The Watcher and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

present there, and gradually it was revealed in each, varying in its degree of intensity, in the individual temperature they ran in playing their parts: Amerigo’s vacillation, the orange woman’s impatience (she was a member of the Socialist party, as he learned the moment they could go off to one side and talk), the thin, young Christian Democrat’s need to believe that he was (even if there was no need) on a battle line, surrounded by enemies, the chairman’s apprehensive rigidity, caused by his tenuous conviction in the system, and, for the woman in the white blouse (who overlooked no opportunity to underline her disagreement with the other woman), a need to feel edified and protected from the scandal of disobedience.
    As for the others at the polls (all of them Christian Democrats, or further to the right), they seemed concerned only with smoothing over the differences: all of them knew that everyone in here would vote the same way, didn’t they? Then why become upset, why look for trouble? There was nothing to do but accept things as they were, friends or enemies.
    Among the voters, too, the importance of what they were doing varied. For the majority the act of voting occupied a minimal space in their awareness, it was a little “x” to make with the pencil against a printed symbol, something that had to be done, as they had been taught, with great care, like the proper way to behave in church or to make their beds. With no suspicion it could be done any other way, they concentrated their effort on the practical act, which was in itself—especially for the invalids or the mentally deficient—enough to engage their complete attention.
    For others, more emotional, or indoctrinated in a different didactic system, the election seemed to take place in the midst of perils and deceit; everything was to be distrusted, a source of offense or fear. Certain nuns in white habits were especially obsessed with the idea of spotted ballots. One would go into the booth, stay in there for five minutes, then come out without having voted. “Have you voted? No? Why not?” The nun would then hold out the ballot, open and unmarked, and point to a little dot, faint or dark. “It’s got a mark on it!” she would protest, in an angry voice, to the chairman. “I want a new one!”
    The ballots were printed on ordinary paper, greenish, made from a grainy pulp, full of impurities, spattered with printer’s ink from top to bottom. Soon the officials learned that whenever one of those white nuns came to vote the scene of the rejected ballot would be repeated. They couldn’t be convinced that these were only defects in the paper, and that their ballots wouldn’t be invalidated because of them. The more the chairman insisted, the more stubborn the little nuns became: one—an old, dark nun, who came from Sardinia—actually flew into a rage. They must surely have been given God knows what instructions about the question of the stains or spots: they were to watch out, at the polls there were Communists who spotted the nuns’ ballots on purpose, to spoil their votes.
    Terrified, that’s what they were, these little white nuns. And in trying to make them see reason, the officials were of one mind: in fact, it was the chairman and the thin supervisor who became the most angry, since they weren’t trusted and were treated as perfidious enemies. Like Amerigo, they wondered what could have been said to those poor women, to frighten them so, what horrors they had been threatened with, descriptions of the menacing Communist victory, which might be caused by a single wasted vote. The glow of a religious war filled the room for a moment, then was extinguished in nothingness; and the performance of their task resumed its normal course, drowsy, bureaucratic.
VII
    THE JOB assigned him now, in the division of labor among the officials of the polls, was to check the identity