Free A Life by Italo Svevo

bank notes in both hands; he gave Alfonso a sullen look and without stopping, shouted to Giuseppe: “Here, take that bit of paper out of his hand, will you!”
    Later Sanneo gave him another two or three letters to do, and as a last job he had to send off some bills of exchange. White helped him with these too because Alfonso was frightened of handling pieces of paper which were so precious.
    When his first zeal had died down, and he was copying big sums in a letter, Alfonso would calculate how the tiniest fraction of each sum would be enough for him to live a serene life in the country.

VI
    B Y NEXT DAY Alfonso’s work had already increased. Sanneo, who knew nothing of White’s help, found Alfonso’s letters quite satisfactory and felt he could give him more and more serious work. But that day from Paris arrived the settlement which White had to check over, and Alfonso was left to his own devices. By midday there was a first outburst from Sanneo, and by evening Sanneo was going around the bank saying that two days’ work had given Alfonso softening of the brain. He called him in and told him to re-do half the letters he had corrected, and Alfonso was forced to confess that he had been helped out by White on the days before. Sanneo calmed down, but grew more brusque from then on.
    Then Alfonso’s work became more unpleasant. He had been forbidden to ask help from White, with whom Sanneo was not on good terms; often, instead of giving instructions, Sanneo would point to the date on which an identical letter had been written and tell him to find the right letter-file and copy it out. It was not easy to find a file in the Maller bank. With so many clerks using the files, he had to go to and fro between the accounts department and the cash-desk, more than once too, since no one helped; everyone concentrated on their own business, and he had to search through every drawer to make sure that what he sought was not there. At first Alfonso went round every room shouting: “Gentlemen, please, have you the letter-file for such-and-such a day?” But he soon stopped this because he found it was a waste of breath. No one answered, and one or two just smiled. By running from room to room Alfonso eventually found the file beside a clerk who could easily have told him and saved him the useless rush. Having laid hands on the file, there was still the labour of finding the letter he needed. If Sanneo had even mentioned who the writer was, it would have been a great help, for he would not have had to read it all through. Sanneo’s big handwriting filled a whole sheet of copying paper; Miceni’s was reproduced whole and clear as the original; White’s big wide pen-strokes developed blotches in the file-copy.
    Alfonso would go and greet Miceni in the accounts department and sometimes stop to exchange a few words with him. He forced himself to do this against his will because he felt Miceni resented him. Miceni’s new desk had already taken on the look of his old one; ink-pot, pen, pencil, big ledger set parallel to the edge of the desk. He would do his calculations on tiny bits of paper which he filled with microscopic figures.
    Alfonso found he got no enjoyment out of his advancement. It was a real advancement, for even though everyone went out of their way to remind him that he was very far from having Miceni’s position, he had stopped copying letters and offers: servile labour with a pen instead of a broom. But when in the evening Sanneo handed back half his letters with annotations, he felt desperate and longed to take the first train home and leave those letters to be re-done by Signor Maller himself. It was true, though, that if a moment later Sanneo gave a nod of approval when signing a letter, Alfonso, however tired he was, took up his work again with renewed zest.
    Tired? Nauseated, more. From day to day his work increased slowly, but changed little or nothing in kind. He only had to think up one or two paragraphs for