls and the cards scatter on the floor. But it’s great, it’s great even then.

Just to feel that I was present, I interrupted, saying:

“Can he make a mistake?”

“He who?”

“The computer.”

“There’s no he, Lenù, he is me. If he makes a mistake, if he gets in trouble, I’ve made a mistake, I’ve gotten in trouble.”

“Oh,” I said, and then, “I’m tired.”

Pietro nodded in agreement and seemed ready to end the evening. He turned to Enzo:

“It’s certainly exciting, but if it’s as you say, these machines will take the place of men, and skills will disappear; at Fiat robots already do the welding. A lot of jobs will be lost.”

Enzo at first agreed, then he seemed to have second thoughts, and finally he resorted to the only person whose authority he credited:

“Lina says it’s all a good thing: humiliating and stultifying jobs should disappear.”

Lina, Lina, Lina. I asked teasingly: if Lina is so good, why do they give you three hundred and fifty thousand lire and her a hundred thousand, why are you the boss and she’s the assistant? Enzo hesitated again, he seemed on the point of saying something pressing, which he then decided to abandon. He mumbled: What do you want from me, private ownership of the means of production should be abolished. In the kitchen the hum of the refrigerator could be heard for a few seconds. Pietro stood up and said: Let’s go to bed.