...of mistrust

He was scrawny, dark as dark, with thick curly hair, and a snub nose that pulled up his lip with it. Where they had found him nobody knew; what they did know was that the first job he'd been given in the factory, the day they took him on, was that of toilet maintenance man; but the truth was he was supposed to be there all day listening to people talk and passing things on to the management. Quite what there was to hear in the toilets that was so important no one ever really understood; it seems that there being nowhere else in the factory where one could exchange a few words without being fired on the spot, two workers from the Internal Committee, or some other diabolical union invention, had taken to swapping ideas from one cubicle to another, pretending they were there to answer nature's calling. Not that the worker's toilets in a factory are a quiet place, having as they do no doors or just a low gate affair leaving head and shoulders visible so that no one can stop for a smoke, and with the security men poking their heads in every few minutes to see that no one stays too long and check whether you're defecating or just taking it easy, but all the same, compared with the rest of the factory, the toilets are calm, even comfortable places. The fact is that these two men were eventually accused of engaging in political activity during working hours and fired; so someone must have told on them and it didn't take long to identify that someone as Giovannino the Stink as he was henceforth to be called. He was shut away in there, it was spring, and all day he heard watery noises, flushing, plopping, splashing; and he dreamed of open streams and fresh air. No one talked any more in the toilets. So they moved him. Unskilled, manipulated by the unwarranted fears of a management forever in a state of alarm, he was assigned first to one team then another, given vague and obviously pointless tasks but with secret instructions to spy on the others; and wherever he went his workmates turned their back on him in silence, not deigning so much as a glance at the superfluous tasks he muddled over as best he could.

[The Workshop Hen, Calvino, I.]