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?
