Free A Life by Italo Svevo Page A

himself in a day; but he also had to copy out endless figures, repeat the same phrase innumerable times. Towards evening his hand, the only part of his body really tired, would stop, and his attention would stray for lack of stimulus ; sometimes he was forced to fling down his pen and abandon work from nausea, like someone who had eaten too much of one dish. He never quite mastered this work, and worry was now added to his malaise.
    White had told him that all contractual letters could be left for a few days or even weeks without a reply, and this had greatly eased his work in the first days; very soon, though, as pending letters increased, his work became more complicated because incoming letters joined others from the same client awaiting replies, and Alfonso, distracted and forgetful of names, did not remember which were which. In the evening the letters were sent back by Sanneo with an annotation. “What about the letter before this one? Signor Nitti NB . The poor culprit would go off to Sanneo and listen to a long sermon on disorder, which did nothing toimprove the situation because he lacked not goodwill but capacity ; his defect was fundamental.
    While urged along by zeal for his new job, he felt less bored. He needed to concentrate continuously to get through as many letters as possible in the least amount of time, but the very intensity of the work distracted and tired him more than something less mechanical . But this early zeal could only be re-ignited by circumstances independent of his will, and his work proceeded so slowly that a good part of his day was spent either reading letters that had just arrived to find out which he could put aside, and tidying papers left on his desk days before.
    Sanneo said he was surprised that a young man who showed such a wish to work could not get more done. He would come into Alfonso’s room unexpectedly, hoping to surprise him reading a newspaper or out chattering with other clerks; but he always found him at his place, pen in hand and eyes fixed on paper. He even lessened his work out of kindness, but the fifteen or twenty short letters which he gave him to do were never all done by evening, and his pending tray always stayed as high.
    Alfonso came to the conclusion that he felt generally out of sorts because his body needed something to tire itself out on, with which to exhaust itself. This body of his now became a plastic concept which he reshaped to every new sensation. In the evening, after a day spent on sums or rushing about the bank or sitting with pen and paper and thoughts elsewhere, he would imagine matter flowing fast through his body in pliable tubes, impossible to regulate or resist. Whenever he could, he took long walks, and his malaise vanished; his lungs expanded, he could feel his joints becoming more flexible, his body obeying more promptly; and he would imagine that flow of material as having been absorbed or regulated, and helping him now instead of impeding him. If he settled down to study, he would drop his book and feel that his chin was tired, and a strange sensation would come over his forehead as if the volume inside was trying to expand, to enlarge its content. He felt the same sort of calm as if he had tired himself out running ; his brain was lucid and his daydreams either conscious or absent. Very soon even the time he had given to walking became taken up by study: it took less time to find calm in study than it didin walking. A single hour spent on some difficult work of criticism would soothe him for an entire day. He was growing ambitious, and study became a means to satisfy this. That blind obedience to Sanneo, the scenes he had to endure daily, disgusted him; study was his recreation. A well-written book gave him megalomaniac dreams, not due to the quality of his brain but to circumstances; finding himself at one extreme, he dreamt of another.
    Every second of his time outside the office—or even in the office where he kept a few books in a